Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [45]
There was, of course, the complicating factor of William Howard Taft. One of the longest letters in the Colonel’s prodigious stash of mail came from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a litany of Taft’s personal and political troubles, beginning with, “I have had a hard time” and ending with an indirect appeal for help: “It would give me a great deal of pleasure if after you get settled at Oyster Bay, you could come over to Washington and spend a few days in the White House.”
HEADING FOR HOME, Roosevelt was a different person from the gregarious, Africa-bound adventurer of two springs before. He paced several hours a day on the first-class deck, a black hat shading his eyes. Fellow promenaders sensed his distraction and left him alone. He was willing to pose for the occasional “kodaker,” and made himself available for a general handshaking session. Otherwise, passengers saw little of him. He spent most of his time with Edith and Alice in their respective staterooms, while Ethel roamed the ship with a little black dog, and Kermit played bridge in the smoking room. Invariably, the family ate together in the ship’s exclusive “Ritz Carlton” restaurant.
They had much to talk about, and more to ponder individually, with changes looming in all their lives. Edith wanted nothing more than to have her husband back at Oyster Bay for good. Her dream was to grow old with him in Sagamore Hill, their big house overlooking the sea, filling it with more books as it emptied of children. But she knew him well enough not to bet against some urge for action taking him away from her, sooner or later. She had seen him brood at Omdurman, noticed how he huddled with Pinchot in Porto Maurizio, heard him exalt the Man in the Arena in Paris, registered what he said the night he came back depressed and raspy-voiced from Döberitz. At Windsor, she had watched as he walked with kings, and—in Kipling’s cliché—kept his bearing. At none of these times had Theodore looked like a spent force.
Alice, attuned to every political overtone humming around Washington, saw trouble looming between the President, her father, herself, and her husband. Nick was in a difficult position, since he came from a family long associated with the Tafts. Alice’s dread was that, in the event of a Roosevelt-Taft split, Representative Longworth would resign from Congress and run for governor of Ohio. To ultra-sophisticated Alice, the prospect of life in Columbus was only slightly better than death.
Kermit had two more years of Harvard to brace for, with little enthusiasm. During his annus mirabilis with his father, he had discovered himself both as a man and a wanderer. Restless, nervous, intoxicated by danger, he had earned social respect on safari, only to discover, as he trailed Roosevelt through Europe, that people still took no notice of him. He was too grown-up now (and too fond of cards and liquor) to expect any sympathy from his mother. Ethel was his new soul mate.
And she—eighteen years old, the shyest, most studious member of the family—had been transformed too. Her first experience of the world outside America had filled her with a vast curiosity, which reading would no longer satisfy. For that reason alone, Ethel hoped that Roosevelt would not get back into politics. She was starved for his company, his warm physicality, and his universal knowledge. “I love Father so much that it frightens me at times.”
THE COLONEL PRESERVED his sphinx-like silence about domestic politics all the way across the Atlantic. He agreed to speak only at a Sunday service for first-class passengers, and preached a lay sermon on “scribes and Pharisees, publicans and sinners.” Afterward he said that he felt uncomfortable that similar worship was not provided for lower-class passengers. “Let’s see if we can’t carry this righteousness down to the steerage people and the stokers.”
Arrangements were made on the bottom deck, to vast excitement. When Roosevelt descended, escorted by the captain, he found more than a thousand Poles crowded around a makeshift