The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [315]
After work he paid a courtesy call to Secretary Long. If he gave any report on his actions during the last four or five hours, it was of such masterly vagueness that no memorandum of the conversation appears in Long’s diary. Yet something about Roosevelt’s “enthusiastic and loyal” manner made the Secretary uneasy. “If I have a good night tonight, I shall rather feel that I ought to be back in the Department …”47
Refreshed by “splendid” slumbers, the Secretary hurried back to work next morning, Saturday, 26 February. He would have gone whether he felt better or not, “because during my short absence I find that Roosevelt, in his precipitate way, has come very near causing more of an explosion than happened to the Maine … the very devil seemed to possess him yesterday afternoon.”48
War preparations in the Navy Department were now moving at such a pace that it would take Long days to slow the momentum, let alone stop it. The evidence is that the Secretary did not even try. For all his anger and embarrassment over “action most discourteous to me, because it suggests that there had been lack of attention,” Long was forced to defer to the workings of an intellect larger and a political instinct sharper than his own. None of Roosevelt’s letters and cables was countermanded. Even the historic order to Dewey was allowed to stand.49 But Long resolved never to leave Roosevelt in sole charge of the department again. The times were too “trying,” and the Assistant Secretary had severe family problems, which could only aggravate “his natural nervousness.”50
Long did not understand that extreme crisis, whether of an intimate or public nature, had precisely the reverse effect on Theodore Roosevelt. The man’s personality was cyclonic, in that he tended to become unstable in times of low pressure. The slightest rise in the barometer outside, and his turbulence smoothed into a whirl of coordinated activity, while a core of stillness developed within. Under maximum pressure Roosevelt was sunny, calm, and unnaturally clear. History was to show that his behavior as Acting Secretary of the Navy on 25 February 1898, was neither nervous nor spontaneous. It was the logical result of ten months of strategic planning, at the Navy Department and at the Metropolitan Club, in his correspondence with Captain Mahan, and on his walks with Captain Wood. “Someday,” Roosevelt told the latter confidently, “they will understand.”51
SIR WILLIAM OSLER examined Edith over the weekend and confirmed that she was “critically ill.” There was an abdominal swelling which should be operated on at once.52 For some unexplained reason Roosevelt ignored this warning and relied instead on more cautious advice. Edith lay wasting with fever for another week, too frail even to stand the sound of his voice reading to her. On 7 March, all opinions concurred that she must undergo surgery or die. He sat holding her hand until ether removed her from him.53
The operation revealed an abscess near the hip, and was completely successful.
ROOSEVELT’S CONTEMPT FOR “peace at any price men” rose to new heights as he watched William McKinley trying to avoid war in the weeks following the Maine disaster. Certainly the President showed a touching faith in the benign effects of gold currency. His first proposal was that the United States end the Cuban problem once and for all by buying the island outright for $300 million. But Congress showed reluctance to put such funds at his disposal, and the plan was dropped.54 Then, on 25 February, the same day Roosevelt alerted Dewey to the imminence of war, McKinley reportedly suggested that if the Court of Inquiry found Spain responsible for the loss of the Maine, a large cash indemnity would assuage America’s grief. Congress did not like this idea either.55
“An honest man, but weak,” the French Ambassador, Jules Cambon, remarked of McKinley.56 By early March, when preliminary divers’ reports indicated that a mine might have caused the explosion, the President was desperate enough to use scare tactics. He flabbergasted