Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [233]
HIS UNCHARACTERISTIC CIRCUMSPECTION lasted after he returned to work on 12 June. “The President is usually a very outspoken personage, but for ten days he has been absolutely dumb,” complained George Smalley, the Washington correspondent of The Times of London. “The State Department has not known what is going on. The Cabinet does not know—Taft excepted.”
What was “going on” was a new phase of negotiations so delicate as to make the previous ones seem easy. Russia and Japan each felt that they had lost face in agreeing to talk peace, and each now sought to regain it by disagreeing as much as possible on all follow-up details, such as where to meet and when, and how to ensure equal negotiatory strength. Roosevelt was by no means “dumb” in his official communications with both foreign ministries, addressing them in a third-person style that nicely mixed courtesy and contempt for their posturing:
The President feels most strongly that the question of the powers of the plenipotentiaries is not in the least a vital question, whereas it is vital that the meeting should take place if there is any purpose to get peace.… The President has urged Russia to clothe her plenipotentiaries with full powers, as Japan has indicated her intention of doing. But even if Russia does not adopt the President’s suggestion, the President does not feel that such failure to adopt it would give legitimate ground to Japan for refusing to do what the President has, with the prior assent of Japan, asked both Powers to do.
There was a world of sensitivity in his use of the words assent and asked. He did not want even to hint on paper that he considered the war to have been “the triumph of Asia over Europe.” But in plain speech to Cassini, he did not hesitate to state that he had not sympathized with Russia from the start of the war, and considered her entire military effort to have been “a failure.” She would lose no matter how long she kept on fighting, so she had better start making concessions now. To Takahira, he said that obstinacy over peace terms would prolong the war at least another year and cost Japan untold “blood and money.” Japan had already won so much, “the less she asked for in addition the better it would be.”
Smalley was wrong about Taft being well-informed on the President’s current diplomacy. Since coming back from Colorado, Roosevelt had confided only in members of his secret du roi: Edith, Henry Cabot Lodge, Speck von Sternburg, and Jules Jusserand. Even to such intimates, he told only what he wanted to tell. Like a mirror-speckled sphere at a prom, sending out spangles of light, he beamed fragmentary particulars at different dancers. They circled beneath him (or did he revolve above them?) in movements of accelerating, apparently random intricacy. The resultant sweep and blur was enough to make any bystander dizzy, because it looked centrifugal; Roosevelt, however, felt only a centripetal energy, directed inward.
As he mediated between Russia and Japan, he was secretly doing the same between Germany and France. Wilhelm II had become so strident in calling for a conference on the Moroccan question (ranting about a Franco-British plot to contain the Reich) that Roosevelt saw the danger of a “world conflagration” that would make the war in the Far East look like a border skirmish. The French government must accept the idea of a conference. He was accepting it himself, if only to make Wilhelm feel wanted. “Let not people in France take it amiss if I am found particularly flattering toward the Emperor,” he told Jusserand, before handing Speck von Sternburg a memo of near-Levantine obsequiousness.
The French Ambassador himself needed stroking, because his superior and patron, Delcassé, had just resigned over the Morocco problem. Roosevelt made a point of consulting Jusserand