The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [386]
AT 11:52 A.M. ROOSEVELT found himself on a great flat rock, gazing out (could he but see it!) across the whole of New York State. Rolling fog obscured everything but nearer grass and shrubs, yet the sense of being the highest man for hundreds of miles around, cherished by all instinctive climbers, was no doubt pleasing to him. As if in further reward, the clouds unexpectedly parted, sunshine poured down on his head, and for a few minutes a world of trees and mountains and sparkling water lay all around, stretching to infinity.13
Roosevelt was not a reflective man, nor was he prone now in his early middle age (he would be forty-three in six weeks’ time) to long for the past as much as he used to. But the news of President McKinley’s accident, and the unavoidable horrid thrill of being, if only for a few hours, the likely next President of the United States, seems to have temporarily awakened his youthful tendency to nostalgia. Writing to Jacob Riis a few days before, he had said that “a shadow” had fallen across his path, separating him from “those youthful days” which he would never see again.14
Here, if ever, was an opportunity to look around him at all these lower hills, and to think of the hills he had himself climbed in life. Pilatus as a boy; Katahdin as an underclassman; Chestnut Hill as a young lover; the Matterhorn in the ecstasy of honeymoon; the Big Horns in Wyoming, with their bugling elks; the Capitol Hill in Albany, that freezing January night when he first entered politics; Sagamore Hill, his own fertile fortress, full of his children and crowned with triumphant antlers; the Hill in Washington where he twice laid out John Wanamaker; that lowest yet loftiest of hills in Cuba, where like King Olaf on Smalsor Horn he planted his shield; now this. Would he ever rise any higher? Or was McKinley’s recovery a sign that the final peak he had so long sought would after all be denied him?
Mists rolled in again, and Roosevelt descended five hundred feet to a little lake named Tear-of-the-Clouds, where his party unpacked lunch. It was about 1:25 in the afternoon.15
As he ate his sandwiches he saw below him in the trees a ranger approaching, running, clutching the yellow slip of a telegram.16 Instinctively, he knew what message the man was bringing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BEFORE LISTING THOSE WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED in various ways to the writing of this biography, I must single out a few names for special mention. Dr. John Allen Gable, Executive Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, minutely scrutinized my manuscript, corrected errors of fact and judgment, and made no attempt to influence my interpretations of TR’s character—beyond constructing some logical arguments which I was free to accept or reject. In most cases I accepted them. Those which I rejected are nevertheless so valid that I have incorporated them in my Chapter Notes. My debt to Dr. Gable is large.
So, too, is my debt to Joseph Kanon, who honed the manuscript with the elegant precision of a born editor. To Carleton Putnam, a man I have never met, I express gratitude and admiration for his Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years (Scribner’s, 1958), an essential source for students of TR’s youth. It is a tragedy of American biography that this grave, neglected masterpiece was never followed by other volumes. Peggy Brooks and Ann Elmo were the first to suggest, on the basis of a few articles and a screenplay, that I should write a book about TR; if the result bulks somewhat larger than the “short” work they envisioned, my thanks to them have increased proportionately.
I also thank the following, in alphabetical order: John Alsop of Avon, Connecticut, for permission to study his valuable collection of Roosevelt and Robinson papers, now transferred to Harvard; Georges Borchardt,