Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [166]
At home, at dinner, I may partake of a glass or two glasses of white wine. At a public dinner, or a big dinner, if they have champagne I will take a glass or two glasses of champagne, but I take it publicly just as much as privately.
Asked about his medicinal use of spirits, he said that he had suffered from occasional attacks of malaria since serving in Cuba in 1898. Once, when delirious on a bear hunt as President, he had been given a shot of whiskey by Dr. Alexander Lambert. In Africa he had had two recurrences of fever and swallowed, at the direction of Dr. Edgar Mearns, “about seven tablespoons” of brandy. There had been a case of champagne among his safari effects, but he had never broken open a bottle, not even to celebrate killing lions and elephants.
According to African Game Trails, Mearns had treated him with whiskey, not brandy, but Roosevelt’s very vagueness of recall testified to his lack of interest in alcohol. He was, manifestly to the four or five hundred reporters cramming the court, intent only on clearing his name. It was equally plain to the jurors, sitting so close to him that some of his gestures swished the air in front of their faces, why so many rumormongers had inferred over the years that Roosevelt was a toper. They stared at the red, contorting face, and listened in fascination to the unstoppable flow of speech.
HAD THEY NOT BEEN compelled to retire during the first recess, they would have heard him explain why he was so ruddy. Unable to resist the lure of newspapermen, he went over to the press table and sat on it like a boy, legs dangling. “Because of my high blood pressure, I guess, I’m always a great bleeder. I get hurt and bleed so often that Mrs. Roosevelt pays no attention to it.”
He proceeded to tell the kind of anecdote that Lawrence Abbott had tried in vain to have him include in his autobiography. “The other day at Oyster Bay the windmill, on a sixty-foot derrick, was squeaking. I got an oil can and climbed up to oil it, neglecting to shut off the mill. Just as I got to the top, the wind veered. The paddle swung around and took off a slice of my scalp. I started to climb down, but I’m big and clumsy and it took quite a little while. By the time I got to the house my face and shoulders were drenched with blood. Inside the door I met Mrs. Roosevelt. ‘Theodore,’ she said, ‘I wish you’d do your bleeding in the bathroom. You’re spoiling every rug in the house.’ ”
DOCTORS LAMBERT, John B. Murphy, and Arthur D. Bevan, who had examined the Colonel during his prostration in Mercy Hospital the previous fall, proceeded to testify or depose that he was the opposite of an alcoholic patient, with sweet breath, clear urine, no enlargement of the liver, and no tremor. He had an untroubled temperament, a balanced nervous system, and “slept like a child.” Their consensus was that he was a man in splendid health, with no addictive tendencies.
A qualification to these rosy opinions was expressed by Dr. Presley Rixey, who had been his physician in the White House, and had not seen him for four years. Rixey felt that Roosevelt was in only “fairly good” shape, with a noticeable gain in weight, but confirmed that he had always been abstemious. “He is about as moderate as a man could well be, and not be a teetotaler.” His appetite for food was another matter. Even with his vigorous exercise schedule in Washington, “I had to resort to extraordinary means to keep him down … to keep down the flesh.”
Roosevelt made no effort to hide his current paunch. He sat tilted back, caressing the heavy watch chain that draped over it, as witness after witness testified to the main issue of the trial. Robert Bacon, Gifford Pinchot, James R. Garfield, Truman H. Newberry, Jacob Riis, Edmund Heller, Cal O’Laughlin, O. K. Davis, Lawrence Abbott, William Loeb, and many others assured everybody in the courtroom that the Colonel’s thirst for alcohol was only slightly greater than Carry Nation’s.
By mid-morning Wednesday, lawyers for the defense were so desperate that