Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [20]
TRANSFERRING OVERNIGHT at Wadi Halfa to the Nile steamer Ibis, the Roosevelts cruised downriver to Shellal, where they were welcomed to Egypt by condominium officials. They toured the tomb of Rameses II and Sir William’s great waterworks at Aswān before proceeding to Luxor. There, on 21 March, a colder greeting awaited them, in the form of a Nationalist warning that if the Colonel condemned the assassination of Boutros Pasha during his Cairo address, he would suffer the same fate. Roosevelt at once began work on a speech in direct defiance of this threat.
Three days later at Giza, Cleveland H. Dodge, a wealthy friend of Taft’s, was amused to see the Colonel, arms folded, contemplating the Sphinx.
“Theodore, what are you thinking about?” Roosevelt seemed startled by the question.
One thing he had in common with the Sphinx at the moment was inscrutability—at least on the subject of American politics. The New York Times was reporting that he had “summoned” Gifford Pinchot to meet with him somewhere in Europe, for a briefing on the Taft administration’s anti-progressive policies. Apparently the former chief forester was already halfway across the Atlantic.
Roosevelt remained mute on Pinchot, but swung into action on other matters as soon as he had settled into Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. He dictated a telegram to the American minister in Rome: “It would be a real pleasure for me to be presented to the Holy Father, for whom I entertain a high respect both personally and as the head of a great Church … [but I] must decline to make any stipulations or to submit to any conditions which in any way limit my freedom of conduct.”
Next, he embarked on a series of local excursions, in order to weigh up Egypt’s current security situation. Remembering the squalor he had seen in Cairo as a boy, he marveled at the “material and moral” improvements brought about by twenty-eight years of British rule. Yet he was dismayed at the quality of the current army regime, some of whose officers reminded him of the worst caricatures in Kipling. Arrogant in their Englishness, obsessed with tennis and polo, they seemed unmindful of what the assassination of Boutros Ghali portended. Egyptian Nationalists had made plain that the former prime minister had been murdered for being a proponent of condominium, and for supporting long-term extension of Great Britain’s Suez Canal rights.
Roosevelt detected an uncertainty of purpose behind the hauteur of British officials in Cairo. He knew that Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government at home was plagued by anti-imperialists who felt that Egypt should be returned to self-government. But he saw no local elite, Coptic or Muslim, capable of holding the country’s teeming multitudes together—or even apart, since various sects seemed intent on slaughtering one another. Native Christians had democratic ideals, but were hugely outnumbered. Nationalist leaders, with their red fezzes and European clothes, struck him as “quite hopeless as material on which to build,” given only “to loud talk in the cafés and prone to emotional street parades.”
The real danger to condominium, in Roosevelt’s opinion, throbbed among “the mass of practically unchanged bigoted Muslims to whom the movement meant driving out the foreigner, plundering and slaying the local Christian, and a return to all the violence and corruption which festered under the old-style Muslim rule, whether Asiatic or African.” This threatened the world balance of power, for Germany, with its East African protectorate, clearly coveted British control of the Nile.
Sir Eldon Gorst, the new British consul general in Cairo, entreated him to stay off the subject of political assassination in his forthcoming speech at Cairo University. Roosevelt reacted as he had to the Pope’s attempt to strong-arm him. He said that if he could not address “the one really vital question which was filling the minds of everyone,” he