Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [215]
Dean Lewis was not sure that the Colonel had enough force ever to campaign again. Roosevelt struck him as a “thoroughly exhausted” man who should have stayed home. Another Pennsylvania Progressive, Thomas Robins, blamed the Rio da Dúvida for destroying his fire.
“What on earth, Colonel, has a man of your age to do with explorations, anyway?”
“Youth will be served, Tom. It was my last chance to be a boy.”
ROOSEVELT WAS BACK in New York the following day, and visited a laryngologist who contradicted Dr. Lambert and said that his throat was healing admirably. This helped confirm his half-guilty conviction that he should do what he could, over the next two years, to keep progressive principles alive, if not the Party itself.
It was not a task he looked forward to. Leaving for South America nine months before, he had felt a Bunyanesque burden falling off his back. Now it weighed on him again. “I am not in good shape,” he wrote Hiram Johnson. “I could handle the jungle fever all right, and the Progressive Party all right, but the combination of the two is beyond me!”
His soul shrank at the prospect of having to get back on the hustings in the fall. But he felt he must try to make the country’s non-Democratic majority understand that he was not responsible for putting Woodrow Wilson in power. It was corrupt Old Guard bosses like William Barnes, Jr., who had split the GOP. They must be deposed before there could be any hope of a healing fusion. To that end, he would have to recuperate and rebuild his strength over the summer.
Lawrence and Lyman Abbott cited this necessity as an excuse to persuade him to resign from the editorial board of The Outlook. His unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1912 had cost them many thousands of conservative subscribers. Since progressivism had been so cleverly coopted by Wilson, they felt their magazine was suffering from its identity as the Colonel’s personal mouthpiece. Letting him down as lightly as possible, they suggested that he announce his own desire to quit editing in favor of other interests, political and literary. He would still be expected to contribute about ten articles over the next year on “current social questions,” but was free to sign up with another magazine. In the meantime, The Outlook would continue to pay his salary, as well as that of his new private secretary, John W. McGrath, and rent him an office in the city if he needed one.
Roosevelt accepted these generous terms of severance. Nevertheless, his letter of resignation, released to the press on the Fourth of July, sounded regretful: “If I had been able to be, as I expected to be, a man entirely removed from all participation in active politics, nothing would give me keener pleasure than to keep on exactly as in the past.”
IN BERLIN, WILHELM II confirmed to the Austro-Hungarian ambassador that Germany would support the Dual Monarchy in any act of revenge on Serbia for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He advised quick action, so as to crush pan-Slavism, once and for all, before Russia had time to react.
Even if “a serious complication in Europe” did ensue, against his expectation, the Kaiser promised to fight on Austria’s side. He said that his chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, would make the promise formal. Summoned to Potsdam, Bethmann-Hollweg