Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [214]
Roosevelt allowed the diagnosis, if not the warning, to be leaked to the newspapers. It worried the millions of ordinary Americans who had always regarded “Teddy” as indestructible. When he showed up at Christ Church in Oyster Bay on Sunday, 28 June, an old villager reached out in sympathy.
“Oh! I guess I’m all right,” Roosevelt said, taking his hand and shaking it. “All I need is a little rest.”
ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND was equally dismissive of a bullet wound he received that same day in Sarajevo, Bosnia. “Es ist nichts,” he said as he bled to death in his open automobile. “It is nothing.”
His assassination—and that of his pregnant wife, shot in the seat beside him—was, on the contrary, everything that Gavrilo Princip could wish for: a double blow to the jugular and abdomen of the heir to the Habsburg dynasty that had abused Balkan Slavs for so long. The nineteen-year-old student, a Bosnian recruited by Serbia’s Black Hand terrorist movement, could not believe his luck. He had been standing on Franzjosefstrasse, bareheaded in the early summer sunshine, depressed over the failure of a comrade, Nedeljko Čabrinović, to kill the royal couple with a grenade earlier in the day. Then he saw their open-top car take a wrong turn off Appel Quay and pass right by him. The lethal logistics that seem to operate at such moments had transformed error into opportunity. Two point-blank targets presented themselves, and Princip’s gun did what it was designed to do.
BY THE TIME Roosevelt came downstairs for breakfast at 8:30 on Monday, the atrocity in the Balkans was front-page news across the United States. English-language headlines were not as large as they might be, considering their import: the words SERBIA, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA, and, for that matter, AUSTRIA-HUNGARY had yet to become commonplaces of American reporting. European envoys in Washington, however, were under no illusions as to the gravity of the crisis touched off by Princip’s bullet.
Apparently, Franz Ferdinand had crossed the Danube into Bosnia in order to witness an exercise by two corps of the Austrian army—staged with the obvious intent of cowing local unrest. Had he any awareness that he was entering a land of long memories, he might have chosen a day other than the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, when a single Serb had gone behind the Turkish lines and knifed Sultan Murad I to death.
Teenage boys, Princip and Čabrinović could hardly have been aware of the full range of ironies, historical, cultural, and strategic, impinging on the archuke’s visit. Franzjosefstrasse, the thoroughfare into which his driver had accidentally turned—thronged with tarboosh-wearing Muslims, bulging with Russian Orthodox domes, and bearing the name of an octogenarian Austrian Catholic—was in itself symbolic of the combustible elements that had long threatened an explosion in the Balkans. By killing Franz Ferdinand in such a place, at a moment when both Austria and Germany were spoiling for war against the East, the conspirators had acted with more lethal consequences than they knew.
Of all American public figures, Theodore Roosevelt best understood what it was like to be shot at point-blank range. For that matter, he was one of the very few who had any acquaintance with the archduke. And what he had seen of that “furious reactionary” in 1910 was not conducive to grief at his passing. But as Roosevelt traveled during the course of the day to Pittsburgh, through regions of Pennsylvania heavily populated by German speakers and Slavs, he could not fail to feel intense local excitement. Gothic and Cyrillic posters shouted alarm at every station newsstand.
AFTER A JOURNEY of twelve hours, he delivered a husky-voiced address to four thousand wildly applauding Progressives that said nothing about the international situation, except for a vague reference to the administration’s “wretched foreign policy.” For the most part he contented himself with a listless indictment of the New Freedom. He offered only the