Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [244]
Bowers asked when he had last seen the plaintiff. Roosevelt said it had been at the annual Lincoln Day banquet in New York in 1911. Effectively and dramatically, he described how Barnes had boasted that conservatives were now in control of the state GOP, jeering that progressives and their ilk “were out.”
The Colonel looked a happier man when the court adjourned at 5 P.M.
BY NOW THE TRIAL was being treated as a major story in New York newspapers, shouldering aside headlines bearing the words YPRES and DARDENELLES. Court artists rejoiced in the contrasting physical presences of Roosevelt and Barnes (ignoring each other in court) and Ivins, with his skullcap and spats, looking like an illustration from a Dickens novel.
Thursday was the day the old lawyer had been waiting for, and he lit into Roosevelt with relish.
IVINS Has your occupation in life, apart from your public service, been that of an author?
TR An author and a ranchman and an explorer.
IVINS Then you have had three professions?
TR I have followed all three vocations, or avocations.
IVINS And more or less simultaneously?
TR More or less simultaneously. (Laughter)
“I have also been an officeholder,” he tried to add, but Ivins had already managed to imply that, by spreading himself too thin, he could be seen as a dilettante.
Roosevelt smelled danger, and was uncharacteristically terse as Ivins pressed him to talk more about himself. A series of easy autobiographical questions soothed him. He began to answer at greater length. Ivins congratulated him on his memory. “It is pretty good,” Roosevelt admitted.
Ivins switched to a much more detailed interrogation. He focused on one of the low points of Roosevelt’s career: the tax-avoidance controversy that had nearly disqualified him from the gubernatorial nomination in 1898, until Elihu Root rescued him with an argument just short of fraud. Campaign finance was one of Ivins’s specialties—he had published a little book on the subject—and it was emphatically not one of the defendant’s. Roosevelt soon had cause to regret that he had been tricked into praising his own memory. After drawing a few more blanks, he fell back on vehement protestations that he stood for “righteousness” in politics.
IVINS Now, does that rule apply to other people, in their judgment with regard to righteousness and the opportunities for its expression, as well as it does for you?
TR Of course it does.
IVINS Does that apply to Mr. Barnes just as much as it does to you?
TR It does apply to Mr. Barnes just as much as it does to me.
IVINS …Has not every man an equal right to determine his own rule of righteousness and his time of applying it?
TR He has if he has the root of righteousness in him. If he is a wrongdoer, he has not.
IVINS Who is the judge, you or he?
TR It may be that I am the judge, of him. If I had to be the judge—
Justice Andrews sat expressionless between his two bowls of carnations. Roosevelt began to flounder, punching the air as he had in the courthouse in Marquette, Michigan.
TR I will give you an exact example. Senator Burton—
IVINS You need not gesticulate.
BOWERS (for the defense) Why not?
IVINS I do not object to his answering. I object to his manner.
BOWERS Oh, is that it?
IVINS I do not want to be eaten up right here now. (Laughter)
Pleased to have exposed the defendant as both complacent and excitable, Ivins went on to taunt him about his infallibility (“You did not at that time have an attack of righteousness?”) and reprimand him for making speeches (“You need not treat me as a mass meeting, because I am not.”). Roosevelt managed to control his temper through the rest of the day, arguing that he could not be blamed for using the services of political bosses when they saw their way