The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [282]
It was useless to hope for a Cabinet post, such as Thomas B. Reed would have given him; but if he ingratiated himself with McKinley now, and worked hard to ensure his election in November, he might count on some fairly high-level job next spring.
He needed no time to decide which particular appointment to push for. One area of national policy interested him more than any other, in view of what he saw as a gathering threat to American security in the Caribbean and Atlantic.105 Paging at random through his list of extracurricular activities in the months preceding the convention, one finds him dining with Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan in February; criticizing the weakness of Secretary Herbert’s Navy message in March; pumping the German diplomat Speck von Sternburg for “accurate Teutonic information” on world naval affairs in April; and spending “a rather naval week” in May, during which he inspects the Indiana from top to bottom, and lunches on the Montgomery as she lies in the sun off Staten Island. In between times he reads a life of Admiral James, a two-volume British tome on Modern Ironclads, and Lord Brassey’s Naval Annual for 1896. He maintains a running correspondence with his new brother-in-law, Lieutenant Commander William Sheffield Cowles, USN,106 writing in June: “Brassey evidently thinks our battleships inferior to the British, because of their 6 inch quick firers … I am not at all sure they are right; though I dislike the superimposed turrets.”107
Finally, in July, he invites an old friend of William McKinley to visit him at Sagamore Hill. She arrives on the first day of August. Although the weather is very hot, he insists on rowing her across the glaring waters of Oyster Bay. As his oars spasmodically rise and fall, he tells her, “I should like to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy.”108
“The work of the Police Board has … nothing of the purple in it.”
New York City Police Commissioners Andrews, Parker, Roosevelt, and Grant. (Illustration 20.2)
CHAPTER 21
The Glorious Retreat
Then forth from the chamber in anger he fled
And the wooden stairway shook with his tread.
IN ADDRESSING HIMSELF to Mrs. Bellamy Storer rather than Mr. Bellamy Storer, Roosevelt flatteringly acknowledged that lady’s superior political muscle. He had known her since his early Washington days,1 and had plenty of opportunity to see her in action as a lobbyist for the Roman Catholic Church. Mrs. Storer was a wealthy and formidable matron whose eyes burned with religious fervor, and whose jaw brooked no opposition from anybody—least of all William McKinley, whom she considered to be in her debt. The Presidential candidate had gratefully accepted $10,000 of Storer funds in 1893, when threatened with financial and political ruin. Mrs. Storer was now, three years later, expecting to recoup this investment in the form of various appointments for her near and dear.2
Roosevelt knew that she was fond of him, in an amused, motherly sort of way. She tended (like Edith) to treat him as if he were one of her own children. Years later, when events had conspired to embitter her toward him, she wrote that the “peculiar attraction and fascination” of the young Theodore Roosevelt “lay in the fact that he was like a child; with a child’s spontaneous outbursts of affection, of fun, and of anger; and with the brilliant brain and fancy of a child.”3
“A good-natured, well-meaning, coarse man, shrewd and hardheaded.”
Mark Hanna, sketched the day Theodore Roosevelt went boating with Mrs. Bellamy Storer. (Illustration 21.1)
Shrewdly playing upon her maternal sympathies in 1896, he said that his political unpopularity in New York was now so great that the future security of the Roosevelt “bunnies” depended on his getting a high-level post in Washington. Should he fail to negotiate