Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [167]
Casting aside his disguise, Captain Humphrey had later met with leaders of the junta. They proved to be so desperate for military aid that they actually offered him command of their forces. If successful in winning Panama’s freedom, he and Lieutenant Murphy would get a quarter of the ten million dollars that Washington would then (surely) pay for canal rights.
Humphrey had declined appointment, explaining that he was an American Army officer and served only one flag. But he had not scrupled to give free tactical advice (including how to seize a Colombian gunboat lying off Panama City), and a list of Texan arms suppliers. In exchange, he had gotten an indication of the junta’s current assets: five hundred troops, 2,500 arms, and $365,000 in cash and pledges.
The President was not a passive auditor of Humphrey and Murphy’s tale. He impressed them with his topographical and political knowledge of the Isthmus. They half hoped he would say that the United States must avoid any military role there, so that they could resign their commissions and become real-life Captain Macklins. But he made no such disclaimer, and they were shown out into the night. “There goes our revolution,” Murphy muttered sadly.
ROOSEVELT SPENT THE weekend brooding over the Humphrey-Murphy report, identifying to an almost comical degree with President Andrew Jackson. “There was an executive who realized not only the responsibilities, but the opportunities of the office,” he told a lunch group including George Haven Putnam. Old “King Andrew” was no saint, but he had never hesitated “to cut any red tape that stood in the way of executive action.… Now, Haven, I hear you chuckling. I know what you are thinking about.”
On Monday, crisp cables began to issue from the White House and the Navy Department. The Dixie was loaded with a battalion of Marines and ordered to Guantánamo, Cuba, arrival date 29 October. Moody ordered the Boston to steam secretly, “with all possible dispatch” to San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, within striking distance of Panama City, while the Marblehead, Concord, and Wyoming proceeded (as per Hay’s alert to Bunau-Varilla) to Acapulco. The only maverick movement in this slow concentration of forces was that of the gunship Nashville, which had only just left Colón. To wheel her round would excite Colombian suspicions, so she was allowed to continue to Caimanera, Cuba.
In coincidental, yet related movement, the steamer Yucatán sailed for Colón from New York. Dr. Amador was on board, looking rather portly, because he wore under his vest the silk flag of Panamanian independence, stitched by Madame Bunau-Varilla. He was probably unaware that five years before, “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” had headed south on this same dilapidated vessel, with equal dreams of glory.
On 23 October, in further irony, Roosevelt had a recurrence of the malarial fever that had stayed in his system since the Santiago campaign. He spent the afternoon lying on a sofa by a bright fire, with Edith knitting and rocking beside him.
On 26 October, the New York Herald’s Panama correspondent, whose brother was a junta member, reported that seventy anti-Colombian insurgents had “invaded” the Isthmus. Governor Obaldía dispatched one hundred men to meet this imaginary force, conveniently weakening the garrison in Panama City.
On 27 October, Roosevelt turned forty-five, and Dr. Amador was welcomed home. While the President, well again, celebrated with an eighteen-course dinner, Amador had to confess that the only aid he had won in el Norte was pledged by a Frenchman five feet four inches tall.
BUNAU-VARILLA, HOWEVER, was as good as his word. He had already transferred one hundred thousand dollars in personal funds from Paris to New York. But, as a hard man, he set hard conditions on Amador. The money would not be sent on until he received a cable confirming the success of the revolution and appointing him Panama’s Minister Plenipotentiary in Washington. He would then press the Roosevelt Administration to protect and quickly recognize the new republic. “The