Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [5]
How Edith Roosevelt feels about consigning them both to a year in the wilderness is another matter. She accepts that her husband craves danger, perhaps in compensation for his own inclination to bury himself in books. He has proved to be practically indestructible. So has Ted, their grown son. Archie, halfway through Groton, is if possible even flintier. Quentin, the youngest and brightest, is currently a fiend hidden in the cloud of late puberty, yet promises to emerge from it a natural leader and risk taker.
Kermit is made of more fragile material. He, his brothers, and his sisters, Alice and Ethel, worship their father as a sort of sun-god emanating power and love. Edith trusts that in Africa, the aura will be protective.
BY NOW SHE SHOULD have answered or destroyed most of the fifteen thousand farewell letters that had poured into Sagamore Hill before he left. He has retained just one, hand-delivered the day he sailed, along with a gold expanding ruler—just the thing a man needs on safari. The ruler is engraved THEODORE ROOSEVELT FROM WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT: Goodbye—Good luck—and a safe return, and the letter, on heavy White House stationery, reads:
My dear Theodore: If I followed my impulse, I should still say “My dear Mr. President.” I cannot overcome the habit. When I am addressed as “Mr. President,” I turn to see whether you are not at my elbow.…
I write to you to say “farewell,” and to wish you as great pleasure and as much usefulness as possible in the trip you are about to undertake. I have had my qualms about the result, but in thinking it over they disappear. You will undertake no foolhardy enterprise, I know.…
I want you to know that I do nothing in the Executive office without considering what you would do under the same circumstances and without having in a sense a mental talk with you over the pros and cons of the situation. I have not the facility for educating the public as you had through talks with correspondents, and so I fear that a large part of the public will feel as if I had fallen away from your ideals; but you know me better and will understand that I am still working away on the same old plan.
“KERMIT IS MADE OF MORE FRAGILE MATERIAL.”
Kermit Roosevelt in 1909. (photo credit p.2)
Taft cannot find it easy to succeed the most confident executive in modern memory. “Mr. President,” in contrast, is happy to sacrifice supreme power—and along with it, a third term virtually guaranteed by the Republican Party and the American electorate. He waves aside token respect. “I am no hanger-on to the shreds of departing greatness.”
That said, there is one title he cherishes, and asks everybody to use from now on: “Colonel Roosevelt.” He feels that it is both valid, reflecting his rank in the Reserve Army of the United States, and merited through bravery in battle. He was, after all, briefly and gloriously commander of a regiment of volunteer cavalrymen in ’98. If war ever comes again and finds him fit to serve, he intends to reactivate his brevet at once.
He is already “Roosevelt, (Col.) Theodore” in The New York Times Index. Reporters do not intend to drop him as a subject, even as he retreats into the wilds of Africa. For more than a quarter of a century they have pursued him, drawn by his “Teddy-bear” caricaturability, perpetual motion, heroic glamour, machine-gun quotes, and ricochet denials. Most attractive of all is his disaster potential—the likelihood that one day he will spend the last cent of his legendary luck, and be destroyed by either violence from outside, or hubris within.
This potential seems especially fraught now that he has elected to test his fifty-year-old body, and faulty vision, in some of the world’s riskiest hunting grounds. Aware of it himself, he has announced that his safari will be closed to all press coverage, save for occasional statistical bulletins that he may issue through cable facilities in Nairobi. Any attempt to follow in his footsteps will be “an outrage and an indecency.” He does not want every missed shot headlined