Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [222]
What tormented Adams was the possibility that Roosevelt’s electoral triumph—which the world had gasped at—might persuade one or the other power to ask the President to mediate a peace settlement. Surely the Virgin, if she still had any say in world affairs, would allow Hay that final honor.
BOTH KANEKO AND Spring Rice made social calls on the ailing Secretary of State. They were politely vague about their conversations with the President, Kaneko saying only that Roosevelt kept insisting that Japan should not be “exorbitant” in her demands for a price to end the war. The Baron was in no hurry to return home, and hinted at the possibility of “important news” from his government in the spring.
Hay looked out his window and saw nothing but the frozen gray of early February. “The weather remains gloomy,” he wrote in his diary, “et moi aussi.”
Heart pain kept him awake at night, and when he slept he was often plagued by nightmares. Once he dreamed he was going to be hanged. Mrs. Hay conspired with Adams to ship him to Bad Nauheim, Germany, for a cure, but he would not hear of leaving town until after the President’s Inauguration. That was more than a month away. Congress was still in session, and he had to calm the agitation of Takahira and Cassini, both of whom visited on him what they could not properly communicate to Roosevelt.
Cassini waved aside Japan’s recent victories as “éphémères.” The American people should know that Russia had four hundred thousand soldiers in Manchuria, not to mention Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski’s “fine fleet,” still desperately steaming toward the war theater. “Russia is neither defeated nor ruined.”
The President also showed signs of rising agitation. Those who knew him understood that he was merely working up steam for the Inauguration. Henry James thought the Rooseveltian machine was “destined to be overstrained” one day. He had to admit that, at present, “it functions astonishingly, and is quite exciting to see.”
With that, James left town. So did many Democrats wanting to put as much distance as possible between themselves and “Theodore the First” on the day of his coronation. “Roosevelt has the world in a sling right now,” Henry Watterson wrote from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean. “But, wait a little.”
CHAPTER 23
Many Budding Things
Onaisy lies th’ head that wears a crown.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT TOOK his second oath of office in sharp, cold sunshine on 4 March 1905. Exactly four years before, he had stood on this same Capitol platform, watching President McKinley being sworn in by this same little Chief Justice. Then, heavy rain and a dogged phalanx of mostly incumbent Old Guard Republicans had reinforced his sense of having been forced into political immobility. Now, a blustering wind tore at his hair and speech cards as he stepped forward to address the crowd. It tossed the dozens of flags rising to either side of him, so violently that some wrapped around their staffs in tight spirals of red, white, and blue. Other flags, suspended between the marble columns behind him, whipped and cracked. The caps of several Annapolis and West Point cadets went spinning through the air. Women clutched at their hats (none more determinedly than Alice Roosevelt, who wore a flimsy white-and-black satin wheel, undulant with ostrich plumes), while men jammed their toppers down. The whole scene, from the ten-acre crush of spectators in