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By Root 3174 0

June 1903. He listened smiling, his hand resting on a child’s small golden head. The face beneath suffused in bliss. His own children stood outside the circle of attention, waiting to escort him to his carriage. They felt no sense of deprivation, for what he gave, he gave without stint. Only Alice, still the family “orphan” at nineteen, yearned for more. Haunted by the ghost of her namesake, hurt by his denial of that ghost, contemptuous of his guilt, she fought the maddening smile as best she could, with her own income, with cigarettes and flashy clothes. She begged him to let her buy a red automobile like Marguerite Cassini’s. Rebuffed, she “chauffeured” the cars of other friends at desperate speeds up to twenty-five miles an hour. She kept dynamite caps and pet reptiles in her purse, stuck silver butterflies in her hair, and—knowing how Roosevelt despised arrogant wealth—flaunted her popularity with the Four Hundred. But she remained his “blessed girl.” It was also what he called dowdy little Ethel.

“Father doesn’t care for me,” Alice scratched angrily in her diary. “That is to say, one eighth as much as he does for the other children.… We are not in the least congenial.… Why should he pay any attention to me or things that I live for, except to look upon them with disapproval.”

The most Roosevelt would say, to Ted, was, “I wish she had some pronounced serious taste.”

Ted, now fifteen, understood the word serious very well. He had all of his father’s purposeful force, but imagination and intellect were denied him. Small, nervous, grim, plug-ugly, he made plenty of the best blood flow at Groton. “He is a regular bull terrier,” Roosevelt noted proudly. “In a game last year he broke his collar bone, but finished the game without letting anyone know what had happened.”

“WHAT HE GAVE HE GAVE WITHOUT STINT.”

The President and his family, summer 1903 (photo credit 17.1)

Kermit, thirteen, was a grave, fine-eyed, clumsy adolescent, whom Edith adored. Roosevelt was aware of a solitariness and bookishness not unlike his own in youth. But Kermit also had a yielding quality: if not exactly soft (“He seems to hold his own well with boys”), he was pliable and easy to bruise.

Ethel, nearly twelve, was already the family hausfrau—a heavy-legged, blunt-featured girl who bossed the servants and took no nonsense from horses. Roosevelt thought her “gloomy,” but she was in reality shy, intimidated both by his power and by her half-sister’s glamour.

The two smallest boys, aged nine and five, were still too much in a state of perpetual motion, on banisters, bicycles, ponies, stilts, or swaying trees, to register on anyone with precise definition. Out of the noisy scurry that was Archie there poked occasionally a fierce, hawklike face, and sharp bony extremities much bitten by Josiah the badger. When the dust clouds around Quentin thinned, a miniature Theodore Roosevelt was revealed, dome-headed and wheezily garrulous, with mild, rather abstracted blue eyes.

“WASHINGTON IS NOW quite deserted,” Speck von Sternburg noted at the end of June, “and the men who are pushing the world seem to be taking a short and well-deserved nap.” One of the pushiest, however, remained in town long enough to disturb the rest of both President and Secretary of State. “The Russian Government,” Count Cassini announced on 1 July, “most positively and absolutely denies the reports that it has offered any official explanations to the American Government … regarding the Kishinev incident.”

Roosevelt was mystified. No explanation had been demanded. He and Hay had decided, on second thought, to allow the B’nai B’rith leaders to proceed with their petition, on the understanding that it was nongovernmental, and almost certainly a waste of ink. Cassini confirmed the latter point: “The Russian Government has categorically refused to receive any petitions, communications, or representations from any power regarding Russian internal affairs.”

Behind this statement Roosevelt sensed shame over the pogrom, as well as fear of publicity that might further hurt Russian