The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [388]
After sleeping one night in the ocher-colored cottage—which had a cedar roof, dark green shutters, and a hardwood tree growing inside—Roosevelt declared Pine Knot “the nicest little place of the kind you could imagine.” Not everybody in Blue Ridge country, however, was happy to have President Roosevelt as a neighbor. Anger over the dinner with Booker T. Washington had made Roosevelt persona non grata in parts of Albemarle County. No reconciliation with these bigots was possible. Also, Roosevelt’s admiration for General Sheridan—who was to Virginians what General Sherman was to Georgians—didn’t endear him to the locals. Furthermore, Roosevelt’s attempts at taking land in the Blue Ridge Mountains for federal forest reserves had angered local timber companies. So, this was hostile country to some degree. Nevertheless, Roosevelt refused Secret Service protection; that was a reluctantly agreed upon precondition with Edith. He instead chose to sleep with a pistol at his bedside, thumbing it open to check the bullet chambers before blowing out the light. A real man, Roosevelt believed, protected his own family in the woods.
What Roosevelt enjoyed most about Pine Knot was the sound of birds, which reminded him of the Elkhorn Ranch in North Dakota. Ahhh—all of his weariness evaporated in the woods. He was like a refugee who had fled the Washington battlefield, escaping the knife blade to the throat by the grace of God. “It was lovely to sit there in the rocking chairs and hear all the birds by daytime,” he wrote to Kermit, “and at night the whippoorwills and little forest folk.”87 Visiting Pine Knot also gave Roosevelt a chance to cook his favorite food, fried chicken, on a kerosene stove. Just as Roosevelt had played at being an Oklahoma wolf hunter with Catch ’Em Alive Abernathy, he now played at being John Burroughs in the grove. And at Pine Knot he ate like a glutton—a dozen eggs for breakfast, washed down with glasses of milk. No longer was he trim and fit. He was taking on a little of the girth of Grover Cleveland. As Edith’s biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris noted, Theodore believed that “a man with a huge brain needed plenty of nourishment.”88
And President Roosevelt’s brain was needed more than ever during the summer of 1905. On the death of Secretary of State Hay, Roosevelt took up the Russo-Japanese peace negotiations himself. The melancholy prospect of endless war had seemed likely, but now diplomats from both sides came to Oyster Bay to search for common ground. Roosevelt then selected the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire as the site of a further, more intense round of negotiations. What made the Russo-Japanese War so unusual was that the fighting was taking place in neutral nations: China and Korea. Today many military historians call the conflict the first modern war because the telegraph, advanced torpedoes, minefields, and armored battleships were introduced. Roosevelt wanted to prevent a global cataclysm—this was the reason why he threw himself so wholeheartedly into the diplomatic fray. At stake was the balance of power for the entire Pacific.
Using diplomatic muscle, Roosevelt achieved a stalemate. Such large-scale wars, he believed, should be obsolete. His negotiation skills and his aggressive diplomacy, which culminated in the Treaty of Portsmouth (signed on September 5, 1905), won him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. Roosevelt had persuaded Russia to stop its expansionism into East Asia, while the Japanese won control of the Korean Peninsula. Neither side was very happy with the negotiated peace.