Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [228]
A spell of bad weather set in. Roosevelt spent the next few days recovering from his malaria and reading Pierre de La Gorce’s Histoire du Second Empire. Jules Jusserand, who understood better than anyone else in Washington that the key to the President’s heart was his mind, had made sure that he packed all seven volumes, along with Albert J. M. de Rocca’s Mémoires sur la guerre des Français en Espagne.
Roosevelt read at less than his usual breakneck speed, hampered by rusty French and the occlusion of his left eye. In the process, he pondered every word, and was “struck by certain essential similarities in political human nature, whether in an Empire or a Republic, cis-Atlantic or trans-Atlantic.”
This was not quite the reaction Jusserand had hoped for. It was altogether too large-minded for a President whose sympathy France needed in Morocco and the Far East. At least, though, Roosevelt was not reading Clausewitz, or samurai sagas, or Ieronim Pavlovich Taburno’s Pravda o Voine.
WHAT NONE OF THE diplomats appreciated, as they obeyed their instructions, was Theodore Roosevelt’s lifelong obsession with balance. He loved the poised spin of the big globe in his office, the rhythm of neither-nor sentences, the give-and-take of boxing, the ebb and flow of political power play. His initial tilt in the Russo-Japanese War (“Banzai! How the fur will fly when Nogi joins Oyama!”) had straightened like the needle of a stepped-off scale. He instinctively sought neutrality now, as more and more potentates yielded to parochial fears: the Tsar of defeat and deposition, the Mikado of impoverishment, the Kaiser of encirclement, King Edward VII of invasion, Sultan Abd al-Aziz of serfdom, Delcassé an end to la glorie de la France—not to mention whatever Korea’s impotent Emperor and China’s aged Empress must be feeling.
“THE KEY TO THE PRESIDENT’S HEART WAS HIS MIND.”
Roosevelt reading with Skip in Colorado, May 1905 (photo credit 23.2)
Although Roosevelt had plainly been irresponsible in heading west at such a time, his isolation had the effect of making him seem all the more “above” the fray, eminently desirable as a peacemaker. And in remaining aloof, at least for a while longer, he kept all parties guessing as to how he would proceed.
ROOSEVELT HAD BEEN interested to discover, after killing his third black bear, that “in her stomach … there were buds of rose-bushes.” His task now was to corner the biggest bear of his career, badly worried by yellow hounds, and bring forth the flowers of peace. He had already tried, and failed, to do so through George von Lengerke Meyer, his new ambassador to St. Petersburg. Meyer had managed to see Nicholas II and present an offer of mediation worded almost as delicately as Hay’s earlier murmurings to Takahira. But Tsarina Alexandra had monitored the interview, and Nicholas, cowed by her fierce stare, had changed the subject without committing himself.
The Tsarina’s problem with peace was a double loss of face for Russia, if her husband was seen as suing for peace out of weakness. Not only would Japan look like an external victor, but Russia’s peace party, dominated by the formidable Count Sergei Witte, would gain great power within the Empire. And there was always the imponderable of revolutionary discontent, seething among intellectuals and the peasantry.
“Did you ever know anything more pitiable than the condition of the Russian despotism in this year of grace?” Roosevelt wrote Hay. “The Tsar is a preposterous little creature as the absolute autocrat of 150,000,000 people. He is unable to make war, and he is now unable to make peace.”
The only Russian left who might