Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [165]
Roosevelt ignored the question.
“I don’t suppose you can say.”
“I cannot.”
“Will you protect Colombian interests?”
“I cannot say that.”
All that the President would say was that Colombia, in rejecting a treaty she herself had proposed, had forfeited any further consideration by the United States. “I have no use for a government that would do what that government has done.”
Both men were anxious for the interview to end. They perfectly understood each other. Roosevelt saw that if anyone was capable of bringing about the revolution, it was this tremendous little foreigner. Bunau-Varilla, in turn, was convinced that the United States would find a way to support him.
THE PRESIDENT’S FAUX PAS about a “plan” may not have been involuntary. When receiving officers and gentlemen—Bunau-Varilla was, like himself, a colonel—he was sure that his confidence would not be abused. (It might, however, be discreetly used.) With advisers, Roosevelt was even franker, telling Professor Moore that he would recognize Panama if it revolted and set up an independent government “under proper circumstances.”
In the same spirit, he now informed Albert Shaw that he would be “delighted” to hear of an uprising on the Isthmus. “But for me to say so publicly would amount to an instigation of a revolt, and therefore I cannot say it.” With his current unpopularity among unionists, white Southerners, and Wall Street bankers, he dared not risk any word or deed that might revive old images of him as a rash, rough-riding imperialist.
John D. Long could not have chosen a worse time to publish an article in Outlook jocularly recalling the days when the President, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had wanted “to send a squadron across the ocean to sink … the Spanish fleet while we were still at peace with Spain.” Roosevelt angrily denied the allegation, but critics of his Administration thought that Colombia should take it as a forewarning. “He is the most risky man the United States has had in the Presidency,” declared the Philadelphia Record.
Another article, by Henry Watterson in the Louisville Courier-Journal, alleged that half of the forty million dollars that American taxpayers were paying to the Compagnie Nouvelle for canal rights would be kicked back to various American senators, lobbyists, engineers, and columnists—the “thieves” behind the original switch to Panama. While nobody believed that Roosevelt had any “share of the stealage,” he was being importuned by too many unscrupulous parties. There was only one honest alternative: to opt for Nicaragua, and quickly. “Time’s up, Mr. President!” Watterson taunted. “Will you act … or will you continue to play politics?”
Philippe Bunau-Varilla demolished Watterson’s claims in a letter to the New York Sun. He noted that “not one cent” of the canal-rights money could be disbursed illegally, since the Compagnie Nouvelle was in receivership, and thus managed by the courts of France. As for the Nicaragua route, “it has all the advantages over Panama except the technical ones.”
Watterson was reduced to weak taunts aimed at “Mr. Vanilla Bean.” The nickname stuck, to Bunau-Varilla’s fury, but the charges of corruption did not.
MANUEL AMADOR GUERRERO, an elderly physician accredited by the Panamanian revolutionary junta, met with Bunau-Varilla in New York. An American intermediary, known only as “W,” had led him to believe that the Roosevelt Administration would contribute at least six million dollars of unspecified secret funds to his cause. The money was needed to buy gunboats that would prevent Colombia from landing reinforcements on the Isthmus when revolution broke out. Bunau-Varilla told him to forget about any such subsidy.
A more realistic hope, based on Roosevelt’s hints in the Executive Office, was that the United States Navy would provide such protection, under Roosevelt’s treaty obligations to keep traffic across Panama clear. Amador said that in that case the junta had no worries about the five hundred Colombian troops garrisoned in Panama City. They had been so long neglected