Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [206]
They each needed self-control for this second farewell.
“I hope and pray that you will visit my country,” Roosevelt said.
“I will do so,” Rondon replied, “when I can help you be reelected President of the United States.”
* Lieutenant!
CHAPTER 17
A Wrong Turn Off Appel Quay
Far off one afternoon began
The sound of man destroying man.
THE FIRST PUBLISHED DESCRIPTIONS of Theodore Roosevelt returning to New York on 19 May 1914—haggard, malaria-yellow, limping on a cane, his belt hauled in six inches—were graphic enough to persuade political observers in Washington that he was now, in more ways than one, a spent force. He claimed that he had put back twenty of the fifty-five pounds he had lost on his journey into hell (“I don’t look like a sick man, do I?”), but word went around that he had suffered a relapse of fever before disembarking from the Aidan. When a private yacht transferred him to Oyster Bay, he had needed two helpers to climb the slope of the beach below Sagamore Hill.
Consequently, the Colonel’s energetic demeanor only a week later, when he marched into Woodrow Wilson’s White House, took reporters by surprise. His gray suit hung slack, and his collar stood away from his neck. But the cane was gone and he was as ebullient as ever as he recognized some familiar faces—including that of Jimmy Sloan, the veteran secret service agent.
The President had heard he was coming to town to address the National Geographic Society on 26 May, and had invited him to lunch. Roosevelt was as wary of getting cozy with Wilson as with Taft, four years earlier, and had pleaded a late train journey. This enabled him to get away with a mere courtesy call.
At three o’clock he was shown into the Red Room, where his host was waiting. It was a freakishly hot afternoon, so Wilson suggested a glass of lemonade on the southern portico. For the next half hour the two men were able to take stock of each other, in a conversation that avoided politics.
THEY WERE NOT STRANGERS, having been distantly acquainted since 1896, when Roosevelt was a police commissioner of New York City and Wilson a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton. As later chance would have it, Wilson had been in Buffalo at the time of Roosevelt’s emergency inauguration as President, and had visited him after the ceremony to pay his respects. Now their positions were reversed.
Roosevelt had always breezily been inclined to like Wilson, as part of his general bonhomie toward everybody until they crossed him. Wilson’s attitude was ambivalent. He admired the Rough Rider’s exuberant activism and envied his popularity, but had been alarmed to see him elevated to supreme power. “What is going to become of us with that mountebank in charge?” Soon, however, he had been compelled to admit that Roosevelt was “larger” than most Americans realized, “a very interesting and a very strong man.”
When Wilson became president of Princeton in 1902, Roosevelt had congratulated him for exemplifying “that kind of productive scholarship which tends to statesmanship.” Wilson had early on detected those same qualities in himself, along with “latent powers of oratory.” But as he became more and more a candidate for office, and less and less an academic, his misgivings about Roosevelt returned. “I am told that he no sooner thinks than he talks, which is a miracle not wholly in accord with an educational theory of forming an opinion.”
Roosevelt’s reciprocal attitude of incurious goodwill had begun to change in 1911, when he saw Wilson’s political fortunes rising in contrast to his own. It irritated him to see an academic, peace-minded intellectual—exactly the kind of “dialectician” he had always despised—achieving reform after progressive reform as governor of New Jersey, then, as his Democratic opponent in 1912, coolly poaching most of the tenets of New Nationalism and adapting them as the New Freedom. Now here was Wilson, serene