Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [57]
“Are you aware,” Bristow asked the others as they walked back to Oyster Bay, “that we have been participants in a historic occasion where a former President definitely broke with the man he had made his successor?”
Madison expressed awe, but Murdock was skeptical. A former newspaperman, he noted the vehemence of Roosevelt’s private denunciations of Taft and the coyness with which he declined to be quoted.
Actually Roosevelt was struggling, as throughout his life, between the desire for power and the ethics of responsibility. It was a struggle he had never been able wholly to resolve: indeed, its contrary tensions held him together. He wanted to destroy Taft because Taft had failed. He wanted Taft to succeed because Taft was an extension of himself. He knew he was no longer President, yet he was seen as presidential—the emperors of the Old World had made that clear, not to mention Taft in conversation. Although not running, he was running. Even as he maintained his vow of silence, he was shouting from the hustings.
“THE GREATEST SERVICE I can render to Taft,” Roosevelt wrote Lodge, “the service which beyond all others will tend to secure his renomination … is to try and help the Republican Party to win at the polls this Fall, and that I am trying to do.”
That meant resisting, on the one hand, pressure from GOP leaders to come out with a “flaming endorsement” of the President, and on the other, appeals from insurgents to proclaim himself in opposition. Either course, he felt, would cost him friends, and split the Party. The fault line ran right through his own family. Alice shared his reformist philosophy, while Nicholas Longworth was a regular, albeit moderate, Republican.
Roosevelt felt sorry for them both. If any single person symbolized the urgency of holding the Party together, it was Nick: son-in-law to the most eminent progressive in America, yet a former law student of William Howard Taft, hailing from the same district in Cincinnati, even representing Taft in Congress.
In response to a letter from Nick, saying it was essential that the President keep control of his own home state, Roosevelt wrote to say he agreed. “Of course you must stand straight by Taft.… He is your constituent.” He urged the same spirit of cooperation on Gifford Pinchot. “I do hope you won’t take any position which would make it impossible, or even merely exceedingly difficult, for you to support him if necessary.” The President had started off badly, he felt, through having no real qualities of leadership. “He is evidently a man who takes color from his surroundings. He was an excellent man under me, and close to me. For eighteen months after his election he was a rather pitiful failure, because he had no real strong man on whom to lean, and yielded to the advice of his wife, his brother Charley, the different corporation lawyers who have his ear, and various similar men.” With a midterm review coming his way, however, Taft must surely start considering the interests of the people. “He may and probably will turn out to be a perfectly respectable President, whose achievements will be disheartening compared with what we had expected, but who nevertheless will have done well enough for us to justify us in renominating him—for you must remember that not to renominate him would be a very serious thing, only to be justified by really strong reasons.”
The Colonel was putting the case as favorably for Taft as he could. “Otherwise I could see very ugly times ahead for me, as I should certainly not be nominated unless everybody believed that the ship was sinking and thought it a good thing to have me aboard her when she went down.”
ROOSEVELT PONDERED WHAT to say about the state of the nation when his two-month vow of silence was up. His every word would be listened to as if megaphoned. Plainly, he would have to make a major address, or Americans would ask why he was willing to orate to Europeans, but not them. A poll conducted by World’s Work magazine showed that more than three out of every four of its readers wanted