Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [161]
Roosevelt had already opted for the first choice, but made plain his perfect willingness “to interfere when it becomes necessary so as to secure the Panama route without further dealing with the foolish and homicidal corruptionists in Bogotá.”
As the Panama Canal Treaty died, so did summer. Around Cove Neck, lilies and pale beach rosemary gave way to goldenrods and coarse asters, bristling against fresher breezes. Edith Roosevelt put away her white dresses. Archie and Quentin started wearing shoes again. Ted and Kermit braced themselves for another year at Groton. Their father industriously chopped wood.
The thudding ax and sprays of chips did not quite work off an onset of autumnal melancholy. A harvest of tart political fruits awaited him when he returned to the White House. Relations with Russia and Colombia had deteriorated sharply. His Syracuse speech did not seem to have reduced tensions between business and labor. Government antitrust policies were being blamed for the “rich man’s panic.” The Postal Service’s corruption probe had spread into his own state. Local Republicans warned that if the upper house in Albany were implicated, he would “certainly” lose New York in 1904.
These problems were complicated by another, more painful and personal. Elihu Root (currently representing him at the Alaska Boundary Tribunal in London) wanted to return to the practice of corporate law, after four and a half years as Secretary of War. Roosevelt had long dreaded this resignation as “the worst calamity that could happen to me officially.” But he could not deny his old friend’s need to recoup lost income. Fortunately, Root was willing to stay on until an adequate successor could be found.
Roosevelt took one last daylong row with Edith, down to the salt marsh at the end of Lloyd’s Neck. They ate their lunch there and watched the white sails of coasters passing up and down the Sound. Then he pulled home, exulting in the opposition of the wind and tide. “Next Monday I go back to Washington,” he wrote his sister Corinne on 23 September, “and for the thirteen months following there will be mighty little letup to the strain.”
He was confident of nomination to another term in his own right, but not at all sure of election. “I suppose few Presidents can form the slightest idea of whether their policies have met with approval or not—certainly I cannot.… As far as I can see these policies have been right, and I hope that time will justify them. If it does not, why, I must abide the fall of the dice, and that is all there is about it.”
CHAPTER 18
The Most Just and Proper Revolution
An autocrat’s a ruler that does what th’ people wants
an’ takes th’ blame f’r it.
THE PRESIDENT’S FIRST visitor when he returned to his desk on 29 September 1903 was Secretary of the Navy William Henry Moody. With the expected retirement of Elihu Root, the forty-nine-year-old Moody was seen as the new “strong man” of the Administration, remarkable for ambition, breeding, and intelligence. As a young Massachusetts lawyer, Moody had caught the favorable attention of Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Later, as a member of the House of Representatives, he had also impressed—and sometimes infuriated—Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Although Moody had not been willing, in those days, to “whoop to war” with Spain, he now felt as grandly as the President about America’s future as a world power. Her principal engine of advancement must be an ever-expanding navy, in whose wake freedom would spread like foam.
Since joining the Cabinet sixteen months before, Moody had been much at Roosevelt’s elbow—on his ill-fated tour of New England, as an adviser during the coal strike and the Venezuelan crisis, a fellow passenger