Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [293]
“He did not tell me anything I did not know, or suspect,” Roosevelt told Leary. “France does want our men. She wants them badly, more than she wants supplies.”
There was another dinner for the missions at the Waldorf two nights later. It was hosted by Governor Charles S. Whitman of New York, with Roosevelt seated well away from the guests of honor. But Balfour quietly arranged to come out to Sagamore Hill for “high tea” on Sunday the fifteenth. The State Department, alerted by a sudden deployment of secret service agents, was powerless to stop him.
For four hours, he and Roosevelt renewed their acquaintance: grayer and sadder statesmen than they had been when they were respectively prime minister and president. The war they had long seen coming both joined them and separated them now. Balfour confided that he found Woodrow Wilson’s White House to be lacking in urgency. Roosevelt talked of his frustrated desire to serve. Their only auditors, as they talked far into the night, were Balfour’s parliamentary assistant Sir Ian Malcolm, and a rookie pilot from Mineola, Private Quentin Roosevelt.
THAT SAME WEEKEND, Roosevelt received another letter from Secretary Baker. The House-Senate conference was moving toward approval of the draft bill with the Harding amendment intact, but Baker did not want Roosevelt to think this presaged well for his division. “Since the responsibility for action and decision in this matter rests upon me, you will have to regard the determination I have already indicated as final, unless changing circumstances require a re-study of the whole question.”
The only “changing circumstance” Roosevelt could see ahead was Woodrow Wilson’s empowerment, under the pending act, to summon up five hundred thousand volunteer soldiers. Roosevelt believed he could supply almost half that number out of the pool of applications he already had in hand—but what chance was there of the President turning to him, if it was so obviously Baker’s desire to do without volunteers altogether?
Almost none, according to a message from Cal O’Laughlin in Washington. “Tumulty tells me confidentially that the President will approve the army conscription bill, but that he will not exercise his authority for the acceptance of your division.”
On 18 May, Wilson signed the bill into law, inflicting compulsory registration for military service upon ten million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one. The stroke of his pen made him the most powerful commander in chief in American history. In an extraordinary accompanying statement, he acknowledged that a clause in the Draft Act permitted him to give an independent command to Theodore Roosevelt. “It would be very agreeable for me to pay Mr. Roosevelt this compliment, and the Allies the compliment, of sending to their aid one of our most distinguished public men, an ex-President who has rendered many conspicuous public services and proved his gallantry in many striking ways. Politically, too, it would no doubt have a very fine effect and make a profound impression. But this is not the time … for any action not calculated to contribute to the immediate success of the war. The business now at hand is undramatic, practical, and of scientific definiteness and precision.”
The statement was Wilsonian in sounding like a tribute but parsing as dismissal. Roosevelt, by implication, was an old military showman who would only strut the French stage in the manner of Debussy’s “Général Lavine—excentric.”
James Amos was with the Colonel when he received a follow-up telegram from Wilson