Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [108]
Mr. Roosevelt ought not to be nominated at Chicago because in such a nomination the Republican Party will violate our most useful and necessary government tradition—that no one shall be permitted to hold a third presidential term.… (Loud applause)
Mr. Roosevelt would accept a nomination for a third term on what ground? Not because he wishes it for himself. He has disclaimed any such desire. He is convinced that the American people think that he is the only one to do the job (as he terms it), and for this he is prepared to sacrifice his personal comfort. (Laughter) He does not define exactly what the “job” is which he is to do, but we may infer from his Columbus platform it is to bring about a change of the social institutions of the country by legislation and other means.… I need hardly say that such an ambitious plan could not be carried out in one short four years.[sic] … There is not the slightest reason why, if he secures a third term, and the limitation of the Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson tradition is broken down, he should not have as many terms as his natural life will permit. If he is necessary now to the government, why not later?
One who so lightly regards constitutional principles, and especially the independence of the judiciary, one who is naturally so impatient of legal restraints, and of due legal procedure, and who has so misunderstood what liberty regulated by law is, could not be safely entrusted with successive [sic] presidential terms. I say this sorrowfully, but I say it with the full conviction of truth. (prolonged applause)
After returning to his train, Taft put his head in his hands and cried.
THE COLONEL WAS in Worcester, Massachusetts, the next day, and responded in tones of outrage. It was “the grossest and most astounding hypocrisy,” he said, for the President to claim that he had always been a faithful Rooseveltian. The words sent a momentary shiver through his audience, unused to such lèse-majesté. Then cheers and catcalls broke out. “He has not merely in thought, word, and deed been disloyal to our past friendship, but has been disloyal to every canon of ordinary decency and fair dealing.… Such conduct represents the very crookedest type of a crooked deal.”
Roosevelt said that the President had set the tone of their rivalry early on, calling him a “neurotic” and “demagogue,” and then, pathetically, pretending that it hurt to do so. “No man resorts to epithets like these if it really gives him pain,” Roosevelt scoffed. No gentleman, moreover, would read out another’s private correspondence without permission.
Responding to Taft’s charge that he had no right to a third term in the White House, he emphasized that he was not an incumbent seeking to perpetuate himself with patronage. He was a private citizen with the rights of any other. He went on for an hour and twenty minutes, using the personal pronoun 181 times, not admitting a single mistake or error of judgment. At the end, he managed to convey a kind of contemptuous sympathy for the President as a good-natured misfit dominated by stronger men: “He means well, but he means well feebly.”
Later he spoke at the Boston Arena, as Taft had twenty-four hours before. A boxing match had been held there in the interim, and the ropes were still in place. This enabled Roosevelt to make a stooping, straightening, fist-pumping entrance that touched off a seven-minute roar of applause. He had become, literally, the Man in the Arena.
“Now you have me,” he shouted, after yet another statement of his recall philosophy. “Am I preaching anarchy?”
The answer was a roof-raising, “NO!”
As Elihu Root remarked to a friend, “He is essentially a fighter and when he gets into a fight he is completely dominated by the desire