Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [325]
Other visitors came. All paid affectionate respects. Some sought the Colonel’s counsel, as if they feared they might soon be deprived of it. William Howard Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and Henry White wanted to discuss the League of Nations issue, which Wilson was determined to press. Messianic as ever, the President had announced that he would personally represent the United States at a postwar peace conference scheduled to begin in Paris in the new year of 1919. White was the single Republican on his negotiating team—and a weak choice, in Lodge’s opinion, altogether too obsequious to men of power. Wilson had not chosen a senator of either party to accompany him. He appeared to think that his foreign prestige would be enough to enshrine the Fourteen Points in a treaty so perfect, it could not fail to be endorsed.
Roosevelt was mostly silent as he listened to these senior statesmen of the GOP debating peace policy. White got the impression that he was not averse to the League, leaning more to Root’s cautious approval than to Lodge’s harsh opposition. But in letters and articles dictated to Miss Stricker and a new personal assistant, Miss Flora Whitney, the Colonel made clear that he liked best Sir Edward Grey’s old idea of a League that would not require great powers to scale down their defenses. He scoffed at the hypocrisy of Wilson’s grand-sounding phrase self-determination for all peoples, noting that the President was in no hurry to grant liberty to Haiti or Santo Domingo.
Two of his future biographers stopped by with honey on their lips, looking for last-chapter material. Lawrence Abbott told him that his speeches at the Sorbonne and London’s Guildhall in 1910 had “contributed directly” to the success of France and Britain in winning the war. Joseph Bucklin Bishop showed him the typescript of an epistolary volume that Scribners wanted to put out, under the title Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. The Colonel read it entranced. “I would rather have that book published than anything that has ever been written about me.”
November gave way to December. By now Roosevelt was walking again, but only for short painful periods. Even sitting in a chair hurt. He was in his fourth week of hospitalization, on top of the week he had spent bedridden at Sagamore Hill. Unable to write anything but brief notes, he allowed Flora to think she was helping him with her laborious stenography. She was learning shorthand as part of her recovery process. Their relationship was quasi-familial, tender and sorrowful on both sides.
He did what he could to hinder Wilson’s diplomacy, after the President set sail for France in a confiscated German liner renamed the George Washington. In letters addressed to Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Balfour, as well as such other foreign opinion-makers as Lord Bryce and Rudyard Kipling, Roosevelt argued that the Democratic Party’s defeat in the recent Congressional election amounted to a vote of no confidence in the administration. In any other free political system, he told Balfour, the chief executive would have had to resign. Speaking for the Republican Party, he declared that a majority of American opinion stood for “absolute loyalty to France and England in the peace negotiations.” That meant a retreat from the Fourteen Points, which he thought were susceptible to interpretation in Germany’s favor, and an abandonment of any presumption by the United States to act “as an umpire between our allies and our enemies.”
Except for describing himself as “one of the leaders” of this new majority, Roosevelt did not say what was now acknowledged by political strategists: the 1920 GOP presidential nomination would be his if he wanted it. A number of Republicans and former Progressives called to sound him out about running. He declined to encourage them.
“I am indifferent to the subject,” he said, lying back on his pillows. “Since Quentin’s death,