Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [224]
During the ensuing parade, which lasted three and a half hours, Roosevelt scorned his glass-enclosed reviewing stand and stood alone in the constant wind, waving his tall hat, bowing, clapping, and laughing. Whatever tomorrow’s newspapers might say about him being still the youngest of Presidents, he was now the same age Theodore Senior had been when he had died—a sobering thought to his sisters, if not to himself. Four more years of strenuous responsibility loomed. Nor was he as constantly healthy as he pretended to be. The “Cuban fever” he shared with so many of these Rough Riders (trotting by with rebel yells) had to be kept down with drugs; his joints were stiffening, no matter how much he exercised; and his blood pressure, always abnormally high, was being worsened by hardening arteries.
“The President will of course outlive me,” Hay wrote in his diary, “but he will not live to be old.”
ON 10 MARCH, Roosevelt decided it was time “to let the Japanese Government understand that we should be glad to be of use” in any effort to arrive at a negotiated settlement. He cautioned Hay that this stated willingness must not sound too much like an “offer.” If he was to be a peacemaker, he could not let the Tsar think he had solicited the job. Hay obediently bypassed Takahira and gave Lloyd C. Griscom, the young United States Minister to Japan, carte blanche to leak the President’s availability.
The leak coincided with the Japanese capture of Mukden, after weeks of savage fighting. Even Count Cassini had to admit to feelings of despair. He came to see Hay, who was preparing to leave for Europe, and spoke at such length about Russia’s “tremendous sacrifices and misfortunes” in wartime that the Secretary, losing patience, asked, “When will come the time of your diplomats?”
Cassini sank into even deeper gloom. “We are condemned to fight. We cannot honestly stop.”
Hay left Washington on 17 March and journeyed north to New York. So, by a separate train, did Roosevelt. The Secretary went to stay overnight in his daughter’s suite at the Lorraine Hotel. He had no sooner settled in than a crescendo of hooves in the street below signaled the approach of the presidential cavalcade. Hay got to a window in time to see his employer sweep by, en route to Delmonico’s restaurant.
Roosevelt was in town to give away his niece Eleanor to his fifth cousin Franklin, in a Roosevelt-Roosevelt marriage sure to elicit press wisecracks about “King Theodore’s” proliferating dynasty. He seemed sublimely unconscious of the young man’s hero-worship of him. (Franklin had sat unnoticed, a handsome and angular figure, among the crowd of special guests at the Inauguration.) Nor did he realize—or care—that in giving Eleanor away, he inevitably attracted more attention than she did. His presidential gravitas was by now so charged that he took for granted a centripetal clustering wherever he moved or stood.
To that end, he had authorized the construction of a vast new salon at Sagamore Hill. It was to be big enough to accommodate the many delegations who came to see him every summer, and grand enough to impress the envoys of emperors.
THE PRESIDENT TOOK a midnight train back to Washington. He was back at his desk before John Hay, too weak to walk, could be wheeled aboard the SS Cretic. For the next few crucial months, Theodore Roosevelt would be in sole charge of the foreign policy of the United States.
A situation of extraordinary complexity presented itself. Morocco had suddenly become a factor in the Russo-Japanese War. Kaiser Wilhelm II was again using a small state’s weakness to aggrandize his own empire. This time, however, der Allmächtige had cloaked his power play in the guise of an initiative seemingly in the interest of Sultan Abd al-Aziz. He proposed to Roosevelt, in a letter delivered by Ambassador von Sternburg, that the United States and Germany “combine to compel