Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [185]
The reporter, Kate Carew of the New York World, asked, “Which would you rather be, Chief Justice of the United States, or President of the United States?”
Taft quaked with self-protective laughter. “Oh, ho, ho! Of course I couldn’t answer that question.” He flushed with merriment, while she thought, He must have been a very pink and white baby.
“Who do you suppose,” Miss Carew pursued, when the heavings subsided, “will be the Republican candidate for President this year?”
“PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT!” Taft boomed, puffing out his cheeks.
“And who in 1908?”
“Oh,” he said, smiling, “that is too far ahead.”
“But I had read somewhere that perhaps you would be.”
Taft began to talk about golf.
TWO DAYS LATER, the outgoing Secretary of War attended his last Cabinet meeting. He appeared to be struggling with his composure as Roosevelt thanked him for staying on until Taft could relieve him. Root had a public reputation of being “the coldest proposition that ever came down the pike.” But friends knew the warmth of his bottled-up emotions and the precision of his wit, which Owen Wister nicely described as “humor in ambush.” The crack about the President’s culpability for “rape” was already part of Administration lore, as was the cable Root had sent to Manila, after hearing that Taft had taken a twenty-five-mile ride: HOW IS THE HORSE?
Roosevelt rambled on affectionately until Root stood up, unable to bear more. He crossed to Taft’s left, symbolically shedding power. “Mr. President,” he said. His eyes filled, and he stopped.
It was the little parlor in Buffalo all over again. Then, however, Root had been taking charge of a young and nervous beneficiary. Now he was quitting a leader who could do without him. “I thank you for what you have been good enough to say, Mr. President. This, of course, has been the great chapter in my life.…” He could not go on. “You know, sir, what I would say.”
The following evening, Root attended a Gridiron Club dinner in his honor at the Arlington. Roosevelt was there, along with the full Cabinet; even Senator Hanna limped downstairs. A performance group threw satiric barbs. Taft (giggling and guffawing, prodigiously duplicated in mirrors around the room) was warned that he might catch cold in Root’s chilly aura. If so, he must stand close when Mark Hanna finally swore allegiance to Theodore Roosevelt. The President’s glow of joy would thaw him.
Roosevelt and Hanna, separated by white linen and bowls of roses, laughed with the rest. But the latter looked far from happy. He ate and drank nothing, and there were dark smudges under his eyes.
“How is your health, Senator?” somebody asked.
“Not good.”
HANNA DID NOT leave his bed the next morning, Sunday, nor on Monday, the first of February. The jingling cavalrymen rode down the avenue again, below his windows, escorting Elihu Root to the station. Taft was sworn in. An order went out for an extra large Cabinet chair to be built for the new Secretary.
Day followed upon icy day. It had been the whitest winter in decades; Washington lay locked under a glaze of hard snow. Children skated on the streets. Alice Roosevelt and her friend Marguerite Cassini went bobsledding together and competed for the attentions of Congressman Nicholas Longworth, rich, youngish, and sexily balding.
Something about Alice’s laugh, when she asked if “Nick” had ever proposed, made Marguerite say, “Yes, he has.” The two girls began to see less of each other.
Roosevelt took a new course of jujitsu, lunched with Buffalo Bill, and sent a long tirade against the demoralization of scientific historiography to his latest intellectual “playmate,” Sir George Otto Trevelyan. He heard with relief that Mrs. Cox, the black postmaster of Indianola, Mississippi, had decided not to seek another term. In her place, he quietly appointed a white man.
The newspapers reported that Elihu Root had made a powerful speech to an audience of New York Republicans, warning them that Theodore Roosevelt was “not safe”:
He is not safe for