Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [54]
Charles Evans Hughes as governor of New York State. (photo credit i4.3)
By supporting it too, Roosevelt saw an opportunity to show that he was as willing to work with the President, as a Party regular, as with Hughes or any other moderate progressive. Surely the three of them, with their combined prestige, could swing the bill’s passage. Hughes would go out of office in glory, and establish himself on the Supreme Court, no doubt, as a progressive interpreter of the Constitution. Taft would be seen as hospitable to reasonable reform, and the Old Guard would have to accept that progressivism was now a permanent part of the Republican agenda. Best of all, Theodore Roosevelt would go down in history as a statesman who had made one final, selfless gesture of conciliation before retiring from Party politics.
“Our governor,” he announced at a luncheon for Hughes following the commencement ceremony in Sanders, “has a very persuasive way with him. I had intended to keep absolutely clear from any kind of public or political question after coming home, and I could carry my resolution out all right until I met the governor this morning, and he then explained to me that I had come back to live in New York now; that I had to help him out, and after a very brief conversation I put up my hands and agreed to help him.”
AFTER COFFEE, ROOSEVELT seemed to want to retract his pledge. William N. Chadbourne, a Hughes lieutenant from New York County, said that party members who had gotten into politics because of him would be deeply disillusioned if “the old group” reasserted machine control in Albany.
The Colonel hesitated. “What shall I do?”
“You’d better send a telegram to Lloyd Griscom.”
Griscom was chairman of the New York County Committee. Roosevelt sat down and scribbled the brief message that was to reinvolve him in politics. “I believe the people demand it,” he wrote of the direct primary bill. “I most earnestly hope that it will be enacted into law.”
EXHILARATED AS ALWAYS by the prospect of a fight, he went on to stay with Henry Cabot and Nanny Cabot Lodge at their summer home in Nahant, Massachusetts. Old mutual friends, the Winthrop Chanlers, were there too. Margaret Chanler wrote:
He was bursting with the things he wanted to tell us. He always liked to talk from a rocking chair; so one was brought out on the piazza, and the Lodge family, including the three children … and Winnie and I sat around him while he rocked vigorously and told one story after another, holding us enchanted, making us laugh until we cried and ached.… Some of his best stories were about King Edward’s funeral, or “wake” as he irreverently called it.…
I do not think the rest of us spoke a hundred words.… It was a manifestation of that mysterious thing, nth-powered vitality, communicating itself to the listeners.
Lodge was doubtful about Roosevelt’s New York venture, but pleased to hear that he was cooperating with the President on something.
Taft happened to be vacationing nearby on the North Shore. That made it impossible to put off their reunion any longer. So the following afternoon, with Lodge for company, Roosevelt donned a panama hat and motored up the coast to the “summer White House” in Beverly. It was a large rented cottage overlooking the surf at Burgess Point. Taft liked it more for the proximity of the Myopia golf links than for its ozone.
“I know this man better than you do,” a secret service agent, James Sloan, said to Archie Butt as they stood looking out for the Colonel’s automobile. “He will come to see the President today and bite his leg off tomorrow.”
Sloan despised Taft. He claimed he had once heard Roosevelt say, “Jimmy, I may have to come back in four years to carry out my policies.” Butt was ambivalent. He had become fond of his boss, finding him to be essentially good-natured and high-minded. When convinced of the rightness of a course of action, Taft pushed all obstacles out of his way, like an elephant rolling logs. However, again like an elephant, he had a tendency to