Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [270]
“Don’t you do it if you expect me to pussy-foot on any single issue I have raised,” Roosevelt said, adding yet another phrase to the dictionary of American political slang.
AT THIS JUNCTURE, Woodrow Wilson demonstrated once more that he was a political operator without peer.
The attack on the Sussex had typically caused him to go into seclusion, while he deliberated how to respond and waited for an authoritative statement that it had indeed been torpedoed by a U-boat. Meanwhile there had been such a surge of national anger at the loss of American lives aboard, combined with frustration over General Pershing’s inability to track down Pancho Villa, that Wilson saw he must address it, or risk having the anger translate into a general conviction that his foreign policy had failed. On 18 April, he ordered Joseph Tumulty to go to Capitol Hill at 4:30 P.M. sharp, and inform the leaders of Congress that the President had “important affairs” to communicate to both Houses at 1 P.M. the following afternoon. The White House simultaneously announced that Wilson had written a new note to Germany, unprecedented in its harshness, which was ready for dispatch the moment he finished his address.
These drumrolls, so precisely timed for effect, created such suspense that Roosevelt sounded peevish when he complained that Wilson wanted to hold a “town meeting” rather than act like a commander in chief.
When the hour came for the President to appear, Congress was more excited than at any time since it had awaited William McKinley’s request for war against Spain in 1898. Wilson entered looking like a man with his mind made up, and the applause that greeted him as he made his way to the lectern was subdued but prolonged. All he said by way of preamble was, “Gentlemen of the Congress, a situation has arisen in the foreign relations of the country of which it is my plain duty to inform you very frankly.”
He reviewed his diplomatic communications with the Wilhelmstrasse since February 1915, stressing the good faith of the United States in consistently believing Germany’s protestations that it would moderate its submarine offensive against the Allies. Despite a strong warning by the State Department at the beginning of this offensive, and much patience on his own part, “the commanders of German undersea vessels have attacked merchant ships with greater and greater activity, not only upon the high seas surrounding Great Britain and Ireland but wherever they could encounter them, in a way that has grown more and more ruthless, more and more indiscriminate as the months have gone by.”
Greater and greater, more and more. Throughout his fifteen-minute address, the President kept pounding out repetitive qualifiers, stressing the incremental nature of the tests Germany had put on America’s patience. “Tragedy has followed tragedy.… Great liners like the Lusitania and the Arabic, and mere ferryboats like the Sussex, have been attacked without a moment’s warning … and the roll of Americans who have lost their lives on ships thus attacked and destroyed has grown month by month,