Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [166]
Bunau-Varilla grandly promised to raise one hundred thousand dollars for this purpose. If he could not borrow it from a New York bank, “I can provide it, myself, from my own personal fortune.”
Downtown, as the conspirators shook hands, William Nelson Cromwell prepared to decamp for Paris. “The fun of the game” was rapidly becoming too fraught for him. He was terrified that President Marroquín would find out that he, too, had been plotting with Panamanians, and cancel the Compagnie Nouvelle’s remaining rights.
And there was still the dread prospect that Roosevelt might yet decide to dig in Nicaragua. Obsequiously, Cromwell sent him a final appeal before sailing:
YOUR VIRILE AND MASTERFUL POLICY WILL PROVE THE SOLUTION OF THIS GREAT PROBLEM.
BUNAU-VARILLA, having invested so heavily in Panama’s future, returned to Washington on 15 October to see if John Hay would tell him anything more than Roosevelt had. The Secretary of State received him at home, and put on a dazzling display of diplomatic obtuseness. He waited for Bunau-Varilla to raise the subject of Panamanian unrest, then agreed that a revolution was likely. “But,” he added in his silky voice, “we shall not be caught napping.”
He mentioned that a squadron of Navy ships was coaling up in San Francisco, and would next “sail towards the Isthmus.” There was some talk about the propensity of Latin American nations for political violence. Then Hay changed, or seemed to change, the subject. “I have just finished reading a charming novel, Captain Macklin.”
He picked up Richard Harding Davis’s latest adventure story and said that it was about an American soldier of fortune who visits Central America and enlists in a revolutionary army, under the command of an idealistic Frenchman. “Take it with you,” Hay urged. “It will interest you.”
That evening, on the train back to New York, a wildly excited Bunau-Varilla pored over Captain Macklin. Every page furthered his idealistic identity with the French general, fighting in the jungle for “justice and progress.” But the book also made him worry about mañana. When he next saw Dr. Amador, he behaved with Napoleonic briskness, handing over a plan of military action, a declaration of independence, a draft republican constitution, and “a code with which to correspond with me.” The United States, he guaranteed, would move to protect Panama within forty-eight hours of the revolution.
Amador accepted both the documents and the promise. But he was much less willing to accede to Bunau-Varilla’s airy follow-up, “Nobody knows better than I the final aim, which is the completion of the canal and the best way to attain it. It will, therefore, be necessary to entrust me with the diplomatic representation of the new Republic at Washington.”
All Amador could say was that he would discuss the matter with his colleagues. Bunau-Varilla, elated, began to design a national flag.
THAT NIGHT, two young Army officers, Captain Chauncey B. Humphrey and Lieutenant Grayson Murphy, visited the White House to report secretly on a tour they had just made of Panama. Roosevelt listened with interest, having sent them south himself, to survey strategic approaches to the canal zone.
They confirmed Bunau-Varilla’s predictions of a revolution, saying it would probably occur late that month, or in early November. While crossing by train from Colón to Panama City, disguised as English tourists, they had found themselves in the same car as José de Obaldía. The Governor and his aides, assuming that the foreigners spoke no Spanish, had openly—but unenthusiastically—talked about a break from Bogotá. Captain Humphrey got a feeling of general gloom, based on the failure of Panamanian revolutions in the past.
He and Murphy also heard that a German lobbyist had influenced the Colombian Senate’s rejection of the canal treaty, that votes had been sold—either way—at seven to ten thousand gold dollars apiece, and that an American railroad man with “a remarkably attractive wife” had bought