Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [109]
The Admiral was now almost sixty-five. His immaculate mustache was snowy, and his well-pressed uniform did not hang as straight as it had three years before, the day he rolled down Fifth Avenue behind Governor Roosevelt’s prancing horse. Too many good lunches at the Metropolitan Club had pinkened the mahogany tan; he tended to nod off in the late afternoon. Awake, however, Dewey still had formidable authority, accentuated by the glitter of four gold stars. As Roosevelt reminded him, in the order sending him back to sea, his “standing” was enough to ensure world attention to the Caribbean maneuvers.
But Dewey had more than prestige to suit the President’s current purpose. He was notoriously the most bellicose Germanophobe in the United States. And if Speck von Sternburg could not see that, over the white flowers and wineglasses, he needed a stronger monocle.
THE NEXT DAY, Britain and Germany officially informed the State Department of their intents to proceed against Venezuela. There would be an ultimatum followed by a blockade, within the bounds of the Monroe Doctrine. Secretary Hay replied that the United States “greatly deplored” any European intervention in the affairs of a South American republic. He conceded, however, that such action was sometimes justifiable.
Meanwhile, the United States armada off Culebra was joined by a flotilla of support vessels, including colliers and torpedo boats. Farther south, two battleships and four cruisers of the European and South Atlantic squadrons met near Trinidad, at a point only 125 miles from the Venezuelan coast.
Finally, on 1 December, Admiral Dewey went down to the Navy Yard in Washington, where Roosevelt’s yacht Mayflower awaited him as his flagship. He ordered its crew to prepare for the open sea.
CHAPTER 13
The Big Stick
One good copper with a hickory club is worth all th’judges
between Amsterdam an’ Rotterdam.
ON THE MORNING of Dewey’s departure, Roosevelt drained his umpteenth cup of coffee, then spent twenty minutes walking in the garden with Edith. They had come to treasure this early ritual, now that his work took up most of the day and much of the night. The stroll helped him digest three breakfast courses—or rather six, as he usually ordered both choices of each, plus a bowl of fruit or cereal. Edith fondly let him eat as much as he liked. She believed that his intellectual turbine, whirring always at abnormal speed, needed a proportionate supply of fuel. At ten to nine, before going indoors, she would pick a rosebud for his buttonhole. Then, with her kiss warming his cheek, he would march along Jefferson’s colonnade toward his office in the new Executive Wing.
It was a treat not to have to operate out of home anymore. This neutral space, full of winter sun, pleasingly separated his work from his private life. As Roosevelt gave all of himself to each, so he disliked to have the one encroach upon the other. Any person with legitimate business to transact could see him where he was going. But in future, only those worthy of intimacy might venture back the way he had come.
The scents of a little flower shop greeted him as he traversed “the President’s Passage” and entered a hallway dividing the Cabinet Room, on his right, from the Executive Office on his left. The latter was a spacious, southward-facing chamber, thirty feet square, hung with dark olive burlap and simply but solidly furnished. Behind his massive mahogany desk—unencumbered by a telephone, an instrument Roosevelt deemed suitable only for clerks—three tall windows framed, in triptych, the Washington Monument, a lawn still red with construction mud, and Virginia rising beyond the silver river.
Another set of windows looked east toward the residence. If he caught sight of Archie or Quentin misbehaving in the garden, he had only to heave