Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [56]
This was exactly the kind of political “trust” he had battled as a young assemblyman in Albany. But then, legislative disappointments were to be expected. Nearly three decades later, a former president and toast of foreign monarchs could ill afford such a rebuff. Senator Gore had to be laughing. Roosevelt’s ancient scourge, the New York Sun, printed a one-line wisecrack: “And the ‘Hundred Days’ lasted just thirteen.”
The question now was whether he should nurse the bruise William Barnes, Jr., had inflicted on him, and wait for sympathetic critics to point out that he had merely tried to help out his governor and his President. Or, seek revenge on Barnes for humbling all three of them?
Lloyd Griscom came to see him in a funk. At all costs, the triumphant boss must be stopped from bulldozing the New York Republican convention at Saratoga Springs in September. If Barnes prevailed, his machine would write the platform, nominate whom it pleased to local, state, and federal offices, and advertise to the world that the Old Guard was back in control of Party affairs. The result was bound to be a Democratic sweep in November. Griscom suggested that Roosevelt run, with White House support, for chairman of the convention. Barnes doubtless had a conservative candidate in mind, so the contest would pit the forces of moderation against those of reaction, and maybe compensate for the primary-bill debacle.
Roosevelt listened without committing himself. He was not fooled that Griscom—a Taft man—wanted to do anything other than serve the administration. But here was a chance to influence the nomination of a decent man for governor, and push for a moderately progressive state delegation to the national convention in 1912. At the very least, cooperation with Griscom would signal that Roosevelt and Taft were not drifting apart.
The trouble was that they were, and both of them knew it.
“Archie, I am very greatly distressed,” Taft told Captain Butt on 6 July. “I do not see how I am going to get out of having a fight with President Roosevelt.”
He was still inclined to use the last two words when preoccupied or flustered. A rumor was going around that Roosevelt wanted to prevent Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger from running for the the U.S. Senate. True or not, the rumor reminded people that the Colonel had always been close to Ballinger’s enemy, Gifford Pinchot.
“I confess it wounds me very deeply,” Taft said. “I hardly think the prophet of the Square Deal is playing it exactly square with me now.” His wife was taunting him with the possibility that Roosevelt might beat him for renomination in 1912.
Butt asked if he believed Roosevelt really wanted to challenge him.
“I do not know. I have thought sometimes that he did, and then I don’t see how he can. In his mind, however, it may be the only logical way of reaching a third term. Then, too, his tour of Europe, his reception there, and the fact that every crowned head seemed to take it for granted that he would be elected …”
The President spent the rest of the morning soothing his soul with golf.
Later that same day at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt put both hands on the shoulders of two old friends, the civil-service reformers Lucius Burrie Swift and William Dudley Foulke, and said, “I could cry over Taft.” He escorted them upstairs to a private room, complaining that the President had been a good lieutenant, but was unfit for higher command. Then, closing the door, he said, “I will talk to you with perfect frankness. I would not consider another nomination unless it was practically universally demanded.”
It was a classic Rooseveltian recruitment ploy: the physical embrace, the melodramatic confidentiality, the denial of personal ambition. Swift and Foulke left convinced that he was already running. A trio of Kansas insurgents, Senator Joseph L. Bristow, Congressmen Victor Murdock, and Edmond H. Madison, got