Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [273]
At the mention of the last name, Butler showed some interest. When the two parties reassembled on Saturday morning, 10 June, a telegram from the Colonel urged both of them to support Lodge as a man of “the broadest national spirit.” Perkins’s communication of this news to the Progressives provoked anguished cries of “No.” The protests swelled and transformed into such passion for Roosevelt that at 12:37 P.M., Perkins was unable to delay his nomination. That was three minutes too late to influence Republicans voting a few blocks away in Convention Hall. They had already decided on Hughes.
It remained only for Roosevelt to make his final break with the Progressive rank and file. He did so with another telegram declining their nomination “at this time.” Its brusque tone was no more shocking than his demand that his “conditional refusal” be referred to George Perkins’s National Committee to accept as absolute. “If they are not satisfied they can … confer with me and then determine on whatever action we may severally deem appropriate to meet the needs of the country.”
Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Evening Post, watched as the import of these words sank in on the delegates. Roosevelt was not only rejecting them (in the very hall where he had once vowed to battle for the Lord) but, with the silky-smooth collusion of George Perkins, making it impossible for them to nominate anybody else who might damage the Republican Party’s choice. “Around me,” Villard reported, “men of the frontier type could not keep back their tears at this self-revelation of their idol’s selfishness, the smashing of their illusions about their peerless leader.”
ROOSEVELT’S BRUSQUENESS masked considerable hurt. Against all his instincts, he had allowed himself to believe that the miracle might happen, that the Republican nomination he had always wanted (in preference to that of 1912) was coming to him just as Americans realized that he, of all the men in the world, was probably the best equipped to arrest the general breakdown of civilization. If I have anything at all resembling genius, it is the gift for leadership. But leadership once again, and probably forever now, was denied him. The future of America was in the hands of two aloof and cagey deliberators. Wilson and Hughes were men who waited for events to happen and then reacted. They lacked his ability to see events coming and act accordingly, faster than anyone else on the political scene. Since Belgium, he had known in his bones that the United States must go to war, as he had known the same after the Maine blew up in ’98. Now he could only wait until whichever nominee faced up to telling the American people this disagreeable fact.
“Theodore,” Corinne Robinson said, bursting in on him as he sat brooding in his library, “the people wanted you.” She had attended both conventions in Chicago.
He smiled at her. “If they had wanted me hard enough, they could have had me.”
With other family and friends he affected his usual good humor, and joked that the country obviously “wasn’t in a heroic mood.” Wheezing with a sudden attack of dry pleurisy (which he blamed on the bullet in his chest), he admitted, in an off-the-record interview with John J. Leary, that he was deeply disappointed. To the newspaperman’s surprise, he quoted the prophet Micah—What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God—taking apparent comfort in the kind of biblical text William Jennings Bryan was always spouting.
His secretary interrupted to ask if he wanted to comment