The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [11]
He is, fortunately, a superb talker, with a gift for le mot juste that stings and sizzles. Although he hardly ever swears—his intolerance of bad language verges on the prissy—he can pack such venom into a word like “swine” that it has the force of an obscenity, making his victim feel more swinish than a styful of hogs.87 Roosevelt has a particular gift for humorous invective. Old-timers still talk about the New York Supreme Court Justice he pilloried as “an amiable old fuzzy-wuzzy with sweetbread brains.” Critics of the Administration’s Panama policy are “a small bunch of shrill eunuchs”; demonstrators against bloodsports are “logical vegetarians of the flabbiest Hindoo type.” President Castro of Venezuela is “an unspeakably villainous little monkey,” President Marroquín of Colombia is a “pithecanthropoid,” and Senator William Alfred Peffer is immortalized as “a well-meaning, pin-headed, anarchistic crank, of hirsute and slabsided aspect.”88 When delivering himself of such insults, the President grimaces with glee. Booth Tarkington detects “an undertone of Homeric chuckling.”89
Theodore Roosevelt is now only one handshake away. His famous “presence” charges the air about him. It is, in the opinion of one veteran politician, “unquestionably the greatest gift of personal magnetism ever possessed by an American.”90 Other writers grope for metaphors ranging from effervescence to electricity. “One despairs,” says William Bayard Hale, “of giving a conception of the constancy and force of the stream of corpuscular personality given off by the President … It begins to play on the visitor’s mind, his body, to accelerate his blood-current, and set his nerves tingling and his skin aglow.”91
The word “tingle” appears again and again in descriptions of encounters with Roosevelt. He has, as Secretary Straus observes, “the quality of vitalizing things,”92 and some people take an almost sensual pleasure in his proximity. Today, the President radiates even more health and vigor than usual—he has spent the last five days pounding through wet Virginia forests in search of turkey. His stiff hair shines, his complexion is a ruddy brown, his body exudes a clean scent of cologne.93
He stands with tiny feet spraddled, shoulders thrown back, chest and stomach crescent as a peacock, his left thumb comfortably hooked into a vest pocket. For what must be the three thousandth time, his right arm shoots out. “Dee-lighted!” Unlike his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt does not limply allow himself to be shaken. He seizes on the fingers of every guest, and wrings them with surprising power. “It’s a very full and very firm grip,” warns one newspaper, “that might bring a woman to her knees if she wore her rings on her right hand.”94 The grip is accompanied by a discreet, but irresistible sideways pull, for the President, when he lets go, wishes to have his guest already well out of the way.95 Yet this lightning moment of contact is enough for him to transmit the full voltage of his charm.
Insofar as charm can be analyzed, Roosevelt’s owes its potency to a combination of genuine warmth and the self-confidence of a man who, in all his forty-eight years, has never encountered a character stronger than his own—with the exception of one revered person, with the same name as himself.
Women find the President enchanting. “I do delight in him,” says Edith Wharton. The memory of every Rooseveltian encounter glows within her “like a tiny morsel of radium.”96 Another woman writes of meeting him at a reception: “The world seemed blotted out. I seemed to be enveloped in an atmosphere of warmth and kindly consideration. I felt that, for the time being, I was