Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [252]
He felt, not without reason, that he was stronger and smarter than anyone else in the administration. His acuity showed in the speed with which he grasped and cut short any argument, often rejecting a conclusion before it had been fully stated. Lobbyists and petitioners retired feeling that they had not been heard. To that extent Wilson was, or seemed, cold. A Calvinist restraint hindered his attempts to charm the public. He longed to be called “Woody” by the sort of people who called Roosevelt “Teddy,” and reacted with joy when they did. But that rarely happened, to the puzzlement of his three daughters and small circle of adoring friends. They remembered him before his bereavement as a delightfully warm man, a lover of dinner-table repartee, limericks, and the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan, which he would sing in a pleasant tenor voice. The younger Wilson had always had a healthy libido and made no effort to conceal it. While remaining faithful to his wife (as far as anyone knew: there had been rumors), he confessed that he never went to New York alone without feeling certain temptations.
Now, secretly, as Washington burst into full spring flower, he felt them again, without having to stray farther than four blocks from home. It transpired that the President had not been altogether alone the weekend after the Lusitania went down. The weather had been beautiful, and so, in his opinion, was Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt, the big dark Southern widow who went driving with him. He blamed her for his rhetorical gaffe the following Monday: “I do not know just what I said in Philadelphia … my heart was in such a whirl.”
Wilson had in fact already proposed marriage. Mrs. Galt had said no, but in a way that implied she would not mind if he raised the subject again.
ON 30 MAY, Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Washington, handed over a qualified apology for the destruction of the Lusitania. His minister, Count von Jagow, argued that the liner “undoubtedly had guns on board” when she sailed, “mounted under decks and masked.” Germany therefore had the right to sink her “in just self-defense.” The real responsibility for the disaster must lie with the Cunard company, for not informing American passengers that they were being used “as protection for the ammunition carried.” Jagow would have more to say on the subject, but in the meantime, the government of the United States might like to reflect on these complaints, and consider whether it should not visit its wrath on Great Britain instead.
The note said nothing about reparations, and its testy, provisional tone suggested dissension within the Wilhelmstrasse. Wilson began to draft a reply that conveyed his willingness to hear more, but (over Bryan’s protests), reiterated in stronger language the outrage he had expressed already.
FOR ROOSEVELT, TOO, the new season brought release from what he admitted had been “the very nadir” of his life. He set such store by his victories in Roosevelt v. Newett and Barnes v. Roosevelt that when he updated his biography in Who’s Who, the two trials totaled almost a fourth of the available space, dwarfing such achievements as the Panama Canal, the Treaty of Portsmouth, and the Conservation Conference of 1908. “I have never seen Theodore in finer form,” Edith Roosevelt wrote her sister Emily. “He bubbles over with good spirits, and I do my best to pant and puff after him.”
Once more his hasty step and high-pitched laughter were heard down the corridors of Metropolitan magazine.