Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [454]
28 the hasty departure On 27 Mar., Trotsky had sailed from New York to join his radical colleagues in Petrograd. He was secretly arrested in Halifax, Canada, by British military authorities fearful that he would work against the Allied cause in Russia. The New York Times, 11 Apr. 1917.
29 Count Ilya Tolstoy The New York Times, 21 Apr. 1917; TR, Letters, 8.1186. The commission was eventually headed by Elihu Root.
30 Describing himself TR, Letters, 8.1186.
31 Privately, he told Leary, Talks with T.R., 98.
32 “If we do not” Ibid., 99.
33 “This policy” TR, Letters, 8.1174–75.
34 “My dear sir” Ibid., 8.1176–84, 1177, 1178, 1180.
35 “a repetition of” Alvin Johnson, Pioneer’s Progress: An Autobiography (New York, 1952), 253.
36 “For obvious reasons” TR, Letters, 8.1183–84.
37 and looking ahead Harding was also uneasy about having a flagrantly pro-German mistress. See James D. Robenalt, The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War (New York, 2009). Nobody in 1917 was so cynical as to suggest that Harding might have an interest in making it possible for Roosevelt to die gloriously in battle, but nine decades later, the thought does arise.
38 assuming that Wilson While remaining cagey about TR’s chances of being accepted for a command, WW had personally encouraged him to push for the volunteer amendment. TR, Letters, 8.1170.
39 “He is known” The New York Times, 29 Apr. 1917.
40 While the debate Ibid.; Spring Rice to TR, 19 Apr. 1917 (CSR).
41 “It will give me” Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.206.
42 Quentin was summoned Longworth, Crowded Hours, 254–55; Kermit Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt, 32.
43 By the first week Bishop, TR, 2.424.
44 “All the lines of him” Slayden, Washington Wife, 308. Balfour’s depressed look can clearly be seen in a photograph opposite p. 148 of Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.
45 His government was Strachan, The First World War, 228.
46 They agreed, in other Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.202.
47 Marshal Joffre’s pleadings Strachan, The First World War, 248. Joffre’s current army rank was ambiguous, because he himself had been replaced by Nivelle. But as the hero of the Marne, and leader of a crucially important mission, he was still perceived in America as the embodiment of France’s war effort.
48 Roosevelt and Joffre Leary, Talks with T.R., 222; TR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 17 May 1917 (ARC); Leary, notebook 5 (JJL).
49 “He did not tell” Leary, Talks with T.R., 223.
50 There was another Charles Hanson Towne, The Balfour Visit (New York, 1917) 59ff.; Leary, Talks with T.R., 223–24; Leary, notebook 5 (JJL). To avoid upsetting the State Department, TR announced afterward that he and Balfour had been discussing the latter’s Gifford lectures on “Theism and Humanism.” See 673.
51 “Since the responsibility” Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.202.
52 Roosevelt believed Bishop, TR, 2.424.
53 “Tumulty tells me” O’Leary to TR, 17 May 1917, OL.
54 “It would be very agreeable” Ibid., 2.425.
55 an old military showman Claude Debussy, Préludes, bk. 2.6 (Paris, 1913).
56 James Amos Amos, TR: Hero to His Valet, 67; TR, Letters, 8.1195.
57 “I don’t care a continental” Leary, Talks with T.R., 239.
58 Kermit was at Plattsburg TR, Letters, 8.1194.
59 “My dear General” Ibid., 8.1193.
60 Pershing replied TR, Letters, 8.1193. The general did not add that he agreed with Baker and Wilson about the unwisdom of sending a TR-headed division to Europe. Cowley, The Great War, 417.
61 “army of the air” Cowley, The Great War, 294.
62 “Colonel Roosevelt is” Quoted in a memo by Parker, ca. 1928, transcribed and edited by Gary L. Lavergne in “John M. Parker’s Confrontation with Woodrow Wilson,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 10.2. During his interview with WW on the afternoon of 18 May 1917, Parker enraged the President by calling him an “autocrat” and “hired man of the people.”
63 “Never, except” Leary, Talks with T.R.,