Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Walter Hines Page, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, gave the Colonel a welcoming luncheon. It was attended by Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Lord Curzon, the Spanish diplomat Alfonso Merry del Val, the agricultural reformer Sir Horace Plunkett, and other luminaries. Obscurely basking in their combined glow was Woodrow Wilson’s friend Colonel Edward M. House of Texas. One of the busy little gray men who make themselves indispensable to potentates as fund-raisers, gossips, and go-betweens, House was in the midst of a private tour of European capitals. He stood close to the reception line and marveled at the sharpness of the Colonel’s focus on every incoming guest.

  Afterward the Lees drove him out to Chequers. They told him they were thinking of bequeathing the house to the nation as a country retreat for prime ministers. Roosevelt praised the idea in words not entirely flattering to his host, saying that an “ordinary man” could make “a definite difference in the world” by being so generous.

  The company that weekend was congenial and nonpolitical, consisting of John St. Loe Strachey, owner of the Spectator, Sir Owen Seaman, editor of Punch, the literary scholar Sidney Colvin, and their wives. They gasped at his stories of murder and malaria in the jungle (a map of Brazil spread out on the floor of the Great Hall), unaware that in a country palace near Prague, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was making a much more lurid presentation to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  THE HEIR TO THE DUAL Monarchy was seeking advice, as often before, on what to do about unrest in the Balkans. Serbia was increasingly resentful of Austrian repression, and was now, Franz Ferdinand believed, fomenting revolution in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He wanted to know if the Kaiser had meant what he had said in Leipzig, at the time of the dedication of the Volkerschlacht monument: that Germany would support any Austrian move to discipline Serbia, once and for all.

  Wilhelm neither confirmed nor denied this declaration of intent. But he suggested that the archduke would be wise to “do something” about the Serbs soon. If not, Russia, currently preoccupied with modernizing her army and navy, might feel impelled to step in and defend her fellow Slavs.

  WHILE ROOSEVELT MANAGED to give an impression of “abounding vitality” to the unobservant Lees, the fragility of his health was apparent when he returned to London to address the Royal Geographical Society. Fever had left his voice so weak that he had to ask for the lecture to be relocated to a small hall, in spite of a tremendous demand for tickets. Over a thousand ladies and gentlemen in evening dress showed up to hear him, and most had to be turned away. No less a dignitary than Earl Grey, the former governor-general of Canada, was seen climbing a wall to get into the auditorium.

  Roosevelt more or less repeated the blackboard-tapping presentation he had given in Washington. He was listened to with respect, since British geographers initially skeptical of his expedition had by now accepted the truth of all his claims. He was beguilingly modest, hailing the Royal Society as “the foremost geographical body in the world,” again never mentioning that the Dúvida was now named after him, and emphasizing that he had not discovered it. That honor, he said, belonged to Colonel Rondon, one of the Brazilian pioneers who heroically, and without sufficient plaudits from the Anglo-American world, were putting their great wilderness on the map.

  The nearest he got to tweaking the nose of the Society was to brandish a 1911 British map of the territory he had explored and prove it to be almost completely inaccurate. His manner was so mild that this merely provoked laughter. Officials sitting on the platform with him chuckled when he went into falsetto on punch lines, not realizing that he was using humor to disguise the attrition of his voice.

  Next morning, the same Harley Street laryngologist who had treated him in 1910 examined his throat again and ordered him not to make any open-air speeches for several months. Roosevelt jumped at the chance to refute a fresh batch of stateside rumors that he intended to run for governor of New York. “This is my answer to those who wanted me to go into a campaign,” he told an American reporter. “If anyone expected me to do so, I cannot now.”

  He used virtually every minute of his remaining time in London to renew and augment his prodigious range of British acquaintance. He lunched with a trio of humanists—Arthur Balfour, the Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray, and John Bury, regius professor of modern history at Cambridge—and reduced them to silence with a monologue on the interconnection of religion and philosophy. He called on Prime Minister Asquith and found him shaken after having been physically attacked by a suffragette. It was difficult for Roosevelt not to feel, as he paid his respects to other members of the government and Parliament, the collective sense among British policymakers that a dies irae was looming. Sir Edward Grey was furrow-eyed with overwork, haunted by a complex of seemingly insoluble international problems: the Balkan situation, the German-British naval arms race, sedition in Egypt and India, and the prospect of a bloodbath in Ireland, where soldiers of the King had mutinied rather than enforce Home Rule. Sir Cecil Spring Rice, back on leave from Washington, was as loud on the subject of rearmament as his predecessor James (now Viscount) Bryce was on pacifism. The Bishop of London and Sir Robert Cecil wanted the suffragettes to be placated, and the Kaiser intimidated. Prince Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord, one of the last remnants of Anglo-Germanism in the British royal family, was less troubled by his mixed inheritance than by the pressure put on him by the Admiralty to expend the largest naval budget in British history.

  There had been a rumor, before Roosevelt’s arrival in London, that the King and Queen wished to renew their acquaintance with him. But he was no longer a special ambassador, much less a possible revenant to the White House. Nothing was heard from Buckingham Palace. On Thursday, 18 June, he took the boat train to Southampton and boarded his homebound liner, the SS Imperator.

  He was accompanied by Arthur Lee and by the valet who had looked after him during his visit. After the Colonel had bade them goodbye, Lee was surprised to see the servant in tears. “Excuse me sir, but in all my thirty years of service I have never met such a great gentleman as ’im.”

  FIVE MINUTES AFTER being left alone on deck, Roosevelt was felled by a violent attack of malaria. He remained feverish, on and off, for the next forty-eight hours. At one point, his temperature rocketed to 105°F, higher than it had been in Brazil. Then suddenly he was better. But he found his voice was now weaker than ever, and reiterated to reporters on board that he would not be a campaigner for any office in the fall. T. R. OFF STUMP, The Washington Post headlined, on receiving the news by wire.

  If Woodrow Wilson inferred from this that the nonpartisan politesse Roosevelt had displayed, over lemonade in late May, was going to become the keynote of his retirement, a letter from Ambassador Page made clear that the Colonel had lost none of his fighting spirit. “When Roosevelt was here,” Page wrote, “he told a friend of his that he was going home [to] rip the Administration to shreds for its many sins and many kinds of inefficiencies and he mentioned the ‘dead failure in Mexico.’ ”

  Actually, Roosevelt was more bothered by what he considered to be an insult on the part of William Jennings Bryan’s State Department to the most glorious achievement of his presidency. In six weeks or so, the gates of the Panama Canal would be opened to world commerce. Bryan had chosen to herald the event by signing a treaty with Colombia that expressed “sincere regret” for the conduct of the United States in 1903, when President Roosevelt had rejected the Colombian Congress’s demand for a surcharge of $5 million on the transfer of its land rights in Panama, and encouraged the Panamanian Revolution. Bryan now proposed to pay Colombia a compensatory $25 million. Roosevelt angrily insisted, in an interview with James T. Du Bois, a retired diplomat aboard the Imperator, that the revolution was right and proper. For fifty years before, Panama had been trying to opt out of the Colombian federation, to which it bore about as much geographical relation as Cuba did to the United States. “I simply lifted my foot!”

  Du Bois was still reeling when the ship got to New York late
on the evening of 24 June. “If anybody thinks the ex-President is a sick man,” he remarked, “I would advise him to get into a conversation with him on a subject in which he is interested for two hours and he will entirely change his mind.”

  BEFORE PROCEEDING TO Oyster Bay on a friend’s private yacht, Roosevelt put out a two-thousand-word press release. It more than fulfilled Page’s prediction that he was not going to mince his language in criticizing the administration:

  The handling of our foreign affairs by President Wilson and Secretary Bryan has been such as to make the United States a figure of fun in the international world. The proposed Colombian treaty caps the climax, and if ratified, will rightly render us an object of contemptuous derision to every great nation. I wish to call attention to exactly what was done under my administration.

  He reviewed at length, in tones of righteous indignation, the slippery negotiations by which Colombia had persuaded the United States to commit to a canal across Panama rather than Nicaragua, then tried to “blackmail” Uncle Sam—first by more than doubling its own agreed-on sales price, then by threatening to confiscate the construction rights that the State Department had separately arranged to buy from a French company for $40 million.

  I would call the attention of President Wilson and Secretary Bryan to the fact that this $40,000,000 represents the exact sum which Colombia lost when the United States government of that day refused to submit to blackmail. They now only propose to pay $25,000,000 blackmail. They had better make the job thorough while they are about it and give the whole $40,000,000. Otherwise they will still leave an opening for action by some future administration of similar mushy amiability toward foreign powers that have sought to wrong us.

  He went on to indict the President’s Mexican policy, which he described as “a course wavering between peace and war, exquisitely designed to combine the disadvantages of both, and feebly tending first toward one and then toward the other.” One of Wilson’s occasional “spasms of understanding” had been to realize that allowing weapons and munitions to flow unhindered into Mexico would encourage countries supportive of Huerta, such as Germany, to gain a strategic foothold there. So Wilson, abandoning all pretense of neutrality, had resorted to sudden, irrational violence at Vera Cruz.

  In doing so, he had sacrificed nineteen more American lives than Roosevelt had done in his Central American adventure of eleven years before. Which made it all the more grotesque that Secretary Bryan now sought to appease Bogotá for the sin of interventionism. The Colonel’s belittling images—figure of fun, mushy amiability, wavering, feebly tending, spasms of understanding—were effectively chosen. Wilson’s foreign policy had indeed been marked by vacillations and overreactions puzzling to anyone unaware that he and Bryan saw the world through evangelical spectacles. They regarded showy potentates, whether kings or corrupt power-grabbers like Huerta, with such contempt that they were ready to run guns in order to extend the reach of Christian democracy.

  “We have gone down to Mexico to serve mankind if we can find a way,” the President said, rhetorically including the American people in his pilgrim’s progress.

  ROOSEVELT’S HOPE WAS THAT, by making a patriotic issue of the indemnity treaty, he could encourage Republicans and Progressives in the Senate to reject it. And since he was, in spite of himself, getting involved in politics again, what to do about the partisan division that he had caused in 1912? The Progressive Party had weakened badly since then, and so had he—not only physically but in terms of separatist will. Although he could never forgive Elihu Root and the other “thieves” who (he still believed) had stolen his renomination, he remained in his heart a Republican. He longed to see Progressivism lose its capital p, and become once again the liberal conscience of Abraham Lincoln’s party. Unfortunately, that was unlikely to happen as long as Old Guard relics like Boss Barnes of New York and Senator Penrose of Pennsylvania remained in control of the RNC.

  He had just settled in at Sagamore Hill when William Draper Lewis, who was running for governor in Penrose’s home state, came to remind him that he had promised to speak in Pittsburgh on the last day of the month. The event was to be a double one, kicking off not only Lewis’s campaign but also a run for the U.S. Senate by Gifford Pinchot. It was to take place in Exposition Hall, so Roosevelt could not cite the doctor’s order he had received in London against speaking out of doors. He felt bound, in any case, to make a few carefully scripted appearances on behalf of candidates who had once campaigned for him.

  Edith was sufficiently concerned about her husband’s fever attacks to demand that he submit to a complete medical examination before he did any more politicking. Dr. Alexander Lambert told him that his spleen was enlarged and that he was suffering from a “loss of vitality” ascribable to malaria. If he did not have at least four months’ complete rest, his ill health might well become chronic. “You may expect to spend the rest of your days tied to a chair.”

  Roosevelt allowed the diagnosis, if not the warning, to be leaked to the newspapers. It worried the millions of ordinary Americans who had always regarded “Teddy” as indestructible. When he showed up at Christ Church in Oyster Bay on Sunday, 28 June, an old villager reached out in sympathy.

  “Oh! I guess I’m all right,” Roosevelt said, taking his hand and shaking it. “All I need is a little rest.”

  ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND was equally dismissive of a bullet wound he received that same day in Sarajevo, Bosnia. “Es ist nichts,” he said as he bled to death in his open automobile. “It is nothing.”

  His assassination—and that of his pregnant wife, shot in the seat beside him—was, on the contrary, everything that Gavrilo Princip could wish for: a double blow to the jugular and abdomen of the heir to the Habsburg dynasty that had abused Balkan Slavs for so long. The nineteen-year-old student, a Bosnian recruited by Serbia’s Black Hand terrorist movement, could not believe his luck. He had been standing on Franzjosefstrasse, bareheaded in the early summer sunshine, depressed over the failure of a comrade, Nedeljko Čabrinović, to kill the royal couple with a grenade earlier in the day. Then he saw their open-top car take a wrong turn off Appel Quay and pass right by him. The lethal logistics that seem to operate at such moments had transformed error into opportunity. Two point-blank targets presented themselves, and Princip’s gun did what it was designed to do.

  BY THE TIME Roosevelt came downstairs for breakfast at 8:30 on Monday, the atrocity in the Balkans was front-page news across the United States. English-language headlines were not as large as they might be, considering their import: the words SERBIA, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA, and, for that matter, AUSTRIA-HUNGARY had yet to become commonplaces of American reporting. European envoys in Washington, however, were under no illusions as to the gravity of the crisis touched off by Princip’s bullet.

  Apparently, Franz Ferdinand had crossed the Danube into Bosnia in order to witness an exercise by two corps of the Austrian army—staged with the obvious intent of cowing local unrest. Had he any awareness that he was entering a land of long memories, he might have chosen a day other than the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, when a single Serb had gone behind the Turkish lines and knifed Sultan Murad I to death.

  Teenage boys, Princip and Čabrinović could hardly have been aware of the full range of ironies, historical, cultural, and strategic, impinging on the archuke’s visit. Franzjosefstrasse, the thoroughfare into which his driver had accidentally turned—thronged with tarboosh-wearing Muslims, bulging with Russian Orthodox domes, and bearing the name of an octogenarian Austrian Catholic—was in itself symbolic of the combustible elements that had long threatened an explosion in the Balkans. By killing Franz Ferdinand in such a place, at a moment when both Austria and Germany were spoiling for war against the East, the conspirators had acted with more lethal consequences than they knew.

  Of all American public figures, Theodore Roosevelt best understood what it was like to be shot at point-blank range. For that matter, he was one of the very few who had a
ny acquaintance with the archduke. And what he had seen of that “furious reactionary” in 1910 was not conducive to grief at his passing. But as Roosevelt traveled during the course of the day to Pittsburgh, through regions of Pennsylvania heavily populated by German speakers and Slavs, he could not fail to feel intense local excitement. Gothic and Cyrillic posters shouted alarm at every station newsstand.

  AFTER A JOURNEY of twelve hours, he delivered a husky-voiced address to four thousand wildly applauding Progressives that said nothing about the international situation, except for a vague reference to the administration’s “wretched foreign policy.” For the most part he contented himself with a listless indictment of the New Freedom. He offered only the briefest endorsement of Dean Lewis and Gifford Pinchot, letting his presence onstage with them speak for itself. As oratory, his performance was lackluster; as politics, it was an exercise in adroit self-distancing from the party he had created. He let drop a reference to “the honest Republican rank and file” that caught the editorial attention of The New York Times. “It is such a speech as may be read with equal satisfaction by both parties,” the paper remarked. “Without saying a word about reunion, he has made a most effective argument for it. It is as adroit a speech as even this master politician ever made.” The Times was sure he was positioning himself for the GOP nomination in 1916. “In this speech he has struck a great blow to bring it about.”

  Dean Lewis was not sure that the Colonel had enough force ever to campaign again. Roosevelt struck him as a “thoroughly exhausted” man who should have stayed home. Another Pennsylvania Progressive, Thomas Robins, blamed the Rio da Dúvida for destroying his fire.