Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Roosevelt took his time walking to the podium, as if to emphasize his lack of hostility. The rain of petals continued, until he stood grinning on a perfumed carpet of pink and white.

  Moving on to Chicago, he checked in to the Blackstone Hotel. The first person he saw on entering its restaurant was William Howard Taft. Fellow diners applauded as Taft stood up and called, “Theodore!” The two former presidents shook hands with obvious pleasure, straining to hear each other over cheers around the room. They took a small window table and plunged into conversation.

  Afterward, a happy Roosevelt told Leary, “He feels exactly as I do about those creatures in Washington and the way they’re carrying on.”

  QUENTIN AND HAM may have wanted to give Edith Normant the impression that they were headed straight into action, but their orders were to fly first to Orly. It was a ferry-pilot field just east of Paris, at any rate closer to glory than the mudflats of Issoudun. If present trends continued, the Front might well come to them: the Germans had launched another offensive, driving the Allies back from the Aisne to the Marne. Wilhelm II, delighted to pretend that he, and not General Erich Ludendorff, was the strategist of this new Kaiserschlacht, posed for photographs on the lookout at Craonne, where Napoleon had faced the powers that eventually overwhelmed him.

  Quentin went to see Eleanor in her house on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. From its east-facing windows, the flashing of guns could be seen like summer lightning. Just as disturbing was the sight of Ted, crimson-eyed and racked with such spasms of coughing that he had to sleep sitting up. He had been gassed and temporarily blinded at Cantigny, in the first American group action of the war. Two hundred of his comrades had been killed around him. But he had refused to give up command of his battalion, or to be evacuated until the three-day assault was over. His superiors were saying they had never seen such heroism.

  With this and Archie’s example to ponder, not to mention the news that Kermit had been awarded the British Military Cross for bravery in Mesopotamia, Quentin felt compelled to prove himself as the last whelp of “the old Lion.” But his only assignment was to test the airworthiness of new planes shipped through Orly. He fell into another of his depressions, worsened by a report from Oyster Bay that Flora had almost no chance of getting a passport to France. Given that, it was small consolation that her parents had agreed to let them marry. “It seems to me now,” he wrote her, “as tho’ nothing could ever fill that void that the last year has left in my heart.”

  It was a year that had taken him from Newport to Nieuport, and Quentin could not see how the experience had bettered him. If French soldiers retreating from the Front were right in shouting “La guerre est finie” at Americans going the other way, he might at least survive, and unite with Flora after all; but what sort of world would they have to adjust to?

  General Pershing tried to persuade a despairing Clemenceau that the war was not over. The United States was ready to announce that it had a million troops in France, and a million—or more—on the way. The Allies simply needed to hold the Germans off, at this moment of the Reich’s maximum advancement west and east. Overextension always preceded collapse, in Pershing’s view. The strategic situation was poised. “It may not look encouraging just now,” he said, “but we are certain to win in the end.”

  On 7 June, the day Quentin hoped he might be sent into action, Roosevelt was hit by an attack of erysipelas, a streptococcal inflammation of the leg that had bothered him so often since his traffic accident in 1902. He was in Chicago en route to Omaha, still traveling as a spokesman for the National Security League. “Jack, I’m pretty sick,” he confided to John Leary. It was his way of saying that he was running a temperature of 104°F. Fortunately Edith was at hand to nurse him on the train, along with a doctor to control his fever. Roosevelt insisted on keeping every engagement the League had mapped out for him, distracting himself from pain by reading Polybius and what his wife described as “hundreds of thousands” of ten-cent magazines.

  When they got back home in the middle of the month, a cable from Quentin was waiting. He and Ham Coolidge had been ordered forward at last.

  “My joy for you and pride in you drown my anxiety,” Roosevelt wrote. “Of course I don’t know whether you are to go in the pursuit planes—or battle planes or whatever you call them.”

  In fact, as Quentin reported to Flora, he had already ridden to the Front on his motorcycle, after detaching himself from an emotional, one-armed embrace by Archie. “He evidently felt that he was saying a last fond farewell to me.”

  That lugubrious soul was convinced that no Roosevelt in uniform would return to America alive. Quentin thought this funny, as well as the fact that the anti-aircraft shells he would be dodging in the future were known among pilots as “Archies.” He had already, he boasted, experienced flak on his maiden patrol along the lines as a member of the First (U.S.) Pursuit Group. “It is really exciting when you see the stuff bursting in great black puffs around you, but you get used to it in about fifteen minutes.”

  WITH KERMIT NOW attached to the Seventh Field Artillery Regiment of the First Division in France, Roosevelt could congratulate himself on the “first-ness” of all his sons. News that Ted had been cited for both a Croix de Guerre and American Silver Star turned him into something of a paterfamilial bore. Finley Peter Dunne heard him out and said, “Colonel, one of these days those boys of yours are going to put the name of Roosevelt on the map.”

  As his erysipelas ebbed, he spent the latter part of June at Sagamore Hill, lazing on the piazza with a pile of books and listening to birds. “I have finished my last tour of speechmaking,” he wrote Quentin, in words that his family had long learned to ignore. Immediately came the disclaimer: “From now on I shall speak … only just enough to put whatever power I have back of the war, and to insist that we carry it through until we win such a peace as will ensure against danger from Germany for at least a generation to come.”

  For at least a generation to come. Before Quentin left Romorantin, a son had been born to one of the Normants, and he had found a macabre souvenir on his pillow. It was a baby doll and box of chocolates labeled, “From the poilu of 1938.”

  In the place he was now—the censor would not allow him to say where—men had no interest in times beyond the present. The average life of a chase pilot on the Front in the summer of 1918 was eleven days. Quentin was clear-eyed about his own vulnerability, having lost a Mineola comrade earlier in the year. In an attempt to condition Flora to the prospect of him being shot down, he assured her that death came quickly to aviators, as opposed to gassed doughboys or drowning sailors. “There’s no better way,—if one has got to die.… 30 seconds of horror and it’s all over,—for they say that it’s all in that length of time, after the plane’s been hit.”

  To his mother, he was determinedly upbeat. “The real thing is that I’m on the Front—cheers, oh cheers—and I’m very happy.” Then he learned that he was being transferred to a “hot” sector on one of the salients threatening Paris.

  On the Fourth of July, Roosevelt dined with Fanny Parsons in Manhattan. She too had a son in uniform abroad. They both felt, and shared, a lift in the national morale. After the terror of March and April and the good news in June of U.S. troops repelling Ludenorff’s last offensive at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, the war finally looked winnable. For however many more months it continued, American power, burgeoning with the force of lava long suppressed, was evidently going to shape the outcome.

  Little tricolors decorated the Colonel’s table. He was in the same high spirits that had enchanted Fanny forty years before. Then the headwaiter brought over an evening paper, pointing to a cable report that Quentin had just made his first sortie over the German line. Roosevelt read it without comment and set the paper aside, but Fanny noticed that his face had darkened. For the rest of the meal they talked with less animation.

  SIX DAYS LATER, Quentin shot down his first “Boche.” He was in command of a small squadron
of Nieuports, and was flying as top man on a high patrol when he got blown off course at 5,200 meters. Descending out of the sun, he came upon a trio of Pfalz monoplanes. “Great excitement!” he wrote Flora. “They had white tails with black crosses.… I was scared perfectly green, but then I thought to myself that I was so near I might as well take a crack at one of them.” He fired, then hustled for home, fifteen kilometers away beyond Château-Thierry. In his rearview mirror was the pleasing sight of his victim tumbling into lower clouds, and two outraged pursuers unable to catch up with him. There was no confirmation yet that he had scored a kill, but he had tasted what passed for blood in the air, and that evening tooled in to Paris to celebrate. He and Eleanor had dined at Ciro’s and gone on to Grand Guignol.

  Now (Quentin was writing on 11 July) his squadron had relocated yet again. He was billeted in a little French town not far from Reims, where he had first seen airplanes flying, nine summers before. Flora would want to know about his quarters: a ground-floor room in a white plaster house with a weathercock on the roof and a blooming garden behind. “O ruin! There goes an alerte & I must run, or rather fly, so I’ll just finish this off. Goodbye, dear sweetheart, & a kiss from your QR.”

  ROOSEVELT HEARD ABOUT Quentin’s score that same day, in a cable dispatch that thrilled him. He wrote to tell Ethel, who had taken her children to Islesboro, Maine, for the hot months. “Whatever now befalls Quentin, he has had his crowded hour, and his day of honor and triumph.”

  On the afternoon of Tuesday, 16 July, a cryptic advisory from Paris alerted reporters: WATCH SAGAMORE HILL IN EVENT OF [DELETED BY CENSOR]. The Colonel was dictating to Miss Stricker when Philip Thompson, a reporter from the Associated Press, showed the cable to him. “Something has happened to one of the boys,” Roosevelt said, closing the door in case Edith was within earshot.

  Rapid deduction (Archie and Ted incapacitated, Kermit not yet at the Front) made it plain that the news concerned Quentin. But what news? He had no choice but to ask Thompson not to alarm Edith, and continue to dictate as if nothing had happened. One of his letters of the day was to Kermit. He made no mention of the AP advisory, but could not resist saying, “It seems dreadful that I, sitting at home in ease and safety, should try to get the men I love dearest into the zone of fearful danger and hardship.… Mother, who has the heroic spirit if ever a woman had, would not for anything in the world have you four behave otherwise than you have done, although her heartstrings are torn with terrible anxiety.”

  Then a cable from Pershing arrived:

  REGRET VERY MUCH THAT YOUR SON LT. QUENTIN ROOSEVELT REPORTED AS MISSING. ON JULY 14 WITH A PATROL OF TWELVE PLANES HE LEFT ON A MISSION OF PROTECTING PHOTOGRAPHIC SECTION. SEVEN ENEMY PLANES WERE SIGHTED & ATTACKED, AFTER WHICH ENEMY PLANES RETURNED AND OUR PLANES BROKE OFF COMBAT RETURNING TO THEIR BASE. LT. ROOSEVELT DID NOT RETURN. A MEMBER OF THE SQUADRON REPORTS SEEING ONE OF OUR PLANES FALL OUT OF THE COMBAT AND INTO THE CLOUDS AND THE FRENCH REPORT AN AMERICAN PLANE WAS SEEN DESCENDING. I HOPE HE MAY HAVE LANDED SAFELY. WILL ADVISE YOU IMMEDIATELY ON RECEIPT OF FURTHER INFORMATION.

  At sunset Roosevelt changed out of his knickerbocker suit, bathed, and dressed for dinner as usual. With Ethel and the grandchildren away, the house was as quiet as it had ever been. For whatever reason, Edith left her daily diary blank when they went to bed.

  Before breakfast the next day, Thompson returned to say that further dispatches from Europe indicated that Quentin had been killed. The reports, already printed in the morning papers, were unconfirmed but ominously definite. The Colonel paced up and down the piazza. “But—Mrs. Roosevelt? How am I going to break it to her?”

  He disappeared into the house. Thompson was left alone as early morning breezes swept up the hillside from the bay.

  Thirty minutes later Roosevelt emerged with a one-line statement. “Quentin’s mother and I are very glad that he got to the Front and had a chance to render some service to his country, and to show the stuff there was in him before his fate befell him.”

  He was due in town around noon, preparatory to leaving early Thursday for Saratoga Springs, where he had promised to address the New York State Republican convention. An organizer of the event called to ask, sympathetically, if he wanted to cancel. Roosevelt replied that on the contrary, he would honor his engagement. Taft was going to be there. Together, they had to set the Party on a course that would humiliate Woodrow Wilson in the fall Congressional elections. “I must go; it is my duty.”

  Telegrams of condolence began to arrive by the hundreds. Roosevelt spent a couple of hours dictating acknowledgments to them. At times he choked and cried, but would not stop until his chauffeur came to take him and Miss Stricker into Manhattan. Edith emerged from the house to see them off, then turned red-eyed to Philip Thompson.

  “We must do everything we can to help him,” she said, as if her own feelings did not matter.

  Roosevelt had no sooner reached his office than Hermann Hagedorn, a thirtyish writer at work on a biography of him, came to pick him up for lunch. They walked through streets emblazoned with press posters announcing Quentin’s death. Albert Shaw, editor of American Review of Reviews, awaited them at the Harvard Club.

  “Now, Colonel, you know it may not be true,” Shaw said. “I would not make up my mind until I hear from General Pershing direct.”

  “No, it is true,” Roosevelt said. “Quentin is dead.”

  With that he changed the subject, and talked lucidly throughout the meal, giving Hagedorn his take on the events of 1912. But there was a dim look behind his spectacles. Afterward Hagedorn noted, “The old side of him is gone, the old exuberance, the boy in him has died.”

  Edith came later by train to stay with her husband overnight. Alice telegrammed to remind them that the newspaper reports were still unconfirmed. She was coming up from Washington anyway.

  Roosevelt went upstate the following morning, Thursday, 18 July, not knowing that during the night, the Allies had launched the Second Battle of the Marne. It was a devastatingly powerful counterattack, driving German forces back from Château-Thierry toward the country west of Reims where Quentin had disappeared.

  At 3:20 that afternoon the chairman of the convention in Saratoga Town Hall announced that the next speaker would be Theodore Roosevelt. “Before the Colonel begins, I wish to voice on behalf of this audience our common sorrow and our common pride in what has come to afflict him in these fateful days of the war.”

  There was a tumultuous standing ovation when Roosevelt walked onstage in a gray suit with black cravat. But it subsided the moment he laid his speech on the lectern and held up his hand. Isaac Hunt, an upstate delegate who had been his first ally in the New York Assembly, thirty-six years before, was chilled by the anguish on his face.

  Roosevelt looked around the room, noticed a number of women on the floor for the first time in state party history, and hailed them as “My fellow voters, my fellow citizens, with equal rights of citizenship here in New York.” For the next hour, whenever he spoke off the cuff, he addressed himself to them. His typed text was a standard appeal for an end to hyphenated Americanism, a speeded-up war effort under Republican governance, and postwar preparedness. He wanted to see the current army extended so as to be able to completely overwhelm the Central Powers. “Belgium must be reinstated and reimbursed [applause]. France must receive back Alsace and Lorraine [applause]. Turkey must be driven from Europe [applause]; Armenia must be made free and the Syrian Christians protected and the Jews given Palestine [applause].”

  He made no reference whatever to Quentin, except obliquely toward the end of his script, when he looked again at the female delegates and said, “Surely in this great crisis, where we are making sacrifices on a scale never before known, surely when we are demanding such fealty and idealism on the part of the young men sent abroad to die, surely we have the right to ask and to expect an equal idealism in life from the men and women who stay home.”

  The words said little, but his listeners were transfixed
by what he left unsaid. Before he got back to New York the following morning, Friday, an urgent effort was under way to draft him for governor. Taft, Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, and even William Barnes, Jr., subscribed to it. Roosevelt declared that he was not available. “I have only one fight left in me,” he told his sister Corinne, “and I think I should reserve my strength in case I am needed in 1920.”

  She was alarmed. “Theodore, you don’t really feel ill, do you?”

  “No, but I am not what I was.”

  Later in the day he motored to Oyster Bay with Edith, Alice, and Ethel, who had come down from Maine. When they got home, a cable from Eleanor in Paris was waiting for them: QUENTIN’S PLANE WAS SEEN TO DIVE 800 METERS, NOT IN FLAMES. SEEN TO STRIKE GROUND. COULD HAVE BEEN UNDER CONTROL AS DID NOT SPIN. CHANCE EXISTS HE IS A PRISONER.

  Flora Whitney was nowhere to be seen.

  IT TURNED OUT that Flora had also received a cable from Eleanor—EVERY REASON BELIEVE REPORT QUENTIN ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE—and was clutching to it like an oar in a storm. Newspapers got hold of the story, and a new uncertainty built up through Saturday morning.

  The Colonel, clutching himself at every “duty” that would keep him from breaking down, went ahead with a prearranged reception for some Japanese Red Cross officials. They were brought to Sagamore Hill by Henry P. Davison, chairman of the American Red Cross war council, and his son Trubee. The young man watched fascinated as Roosevelt took his guests on a trophy tour of the North Room, then delivered a speech of welcome, which he had evidently composed earlier in the week.