Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [34]
She floated into Dorchester House an hour before midnight, fresh from a transatlantic steamer, bringing a gale of Washington gossip with her. Alice’s chat amounted to primary information, for she was a favorite of President Taft, and the wife of one of his closest associates, Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati. She clearly saw that her father’s return home was going to cause a crisis of leadership in the Republican Party. At all costs he must stay aloof from politics—unless in his heart he wanted to be president again. Alice certainly wanted that in her heart. She had buried what she called “a voodoo” in the White House garden.
“A BORN SOCIALITE, HAPPIEST UNDER THE CHANDELIERS OF THE VERY RICH.”
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ca. 1910. (photo credit i3.1)
FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK Roosevelt went about his business, while hundreds of other envoys fulfilled similar obligations. Name after titled name crowded his calendar: the Princess Royal, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, King George of Greece, Prince and Princess Christian, the Duke of Norfolk, Princess Henry of Battenberg, the Marquess of Londonderry, the Duchess of Argyll, Lords Lansdowne, Clarendon, and Cromer. More to his taste was an interview with Sir Edward Grey—“one of the finest fellows I ever met.”
Emerging one morning from Buckingham Palace with Henry White, he was pounced on by Wilhelm II. “My dear friend, I am so glad to have arrived in time to see you.… I have an hour to spare, and we can have a good talk.” Roosevelt glanced at his watch and said that, unfortunately, he was not quite as free. “I’ll give you twenty minutes.”
His bluntness was so unlike the reverence Wilhelm was used to that it beguiled rather than offended. The Kaiser settled for as long as he would stop, and was rewarded with inside information on what members of the House of Lords felt about Germany’s naval program. Roosevelt was uninhibited in saying what he thought of scaremongers like Lord Londonderry: “No more brains than those of a guinea-pig.” Wilhelm quoted this remark in a cable to Bethmann-Hollweg. It did not seem to cross his mind that the Colonel might be just as frank in talking about him to British leaders.
By late Thursday afternoon, as Roosevelt sat at tea in Dorchester House with a large company of English and American guests, he was beginning to show symptoms of explosive effervescence, as always in periods of intense activity. “I’m going to a Wake this evening,” he wheezed, chortling. Heads turned in shock as he repeated, “I’m going to a Wake at Buckingham Palace!”
“I HARDLY KNOW what else to call it,” he wrote afterward, in a private account of his service as a diplomat. At one protocol level, the “wake,” hosted by George V, was a gathering of some seventy special ambassadors, many of them royal; at another, it amounted to a dinner in honor of Wilhelm II, the senior monarch present.
In contrast to the star-studded uniforms on display, Roosevelt wore what the State Department considered appropriate for a representative of the New World: a swallow-tailed black suit with black studs in his boiled shirt-front. Minus the studs and plus a top hat, it would do him as well at the funeral. For all the severity of his appearance and carefully solemn expression, the satirist in him saw that the next twenty-four hours were going to be rich in comedy.
He was buttonholed at once by the self-styled “Tsar” of Bulgaria, who was a pariah at the party for having recently declared his country an empire. The bearded former prince was triumphant after denying Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary transit rights through his wagon-lit on the train they had shared from Vienna to Calais. As a result, the archduke had been forced to alight at station stops whenever he got hungry, and march furiously down the platform to the dining car.
Wilhelm II did not find this as