Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  “ ‘OH, SWEETEST OF ALL SWEET GIRLS.’ ”

  Edith Kermit Roosevelt in 1909. (photo credit p.5)

  He is therefore relieved to hear that Carnegie will be sending him a check for $20,000 for the naturalists, along with a promise of further cash if needed. “I am now entirely easy as to the expense of the scientific Smithsonian part of the trip,” he writes, emphasizing that he and Kermit will continue to finance themselves. He does not want to become personally indebted to anyone. His experience as a professional politician has been that donors always look for repayment in the coin of their choice. What Carnegie craves is influence over affairs of state. Already there have been indications that the steelmaker, an ardent pacifist, wants to draft him into the international arms control movement—a cause he has never much cared for.

  Revisiting Nairobi in mid-December, he sends off another plump envelope to his publisher. He is pleased to hear from Robert Bridges, the editor of Scribner’s Magazine, that the first installment of his safari story has been a runaway publishing success. “The very large edition of the October number (much the largest we have ever printed) is completely exhausted.” Subsequent print runs are to be even larger. With eleven installments already mailed, he has only two more to write, and can look forward to publication of his complete African book in less than a year.

  In Nairobi’s little bookstore, he amplifies the Pigskin Library with Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, nine volumes of Julian Huxley’s Essays in Popular Science, and every classic he can lay his hands on: Cervantes, Goethe, Molière, Pascal, Montaigne, Saint-Simon. Then, on 18 December, he takes the Uganda Railway to Lake Victoria, and sails in a small steamer for Entebbe. As he does so, he crosses the equator and reenters his home hemisphere.

  CHRISTMAS DAY FINDS him marching northwest toward Lake Albert, parallel with the Victoria Nile. It is elephant country, and he cannot resist downing another leviathan—his eighth—and guzzling the “excellent soup” made from its trunk. He is in superb health, having (perhaps with the aid of Cuban fever) deflected all local diseases. If the rheumatism he began to complain of in his last years as President still troubles him, he has stopped mentioning it. His stride is tireless, unusually long for a small-boned man five feet nine inches tall. He can run, carrying a heavy gun, for one and a half miles in 102°F heat. He eats enormously, but his constant activity burns up fat. He looks better than at any time in his adult life: tanned, hard-muscled, sun bleach gilding the slight gray in his hair. Even his monocular eyesight seems improved. He is the first in his party to spot a distant herd of buffalo, “their dark forms picked out by highlights on the curve of their horns.” His hearing remains phenomenal, and he is intrigued to find that his sense of smell has become animal-like, alerting him to the nearness of invisible prey.

  He has, in short, reached his peak as a hunter, exuberantly altered from the pale, overweight statesman of ten months ago. Africa’s way of reducing every problem of existence to dire alternatives—shoot or starve, kill or be killed, shelter or suffer, procreate or count for nothing—has clarified his thinking, purged him of politics and its constant search for compromise. Yet on the seventh day of the new year, as he enters the valley of the White Nile at Butiaba, he begins to accept that his retreat into the Pleistocene is over. A reverse journey is under way: he feels himself “passing through stratum after stratum of savagery and semicivilization … each stage representing some thousands of years of advance upon the preceding.”

  The advance is as slow as he can make it. It proceeds amphibiously, with most of his porters trekking inland from Kobe to Nimule, while the white command meanders downriver in a flotilla of five small boats. He orders a three-week halt just south of the third parallel, and in a hunting orgy with Kermit, kills nine white rhinos.

  A MONTH LATER, he reaches Gondokoro in the southern Sudan. By now, after a final chase after giant eland, he feels that he has advanced at least as far as the seventh century. A letter from Henry Cabot Lodge jerks him further forward. It warns that a phalanx of foreign correspondents will waylay him at Khartoum, 750 miles north. “There is a constantly growing thought of you and your return to the Presidency.… They will all try to get you to say things. I think it is of the first importance that you should say absolutely nothing about American politics before you get home.”

  He insists in reply that all he wants to do is finish his book, tour Europe with Edith, Kermit, and Ethel, and then come home as a private citizen. “At present it does not seem to me that it would be wise, from any side, for me to be a candidate. But that can wait.”

  THREE MEMBERS OF THE KHARTOUM press contingent, however, cannot. On 11 March they emerge from the Nile’s dawn mist in a commandeered steamboat, waving sun helmets and the Stars and Stripes. Encouraged by his return of salute, they introduce themselves as representatives of the Chicago Tribune, New York World, and United Press. He invites them to dinner aboard his new ship, the Dal, a luxury sternwheeler made available by the Governor-General of the Sudan. But when they row over that evening, they find the table laid on its forward barge, full of malodorous hides. The message is clear: he still considers himself a traveling hunter.

  They listen frustrated as he tells story after safari story, his face silhouetted against a papyrus fire in the swamp of Ar Rank. Eventually he gives them a statement—of sorts—for publication: “We [sic] have nothing to say and will have nothing to say on American or foreign policy questions.… I will give no interviews and anything purporting to be an interview with me can be accepted as false as soon as it appears.”

  Courteously, the next morning, he orders the newsmen back downriver, and spends the next two days writing in his stateroom. Every time he goes on deck for a breather, he recognizes more and more of the Nile birds he pursued and stuffed as a boy, thirty-seven years before on his father’s rented dahabeah: cow herons, hoopoos, bee-eaters, black-and-white chats, plover, kingfishers, desert larks, and trumpet bullfinches. At night, he sits under the stars and listens to other, unseen species calling to one another in strange voices. He watches crocodiles and hippos slide through the black water and thinks up a phrase to describe the luminosity they shed from their backs: “whirls and wakes of feeble light.” His narrative has caught up with him: he is writing now almost in real time.

  All that remains is to list the game he has shot on safari: 9 lions, 8 elephants, 6 buffalo, 13 rhino, 7 giraffes, 7 hippos, 2 ostriches, 3 pythons, 1 crocodile, 5 wildebeest, 20 zebras, 177 antelope of various species, from eland to dik-dik, 6 monkeys, and 32 other animals and birds: 296 “items” in all. Kermit has bagged 216—a total almost as impressive as the young man’s ability to match Heller and Mearns drink for drink.

  “Kermit and I kept about a dozen trophies for ourselves,” Roosevelt writes in a final defensive paragraph. “We were in hunting-grounds practically as good as any that ever existed; but we did not kill a tenth, nor a hundredth, part of what we might have killed had we been willing.”

  Shortly before noon on 14 March, Khartoum’s palms and minarets emerge from a red dust haze downriver. The Dal swings into the mouth of the Blue Nile and bears down on the private dock of the governor-general’s palace, where at last he sees, in his own half-regretful image, “the twentieth century superimposed upon the seventh.”

  PART ONE

  1910–1913

  The epigraphs at the head of every

  chapter are taken from the poems of

  Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935),

  whom Theodore Roosevelt rescued from

  poverty and obscurity in 1905. He went on

  to win three Pulitzer Prizes.

  CHAPTER 1

  Loss of Imperial Will

  Equipped with unobscured intent

  He smiles with lions at the gate,

  Acknowledging the compliment

  Like one familiar with his fate.

  THE KISS THAT THEODORE ROOSEVELT longed for did not materialize when he stepped ashore in Khartoum on 14 March 1910. Instead,
he had to return the salute of Sir Rudolf Anton Karl von Slatin Pasha, G.C.V.O., K.C.M.G., C.B., inspector-general of the Sudan, and pass an honor guard of askaris into the palace garden, where the elite of Anglo-Sudanese society awaited him amid the silver paraphernalia of afternoon tea. He was informed that Edith’s train from Cairo was delayed, and that she and Ethel would not arrive for another couple of hours. In the meantime, Slatin would not hear of the Colonel checking in to a hotel. A suite for his party had been readied in the palace, and a private yacht was standing by for sightseeing during his stay.

  What Roosevelt wanted to see, more than anything but Edith’s face, was Omdurman. The battlefield, where General Kitchener’s Twenty-first Lancers had staged the last great cavalry charge of the nineteenth century, lay only ten miles away. Kitchener had been on his mind in recent days, if only because HMS Dal, the boat that had brought him north from Gondokoro, had been the triumphant commander’s flagship. On its boards, twelve years before, Kitchener had proclaimed British control over the entire Nile Valley, from Uganda to the Mediterranean.

  The success of that dominion—or condominium, as the Foreign Office called it, as a sop to Sudanese, Egyptian, and Turkish sensibilities—was palpable in Khartoum’s tranquil, orange-blossom-scented air. Rebuilt by Kitchener from the ruins of a thirteen-year Muslim interregnum, the city was laid out like the Union Jack, its crossbars lined with stone villas and its triangles filled with seven thousand trees. Once the most violent flashpoint on the African continent, it now lazily breathed pax Britannica. In the sunburned, aristocratic faces of his hosts, in their perfect manners and air of unstudied authority, Roosevelt recognized the attributes he had always admired in the English ruling class, along with “intelligence, ability, and a very lofty sense of duty.”

  “THE ELITE OF ANGLO-SUDANESE SOCIETY AWAITED HIM.”

  Roosevelt arrives in Khartoum, 14 March 1910. (photo credit i1.1)

  Yet he was aware of the constant menace of Arab nationalism, obscure yet encircling, like the mirages wavering on the desert horizon. The haze that hung over the city seemed, to his vivid historical imagination, to be red with the blood of General Gordon, murdered in this very palace by Mahdist dervishes.

  KHARTOUM’S NORTH STATION was cordoned off when he met the Cairo express at 5:30 P.M. He climbed into his wife’s private car the moment it came to a halt, and remained inside for a long time. Finally the two of them emerged arm in arm, with Kermit and Ethel close behind. All four Roosevelts were laughing.

  Edith’s smile transformed her normally stiff public face, exposing perfect teeth and lighting up the blue of her eyes. At forty-eight, she was no longer slender, but had just enough height to carry off the consequences of never having had to cook for herself, and her wrists and ankles and sharp profile were as elegant as ever. She had suffered during her year-long separation from Theodore, more from worry about him on safari than distress about herself: books and music and children had always been her solace.

  That evening, Roosevelt changed into a tuxedo and replaced the wire spectacles he had worn on safari with beribboned pince-nez. Transformed thus, he looked dapper for the first time in nearly a year, and worthy of the place card that confronted him at Slatin Pasha’s table: THE HONORABLE COLONEL ROOSEVELT.

  So far he had managed to keep at bay the reporters that Henry Cabot Lodge had warned him about. They were clamoring for statements on a hot local news item—the murder, by a Nationalist student, of Egypt’s Coptic prime minister, Boutros Ghali Pasha. Roosevelt had heard about this incident before arriving in Khartoum.

  He was not unwilling to speak about it, but preferred to wait until he made a scheduled address on the issue of condominium at Cairo University in two weeks’ time. As for commenting on American issues, he needed first to go through a fat sack of telegrams and letters from home. John Callan O’Laughlin of the Chicago Tribune had collared the sack and was offering to serve as his traveling stenographer, as F. Warrington Dawson had in British East Africa. Roosevelt was fond of O’Laughlin, an experienced foreign policy man, and admired his sass. (It had been “Cal” who, scattering piastres like couscous, chartered the steamboat that met the Dal at Ar Rank.) However, another contender for secretarial honors was at hand: Lawrence F. Abbott, president of The Outlook. Roosevelt felt that, as an employee of that magazine himself (he was listed in its masthead as “Contributing Editor”), he could not turn Abbott down. His work for Scribner’s Magazine was done, and he must look to The Outlook for income—and, not incidentally, space to promulgate his political views.

  So O’Laughlin was consoled with a promise of special access, the press corps invited to accompany the Omdurman excursion, and Abbott granted a close-up position from which to observe, and record, the Colonel’s return to public life.

  EDITH KERMIT ROOSEVELT was a woman of impeccable sang-froid—a phrase that came naturally to her, as did other Gallicisms deriving from her Huguenot ancestry. About the only scrutiny that shook her public composure was that of the camera lens. As mistress of the White House, she had managed to avoid it almost entirely. But now, to her consternation, she found a battery of photographers waiting at Omdurman. Worse still, they continued clicking as camels kneeled to carry the Roosevelt party to the battlefield.

  In the event, she withstood the swaying journey better than her husband, enjoying herself as Slatin Pasha pointed out the plain on which Arab bodies had piled up in masses under the fire of Kitchener’s artillery. Roosevelt chafed, not having been in a saddle of any kind for more than a year. But Slatin was impressed by his knowledge of every detail of the battle.

  They dismounted by the dry watercourse where four hundred cavalrymen, trailed by vultures, had collided with Arab troops in a charge as suicidal as that of Pickett at Gettysburg. It had occurred only two months after Roosevelt’s own charge up the Heights of San Juan in 1898. “All men who have any power of joy in battle,” he had written then, “know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart.”

  Slatin certainly knew, having fought for British control of the Sudan no fewer than thirty-eight times, endured eleven years of Arab imprisonment, and been forced to watch the presentation of Gordon’s head to Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad.

  Roosevelt stood on the crest of Jebel Surgham, from which Winston Churchill had looked down on wave after wave of black-clad Arabs, firing bullets into the air and waving banners imprinted with verses from the Koran. Now he saw only empty sand, and the shabby sprawl of Omdurman Fort, and the Mahdi’s tomb rising like a ruined beehive. His soul revolted against all he had read about “the blight of the Mahdist tyranny, with its accompaniments of unspeakable horror.” Those sons of the Prophet had tortured and killed two-thirds of their own number—mostly blacks in the southern Sudan—in a fanatic interpretation of jihad. If that was what today’s Egyptian Nationalists looked for, as they smuggled in bombs through Alexandria and called for the murder of every foreign official in the condominium, then it was plainly the duty of the British government to stand for humanity against barbarism.

  Omdurman fascinated Roosevelt so much that he was loath to leave. By the time the camelcade got back to the riverbank it was already dark, and a quarter moon had risen. Khartoum’s stately buildings glowed white across the Nile.

  CAL O’LAUGHLIN AND ABBOTT were generous in sharing all the domestic news the Colonel had missed, or failed to register, in nearly a year. The contents of his mail sack amplified every story they had to tell, from betrayal of the Roosevelt legacy on the part of Taft administration officials to what looked like significant stirrings of strength in the Democratic Party, long dormant as a national political force.

  One long, anguished letter, from his protégé Gifford Pinchot, was especially disturbing. It confirmed a rumor Roosevelt had heard some weeks before (courtesy of the naked messenger from Gondokoro) and refused to believe. Taft had dismissed Pinchot as chief forester of the United States.

  It was understandable that the President might find such a passionate reformer diffi
cult to deal with. But of all men, Pinchot was the one most identified with Roosevelt’s conservation record, and by extension, with all the progressive reforms they had worked on together after 1905—reforms that Taft was supposed to have perpetuated.

  “We have fallen back down the hill you have led us up,” Pinchot wrote, “and there is a general belief that the special interests are once more in substantial control of both Congress and the Administration.” He portrayed a well-meaning but weak president, co-opted by “reactionaries” careless of natural resources. Wetlands and woodlands Roosevelt had withdrawn from commercial exploitation had been given back to profiteers. The National Conservation Commission was muzzled. Pinchot’s longed-for World Conservation Conference had never happened. His main villain was his boss, Interior Secretary Richard A. Ballinger, whom he had publicly accused of trading away protected waterpower sites in Alaska, and allowing illegal coal claims in a forest that had been Theodore Roosevelt’s final presidential gift to the American people. Taft, consequently, had had no choice in dismissing Pinchot from office.