The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [134]
I have very little expectation of being able to keep on in politics; my success so far has only been won by absolute indifference to my future career; for I doubt if any man can realize the bitter and venomous hatred with which I am regarded by the very politicians who at Utica supported me, under dictation from masters who are influenced by political considerations that were national and not local in their scope. I realize very thoroughly the absolutely ephemeral nature of the hold I have upon the people, and a very real and positive hostility I have excited among the politicians. I will not stay in public life unless I can do so on my own terms; and my ideal, whether lived up to or not, is rather a high one.
For very many reasons I will not mind going back into private [life] for a few years. My work this winter has been very harassing, and I feel tired and restless; for the next few months I shall probably be in Dakota, and I think I shall spend the next two to three years in making shooting trips, either in the Far West or in the Northern Woods—and there will be plenty of work to do writing.44
WHEN HENRY CABOT LODGE and Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Chicago on Saturday, 31 May, they were already close friends. Earlier that month, the thirty-four-year-old Bostonian had written the twenty-five-year-old Knickerbocker, congratulating him on his election as delegate-at-large from New York, and proposing a joint visit to Washington to interview Senator Edmunds before the convention started. On the very day that Roosevelt received this letter, he had been writing a similar one to Lodge, congratulating him, in turn, on his election as delegate-at-large from Massachusetts. He accepted Lodge’s invitation “with pleasure,” and asked him to stay over at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street en route. “We are breaking up house, so you will have to excuse very barren accommodations.”45
Thus with an exchange of mutual flattery, an evening of echoing conversation in the Roosevelt mansion,46 and a pilgrimage to the city of their destiny, Lodge and Roosevelt laid the foundation of one of the great friendships in American political history.
At first sight the two men seemed an unlikely pair. Next to the wiry, bouncing, voluble Roosevelt, Lodge was tall, haughty, quiet, and dry. His beard was sharp, his coat tightly buttoned, his handshake quickly withdrawn. His eyes, forever screwed up and blinking, surveyed the world with aristocratic disdain. A heavy mustache clamped his mouth aggressively shut. On the rare occasions when the thin lips parted, they emitted a series of metallic noises which, according to Lodge’s whim, might be a quotation from Prosper Mérimée, or a joke comprehensible only to those of the bluest blood and most impeccable tailoring, or a personal insult so stinging as to paralyze all powers of repartee. Only in conditions of extreme privacy would Henry Cabot Lodge unbend an inch or so, and allow the privileged few to call him “Pinky.”47
Among his own kind, Lodge was said to be a man of considerable wit and charm;48 but the large mass of humanity, including most of the political establishment, found him repellently cold. By no amount of persuasion could he be made to see any other man’s view if it differed from his own. Those who ventured to disagree with him were crushed with sarcasm, or worse still, ignored. Although he had served only two terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, as opposed to Roosevelt’s three in Albany, “Lahde-dah Lodge” was already on his way to becoming one of America’s most disliked politicians.49 Yet nobody could deny that he was a man of extraordinary caliber. His promises, once made, were never broken. His treatment of both friends and enemies was unshakably fair. As for his attitude to government, it was as high-minded as a philosopher’s.
This latter characteristic,