Colonel Roosevelt

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by Edmund Morris


  For forty hours, civilian, military, and naval forces besieged the gilded redoubt, threatening to destroy it if power was not transferred to the proletariat. By daybreak on 8 November, Lenin was the presumptive ruler of Russia. He was elected chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars later in the day, and Trotsky became his commissar for foreign affairs. Their first joint action was to issue a decree of peace with Germany, pending negotiation of a formal armistice.

  Coincidentally, Roosevelt had just finished writing a foreword to Herman Bernstein’s edition of The Willy-Nicky Correspondence: Being the Secret and Intimate Telegrams Exchanged Between the Kaiser and the Tsar. He said the telegrams not only illuminated the dark relationships of despots just before the war, but that they were prophetic in showing “the folly of the men who would have us believe that any permanent escape from anarchy in Russia can come from the re-establishment of the autocracy, which was itself the prime cause of that anarchy.”

  IN THE MIDDLE of the month, he suffered the most devastating review of his literary career. Stuart P. Sherman, chief book critic of The Nation, took advantage of the publication of The Foes of Our Own Household to speak out on behalf of all the antiwar mollycoddles Roosevelt had sought to emasculate over the years. He argued that the Colonel had become a split personality because of his tendency to be “impressed with the two-sidedness of things.” Foes, consisting of twelve reprinted articles on domestic and foreign policy, was really two books, Sherman observed. “Just as one of them was written by a judicious, progressive, and patriotic Aristotelean, exactly in the same way the other was written by a willful, angry, and furiously inequitable extremist.” Roosevelt’s musings on social and political questions were “judicious, progressive … timely and weighty,” the thought of an eminently skilled polemicist. But when dealing with matters of defense and warfare, he perverted the words of past statesmen to suit his rhetorical purpose. “Any man who desires to believe that Washington and Lincoln saw eye to eye with Mr. Roosevelt,” Sherman remarked, “should give his days and nights to the study of The Foes of Our Own Household; but any man who desires to know what [they] actually thought and said had better go to the original documents.”

  The critic was less effective in comparing Roosevelt’s executive philosophy to that of Wilhelm II, if only because Woodrow Wilson had also come to believe in strong central control, compulsory military service, national self-assertion, patriotism, and preparedness. But Sherman drew attention to the “pervasive and sustained ugliness” of the Colonel’s personal campaign against Wilson, and to his love of war for war’s sake. “Apparently he cannot contemplate with equanimity a future in which our children shall be deprived of the ‘glory’ of battle with their peers.”

  For once, Roosevelt elected to let a pacifist berate him without reply. His silence implied, more than an attempt at self-defense would have, that he was beginning to doubt himself. He had entered his sixtieth year. An impotent old age was being forced on him, while Georges Clemenceau had been made prime minister of France at seventy-six. “I have never regretted anything so much as the absence of the Roosevelt army, nor understood the reason for it,” his fellow Cassandra wrote him.

  A bitter winter was settling in, with a national coal famine threatening, and obligatory fasts imposed upon all citizens by the President’s new food czar, Herbert Hoover. Flora no longer offered youthful cheer. Quentin had inexplicably stopped writing to her, and she exuded misery. Her visits became fewer, and in early December stopped altogether. Just before Christmas, subzero temperatures gripped Oyster Bay. Theodore and Edith found themselves so alone and cold that they closed off most of Sagamore Hill and tried to keep warm in just two or three west-facing rooms with wood-burning fireplaces. In blustery weather, the flag with four stars flapped loudly enough to disturb their sleep. Often they repeated to each other the lines of Edwin Arlington Robinson that most addressed their situation: There is ruin and decay / In the House on the Hill: / They are all gone away, / There is nothing more to say.

  * Irene M. Given-Wilson, a Red Cross official close to Quentin Roosevelt. The Harrahs are unidentified.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Dead Are Whirling with the Dead

  The beauty, shattered by the laws

  That have creation in their keeping,

  No longer trembles at applause,

  Or over children that are sleeping;

  And we who delve in beauty’s lore

  Know all that we have known before

  Of what inexorable cause

  Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.

  ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH, who could be relied upon to be au centre of the gayest, most fashionable crowd on New Year’s Eve, was partying with the Ned McLeans at their annual dance in Washington when the lights doused, signaling the approach of midnight. As the hour struck, a huge electric sign at the end of the ballroom blazed out in red, white, and blue: GOOD LUCK TO THE ALLIES IN 1918.

  Her parents, at the same time, were trying to keep warm in one of the last big houses on Long Island that still relied on gaslight after dark. The northeastern weather that January was so arctic—colder than any ever recorded—that they decided to make their third great concession to modern times, after buying an automobile and paving the driveway. The Colonel agreed to pay an electrical contractor something over $1,500 to wire his mansion. Unfortunately, the system promised only light, not warmth. But he would no longer have to strain his one good eye when he read, and the freezing hallways and bathrooms would at least look more welcoming.

  Comforts, real or imagined, had to be seized upon in a season that offered little in the way of good news. Quentin’s long silence was disturbing. Even allowing for the irregularity of military mail (with as much as four or five weeks needed for an exchange of letters), something had to be wrong with him. It was likely not serious, or his commanding officer—or Ted, or Archie, or Eleanor—would have cabled. Edith was so exasperated at his failure to reply to her letters that she refused to write any more until he became ashamed of himself.

  Roosevelt felt Flora’s desolation enough to have sent Quentin a stern reproof: “If you wish to lose her, continue to be an infrequent correspondent. If however you wish to keep her, write her letters—interesting letters, and love letters—at least three times a week. Write no matter how tired you are … write if you’re smashed up in a hospital; write when you are doing your most dangerous stunts; write when your work is most irksome and disheartening; write all the time!” He signed himself, “Affectionately, a hardened and wary old father.”

  The strange thing was that Quentin was the most epistolary of his children, quick to pour out jokes, stray observations, confessions, even poems on paper. Not that the others were slack correspondents. Ted and Dick Derby sent long letters through Eleanor, whose house in Paris functioned as a Rooseveltian hostel and information center. Kermit’s mail from Mesopotamia took many weeks to come, but could otherwise be relied on. Even taciturn Archie (due to become a father in six or seven weeks’ time) kept Grace fully briefed in Boston. His latest proud news was that he had been promoted to captain. Neither he nor Ted had much to say about Quentin, but being at the Front, that was not surprising. Or were they holding something back?

  IF SO, THEY WERE AMATEURS compared to Woodrow Wilson, preparing with fanatical secrecy to make yet another surprise appearance before Congress. He had sensed a misalignment among the war’s strategic blocks since the Bolshevik coup of last November, and especially after Russia’s negotiation of a provisional peace with Germany. Now, thanks to the transferal of 77 German divisions from the Eastern Front to the Western, the Central Powers were at last ascendant over the Anglo-French Entente, at 177 divisions to 173. And they could draw on a further 30 divisions in consequence of Austria’s epic defeat of the Italian army at Caporetto. This imbalance would prevail until General Pershing’s army (still only four divisions strong, and untested in any major engagement) began to swell with a steady influx of stateside troops in the
summer.

  By then the war might be over—or so Lloyd George and Clemenceau, two deeply worried ministers, kept warning Wilson. Their messages combined impatience at the slowness of American mobilization with a craven dependence on the administration’s goodwill. Britain had lost an estimated four hundred thousand men in its last six-month offensive, with a blindly determined General Haig sending his last reserves to die in the mud and Scheisse of Passchendaele. Wilson could not help being sympathetic, although he had lost much of his earlier sentimental attachment to Great Britain. He saw that its protectiveness toward France was really motivated by fear that a victorious Reich might threaten its overseas empire, and prevent the British Petroleum Company from acquiring significant real estate in Mesopotamia.

  Logistically and psychologically, the Allies would seem to need all the good luck that Ned and Evalyn McLean wished them. But Wilson’s sharp-pencil mind, never clearer than when plotting dynamic curves against a timeline, saw that the Central Powers were not yet as strong as they needed to be, to win the war. Their principal weapon—the U-boat—had been made much less lethal by new detection techniques and American-built patrol craft and destroyers. The German navy was still landlocked. Perhaps most to the point, Marxist discontent was surging powerfully among Europe’s labor and peasant classes. The Bolsheviks had called upon Western workers to throw over their governments. Trotsky sounded not unlike the Pope in urging a peace conference, before the belligerents became so degenerate as to keep fighting for the sake of fighting.

  Wilson’s phenomenal instinct for the right moment prompted him to move toward a sudden announcement of settlement terms that he believed the whole world would ascribe to. On Saturday, 5 January, he huddled with Colonel House, who at his behest had spent several months soliciting and collating the recommendations of experts on the European situation. Even as the two men met, Lenin was moving murderously to overturn the results of an election that had, to Bolshevik rage, placed a liberal majority in control of Russia’s constituent assembly. By late Sunday night, totalitarianism reigned again in the land of the tsars, and Wilson had a typed “Statement of the War Aims and Peace Terms of the United States,” for democratic governments to consider, negotiate, and adopt—he hoped, at a conference to end all wars.

  The statement listed a series of talking points. They were bound, at first, to antagonize the parties that Wilson most wanted to bring together: Germany, France, and Britain. All three nations still claimed they were at war for defensive reasons. So, less plausibly, did America. But it was the only belligerent sure to gain strength, no matter how long it fought. Wilson was gambling on the exhaustion, not to say internal rebellion, of the others. Sooner rather than later, a pax Americana should prevail.

  Wilson presented his “Fourteen Points” to Congress on Tuesday afternoon, carefully speaking in plain language that ordinary people could understand. Not for him, this time, the fine style and sly syntax that so irritated Roosevelt. His propaganda chief, George Creel of the Committee on Public Information, had arranged for the address to be broadcast around the world via a Marconi station in New Jersey, equipped with a one-hundred-thousand-cycle alternator. Wilson was not bothered by the sight of empty seats in the House chamber, including a few in the row reserved for cabinet members. He was addressing the larger audience he liked to refer to, with a sense of suzerainty, as “mankind.”

  It was an audience largely ignorant of American foreign policy, and therefore unaware that not one of the Fourteen Points was new. Lansing had presented each of them in various diplomatic communications. But they gained in impact now by being presented all together, just when their relevance was broadest. Wilson said he wanted to see open peace negotiations; absolute freedom of the seas; radical disarmament; impartial settlement of colonial disputes; recognition of Russia’s right to shape its own future “unhampered and unembarrassed” by outside constraints; the evacuation by Germany of Belgium, Alsace, and Lorraine, and by Austria-Hungary of the Balkans; Serbian access to the Mediterranean; an ethnic redrawing of Italy’s northern frontier; national liberation of Ottoman provinces from Turkish rule; free passage through the Dardenelles; an independent Polish state with seaboard facilities; and—closest to his heart—“A general association of nations [with] specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

  The last point was yet another bang on the peace-league gong that Roosevelt and others had sounded over the years. This time, however, its reverberations refused to die. Creel printed the President’s speech for translation and distribution as far away as China and Lapland (and projection over German territory in scattershot “leaflet shells”), achieving a saturation of international opinion that made Woodrow Wilson, the former girls’-school teacher and parochial Presbyterian, look like the only visionary statesman in the world.

  THE FOURTEEN POINTS registered seriously, if not favorably, on both sides of the Western Front. “Le bon Dieu n’avait que dix,” Clemenceau grumbled.* Britain balked at Wilson’s freedom-of-the-seas demand, which would compromise its blockade capability. France wanted stronger language to guarantee war reparations. Vague conciliatory noises came from Germany and Austria. But on the whole, the President seemed to have succeeded brilliantly in drafting a text negotiable by all the governments concerned. No immediate move could be expected toward the great peace conference he envisaged. If and when it happened, the United States had earned a coequal place at the table. Not a few political prophets saw Wilson himself sitting there as chief negotiant.

  “I am sorry from the bottom of my heart for Colonel Roosevelt,” William Howard Taft said to a dinner companion. “Here he is, the one man in the country most capable of doing things, of handling the big things in Washington, denied the opportunity.… My heart goes out to him.”

  Roosevelt emerged from his doldrums, as he had so often before, by launching into a period of manic public activity. Pausing only to write his January quota of articles for Metropolitan magazine and the Kansas City Star, plus an introduction to Henry Fairfield Osborn’s The Origin and Evolution of Life, he delivered ten speeches in nine days in New York, to audiences as diverse as the National Security League and the Boy Food Scouts of P.S. 40. Ray Stannard Baker caught up with him at a memorial service for Joseph Choate, and noted how his personality galvanized the somber proceedings. Witty and graceful, able both to conjure up the ghost of Sir Horace Walpole in the same breath as a Latin epigram (suaviter in modo, fortiter in re),* he seemed almost the Bull Moose of old. Jack Cooper’s Reducycle had trimmed his waistline by several inches. “Roosevelt remains a virile and significant figure in American life,” Baker wrote.

  Republican strategists in Washington were of similar opinion. Already thinking ahead to November’s congressional elections and the presidential campaign of 1920, they lured Roosevelt down late in the month for four days of policy talk. He took Edith with him, and Alice again made her town house available as a place where the Colonel could hold court, in the manner of a deposed king plotting a return to the throne. Father and daughter enjoyed the comings and goings of Party stalwarts who believed that Wilson’s current pride preceded a fall from public esteem. But for Edith, who had not seen the capital since she left it in 1909, the visit was painful. M Street was noisy and dirty now with automobile traffic. There were uniforms everywhere, and ugly wooden army buildings. She could not sit in Henry Adams’s parlor without seeing, across Lafayette Square, the radiant mansion where she had brought up Archie and Quentin, married Alice off, and entertained so many of the world’s best people. Its gates were shut to her, its servants obeyed another Edith. Adams was clearly dying, a little gray dormouse of a man. Henry Cabot Lodge had lost his wife’s reflected charm. Springy was gone from the British Embassy, a failed envoy, maligning his replacement, Lord Reading, with the single word Jew. Boozy Nick and brittle Alice went their separate ways.

  “Mother found much sadness,” R
oosevelt reported to Kermit after returning home. “Our old friends are for the most part dead or else of hoary age.” A quotation from Oscar Wilde occurred to him: The dust is dancing with the dust, the dead are whirling with the dead.

  TWO MONTHS’ WORTH of snow lay thick around Sagamore Hill in early February, and still the iron cold persisted. On the morning of Tuesday the fifth, when the Colonel motored to Manhattan to work in his Metropolitan office, the thermometer dropped to seven degrees below zero.

  For obvious reasons, he did not inform Josephine Stricker, his secretary, that he had a severe pain in the rectum. An abscess had formed there, brought on by an attack of fever. Since returning from Brazil, Roosevelt had noticed a correlation between these proclivities of his system. The abscess had been lanced less than twenty-four hours before in Oyster Bay, but he did not feel much relief. His habit was to ignore body signals, so he kept his morning appointments, lunched at the Harvard Club, and dictated through the afternoon to Miss Stricker.

  Around four o’clock he felt his trousers filling with blood and fled to the Langdon Hotel, where he kept a suite of rooms. Miss Stricker followed, unsuspecting, and continued to take dictation until she noticed his face was white. She gave him a glass of whiskey that seemed to revive him, but then he staggered to the sofa and fainted, leaving a trail of blood across the carpet. By the time his city physician, Dr. Walton Martin, arrived to treat him, his temperature was 103°F and he sat in a red puddle. He had to be forced to go to bed. Edith found him there later, in care of three implacable nurses. “What a jack I am,” he said. “Did you ever see such a performance?”

 

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