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balance of power in general, and America’s hemispheric security in particular. WW, in contrast, advocated neutrality only for as long as it would take him to impose upon the belligerents his “messianic” vision of a negotiated peace based on American moral principles. While Kissinger regrets that WW’s and not TR’s foreign policy prevailed (fostering the myth of American exceptionalism for the rest of the century), he does not consider the possibility that TR, reelected with all the prestige of his proven success as an international mediator (not to mention his personal knowledge of most of the European potentates prosecuting the war), could have brought about a diplomatic solution before the end of 1914.

Determinists might counter that a certain cosmic inevitability caused Franz Ferdinand’s automobile, on 28 June, to take the wrong turning that proved so right for Gavrilo Princip—leading over the course of the next four years to societal changes that had been generating since the end of the nineteenth century. In such a view, TR might as well have tried to mediate the eruption of Mont Pelée.

21 “As President” TR, Letters, 8.87.

22 In the terrible Ibid., 8.214–16.

23 He was playing Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 57.

24 “He will never” Hamlin Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries: A Literary Log (New York, 1932), 45. The phrase distinctly older is Garland’s.

25 TR (laughing) Dunne, Mr. Dooley Remembers, 184–85.

26 “striking his palm” Ibid.

27 “We cannot remain” Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson, 228.

28 Britain proposed This policy was announced on 1 Mar. 1915. For the Wilson administration’s complicity with it, see Walter Karp, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (New York, 1979), 176–82.

29 “The waters surrounding” The New York Times, 7 Feb. 1915.

30 “This is in effect” Spring Rice to William Jennings Bryan, 1 Mar. 1915, The American Journal of International Law, 12 (1918), 866.

31 If the commanders Foreign Relations of the United States Supplement, 1915, 98–100.

32 “I hope that” TR, Letters, 8.879, 888–89.

33 In a censuring tone Ibid., 8.889.

34 almost treasonous letter Ibid., 8.876–81; Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.154.

35 For as long as TR, Letters, 8.910, 899, 906–7, 918.

36 “T. Vesuvius Roosevelt” Title of a poem by W. Irwin in Collier’s Weekly, 12 Jan. 1907.

37 he checked Edith Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 406. The operation, performed on 14 Apr., was a success, and restored EKR’s health, which had been troubled for several years.

38 Upon arrival William Lyon Phelps, Autobiography with Letters (New York, 1939), 618. Throughout the winter, WHT had been outspoken in his praise of WW’s war policy. It is hard to believe that TR did not say something to him, but Phelps was a close witness to the encounter, and TR’s account of the incident avoids any mention of a verbal response. (TR, Letters, 8.1118.) According to secondary newspaper reports, the two men exchanged the briefest of greetings.

CHAPTER 21: BARNES V. ROOSEVELT

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 230.

2 the most entertaining libel suit See George T. Blakey, “Calling a Boss a Boss: Did Roosevelt Libel Barnes in 1915?” New York History, 60.2 (Apr. 1979).

3 Barnes’s counsel TR.Jr. to KR, 29 May 1915 (KRP). A later version of this anecdote is in Bishop, TR, 2.366.

4 Roosevelt’s classmate Andrews (1858–1936) was a respected judge of the legal-realist school. Elected later to a seat on the New York Court of Appeals, he famously dissented against the majority opinion of Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. (1928).

5 “Your Honor, I move” New York (State) Supreme Court, William Barnes, plaintiff-appellant, against Theodore Roosevelt, defendant-respondent, 4 vols. (Walton, N.Y., 1917), 1.129. Except where otherwise indicated, all testimony in the Syracuse trial is quoted from this source (hereafter cited as Barnes v. Roosevelt). Narrative and descriptive details derive from the observant reporting (with illustrations) of the New York World, 19 Apr.