Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [322]
He earnestly hoped, he said, that Wilson would “refuse to compound a felony by discussing terms with felons.”
These words showed that, ailing or not, the Colonel still packed a rhetorical punch. Similar statements by Henry Cabot Lodge and a nearly insubordinate General Pershing enraged the administration. Political strategists fantasizing another run by Roosevelt for the presidency in 1920 had a fair idea who he would choose as his secretary of state and secretary of war. Following up, Roosevelt sent an open telegram to Lodge, and carbon-copied it to Senators Poindexter and Hiram Johnson for promulgation “from one ocean to the other.” It expressed his fervent hope that the Senate would disavow the Fourteen Points “in their entirety,” and take independent action to ensure Germany’s unconditional surrender.
“Let us dictate peace by the hammering of guns,” he wrote, “and not chat about peace to the accompaniment of the clicking of typewriters.”
The President, goaded, issued a personal appeal to the nation the next day, 25 October. It was egotistical enough to make Roosevelt seem bashful: “My fellow countrymen, the congressional elections are at hand.… If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you express yourselves unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives.”
Wilson made things worse by saying it was “imperatively necessary,” with peace negotiations impending, that the Senate remain loyal to him. A loss by his party of either house would “certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.” The respect that America’s allies entertained for him would be seriously undermined if they saw voters in the United States electing a legislature that was “not in fact in sympathy with the attitude and action of the administration.”
The folly of this statement, implying that Republicans put party above patriotism, and that only Democrats were idealistic enough to impose pax Americana on the world, admitted of no rational explanation. Wilson was neither tired nor sick nor inclined to be bothered by anything Roosevelt said about him. But he was bothered, to a degree that made him lose his famous calm, by the addressee of Roosevelt’s telegram. He had hated Henry Cabot Lodge ever since he heard that the senator had accused him of turning white and “womanish” after Vera Cruz. The prospect of Lodge, an outspoken opponent of Wilson’s League of Nations idea, becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was more than the President could bear. He had had to be dissuaded from directly naming Lodge in his appeal.
Roosevelt sniffed a vote-getting issue and threw away the political address he had promised to give at Carnegie Hall. He composed a new one, passing the sheets to Alice Longworth as he wrote them.
TWO DAYS LATER the Colonel turned sixty. Archie and Ethel and their three children joined Alice and Edith in a celebration tinged with worry about his condition. He looked well, and somewhat thinner than he had been a year before, but his joints were burning with rheumatism. Ethel noticed that he still became dizzy if he moved too fast. He told her that ever since his abscess operation he had had “queer feelings” in his head.
She was encouraged to find him optimistic for a victorious