Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [259]
JULIAN STREET, A YOUNG journalist assigned to write a profile of Roosevelt for Collier’s, had an appointment to interview him in his Manhattan office the following morning. Expecting to encounter a fierce militarist, Street was pleasantly disappointed. “As the Colonel advanced to meet me he showed his hard, white teeth, wrinkled his red, weather-beaten face, and squinted his eyes half shut behind the heavy lenses of his spectacles, in suggestion, as it seemed to me, of a large, amiable lion which comes up purring gently as though to say, ‘You needn’t be afraid. I’ve just had luncheon.’ ”
Before they could talk, a clutch of newsmen arrived to announce that the secretary of war, Lindley M. Garrison, had telegraphed a reprimand to General Wood for allowing Roosevelt to cast aspersions on President Wilson at an army base. Street looked, fascinated, as the Colonel dictated a statement absolving Wood of responsibility.
At first Roosevelt spoke gravely, and the faces of the reporters mirrored his sober expression. “It was not until he lapsed briefly into irony, turning on, as he did so, that highly specialized smile, that I perceived how truly those young men reflected him.… To watch their faces was like watching the faces of an audience at a play: when the hero was indignant they became indignant; when he sneered they sneered; and when he was amused they seemed to quiver with rapturous merriment.”
Street visited with Roosevelt several more times over the course of the next few days, trying to get as much out of him as possible before he left for a three-week hunting trip to Quebec. In the event, he got a major scoop: Roosevelt flatly declared that he would not accept any party’s nomination in 1916. Then, with sublime appropriateness, he packed his guns and went north in search of a bull moose.
During his absence, Street wrote the profile. The young man was convinced that Roosevelt was the greatest man alive. For journalistic purposes, however, he decided to go no further than to call him “the most interesting American.” The phrase leaped out as the title of his magazine piece, and also of the book that might grow out of it: a portrait of the Colonel as the prophet of preparedness and, not inconceivably, President of the United States again someday.
That fantasy made Street worry about the consequences of publishing his “scoop.” Some momentary political situation could arise in which Roosevelt might regret disqualifying himself as a candidate in 1916. With a deadline from Collier’s looming, Street took his manuscript to Sagamore Hill to show to Edith.
She sighed heavily at the thought of her husband being dragged into another presidential run. “It almost killed us last time!” But she said he would be home soon, and promised to ask him about withdrawing his statement.
On 27 September she wrote Street, “The Master of the house is home, & entirely approves of the omission.”
ROOSEVELT GOT HIS BULL MOOSE, in addition to another that caused him considerable embarrassment, because the province of Quebec had licensed him to shoot only one specimen. He had to explain, in a bizarre deposition endorsed by both of his guides, that the second moose had pursued him both in water and on land, uttering strange cries and banging its antlers against trees. It was evidently as insane as Amos Pinchot, and as unwilling to let him go. He had had to kill it before it killed him.
Shaken by the experience, he told Charles Washburn early in October that his hunting days were over. He did not want to risk his deteriorating body on any more strenuous chases. It would be a humiliation, he said, to end up being “taken care of.”
Washburn observed that the Colonel had aged much over the last year and a half. “This mighty human dynamo,” he noted in his diary, “is working with a somewhat diminished energy.