Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [84]
As an example of proxy words, he cited justiciable, which Secretary Knox had applied to the kind of disputes best suited to arbitration by The Hague: “It can be defined in any way that either party chooses.” Was the Monroe Doctrine justiciable, along with the administration of the Panama Canal, U.S.-Cuba relations, West Coast immigration policies, and even Canadian reciprocity? If so, were they to be arbitrated by judges sitting in The Hague? A president willing to let foreigners decide questions affecting America’s national security “was not fit to hold the exalted position to which he had been elected,” Roosevelt declared.
Taft laughed the editorial off. “The fact of the matter is, Archie, the Colonel is not in favor of peace.”
ROOSEVELT SAT ONE AFTERNOON on the piazza at Sagamore, drinking tea with the veteran journalist Henry L. Stoddard.
“This is the only spot on earth for me,” he said. “I’m never satisfied away from here.”
They talked about the old days of the Harrison administration. Roosevelt remembered wanting to live in the White House every time he walked past it.
Stoddard suggested there might be a call for him to live there again.
“No—I’ve had the title of President once—having it twice means nothing except peril to whatever reputation I achieved the first time.”
He was silent a moment, then said, “Do you know the only title that appeals to me now?”
“I suppose it is ‘Colonel.’ ”
Roosevelt admitted that he liked being called that. “But if I were asked what title I would prefer, it would not be President or Colonel; it would be Major General in the U.S. Army in active service.”
ON 15 SEPTEMBER, the President set off on a thirteen-thousand-mile cross-country tour, which he hoped would drum up popular support for his arbitration treaties and force the Senate to ratify them without change. In response to Roosevelt’s editorial, he remarked, “I don’t think that it indicates that a man lacks personal courage if he does not want to fight, but prefers to submit questions of national honor to a board of arbitration.”
Taft had faith in his ability to persuade people by speaking at stupefying length (the transcripts of his presidential addresses already totaled twenty volumes). He also relied on travel as a means of escape from the bad political news that kept seeping into the Oval Office, like cold air through cracked windows. But the gust that came down from Ottawa on the first day of fall was enough to chill him in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Canadians had voted against reciprocal tariffs, and elected a new government skeptical of the goodwill of the United States.
Roosevelt was relieved of the need to pay any further lip service to Taft’s foreign policy. He had supported reciprocity, he wrote Arthur Lee, only because he favored closer relations with the British Empire. England was much in his thoughts, what with her quarrel with Germany over Morocco and Lloyd George’s success—at last—in wresting parliamentary power from the House of Lords.
Contrite at not having finished an account of his European grand tour, long promised to Sir George Otto Trevelyan, he took up the manuscript and resumed it with enormous enjoyment. I found I was expected to walk in with the queen on my arm and my hat in the other hand—a piece of etiquette which reminded me of nothing with which I was previously acquainted except a Jewish wedding on the East Side of New York.…
By the last day of September his letter was approaching the length of a small book, at more than thirty thousand words. That afternoon, he went riding with Edith. They were galloping along the bay road when her horse swerved and threw her headfirst onto the pavement. She was knocked unconscious for thirty-six hours, and remained semicomatose for ten days, waking to terrible pain. Throughout her life, she had been prone to neuralgia,