Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [234]
Another—and surprised—recipient of presidential confidences was Sir Mortimer Durand, unaware that Roosevelt privately rated his intelligence at “about eight guinea-pig power.” A summons to the White House at 10:00 P.M.; the Washington Monument dark against the full moon; fireflies striking sparks over the lawn; magnolia blossoms stirred by the southern breeze. A long wait, then one of the President’s patented sudden entrances. Two cane chairs drawn up on the porch. A torrent of Rooseveltian talk.
“He told me,” Sir Mortimer informed Lord Lansdowne, “that he wished me to know the exact course of the recent negotiations, England being the ally of Japan.… He had told no single person except Taft [sic]—Hereafter a month or so hence, he might tell Lodge and one or two others, i.e. everyone.”
The British Ambassador might have been less beguiled by this frankness had he been aware that Roosevelt had already given Lodge almost a mirror version of it. (“You are the only human being who knows … except Edith, though I shall have to in the end tell both John Hay and Taft.”) Lodge, in turn, did not know some of the things that Sir Mortimer now knew: that the President had “lashed out savagely” when Count Cassini implied that Russia was going along out of sheer magnanimity, and had told Takahira to be content with the Tsar’s willingness to appoint plenipotentiaries, because the very word meant “persons with full powers.”
So with speech both soft and hard, white lies and colorful confidences, Roosevelt coaxed the peace process along. Durand noted how happy he was that June, how proud of his quiet game, and how “perfectly confident of success.”
JUSSERAND HAD NO sooner gotten used to being teasingly addressed as “John Hay” than the real owner of the name sailed home to claim it. “Cordial congratulations on your peacemaking,” Hay wrote after disembarking in New York. “You do not need any Secretary of State.”
The weather in the capital was already hot, and Roosevelt urged Hay to go straight on to his place in New Hampshire. Hay, however, seemed determined to come south.
“I suppose nothing will keep John away from Washington,” the President wrote Clara Hay. “But he must not stay here more than forty-eight hours.… He must rest for this summer.”
She knew as well as Roosevelt that Hay would not see another. His German “cure” had been ineffectual, and he hardly had the strength to walk, let alone work. Some obscure desire to reconnect with the scenes of his youth in the nation’s capital drove him. In the mid-Atlantic, he had dreamed of reporting back to the White House and being greeted not by Theodore Roosevelt, but by Abraham Lincoln. The vision had filled him with an overpowering melancholy.
“I am going to Washington simply to say Ave Caesar to the President,” Hay wrote, in the last of his letters to Henry Adams.
A White House dinner invitation awaited him when he got in on 19 June. He declined, but crossed the square later and found the Roosevelts still at the table. Refusing to be tempted by ice cream, fruit, and coffee, he joined the President on the same porch that had recently accommodated Durand. Roosevelt was in cordial humor, and gave Hay a full report on the peace negotiations. As they talked, there was a strange guttural sound in the darkness, and an owl flew over their heads. It perched on a window ledge and looked down on them with an expression that struck Hay as wise, yet also full of scorn.
NEWS OF THE SECRETARY’S death on 1 July from a coronary thrombosis reached Roosevelt that day, just after he had moved to Sagamore Hill for the summer. Simultaneously, William Howard Taft headed to San Francisco, accompanied by Alice Roosevelt and a large Congressional party, to embark on a slightly mysterious “goodwill tour” of the Far East.
Taft’s renewed assignment to diplomatic business underlined a need, now critical, for a strong Secretary of State—someone who could be relied on to restore morale