Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [142]
SOUTH OF HIS OFFICE WINDOW.”
View of the renovated White House, ca. 1903 (photo credit 16.1)
A younger, slimmer, oil-painted Roosevelt greeted him in the vestibule. Edith had hung Fedor Encke’s portrait there, rather than the more recent rendering by John Singer Sargent, knowing that her husband loved to see himself in Rough Rider uniform. “I cannot say that I think it looks particularly like me,” he commented, but admitted that it was the image he wanted his children to have of him.
Roosevelt’s vanity was oddly leavened with modesty. He never failed to take the bait when Root drawled, “Mr. President, I would like so much to have you give us an account of the fight at San Juan Hill,” yet he deferred to all Civil War veterans. He lectured some of the finest minds in America on their own specialties, while protesting his own intellectual ordinariness: “I am but the average man.” Living in a White House more formal than any in history, he nevertheless entertained cowboys and backwoodsmen there, on equal terms with Cabinet officers and diplomats.
Although political analysts were beginning to use the word genius to describe his political sleight of hand, he scoffed at such hyperbole. Genius was what drove Frank Jarvis in the hundred meters, or John Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “power to do what no one else has the power to do.” His own power, idiosyncratic as it seemed, was the same given to all Presidents. Democratically won, it could be democratically lost, as soon as he failed to please.
Yet his wife, watching him swig Apollinaris from his Golden State loving cup “as if he were a King of Thule,” noticed a new, almost placid confidence in his attitude toward affairs of state. Less intimate observers, such as former Senator David B. Hill, feared the development of “demagogical and dangerous tendencies.” There was little anyone could do to restrain Roosevelt for the next half year, until the new Congress was sworn in. Three current issues offered him much opportunity for executive rashness: Jewish demands to protest the Kishinev pogrom; allegations of spoilsmanship, forgery, bribery, and fraud in the Post Office Department; and reports that resistance to the Panama Canal Treaty had developed in Colombia.
To all of these challenges the King of Thule felt equal. He would receive the Jews and make the Post Office’s own internal investigation (relating, fortunately, to matters predating his presidency) an essay on open government. But the third matter required urgent attention.
ONE OF HIS FIRST acts on returning to his desk was to ask the State Department for a copy of the 1902 Canal Bill, which spelled out his powers in the event of nonratification. John Hay cautioned him that there was no immediate crisis. The Colombian Congress had not yet assembled to debate the treaty. And President José Manuel Marroquín was constitutionally authorized to override any negative vote.
There was no guarantee, though, that Marroquín would so override. Roosevelt discovered that Hay had been keeping quiet about a sharp deterioration in Colombian-American relations. Cables from the American Minister in Bogotá, Arthur M. Beaupré, quoted angry local protests against any “surrender of sovereignty” in the canal zone, and described a general feeling that the treaty prescribed a “loss of the national honor.” (Apparently this feeling related to the ten-million-dollar fee negotiated by Hay and Herrán. Beaupré said he had received “private” assurances that Colombia’s honor would be restored if the United States agreed to pay “a much greater sum of money.”)
Hay, a poet’s soul in a diplomat’s body, reacted with sulky distress to any criticism of his treaties. An instrument like this—the painstakingly worded distillation of months of gentlemanly conversation, of late-night pourparlers and next-morning “memorials,” calligraphed at last on crisp parchment—was as dear to him as any sonnet. Wholesale rejection was apt to aggravate his chronic depression.
“A POET’S SOUL IN A DIPLOMAT’S BODY.”
Secretary