Returning to the Police Board after McKinley’s victory, Roosevelt waited expectantly for a high post in the new administration. While numerous friends lobbied on his behalf, hopeful for his appointment as secretary of the navy, McKinley hesitated. “I want peace,” the new president told one Roosevelt ally, but “Theodore—whom I know only slightly—is always getting into rows with everybody. I am afraid he is too pugnacious.” Roosevelt’s supporters refused to relent. And finally, McKinley made an offer to Roosevelt—the post of assistant secretary of the navy. As so often before, friends cautioned Roosevelt not to settle for this lesser post, but in what had become a familiar pattern, he snatched up the offer.
* * *
As assistant secretary to Navy Secretary John Davis Long, Roosevelt was relegated to an actual subordinate role for the first time, directly answerable to a superior. Potential minefields surrounded the relationship from the start. Two decades older than Roosevelt, Long, cautious by temperament, personified the status quo of the McKinley administration. Having experienced the horrific years of the Civil War, Long, like McKinley, was committed to preserving the peace. Roosevelt was convinced that a looming war with Spain over their treatment of the Cuban freedom fighters was on the near horizon, and that the Navy must be transformed to address that likelihood.
How then, did Roosevelt manage this subordinate position? For a start, Roosevelt built up “a reserve of good feeling” through repeated acts of courtesy, kindness, and helpfulness that secured the trust and confidence of Secretary Long. Recognizing that Long, who had no prior experience with the Navy, was uncomfortable with talk of “dry docks, gun turrets, blueprint specifications, or the frailty of torpedo boats,” Roosevelt swiftly mastered the technical details involved in overseeing the Navy—the schedules for inspection, repair, and maintenance, the numbers of inactive vessels, the construction of new ships—which he then translated into clear, readable reports delivered to Long’s desk every morning. As ever, Roosevelt’s voracious scientific and historical reading and writing served him well. In this case, his statistical understanding and expertise, begotten as a fledgling naval historian when he wrote his first published work, on the naval battles in the War of 1812, enabled him to easily master telling details that held no interest for his superior Long.
Long was delighted with his industrious young assistant. “He is full of suggestions; many of which are of great value to me,” Long remarked, “and his spirited and forceful habit is a good tonic for one who is disposed to be as conservative and careful as I am.” Just as Roosevelt had instituted hands-on inspections in the Civil Service and extended his rambles to the sidewalks of New York, so now he left his desk to investigate, inspect, and review various aspects of the Navy. He was on hand during an investigation of a torpedo accident; spent five days reviewing the Naval Reserve Militia in the Midwest, accompanied the First Battalion on a practice cruise, and went aboard the Iowa, the Navy’s state-of-the-art battleship. When he met with the crew that had designed the ship, he “broke the record asking questions,” leaving the shipbuilder in a state of amazement at the combination of his “theoretical knowledge” of construction and his command of “the details of bolts and rivets.” And just as he had commended policemen on the beat, so he now praised members of the Second Battalion after witnessing a field exercise on parade grounds.
Even as he surveyed the current readiness of the Navy and appeared to Secretary Long a dutiful and solicitous son, Roosevelt was carefully formulating his agenda to build an expanded, war-ready Navy. Sensitive to the administration’s reticence regarding war, he cloaked his plans in the sheep’s clothing of preparedness. In a well-publicized speech at the Naval War College, he drew upon the wisdom of the country’s first president. “A century has passed since Washington wrote, ‘To be prepared for war is the most effectual means to promote peace,’ ” he began. “In all our history there has never been a time when preparedness for war was any menace to peace.” The speech garnered widespread praise, making Roosevelt a leading proponent of preparedness and war-readiness.
While pleased with the response, Roosevelt craved action. “I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds,” Roosevelt frequently charged. And that summer presented the opportunity for action when the fatigued Secretary Long retreated to Massachusetts for an eight-week vacation. This was not remarkable in the days before air-conditioning; government officials, including presidents, regularly escaped Washington during the summer. Furthermore, prior to the hot weather setting in, Roosevelt had graciously promised Long that he would give up his family summer at Sagamore Hill to accommodate his superior’s schedule.
Long’s protracted hiatus left Roosevelt the acting secretary of the navy and he made the most of his temporary elevation. “The Secretary is away, and I am having immense fun running the Navy,” Roosevelt reported to a friend in August. “As I am given a free hand when alone, I am really accomplishing a great deal,” he told Bamie. Indeed, under Roosevelt’s “hot-weather” acting secretaryship, ports and coastal fortifications were improved, numerous shakedown cruises were taken, and Congress was lobbied to expand the fleet. Most importantly, Roosevelt’s awareness of the disposition of fleets around the world persuaded him that the Pacific sector, where the bulk of the Spanish fleet was stationed, could play an instrumental role if war broke out in Cuba. Consequently, he pulled every string to get the man he wanted appointed commander in chief of the Asiatic Squadron—Admiral George Dewey. Though they had met but several times, Roosevelt instinctively recognized in Dewey the right leader for a crisis. “I knew that in the event of war Dewey could be slipped like a wolf-hound from a leash; I was sure that if he were given half a chance he would strike instantly and with telling effect; and I made up my mind that all I could do to give him that half-chance should be done.”
Simultaneously, he conducted an extended, informative, and affectionate correspondence with Secretary Long, assuring him that all was under control. “You must be tired and you ought to have an entire rest,” he wrote in early August. “If things go on as they are now there isn’t the slightest reason to you to come back for six weeks more,” he reiterated a week later. “I am very glad you have been away,” he followed up, “for it has been the hottest weather we have had.” He could not have pressed harder against the bounds of duplicity and not broken them.
The relationships Roosevelt had long cultivated with the press aided his quest to build up the Navy. Invited to participate in several cruises, reporters praised the current state of the Navy but indicated what still needed to be done. On occasion, Roosevelt’s comfort with the press led to the publication of overtly bellicose statements that countered the administration’s agenda and drew the ire of Secretary Long. In such instances, Roosevelt immediately apologized to Long, accepted his reprimand with grace, restored obedience by promising that his spirit was “chastened,” and then proceeded exactly as before. He succeeded in keeping Long’s trust by remaining “beguilingly honest and open” about their differences of views. Of paramount importance was simply to acknowledge who was in charge.
When a potentially troublesome article appeared in the Boston Herald, charging that Roosevelt was trying to seize for himself the functions and responsibilities of the man in charge, Roosevelt instantly notified Long about the piece and confessed that it greatly discomforted him. He understood, Roosevelt added, that the idea that he would not be a loyal subordinate “was just what you were warned against before I came,” and he “flattered” himself to believe that aside from a few “infernal” statements, he had done nothing of which Long would have disapproved. While he would continue to present his own views as “strongly” as possible, “when you have once determined on your policy I shall carry it out in letter and spirit.”
That both men were truly fond of each other smoothed such occasional tensions. After Long highly praised his subordinate in an interview, Roosevelt wrote to thank him for his “generous” statements. “It has be
en an entirely new experience for me to serve under a man like you. Of course, you will never have any friction with me, excepting from wholly unintentional slips on my part, for the excellent reason that I should regard myself as entirely unworthy to hold such a position as I do hold if, now that I have a chief like you, I failed to back him up in every possible way.”
Dramatic reports of Spanish treachery against the Cuban rebels in the winter of 1898 (many luridly exaggerated by war-mongering newspapers) sparked widespread humanitarian outrage, ratcheting up Roosevelt’s sense of urgency about the possible need for intervention. If war should come, “it should come finally on our initiative,” he beseeched Long. “If we drift into it, if we do not prepare in advance, and suddenly have to go into hostilities without taking the necessary steps beforehand, we may have to encounter one or two bitter humiliations, and we shall certainly be forced to spend the first three or four most important weeks not in striking, but in making those preparations to strike which we should have made long before.”
Roosevelt’s warning proved prescient. On February 15 the USS Maine, stationed in Havana Harbor as “an act of friendly courtesy” to the Cuban people, exploded, killing 266 Americans. Though the cause of the explosion was never determined, widespread rage and a call to declare war swept the country. Still, President McKinley, who had fought at Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, hesitated. “I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.” While the president was plagued with indecision, Roosevelt took a series of unwarranted actions that under any boss other than John Davis Long might well have caused his immediate firing for insubordination.
On February 25, Long left the office for a day’s rest. “Do not take any step affecting the policy of the Administration without consulting the President or me. I am not away from town and my intention was to have you look after the routine of the office while I get a quiet day off. I write to you because I am anxious to have no unnecessary occasion for a sensation in the papers.” Despite this warning, Roosevelt’s months of preparatory work burst into coordinated execution. He launched a series of “peremptory orders”—“distributing ships, ordering ammunition,” purchasing tons of coal, “sending messages to Congress for immediate legislation authorizing the enlistment of an unlimited number of seamen,” and finally, ordering Admiral Dewey to “keep full of coal” and be prepared if war comes to take offensive action “to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the coast.”
Long discovered these orders when he returned to the office the next morning. “Roosevelt, in his precipitate way, has come very near causing more of an explosion than happened to the Maine,” he confided to his diary. “He means to be thoroughly loyal but the very devil seemed to possess him yesterday afternoon.” Reacting more from compassion than in anger, Long rationalized that Roosevelt had lost his head as a consequence of grave troubles at home: Edith suffered from what doctors would finally diagnose as a massive abscess in a muscle near the base of her spine, requiring a long and dangerous operation to remove; at the same time, Long knew that their ten-year-old son, Theodore Jr., was “just recovering from a long and dangerous illness.” This combination, Long wanted to believe, “accentuated” Roosevelt’s “natural nervousness” and prompted him to take action which he otherwise would not “for a moment have taken.” Long’s supposition that Roosevelt’s sensitive nature had resulted in a man overburdened by family crises was the opposite of the well-meditated, if transgressive, case at hand on February 25.
Nonetheless, neither Long nor McKinley revoked a single one of Roosevelt’s orders. Accordingly, when Congress finally declared war on Spain nearly nine weeks later, Commander Dewey was well-positioned to strike. Two hours after the Battle of Manila Bay commenced, seven weeks before the invasion of Cuba, the Spanish Pacific fleet was decimated, giving the American forces a decided advantage. “If it had not been for Roosevelt we should not have been able to strike the blow we did at Manila,” the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations remarked. “It needed just Roosevelt’s energy and promptness.” American army officer Leonard Wood later observed that “few men would have dared to assume this responsibility, but Theodore Roosevelt knew that there were certain things that ought to be done and that delay would be fatal. He felt the responsibility and he took it.” For Roosevelt, being a subordinate was never confused with being subservient.
* * *
No sooner had Congress declared war on Spain on April 25, 1898, than Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that he would resign his Navy post and volunteer for the Army. Not a single friend agreed with what seemed to them an impulsive decision. “I really think he is going mad,” one remarked. “The President has asked him twice as a personal favor to stay in the Navy Dept., but Theodore is wild to fight and hack and hew. It really is sad, of course this ends his political career for good.” Both his intimate political friend Cabot Lodge and his old mentor William Sewall emphatically concurred that he had far “more important work to do in the Navy Department.” Secretary Long worried that he had “lost his head in this unutterable folly of deserting his post where he is of most service and running off to ride a horse and probably, brush mosquitoes from his neck on the Florida sands.” While “his heart is right, and he means well,” he added, “it is one of those cases of aberration—desertion—vainglory of which he is utterly unaware.”
Roosevelt’s decision was, in fact, anything but rash. His “usefulness” in the Navy Department, he suspected, would “largely disappear in time of war.” Not only would the military advisers take center stage, but Secretary Long would steadfastly remain at his post. War would close the doors on his decisive and eventful days as acting secretary. The time had come to find a way out. “My work here has been the work of preparing the tools,” he told Sewall. “They are prepared, and now the work must lie with those who use them. . . . I would like to be one of those using the tools.”
The chance to volunteer in war touched a raw nerve in Theodore. He considered his father’s decision to avoid service in the Civil War a stain on his family’s honor, even though the decision was made to avert the utter breakdown of his southern wife within a badly strained family dynamic. So, now, in the spring of 1898, despite the fragility of his own family—Edith had not yet recovered from her operation and young Theodore seemed to be suffering a nervous collapse—Roosevelt felt compelled to serve in Cuba. “You know what my wife and children mean to me,” he later told his military adviser, Archie Butt, “and yet I made up my mind that I would not allow even a death to stand in my way; that it was my one chance to do something for my country and for my family and my one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring-rod in every family. I know now that I would have turned from my wife’s deathbed to have answered that call.”
* * *
Among our four leaders, only Theodore Roosevelt would command men in the heat of a military operation. Only Roosevelt would face an actual enemy with his life and the lives of his men in the balance. When he took command of his troops in Cuba, he was directly responsible for them, an experience that altered and vastly enlarged his confidence in himself as a leader.
When the original call for three volunteer regiments to supplement the Regular Army was issued, it was to be “composed exclusively of frontiersmen possessing special qualifications as horsemen and marksmen.” Here was the fortuitous conjunction of precisely the skills Theodore Roosevelt had honed during his years in the Badlands. He had willed himself to become an indefatigable hunter, a reasonable marksman, a cowboy able to stay in the saddle for a dozen hours at a time, inured to extremes of weather, equipped to tolerate all manner of unexpected hardships. Yet, when Secretary of War Russell A. Alger offered Roosevelt the top leadership post—colonel of the first of these three volunteer regiments—he declined.
Why, when Roosevelt had the opportunity to actualize a lifelong fantasy of the knight on horseback, the heroic martial figure leadi
ng a charge at the forefront of his men, would he decline and instead defer to his younger friend Leonard Wood? The answer reveals a critical leadership attribute—the self-awareness to soberly analyze his own strengths and compensate for his weaknesses. He declined the offer and recommended Wood solely because he knew that he lacked the experience and technical knowledge to speedily outfit and provision a regiment—the knowledge possessed by Wood, who had served in the Regular Army and been awarded the Medal of Honor. “I told [Alger] after six weeks’ service in the field I would feel competent to handle the regiment, but that I did not know how to equip it or how to get it into action.” If Wood were made colonel, however, Roosevelt said he would happily, without the slightest reservation or competitiveness, accept the subordinate post of lieutenant colonel. “Alger considered this an act of foolish self-abnegation on my part,” Roosevelt later said, “instead of its being what it was—the wisest act I could have performed.” Central to Roosevelt’s decision was not the title he would enjoy, but the ultimate success of the regiment in which he would share command.
Colonel Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt formed an effective and complementary team. While Wood requisitioned horses, saddles, tents, blankets, boots, and the like, Roosevelt so successfully promoted the concept and public perception of the regiment, which eventually became known as the Rough Riders, that twenty thousand applications were received within five days for fewer than eight hundred places. Projecting a vision of a unique fighting force that would represent a microcosm of the country itself, Roosevelt persuaded the authorities to enlarge the regiment to include a troop of easterners who “possessed in common” with the cowboys, Indians, hunters, and miners “the traits of hardihood and thirst for adventure.” He found such qualities among Ivy League football stars, polo players, oarsmen, sportsmen from the Knickerbocker Club and the Somerset Club, and policemen from their beats in New York City. This glamorous mosaic of the country’s diversity would form any journalist’s dream of a melting pot, and Roosevelt was just the figure to supply sufficient heat to melt these heterogeneous elements into a cohesive unit. In the men he gathered into his regiment, he had quilted together the broad episodes of his life: his willed athleticism, body building, Harvard education, engagement with hunters and woodsmen in Maine, ranching and riding in the Far West, and working with the police force in New York.
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