Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [235]
Roosevelt appeared on the surface to be content. He insisted, as he had in late 1910 and 1912, that his politicking days were over (“I never wish to leave Sagamore again!”) and that his heart and mind were at ease. Family and friends used to such protestations saw that he was, on the contrary, unhappier than at any time they could remember. He had regained the seventy pounds of flesh he lost to malaria, and it was not the firm musculature of earlier years, but a fatness around the waist and neck that disgusted him. “I am now pretty nearly done out,” he confided to his former White House physician, Dr. Presley Rixey. “The trouble is that I have rheumatism or gout and things of that kind to a degree that make it impossible for me to take very much exercise; and then in turn the fact that I cannot take exercise prevents my keeping in good condition.” Like many another ovoid person, he did not relate his weight gain to compulsive eating.
Ted was concerned enough about him to call old Rough Riders and ask them to rally round. “Father is in very bad shape. Won’t you come out and see if you can cheer him up.” Those who did tried the dubious therapy of encouraging Roosevelt to think of raising a volunteer division to fight in Mexico or, if need be one day, overseas. Edith lost patience with these fantasies. “Both you men,” she said to her husband and Frank Knox, “are exactly like small boys playing at soldiers.”
She sat in glowing firelight, with needlework on her lap.
“It’s a lovely game. But as far as the Mexican trouble is concerned, Theodore, you know quite as well as I do that Mr. Wilson will never let you, or your division, get into it at all.”
William Allen White correctly diagnosed that the Colonel was suffering from power deprivation. As the ambivalent leader of a dying party, he no longer looked or sounded presidential. It was inconceivable, given what was happening in Europe, that he could ever again call upon straw-hatted idealists to stand and fight at Armageddon. In his despair that nothing was being done for the Belgians (or was it frustration at not being in control?), he was resorting increasingly to ugly language against Wilson and Bryan. His series of articles on the war had become near-libelous after the election. That infallible sign of Rooseveltian frustration, the tendency to castrate political opponents, had resurged: “Weaklings who raise their shrill piping for a peace that shall consecrate successful wrong occupy a position quite as immoral as and infinitely more contemptible than the position of the wrong-doers themselves.… It comes dangerously near flattery to call the foreign policy of the United States under President Wilson and Secretary Bryan one of milk and water.”
White tried to tease him back into the kind of civilized essay-writing that suited him best. “Your cistern is dry on politics.… I understand that you have a contract with the Metropolitan. If I were you I would go strong on the discussion of modern tendencies in architecture with here and there a few remarks on Sir Oliver Lodge’s views on abnormal psychology, and I might take a swipe at the national moving picture censorship, but I would not have anything to do with friend Bryan or friend Wilson.”
Roosevelt did not rise to White’s humor. “I am more like a corpse than like the cistern of which you spoke.” He laboriously explained that Metropolitan magazine was interested only in his views on “international, social and economic questions,” and would not permit him to write literary essays—much as he might want to. “Like you I make my living largely by my pen. I don’t care to go into work that will take me beyond the