The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [302]
Wood was a doctor by profession and a soldier by choice; he excelled in both capacities. His looks were noble, his physical presence splendid as a Viking’s.56 Tall, fair, lithe, and powerfully muscled, he walked with the slightly pigeon-toed stride of a born athlete, and was forever compulsively kicking a football around an empty lot, the leather thudding nearly flat as he drove it against the wall.
Roosevelt, who as Civil Service Commissioner had won fame as the most strenuous pedestrian in Washington,57 was impressed to discover that this newcomer could outpace and outclimb him with no signs of fatigue. “He walked me off my legs,” the Assistant Secretary told Lodge, with some surprise.58 Ever the boy, he hero-worshiped Wood (although the doctor was two years his junior) as a fighter of Apaches and a vanquisher of Geronimo. Wood’s personality was clear, forceful, honest, and unassuming. Best of all, he was an ardent expansionist, and could not stop talking about Cuba as a wound on the national conscience. Roosevelt decided that this quiet, charming man with excellent military connections (Wood was married to the niece of U.S. Army Commanding General Nelson A. Miles) must needs be cultivated.
Little old Commodore Dewey was a total contrast.59 Nut-brown, wiry, and vain, he was in his sixtieth year when Roosevelt befriended him, but the size of his personal ambition was in inverse proportion to his age and height. Over three decades of undistinguished peacetime service had not quenched his lust for battle, kindled as a lieutenant under Farragut in the Civil War. Now, with retirement only three years off, Dewey was forced to accept the fact that glory might never be his.60 Yet the Commodore still bore himself with fierce pride, immaculate in tailored uniform and polished, high-instepped boots. He was without doubt the smartest dresser in the Navy. “It was said of him,” wrote one reporter, “that the creases of his trousers were as well-defined as his views on naval warfare.”61 With his beaky nose and restless, caged strut, Dewey looked like a resplendent killer falcon, ready to bite through wire, if necessary, to get at a likely prey.
The Commodore had attracted Roosevelt’s admiring attention as long ago as the Chilean crisis of 1891, when he voluntarily bought coal for his ship instead of waiting for official battle orders.62 Any officer whose instinct was to stoke up before a crisis—at his own expense—could be trusted in wartime. Like Wood, Dewey was a dedicated expansionist,63 lunching and dining daily at the Metropolitan Club; like Wood, he was a man of action rather than thought. Roosevelt began to muse ways of giving him command of the Asiatic Squadron when Rear-Admiral Fred V. McNair retired later in the year.64
In the meantime, their friendship ripened. Often, on a sunny afternoon after work, they could be seen riding in Rock Creek Park together.65
AT THE BEGINNING OF JULY it was the Assistant Secretary’s turn to take a brief vacation. He headed north for a reunion with Edith—pregnant, now, with his sixth child. Distracted as he was with naval affairs and plans for the coming war (whose certainty he never questioned), Roosevelt allowed himself ten days of quiet domesticity at Oyster Bay. The white marble city on the Potomac was all very well, he told Bamie, but “permanently, nothing could be lovelier than Sagamore.”66
And nothing could be more satisfying than to see his own progeny growing sturdy and sunburned in his own fields. Roosevelt confessed to Cecil Spring Rice that “the diminishing rate of increase” in America’s population worried him in contrast to the fecundity of the Slav. Looking around Sagamore