Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [224]
Yet for the moment, Roosevelt believed that it was right for America to stay neutral. Newspapers were reporting that no rules of war had so far been broken. “The melancholy thing about this matter to me,” he wrote Hugo Münsterberg, a Prussian-born professor at Harvard, “is that this conflict really was inevitable and that the several nations engaged in it are, each from its own standpoint, right under the existing conditions of civilization and international relations.”
The only one he felt had a moral (as opposed to strategic or economic) reason to fight was Belgium, which had courageously vowed to defend its honor and sovereignty. He made this plain when an emissary from Wilhelm II visited him. Count Franz von Papen was military attaché to the German Embassy in Washington, and the only soldier in the diplomatic corps representing the Central Powers. Young and handsome, with a noble lineage extending back to the fifteenth century, Papen was a Westphalian gentleman of the finest sort, except that there was something unctuous about him that irritated Roosevelt.
The message he brought was more than eight months old, and consisted of nothing more than one of the Kaiser’s typical protestations of esteem, updated to suit the current emergency. Papen obviously meant to take advantage of it by enlisting Roosevelt as a voice for the German cause. Bowing, he said that His Imperial Majesty had never forgotten how pleasurable it had been to entertain the Colonel four years before, “as a guest in Berlin and at the palace at Potsdam.” In view of these fond memories, Wilhelm “felt assured” that he could count on Roosevelt’s “sympathetic understanding of Germany’s position and action.”
Roosevelt bowed back. He said that he too had never forgotten the royal way the Kaiser had treated him, “nor the way in which His Majesty King Albert of Belgium received me in Brussels.”
Silence fell. Papen’s expression did not change. He clicked his heels, bowed again, and left the room without uttering another word.
The visit only confirmed Roosevelt’s intent to support Wilson and Bryan as they pursued their policy of noninvolvement. He made his commitment clear in one of the occasional articles he now contributed to The Outlook: “In common with the immense majority of our fellow countrymen, I shall certainly stand by not only the public servants in control of the administration at Washington, but also all other public servants, no matter of what party, in this crisis; asking only that they with wisdom and good faith endeavor … to promote the cause of peace and justice throughout the world.”
He commended an early offer by the President to act as a mediator in Europe, although evidence mounted daily in black headlines (swamping even, on 15 August, news of the inauguration of the Panama Canal) that the war was irreversible.
The truth was, Wilson had no diplomatic qualifications. His only exposure to the outside world—unless Bermuda counted as a foreign power—had been gained on two or three vacations in Britain, visiting universities and bicycling through the Cumberland and Scotland of his ancestors. Roosevelt had gone on four grand tours of Europe and the Middle East before he was thirty, amassing an international circle of acquaintance that now extended from emperors down to his barefoot camaradas in Brazil. He could converse in three languages and read in four. He had been blessed by a Pope, honored by the mullahs of Al-Azhar, and asked to mediate an international war. He had heard Casals play Bach, confronted Cubism, and watched the gyrations of snake priests and Diaghilev’s dancers—not to mention the goose-steps of German troops at Döberitz. He had killed a man in battle and just four months before, on the shore of a river unknown to