Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [246]
THE DEFENDANT REMAINED in the witness stand for four more court days. He suffered further lapses of memory, principally on questions of campaign financing. Ivins tried to represent them as selective amnesia, but they looked to impartial observers like the forgetfulness of a man with larger things on his mind. The trial so far amounted to an entertaining exposé of unremarkable political facts. Both parties to Barnes’s lawsuit were—always had been—pragmatic politicians, the one looking for votes and reliable appointees, the other able to supply them, but at a price. As a young governor, Roosevelt had understood that reform legislation was impossible unless he could rely on a Party majority that was boss-controlled and lubricated with corporate contributions. As a power broker, Barnes knew that cooperation with the minority machine was sometimes necessary; the will of the people might even demand it.
Ivins’s evidence showed only that early on, Roosevelt had been naïvely eager to believe that Platt’s machine men were altruistic. He was certainly so himself (even the most wheedling letters Ivins obtained from the archives showed him to have been active in the public interest). But he had often kept his long-distance glasses on, rather than focus too closely on what the Easy Boss was doing.
Under hard interrogation by William L. Barnum, one of Ivins’s associates, Roosevelt admitted that he had once appointed a Democrat to office because Platt needed to do Tammany Hall a favor. Barnum said that in exchange, the man’s sponsor, a state senator, had asked them both to cooperate on a $12 million appropriation for one of his real estate interests. Had such a bill been passed? The Colonel could not remember.
“A little matter of twelve million wouldn’t make any impression on you?”
“After sixteen years,” Roosevelt snapped, “during which I have had to do with billions of expenditures, the item does not remain in my mind.”
It irked him that day after day of cross-examination was being devoted to his operations in Albany, long ago, rather than to Barnes’s later behavior as the successor of Boss Platt. Justice Andrews seemed to be in no hurry to summon witnesses like Cousin Franklin, who could testify to the venality of the plaintiff in recent years. The trial threatened to drag on indefinitely. Barnes quit attending on 26 April, saying that he would return only when called for.
“ ‘WHAT RELATION ARE YOU TO THE DEFENDANT?’ ”
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. (photo credit i21.2)
Roosevelt finally stepped down as a witness at noon on the twenty-ninth, with his reputation for total recall much damaged. Nevertheless, Bowers succeeded in introducing some damning evidence against Barnes, including ledger-book proof that the boss had enriched himself on state printing contracts. Whether that made him corrupt or not, the jury would have to decide.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt’s appearance in court on Tuesday, 4 May, created a stir.
“What relation are you to the defendant?” Bowers wanted to know.
“Fifth cousin by blood and nephew by law,” Franklin replied, grinning. The line was obviously well rehearsed.
He confirmed that Barnes and Boss Murphy had been partners in legislative shenanigans to which he had been privy. But the lift he gave to the Colonel’s case was mainly psychological. As a senior official of the Wilson administration, he was manifestly an important man. His department was on high alert over attacks on transatlantic shipping by German submarines. No fewer than twenty-three merchantmen had been torpedoed since the beginning of May—among them an American oil freighter, the Gulflight, with three lives lost—and persistent rumors were circulating that a major liner was being targeted for destruction soon.
Franklin did