Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [238]
At a dinner entertainment at the Maple Club, she tapped Lloyd Griscom on the shoulder. “Do you see that old, bald-headed man scratching his ear over there?”
“Do you mean Nick Longworth?”
“Yes. Can you imagine any young girl marrying a fellow like that?”
Since her father had never once mentioned her mother to her, she had no way of knowing that Theodore Roosevelt had had a similar conversation, at a similar event, when he, too, had been twenty-one, despairingly in love with Alice Hathaway Lee. Her determination was as great now as his had been then.
“Why, Alice, you couldn’t find anybody nicer,” Griscom said.
On the night of 29 July, she stood with Taft on the balcony of Shimbashi station and waved good-bye. Her last impression of Tokyo was a medley of thousands of paper lanterns, densely packed people, grinning—or snarling—teeth, and barking roars of “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!” The roars were interspersed with a chant that, so far as Alice could make out, meant, “Japan a thousand years, America a thousand years.”
ALTHOUGH ROOSEVELT, on the whole, breathed more freely when Alice was in another hemisphere, he missed her company. Of all his children, she was the only one with an original intelligence. He identified with her quirky reading tastes, her strong passions, her ravenous curiosity. Vicariously, half enviously, he lived through “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (as the press kept reporting them), and sent her one of his quaint “picture letters,” a mix of deliberately naïve drawings and allusive prose. It included a sketch of his daughter and the Empress Dowager of China exchanging ceremonial puffs of opium.
(photo credit 24.2)
At the top of the page, over another drawing of Alice being pursued by bicycle cops, he depicted himself as a toothily grinning, vaguely Oriental sun flapping two beneficent wings:
At the time of the sketch, his wings were still beating in vain with regard to an armistice between Russia and Japan, and also to the fraught issue of an indemnity, which Katsura’s government seemed determined to demand. But July had otherwise seen a heartening accelerando of diplomatic developments, as if the peace conference, so long discussed and dreamed of, was suddenly so urgent that it had to take place at once. In short order, the two powers appointed their full delegations, separately confided (to Roosevelt only) the extent of their possible concessions, and announced that they would meet in early August on American soil—the United States being, at least symbolically, halfway between Europe and Asia. The initial introductions would be performed at Oyster Bay by President Roosevelt.
Washington was, of course, no longer a suitable location for the conference proper. Tempers were likely to be hot enough without the aggravating factor of Potomac humidity. Roosevelt volunteered to find “some cool, comfortable and retired place,” where there would be “as much freedom from interruption as possible.” Many East Coast seaside towns made bids to host the conference. Only one met his stipulations, while also offering the security and communications facilities necessary for a major diplomatic event: Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
The pretty little town boasted a navy yard—strictly speaking, in Kittery, across the bay in Maine—and ample hotel accommodations for both delegates and press. Authorities at the yard made available a big, dignified, vaguely Petrovian building with its own railway siding, and plenty of exposure to sea breezes. Its oblong design, centering on a pedimented entrance facade, was symmetrical enough to satisfy the most stickling insistence on equal space. It was the architectural equivalent of a joint communiqué.
Kogoro Takahira, who had been named as Japan’s junior plenipotentiary to the conference, approved