Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [23]
They spent most of that day and evening together. Pinchot got the attention he craved (“One of the best & most satisfactory talks with T.R. I ever had”), while Roosevelt pored over a sheaf of disturbing letters from other progressive Republicans. All warned that some of his most cherished reforms were doomed, unless something was done soon to check the alliance developing between the administration and reactionaries in Congress.
He was more impressed by the letters than by their carrier. Perhaps Taft had been right to fire so uncompromising a person. “Gifford is a dear, but he is a fanatic.”
FOUR DAYS LATER, Roosevelt and Kermit, traveling stag while Edith and Ethel proceeded independently to Paris, arrived in Vienna. A familiar, courtly figure awaited them at their hotel: Henry White, whom Taft had so brusquely removed as American ambassador to France. Roosevelt was overjoyed to see him. He had written ahead to ask if White, schooled in the nuances of Old World diplomacy, would consider being at his side in Berlin and London.
“ ‘GIFFORD IS A DEAR, BUT HE IS A FANATIC.’ ”
Gifford Pinchot, former chief forester of the United States. (photo credit i2.1)
Vienna was a plus. As somebody who had dealt personally with many of the monarchs he was to see during the next month and a half, White would be a useful adviser—particularly on how to handle Wilhelm II, that constant imponderable on the international scene. Roosevelt could look after himself in republican France. He wanted to avoid the danger of becoming an emissary between the four most truculent powers in Europe. No matter how often he protested that he was “merely a private citizen,” he could not ignore the consequences of his presidency, his Nobel Peace Prize, his international circle of acquaintance, and (perhaps most persuasive of all) the publicity glow he generated in motion, like that of the great comet currently approaching Venus.
After a reunion breakfast, the two men went over to the Hofburg palace at the invitation of Emperor Franz Joseph. White sat in an anteroom while Roosevelt had the disarming experience of being hailed as the embodiment of “the present and future” by an octogenarian who admitted to being “the last representative of the old system.”
Franz Joseph had held Austria and Hungary together, with difficulty, for sixty-one years. He spoke in French, out of courtesy to the Colonel’s rusty German, and confessed that he was curious to see for himself how somebody so modern “felt and thought.” Roosevelt had detected a similar tempora mutantur wistfulness in the conversation of Victor Emmanuel, who seemed resigned to socialistic trends in Italy. Both rulers evidently felt that republicanism would soon be the doom of royalty, in Europe as well as Russia.
Aware that he was gazing for the first time into the eyes of a Habsburg, he was interested, but not awed. The best that could be said of the old monarch was that he was “a gentleman”—in Roosevelt’s mind, the highest of social categories. Not so the Emperor’s nephew and heir apparent. Archduke Franz Ferdinand struck him as “a furious reactionary in every way, political and ecclesiastical both.”
Meeting later with the Austrian Prime Minister, Richard von Bienerth, and Baron Alois von Aehrenthal, minister of foreign affairs, Roosevelt felt more at home. They were statesmen like himself, well-born Realpolitikers, executives of driving force. Yet he sensed a strategic insecurity in their conversation, not unlike that of condominium officials in Egypt. They clearly relied on Germany to hold their multicultural empire together. At the same time, they were worried about German disapproval of Austria-Hungary’s recent annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (the hyphens alone betrayed the looseness of the overall structure), not to mention calls for revenge in Russia and Serbia, likely allies in any Balkan war. Germany’s fear of such an imbroglio was understandable: