Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Other visitors came. All paid affectionate respects. Some sought the Colonel’s counsel, as if they feared they might soon be deprived of it. William Howard Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and Henry White wanted to discuss the League of Nations issue, which Wilson was determined to press. Messianic as ever, the President had announced that he would personally represent the United States at a postwar peace conference scheduled to begin in Paris in the new year of 1919. White was the single Republican on his negotiating team—and a weak choice, in Lodge’s opinion, altogether too obsequious to men of power. Wilson had not chosen a senator of either party to accompany him. He appeared to think that his foreign prestige would be enough to enshrine the Fourteen Points in a treaty so perfect, it could not fail to be endorsed.

  Roosevelt was mostly silent as he listened to these senior statesmen of the GOP debating peace policy. White got the impression that he was not averse to the League, leaning more to Root’s cautious approval than to Lodge’s harsh opposition. But in letters and articles dictated to Miss Stricker and a new personal assistant, Miss Flora Whitney, the Colonel made clear that he liked best Sir Edward Grey’s old idea of a League that would not require great powers to scale down their defenses. He scoffed at the hypocrisy of Wilson’s grand-sounding phrase self-determination for all peoples, noting that the President was in no hurry to grant liberty to Haiti or Santo Domingo.

  Two of his future biographers stopped by with honey on their lips, looking for last-chapter material. Lawrence Abbott told him that his speeches at the Sorbonne and London’s Guildhall in 1910 had “contributed directly” to the success of France and Britain in winning the war. Joseph Bucklin Bishop showed him the typescript of an epistolary volume that Scribners wanted to put out, under the title Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. The Colonel read it entranced. “I would rather have that book published than anything that has ever been written about me.”

  November gave way to December. By now Roosevelt was walking again, but only for short painful periods. Even sitting in a chair hurt. He was in his fourth week of hospitalization, on top of the week he had spent bedridden at Sagamore Hill. Unable to write anything but brief notes, he allowed Flora to think she was helping him with her laborious stenography. She was learning shorthand as part of her recovery process. Their relationship was quasi-familial, tender and sorrowful on both sides.

  He did what he could to hinder Wilson’s diplomacy, after the President set sail for France in a confiscated German liner renamed the George Washington. In letters addressed to Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Balfour, as well as such other foreign opinion-makers as Lord Bryce and Rudyard Kipling, Roosevelt argued that the Democratic Party’s defeat in the recent Congressional election amounted to a vote of no confidence in the administration. In any other free political system, he told Balfour, the chief executive would have had to resign. Speaking for the Republican Party, he declared that a majority of American opinion stood for “absolute loyalty to France and England in the peace negotiations.” That meant a retreat from the Fourteen Points, which he thought were susceptible to interpretation in Germany’s favor, and an abandonment of any presumption by the United States to act “as an umpire between our allies and our enemies.”

  Except for describing himself as “one of the leaders” of this new majority, Roosevelt did not say what was now acknowledged by political strategists: the 1920 GOP presidential nomination would be his if he wanted it. A number of Republicans and former Progressives called to sound him out about running. He declined to encourage them.

  “I am indifferent to the subject,” he said, lying back on his pillows. “Since Quentin’s death, the world seems to have shut down upon me.” But when William Allen White reported that Leonard Wood was a candidate, he said with studied casualness, “Well, probably I shall have to get in this thing in June.” Then he produced an article he had dictated that amounted to an advance campaign platform.

  “I tell you no secret when I say that the cards are arranged for the nomination of T.R.,” Hiram Johnson wrote a journalist on 14 December. “He has gained immeasurably in public esteem, I think.”

  If so, the gain was registered at home, not abroad. That evening’s newspapers broadcast the story that Woodrow Wilson was being received in Paris with a hysteria that far eclipsed the welcome given Roosevelt in 1910. A crowd of two million had greeted the President as the savior of Western civilization, showering him with roses as he rode up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe.

  ROOSEVELT WOKE THE following day with his left wrist in such agony it had to be splinted. Much more alarmingly, he showed symptoms of a pulmonary embolism. The hospital kept this secret from the press. His temperature shot up to 104°F, then subsided. Dr. Richards had been talking of sending him home, but it was obvious now that he should be watched day and night. Edith could do nothing but sit at his bedside while he slept, reading Shakespeare in an effort to stay calm. “Poor dear, I wish I could take the pain.… There are so many things which he wants to do and cannot.”

  He was buoyed by the appearance of Eleanor, back from France, except that she brought news that her husband had been left with a permanent limp. Roosevelt wished Ted could have been sent home on sick leave, like Archie. But he and Kermit were stuck in Europe, pending discharge from service.

  Stuck too, the Colonel resigned himself to the prospect of Christmas in hospital. He would have to forgo his thirty-year ritual of playing Santa Claus at the Cove School in Oyster Bay. Archie was appointed to substitute for him.

  Margaret Chanler paid a visit, and was disconcerted by her old friend’s listlessness. “I am pretty low now,” he admitted, taking her by the hand, “but I shall get better. I cannot go without having done something to that old gray skunk in the White House.”

  He did get better, enough that Edith got permission to take him home for Christmas. They agreed that it would be best to leave early on the holiday itself, when no press photographers would be around. Corinne came in on Christmas Eve and found Roosevelt in his bathrobe, bandaged but bright-eyed. He told her that there seemed to be “a strong desire” among Republicans to nominate him for the presidency in 1920. His health, however, might prevent him ever again entering public life.

  “Well, anyway, no matter what comes, I have kept the promise that I made to myself when I was twenty-one.”

  “What promise, Theodore?”

  “I promised myself that I would work up to the hilt until I was sixty, and I have done it.”

  Vertigo assailed him on Christmas morning as the hospital elevator dropped to the ground floor. Dr. Richards reached to steady him, but he flinched.

  “Don’t do that, doctor. I am not sick and it will give the wrong impression.”

  Bracing himself when the door opened, he walked firmly down the corridor to his waiting car.

  ALICE, ETHEL, ARCHIE, AND GRACE were waiting at Sagamore Hill when Edith brought him home. Lunch was going to be late, and the grandchildren were napping upstairs. Roosevelt looked white and battered, but clearly happy, after seven weeks away, to be back among his books and trophies. He gazed with rapture at the snow-whitened landscape around the house.

  There was a great turkey on the table, and mince pie and plum pudding and ice cream. The Colonel’s frailty, however, cast a pall upon the feast. He reveled in the excitement of the boys and girls as they opened their presents, heaped around the tree in the North Room. Before going to bed early, he noticed sympathetically that little Richard Derby had asthma, like himself as a child.

  ROOSEVELT LAY NOT in the bedroom he and his wife customarily shared, but in an adjacent chamber with corner windows facing south and west. It had been Ethel’s bedroom prior to her marriage, and back in days that Alice could scarcely remember, a gated nursery. It was said to be “the warmest room in the house” (so far as the phrase had any meaning at Sagamore Hill), because of its high, sunny exposure on winter afternoons. Edith wanted him there for that reason, and also because she could ha
ve quick access to him during the night.

  A coal fire burned in the corner hearth. Servants kept it going around the clock. Propped up in a mahogany sleigh bed, Roosevelt saw faded blue curtains, a blue plush armchair, a tufted sofa, a chest of drawers with swing mirror, a lift-top desk, and an Italian walnut nightstand, a souvenir of his second honeymoon. No bearskin rugs snarled on the carpeted floor, but there were carved heads and masks on the wall to comfort him.

  Every morning he breakfasted in bed, then got up and painfully dressed himself. Shaving, however, was impossible, so a barber came daily to freshen him up. Later he would limp downstairs to his study, where there was a log fire and a chaise longue. He could recline there, reading or dictating. Anemia enfeebled him. His inflammation traveled mysteriously from joint to joint, ending up on the last day of the month in just one finger. At the same time his temperature shot up to 103°F. It may have been precipitated by a surge of mixed emotions: an envelope from France had come, enclosing Marshal Pétain’s posthumous citation of Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt for a Croix de Guerre.

  Compared to such news, foreign dispatches reporting that Woodrow Wilson had been welcomed in London as rapturously as in Paris, and was now en route to Rome by royal train, were but the rattling of distant drums.

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1919, rheumatism flared afresh in Roosevelt’s right wrist. He gave up dressing and kept to the sofa in his bedroom, weakly trying to acknowledge at least some of the letters that still came up the hill in sacks, six days a week. Looking back over the past two years, he calculated that he had answered twenty-five thousand of them, and rejected well over two thousand speaking invitations. Now there was talk of him being president again, the sacks were sure to bulk larger.

  Despite worsening pain, he dictated a Kansas City Star editorial on Friday, 3 January. The article—his thirteenth for that paper since the Armistice—was a final statement of his views on the League of Nations issue, before the Paris Peace Conference opened in the middle of the month.

  “We all of us desire such a league,” Roosevelt said, “only we wish to be sure that it will help and not hinder the cause of world peace and justice.” Speaking as “an old man who has seen those dear to him fight,” he said that Americans did not wish to send any more of their sons to die in wars provoked by obscure foreign quarrels.

  He also dictated a new article for the Metropolitan, putting himself on record in favor of a constitutional amendment awarding equal voting rights to women. In a letter sent that same day to Senator George H. Moses of New Hampshire, he said it was “a misfortune” that his old friend Henry Cabot Lodge and some other New England senators were “so very bitter about woman suffrage.” He begged Moses not to oppose the amendment. “It is coming anyhow, and it ought to come.”

  The effort of this literary work exhausted him, and he told Edith that he felt as miserable as at any time during his hospitalization. Alarmed, she summoned Dr. Faller, who could do little but prescribe a course of arsenic injections to reduce the swelling in his patient’s wrist.

  Roosevelt suffered so much general pain overnight that on Saturday morning Edith engaged a full-time nurse. Since none of their children were around for extra help (Alice, Ethel, and Archie had gone their various ways after the holidays), she placed a desperate call to James Amos. The Colonel’s former valet was now working for the William J. Burns International Detective Agency in New York, but he agreed to come back temporarily into the family service.

  When Amos arrived that afternoon, he was shocked to see how ravaged Roosevelt looked. He bathed him with extreme care and coaxed him into a fresh pair of pajamas. “By George,” Roosevelt said gratefully, “you never hurt me a bit.” Amos turned his armchair so he could sit looking out over Oyster Bay, then put him to bed and monitored him through the night.

  Roosevelt was in too much discomfort to sleep well, but when Dr. Faller stopped by on Sunday morning, he seemed somewhat better. He stayed in his room all day, dictating two or three letters to Edith, and correcting the typescript of his Metropolitan article. She was touched by his exceptionally gentle mood, and whenever she passed the sofa she could not help kissing him and stroking his short, little-boy’s hair. “As it got dusk,” she wrote Ted later, “he watched the dancing flames and spoke of the happiness of being home, and made little plans for me. I think he had made up his mind he would have to suffer for some time & with his high courage had adjusted himself to bear it.”

  They were still together when, at around ten o’clock, he asked her to help him sit up. He said he felt as if his lungs or heart were about to give in. “I know it is not going to happen, but it is such a strange feeling.” She gave him a sniff of sal volatile and sent at once for Dr. Faller, who found Roosevelt’s bronchi clear and his pulse beating steadily and calmly.

  Leaving the nurse in charge, Edith accompanied Faller downstairs for a discreet conversation in the library. She said that her husband was insomniac, and asked permission to give him morphine. Faller assented, saying that he himself would rest easier if he knew the Colonel was comfortable.

  Edith watched while the nurse administered the shot shortly before midnight. James Amos took over, and the two women retired to their bedrooms. Roosevelt lay on the sofa for a while, saying little. Amos noticed a look of great weariness on his face.

  “James, don’t you think I might go to bed now?” He had to be half-lifted onto the mattress, then asked to be turned on his side. For a while he lay staring at the fire.

  Then he said, “James, will you please put out the light?”

  A SMALL LAMP on the dresser filled the room with a dim yellow glow. Amos switched it off and sat where he could see Roosevelt, or at least hear him breathing in the darkness. It was a calm, moonless night, and the big house was still. Edith came in at twelve-thirty to check on her husband. She found him sleeping peacefully, and did not kiss him for fear of waking him. When she visited again at two o’clock, he was still asleep. Amos had moved closer to what was left of the fire.

  About an hour later the valet was startled by a new note in Roosevelt’s respiration—“roughling” was the only word he could think of. He touched his master’s forehead. It felt dry and warm. Then Roosevelt began to breathe irregularly, with intermittent periods of silence. Each time he started again, his respiration sounded weaker. Eventually Amos had to lean close to hear any sound at all.

  AT FOUR O’CLOCK, Edith woke to find the nurse standing over her. She hurried through and called, “Theodore, darling!” But there was no response from the sleigh bed.

  * Tight, smooth, climbing turns that reverse direction by 180 degrees.

  EPILOGUE

  In Memoriam T.R.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S DEATH CERTIFICATE, signed by Dr. Faller, declared that he had succumbed at 4:15 A.M. on Monday, 6 January 1919, to an embolism of the lung, with multiple arthritis as a contributory factor. In a simultaneous press statement, Faller and two consulting physicians hedged slightly, saying that the blood clot might have gone to the brain. They revealed for the first time that their patient had been struck by a near-fatal pulmonary embolism some three weeks earlier. Neither of these detachments, they felt, necessarily related to the inflammatory rheumatism that had troubled him for some twenty years. They did not seem to know that in early childhood Roosevelt had shown many symptoms of rheumatic heart disease—an affliction notoriously capable of recurring in later life, often in winter weather. It was left to other observers to note that he had never entirely recovered from his prostration in the Brazilian jungle, or from the bullet John Schrank had fired into his chest. Not to be discounted, either, was the fact that he had recently suffered a devastating bereavement. In a more sophisticated era of professional diagnosis, a review of his medical history would indicate that “the cause of death was myocardial infarction, secondary to chronic atherosclerosis with possible acute coronary occlusion.”

  If so, he could be said in more ways than one to have died of a broken heart.

  THE
NEWS OF THE COLONEL’S death came too late for the morning papers that Monday, but it spread around the world with extraordinary swiftness by telephone, telegraph, and cable.

  A common reaction among the millions of Americans who had imagined him to be indestructible, and headed again for the presidency, was a sense of shock so violent they took refuge in metaphor. For Henry A. Beers, “a wind had fallen, a light had gone out, a military band had stopped playing.” For John Burroughs, a pall seemed to cover the sky. For William Dudley Foulke, as well as the editors of the New York Evening Post, there had been an eclipse of the sun. For General Fred C. Ainsworth, a storm center was swept away. For Hamlin Garland, a mountain had slid from the horizon. For Kermit Roosevelt, who heard the news with Ted at the U.S. Army headquarters in Coblenz, the earth had lost one of its dimensions.

  “You will know how the bottom has dropped out for me,” he wrote his mother.

  Archibald Roosevelt announced that a funeral of stark simplicity would take place in two days’ time at Christ Episcopal Church in Oyster Bay. The burial would follow in Youngs Memorial Cemetery, nearby on a hillside overlooking the cove. President Wilson issued a proclamation from Paris, appointing Vice President Thomas R. Marshall to represent him at both ceremonies, and directing government offices to fly their flags at half-mast for a month. Both houses of Congress adjourned, as did the Supreme Court, closing without any proceedings for the first time in its history. Secretaries Newton D. Baker and Josephus Daniels ordered army, marine, and naval posts around the world to fire salutes to the former commander in chief at sunrise on the day of his obsequies, Wednesday, 8 January, and to continue firing at half-hourly intervals until sunset.