Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [230]
So the diplomatic whirlpool spun its rounds.
ROOSEVELT PUT ALL his hopes on George von Lengerke Meyer. Although the United States Ambassador had been in St. Petersburg only seven weeks, he was already irreplaceable, the kind of man Kipling envisaged as being able to “walk with kings.” The way Meyer bore himself had much to do with his effectiveness. No aristocratic American rode a horse better, with so straight a back and so poised a top hat. All the Brahmin airs—Beacon Hill, Harvard, Essex County, oars and polo, cigars and buckshot, severity and solemnity—emanated from his manly person. He had worked for the right shipping companies, married the right woman, and sat on the right committees in the Massachusetts Legislature. After four years as Ambassador to Italy, Meyer already had the desired “envoy” look: sleek fine brow, clipped mustache, a face at once open and noncommittal. Only the overlarge, long-fingered hands were strange, more suited to a cellist, or masseur. But cello-playing and massage arts were not incompatible with royal diplomacy. He was just old enough to have graduated one year ahead of Theodore Roosevelt, and just enough inferior, in whatever imponderables determine clubmanship, to have made the A.D., but not the Porcellian. Decent, discreet, comfortingly dull, he lacked the imagination to be afraid of anything except failure to do his duty.
Roosevelt had already spelled that duty out, in detail:
I want a man who will be able to keep us closely informed, on his own initiative, of everything we ought to know; who will be, as an Ambassador ought to be, our chief source of information about Japan and the war—about the Russian feeling as to the continuance of the war, as to the relations between Russia and Germany and France, as to the real meaning of the movement for so-called internal reforms, as to the condition of the army, as to what force can and will be used in Manchuria … and so forth.
In other words, the President wanted Meyer to look at the war through Russian eyes. He, Roosevelt, already had his own American take on it, communicated frankly enough to whiten Hay’s last gray whiskers:
I am not inclined to think that Tokyo will show itself a particle more altruistic than St. Petersburg, or for the matter of that, Berlin. I believe that the Japanese rulers recognize Russia as their most dangerous permanent enemy, but I am not sure that the Japanese people draw any distinctions between the Russians and other foreigners, including ourselves. I have no doubt that they include all white men as being people who, as a whole, they dislike, and whose past arrogance they resent; and doubtless they believe their own yellow civilisation to be better.…
For years Russia has pursued a policy of consistent opposition to us in the East, and of literally fathomless mendacity. She has felt a profound contempt for England and Japan and the United States, all three, separately and together. It has been impossible to trust to any promise she has made. On the other hand, Japan’s diplomatic statements have been made good. Yet Japan is an oriental nation, and the individual standard of truthfulness in Japan is low. No one can foretell her future attitude. We must, therefore, play our hand alone.… Germany and France for their own reasons are anxious to propitiate Russia, and of course care nothing whatever for our interests. England is inclined to be friendly to us and is inclined to support Japan against Russia, but she is pretty flabby and I am afraid to trust either the farsightedness or the tenacity of purpose of her statesmen; or indeed