Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [146]
Ingenuous protests like this, half boyish, half calculating, always made Hay’s whiskers twitch, but the committee listened with respect. Soon Roosevelt was well away:
You may possibly recall—I am certain some of my New York friends will recall—that during the time I was Police Commissioner, a man came from abroad—I am sorry to say, a clergyman—to start an anti-Jewish agitation in New York, and announced his intention of holding meetings to assail the Jews. The matter was brought to my attention. Of course I had no power to prevent these meetings. After a good deal of thought I detailed a Jewish sergeant and forty Jew policemen to protect the agitator while he held his meetings. So he made his speeches denouncing the Jews, protected exclusively by Jews!
It was a story he loved to tell. “Now let me give you another little example.…”
After an hour of such confidences, the committee trooped out glowing with satisfaction. Questioned by reporters, they had to admit that they had failed in their mission. However, the President had promised to read the petition “most carefully.”
HIS EXCELLENCY Arturo Paul Nicolas, Count de Cassini and Marquis de Capizzucchi de Bologna, Russian Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States, told Roosevelt that some four hundred anti-Semitic rioters had been arrested in Kishinev, and the local governor dismissed for failing to prevent the pogrom.
Hay cautioned that Cassini could not be trusted. For all his Italian nomenclature, he was as Russian as borscht, and lied with fabled virtuosity. The Ambassador, who mysteriously depended on his teenage daughter, Marguerite, for social purposes, introduced her around town as “Princess Cassini,” when she was neither a princess nor, according to rumor, a Cassini. His numberless jeweled decorations may not all have been earned in the Tsar’s service, but they were the glittering envy of Embassy Row. When he stood under a chandelier at receptions, he looked like a section of the Milky Way.
Cassini’s assurances regarding Kishinev were nothing compared to his obfuscations about when, if ever, Russia intended to withdraw from Manchuria. He would say only that the ports there were now open to United States trade. This came as news to American observers in China, who reported that the Russian Bear had also begun to prowl Korea.
“Dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult matter,” Hay complained.
Roosevelt cared little for Korea, a little, impotent kingdom that fancied itself an empire—and even less for China. But he was aware that the latter was potentially the world’s greatest market. If the Open Door was not so blocked by Russia, the United States could easily export everything the Chinese wanted to buy. “We wish for our people the commercial privileges which Russia again and again has said we shall have,” Roosevelt wrote to Lyman Abbott, the editor of Outlook. “It is very irritating. I do not know what action may be necessary in the future.”
As a strategic pragmatist, he felt that Russia had some “legitimate aspirations” to fulfill in Manchuria, providing China was not partitioned, and the Far Eastern balance of power maintained. He agreed with Frederick W. Holls, one of his private foreign-policy advisers, who had written: “You cannot keep an Empire of one hundred and twenty million away from a harbor [Port Arthur] which is not frozen up in winter.… No Empire would build a stupendous work like the Siberian railroad, to end anywhere but in an ice-free harbor under its own control.”
Cassini expressed the same thought to his daughter in the privacy of the Russian Embassy. “Try to understand this, Margot,” he said, running a long forefinger down the map of Manchuria