Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [70]
Gradually Roosevelt began to feel more cheerful about his disastrous decision to reenter politics. He gave thanks that there would be no more talk of him challenging the President for renomination. “It looks to me as if, ultimately, the best thing that could happen to us now would be to do what we can with Taft, face probable defeat in 1912, and then endeavor to reorganize under really capable and sanely progressive leadership.”
He thought that he had behaved responsibly at Saratoga, fighting against machine politics with the approval of the administration. And he was pleased that, although his too-big personality seemed to have hurt some progressive candidates, his promulgation of the New Nationalism had helped others to win big in the West and Midwest. The swing vote that Republican insurgents now wielded in the Senate was encouraging. If Democrats had been shameless in cottoning on to the progressive cause, at least their imitation was a sincere form of flattery. One of them, Woodrow Wilson, the former president of Princeton University, had been elected governor of New Jersey on a campaign platform of corporate control, railroad taxation, humane labor policies, and primary reform that the Colonel himself could have written.
AS THE END of the year approached, Roosevelt and Taft began—half-shyly, half-warily—to reconcile. They had mutual bruises to nurse, as well as memories of an era when they had been on happier terms, forever roaring with laughter.
On 19 November, the Colonel put in a surprise appearance at the White House. He pretended not to know that Taft was away on a Caribbean cruise, and said only that he had time to kill before engagements at the Smithsonian and National Geographic Society. Munching corn bread from the kitchen and trailed by an excited group of former servants and clerks, he marched over to the West Wing to look at the new Oval Office that Taft had built over his former tennis court.
Without a trace of self-consciousness, he sat behind the President’s desk and said how “natural” it felt to be there. He praised everything he saw, and remembered the names of all around him, including scullery maids. Then he was off, leaving behind a calling card for Mrs. Taft. Ike Hoover, the White House usher, wept when describing the event to Archie Butt. “It is the only happy day we have had in two years, and not one of us would exchange it for a hundred-dollar bill.”
When Taft returned to reclaim his chair, he wrote Roosevelt to say he was sorry to have missed him, and insisted that he stay at the White House next time he came to the capital. “I think you are a trump to ask me,” Roosevelt replied, but was vague about future visits. A political instinct sharper than the President’s warned him to keep his distance. That did not stop him lobbying Taft to appoint Edward Douglass White, a Southern Democrat and a Catholic, as Chief Justice of the United States, instead of Charles Evans Hughes, who had shown no gratitude for services rendered earlier in the year. Taft was happy to oblige, and in return asked the Colonel to review a draft of his annual message to Congress. “There is nothing for me to say,” Roosevelt replied, “save in the way of agreement and commendation.”
Notwithstanding their politesse on paper, a residue of personal disapproval remained. Taft used the phrase deeply wounded so often, in complaining about Roosevelt’s post-Africa attitude, as to sound almost masochistic. It was clear to aides that the President was mentally and physically ailing. Over the summer his weight had ballooned to 330 pounds, and he kept falling asleep during the day. A