The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [218]
Stung, Roosevelt leaped to the attack.
ROOSEVELT All these facts … are in a report that we made to the President of the United States on this matter. You had that report, and had acted upon it, had you not?
WANAMAKER We had the report.
ROOSEVELT And you had acted upon it, had you not?
WANAMAKER How do you mean, “acted upon it”?
ROOSEVELT You referred to it … in your letter notifying Mr. Paul that you had accepted his resignation. If there is any doubt in your mind, you can produce the letter, I presume?
WANAMAKER I cannot say how much influence the Civil Service report had upon me …
ROOSEVELT Would you send a copy of the letter? … My memory is very clear that in that letter you referred to this report.
WANAMAKER I will furnish it with pleasure.137
The letter was duly furnished, but with little pleasure, for it proved the accuracy of Roosevelt’s memory, as opposed to Wanamaker’s convenient amnesia.
Although the hearings dragged on for another week, neither Hatton nor Ewart was able to uncover any evidence of maladministration by the Civil Service Commission. There was a series of interminable examinations by Roosevelt of George H. Paul, who had been brought in from Milwaukee especially for that purpose. The humiliated ex-postmaster sat for three days in his chair, helpless as a trussed turkey, while Roosevelt determinedly pulled out his feathers, one by one. Squawks of protest—that Paul had given all this testimony before and had already suffered amply for it—went unheeded. Roosevelt seemed determined to show the committee what an angry Civil Service Commissioner looked like in action. Not until late in the afternoon of Friday, 7 March, did the chairman tactfully suggest that enough was enough.138
EVEN BEFORE the committee filed its formal report, it was plain that Roosevelt had scored a personal triumph. He had dominated the hearings from the first day to the last, and had somehow managed to arouse sympathy for his patronage of “Shady Shidy,” as that gentleman was now known. His prestige as Civil Service Commissioner had been greatly enhanced, at the expense of the discredited Lyman and the reticent Thompson. The committee was rumored to be in favor of recommending the creation of a single-headed Commission, with himself the obvious choice as chief, but Roosevelt, surprisingly, opposed this idea, saying that it was attractive but premature. To put a Republican in sole control, he argued, would compromise the Commission’s non-partisan image and make it vulnerable to changing majorities in Congress.139 This was true enough, but sophisticated observers could detect signs of a larger, more long-term ambition in Roosevelt’s modesty. He already had all the power the inadequate Civil Service Law allowed him; killing two colleagues off would not increase it. At thirty-one, he could afford to wait a few more years for real power.
Roosevelt himself admitted, later in life, that it was about this time that he began to cast thoughtful eyes upon 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “I used to walk by the White House, and my heart would beat a little faster as the thought came to me that possibly—possibly—I would some day occupy it as President.”140 Jeremiah Curtin, the translator of Sienkiewicz, happened to catch him in the act one day, during a visit to the White House with Representative Frederick T. Greenhalge of the House Civil Service Committee. “That man,” said Curtin, “looks precisely as if he had examined the building and, finding it to his liking, had made up his mind to inhabit it.” “I must make you acquainted with him,” replied Green-halge. “But first listen to a prophecy: when he wants this house he will get it. He will yet live here as President.”141
MARCH MERGED INTO APRIL, April into May, but the committee, plagued by absenteeism,