Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [302]
For forty hours, civilian, military, and naval forces besieged the gilded redoubt, threatening to destroy it if power was not transferred to the proletariat. By daybreak on 8 November, Lenin was the presumptive ruler of Russia. He was elected chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars later in the day, and Trotsky became his commissar for foreign affairs. Their first joint action was to issue a decree of peace with Germany, pending negotiation of a formal armistice.
Coincidentally, Roosevelt had just finished writing a foreword to Herman Bernstein’s edition of The Willy-Nicky Correspondence: Being the Secret and Intimate Telegrams Exchanged Between the Kaiser and the Tsar. He said the telegrams not only illuminated the dark relationships of despots just before the war, but that they were prophetic in showing “the folly of the men who would have us believe that any permanent escape from anarchy in Russia can come from the re-establishment of the autocracy, which was itself the prime cause of that anarchy.”
IN THE MIDDLE of the month, he suffered the most devastating review of his literary career. Stuart P. Sherman, chief book critic of The Nation, took advantage of the publication of The Foes of Our Own Household to speak out on behalf of all the antiwar mollycoddles Roosevelt had sought to emasculate over the years. He argued that the Colonel had become a split personality because of his tendency to be “impressed with the two-sidedness of things.” Foes, consisting of twelve reprinted articles on domestic and foreign policy, was really two books, Sherman observed. “Just as one of them was written by a judicious, progressive, and patriotic Aristotelean, exactly in the same way the other was written by a willful, angry, and furiously inequitable extremist.” Roosevelt’s musings on social and political questions were “judicious, progressive … timely and weighty,” the thought of an eminently skilled polemicist. But when dealing with matters of defense and warfare, he perverted the words of past statesmen to suit his rhetorical purpose. “Any man who desires to believe that Washington and Lincoln saw eye to eye with Mr. Roosevelt,” Sherman remarked, “should give his days and nights to the study of The Foes of Our Own Household; but any man who desires to know what [they] actually thought and said had better go to the original documents.”
The critic was less effective in comparing Roosevelt’s executive philosophy to that of Wilhelm II, if only because Woodrow Wilson had also come to believe in strong central control, compulsory military service, national self-assertion, patriotism, and preparedness. But Sherman drew attention to the “pervasive and sustained ugliness” of the Colonel’s personal campaign against Wilson, and to his love of war for war’s sake. “Apparently he cannot contemplate with equanimity a future in which our children shall be deprived of the ‘glory’ of battle with their peers.”
For once, Roosevelt elected to let a pacifist berate him without reply. His silence implied, more than an attempt at self-defense would have, that he was beginning to doubt himself. He had entered his sixtieth year. An impotent old age was being forced on him, while Georges Clemenceau had been made prime minister of France at seventy-six. “I have never regretted anything so much as the absence of the Roosevelt army, nor understood the reason for it,” his fellow Cassandra wrote him.
A bitter winter was settling in, with a national coal famine threatening,