Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [18]
Taft had endorsed an equally divisive overhaul of the nation’s revenue system, already infamous as “the Payne-Aldrich tariff.” Touted as a downward revise of protectionist duties on products ranging from apricots to wool, and debated in the Senate with extraordinary acrimony, it had somehow become law, to the continuing enrichment of America’s corporate elite.
“Honored Sir: Please get back to the job in Washington, 1912, for the sake of the poor,” one plaintive note read.
Captain Archibald Willingham Butt, the gossipy military aide who now served Taft as he had once served Roosevelt, reported that the President had been cast down by a stroke suffered by Mrs. Taft, the previous spring. “I flatter myself that I have done something in the way of keeping him from lapsing into a semi-comatose state by riding with him and playing golf.…”
Roosevelt paid no attention to several appeals for him to run for mayor of New York, or senator in the New York state legislature—stopgap positions, obviously, from which he would be expected to launch another run for the presidency in 1912. “My political career is ended,” he told Lawrence Abbott. “No man in American public life has ever reached the crest of the wave as I appear to have done without the wave’s breaking and engulfing him.”
THE LATE EVENING of 17 March found the Colonel, his party, and press pool clattering north by train toward Wadi Halfa. He was not sorry to leave Khartoum, where an excess of formal engagements, climaxing in a thousand-plate dinner, had tried his patience after nearly a year in the wilderness.
At least, one delicate encounter, with a group of “native” army officers whom Slatin suspected of anti-British sentiments, had gone well. Roosevelt had reminded them of their sworn duty to the Crown, without saying anything controversial about Arab nationalism, and they had been polite enough to cheer him.
There was no question in his mind that all the North African lands west of Suez were better off as imperial protectorates. He admired what the French had done in Algeria, and hoped they would do the same for Morocco. Likewise, he thought that the British should continue to govern Egypt—if only to protect it from the Turks and that self-proclaimed “friend of three hundred million Muslims,” Kaiser Wilhelm II. His own country was constitutionally unfit for empire, yet he approved of its missionary work in the Nile Valley and in Lebanon. He had not hesitated, as President, to send gunboats into the Mediterranean whenever American interests seemed threatened, and he had followed up with the Great White Fleet in 1908, signaling that the United States would henceforth be a strategic presence in the Near East.
On the morning of the eighteenth, desert sands disclosed themselves, undulating unbroken to the horizon. Phantom lakes shimmered, running like mercury with the progress of the train. This Nubian landscape was the last depopulated country Roosevelt would see. For several months, he was told, a series of imperial or royal capitals had been bidding for the privilege of entertaining him. So many invitations were already on hand that Lawrence Abbott warned he would need another secretary, if not two, when he got to Europe. “Darkest” Africa had polished his public image to a dazzle of celebrity.
The appearances he had long promised to make at the universities of the Sorbonne, Berlin, and Oxford were now but stops on an ever-expanding grand tour of Europe. In Rome, both the Pope and the King of Italy insisted on receiving him. So did the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, who expected him to visit both Vienna and Budapest. Next in line were the President of France, the Queen of Holland, and the monarchs of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where the Nobel Prize committee wished him to make an address on world peace. Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to show him the German army, and King Edward VII the British. Not only têtes couronnées, but aristocrats, intellectuals, industrialists, press lords, and politicians of every persuasion clamored for a few moments