Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [212]
There had been a rumor, before Roosevelt’s arrival in London, that the King and Queen wished to renew their acquaintance with him. But he was no longer a special ambassador, much less a possible revenant to the White House. Nothing was heard from Buckingham Palace. On Thursday, 18 June, he took the boat train to Southampton and boarded his homebound liner, the SS Imperator.
He was accompanied by Arthur Lee and by the valet who had looked after him during his visit. After the Colonel had bade them goodbye, Lee was surprised to see the servant in tears. “Excuse me sir, but in all my thirty years of service I have never met such a great gentleman as ’im.”
FIVE MINUTES AFTER being left alone on deck, Roosevelt was felled by a violent attack of malaria. He remained feverish, on and off, for the next forty-eight hours. At one point, his temperature rocketed to 105°F, higher than it had been in Brazil. Then suddenly he was better. But he found his voice was now weaker than ever, and reiterated to reporters on board that he would not be a campaigner for any office in the fall. T. R. OFF STUMP, The Washington Post headlined, on receiving the news by wire.
If Woodrow Wilson inferred from this that the nonpartisan politesse Roosevelt had displayed, over lemonade in late May, was going to become the keynote of his retirement, a letter from Ambassador Page made clear that the Colonel had lost none of his fighting spirit. “When Roosevelt was here,” Page wrote, “he told a friend of his that he was going home [to] rip the Administration to shreds for its many sins and many kinds of inefficiencies and he mentioned the ‘dead failure in Mexico.’ ”
Actually, Roosevelt was more bothered by what he considered to be an insult on the part of William Jennings Bryan’s State Department to the most glorious achievement of his presidency. In six weeks or so, the gates of the Panama Canal would be opened to world commerce. Bryan had chosen to herald the event by signing a treaty with Colombia that expressed “sincere regret” for the conduct of the United States in 1903, when President Roosevelt had rejected the Colombian Congress’s demand for a surcharge of $5 million on the transfer of its land rights in Panama, and encouraged the Panamanian Revolution. Bryan now proposed to pay Colombia a compensatory $25 million. Roosevelt angrily insisted, in an interview with James T. Du Bois, a retired diplomat aboard the Imperator, that the revolution was right and proper. For fifty years before, Panama had been trying to opt out of the Colombian federation, to which it bore about as much geographical relation as Cuba did to the United States. “I simply lifted my foot!”
Du Bois was still reeling when the ship got to New York late on the evening of 24 June. “If anybody thinks the ex-President is a sick man,” he remarked, “I would advise him to get into a conversation with him on a subject in which he is interested for two hours and he will entirely change his mind.”
BEFORE PROCEEDING TO Oyster Bay on a friend’s private yacht, Roosevelt put out a two-thousand-word press release. It more than fulfilled Page’s prediction that he was not going to mince his language in criticizing the administration:
The handling of our foreign affairs by President Wilson and Secretary Bryan has been such as to make the United States a figure of fun in the international world. The proposed Colombian treaty caps the climax, and if ratified, will rightly render us an object of contemptuous derision to every great nation. I wish to call attention to exactly what was done under my administration.
He reviewed at length, in tones of righteous indignation, the slippery negotiations by which Colombia had persuaded the United States to commit to a canal across Panama rather than Nicaragua, then tried to “blackmail” Uncle Sam—first by more than doubling its own agreed-on sales