Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [363]
70 Reporting afterward TR, Letters, 7.395. For the epistolary relationship of TR and Trevelyan, see Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents.”
71 At least we agreed TR, Letters, 7.396.
72 Roosevelt asked Ibid., 7.398. At a meeting of the Navy League in Berlin on 22 May 1910, Admiral Hans von Köster noted that every naval power was currently trying “to reach the highest possible degree of readiness for war.” Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. F, 21.77–78.
73 This sounded reasonable TR, Letters, 7.399.
74 By the time EKR diary, 10 May 1910 (TRC); Chicago Tribune, 12 May 1910.
75 He cabled Chicago Tribune, 12 May 1910; Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (New York, 1939), 542.
76 More vocal wear KR diary, 11 May 1910 (KRP); Chicago Tribune, 12 May 1910; O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 150–51. TR’s “suite” was also accredited with naval and military aides-de-camp. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1910, 528.
77 “Roosevelt, mein Freund” There are various versions of the Kaiser’s words, overheard by many listeners. This version was repeated by Henry White to Lawrence Abbott on the evening after the ceremony. The phrase mein Freund struck White as unusually intimate for Wilhelm II, on such a military occasion. Nevins, Henry White, 302.
78 Roosevelt knew this Morris, Theodore Rex, 186; New York Tribune, 12 May 1910; O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 150.
79 Lifting his hat Chicago Tribune, 12 May 1910; Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 122–23.
Biographical Note: This paragraph represents the author’s interpretation of a curious passage that Looker wrote after interviewing EKR many years later. Since Looker had known all the Roosevelts intimately from his days as a member of the “White House Gang,” and since EKR endorsed his book with a personal letter (facsimile, 116), the passage deserves attention. In its entirety, it reads as follows: “In talks with his family he [TR] indicated that ‘the Kaiser most evidently showed, in company with some lesser sovereigns, a sort of double-barreled perspective as he went through this show. He was sitting on his horse seeing two different divisions of things happening about himself. One included his own observations of my own impressions of the pageant, the Staff’s impressions and his own as the various battle units passed by us all. The other was as if his mental ghost had spurred away from us, halted, faced about, and was now scrutinizing himself and all of us through foreign eyes in order to understand what the rest of the world would think. As if the rest of the world at this particular moment was the slightest bit interested or even amused! It was just the same dual thought that made it possible for him to look upon his own human acts in one way and upon such Imperial acts, as he selected from the point of view of his “divine right,” in another. He was actually, as far as I could discover, one of the last of those curious creatures who sincerely believed himself to be a demi-god.’ ”
80 When Edith saw Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 129–30. In 1912, TR told a reporter, “I tried him with everything I knew, but the only subject on which I could strike fire was war. He knows military history and technique. He knows armies, and that is all. I couldn’t get a spark from him on anything else.” Oscar King Davis, Released for Publication: Some Inside Political History of Theodore Roosevelt and His Times, 1898–1918 (Boston, 1925), 92.
81 He recovered Chicago Tribune, 13 May 1910. The text of TR’s Berlin University address is in TR, Works, 14.258–83.
82 Wilhelm had never Chicago Tribune, 13 May 1910.
83 “the great house of Hohenzollern” TR, Works, 14.259.