Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [326]
“I tell you no secret when I say that the cards are arranged for the nomination of T.R.,” Hiram Johnson wrote a journalist on 14 December. “He has gained immeasurably in public esteem, I think.”
If so, the gain was registered at home, not abroad. That evening’s newspapers broadcast the story that Woodrow Wilson was being received in Paris with a hysteria that far eclipsed the welcome given Roosevelt in 1910. A crowd of two million had greeted the President as the savior of Western civilization, showering him with roses as he rode up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe.
ROOSEVELT WOKE THE following day with his left wrist in such agony it had to be splinted. Much more alarmingly, he showed symptoms of a pulmonary embolism. The hospital kept this secret from the press. His temperature shot up to 104°F, then subsided. Dr. Richards had been talking of sending him home, but it was obvious now that he should be watched day and night. Edith could do nothing but sit at his bedside while he slept, reading Shakespeare in an effort to stay calm. “Poor dear, I wish I could take the pain.… There are so many things which he wants to do and cannot.”
He was buoyed by the appearance of Eleanor, back from France, except that she brought news that her husband had been left with a permanent limp. Roosevelt wished Ted could have been sent home on sick leave, like Archie. But he and Kermit were stuck in Europe, pending discharge from service.
Stuck too, the Colonel resigned himself to the prospect of Christmas in hospital. He would have to forgo his thirty-year ritual of playing Santa Claus at the Cove School in Oyster Bay. Archie was appointed to substitute for him.
Margaret Chanler paid a visit, and was disconcerted by her old friend’s listlessness. “I am pretty low now,” he admitted, taking her by the hand, “but I shall get better. I cannot go without having done something to that old gray skunk in the White House.”
He did get better, enough that Edith got permission to take him home for Christmas. They agreed that it would be best to leave early on the holiday itself, when no press photographers would be around. Corinne came in on Christmas Eve and found Roosevelt in his bathrobe, bandaged but bright-eyed. He told her that there seemed to be “a strong desire” among Republicans to nominate him for the presidency in 1920. His health, however, might prevent him ever again entering public life.
“Well, anyway, no matter what comes, I have kept the promise that I made to myself when I was twenty-one.”
“What promise, Theodore?”
“I promised myself that I would work up to the hilt until I was sixty, and I have done it.”
Vertigo assailed him on Christmas morning as the hospital elevator dropped to the ground floor. Dr. Richards reached to steady him, but he flinched.
“Don’t do that, doctor. I am not sick and it will give the wrong impression.”
Bracing himself when the door opened, he walked firmly down the corridor to his waiting car.
ALICE, ETHEL, ARCHIE, AND GRACE were waiting at Sagamore Hill when Edith brought him home. Lunch was going to be late, and the grandchildren were napping upstairs. Roosevelt looked white and battered, but clearly happy, after seven weeks away, to be back among his books and trophies. He gazed with rapture at the snow-whitened landscape around the house.
There was a great turkey on the table, and mince pie and plum pudding and ice cream. The Colonel’s frailty, however, cast a pall upon the feast. He reveled in the excitement of the boys and girls as they opened their presents, heaped around the tree in the North Room. Before going to bed early, he noticed sympathetically that little Richard Derby had asthma, like himself as a child.
ROOSEVELT LAY NOT in the bedroom he and his wife customarily shared,