Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [301]
Roosevelt remained a formidable force, by virtue of his popularity, tactical skill, and unequaled political intelligence. But he had not much more than six months left as the leader of the Republican Party. By next June, a new claimant to that title would be nominated, and in less than a year, a new President elected. Senator Foraker was already a declared candidate, and “Uncle Joe” was not saying no to rumors that he might run, too. Senators LaFollette and Beveridge were separately wondering if they should mount token candidacies, to test the strength of the progressive movement, while William Howard Taft remained an oddly apathetic heir apparent.
Never again—unless Roosevelt withdrew his vow not to seek a third term—would “Theodore Rex” dominate the political scene as completely as he had for the last three years. And on 11 December, he removed all lingering doubts as to the seriousness of his post-election statement that he would not accept another nomination for President. “I have not changed and shall not change the decision thus announced.”
MONDAY, 16 DECEMBER, broke sunny, sharp, and clear over the James River estuary after a weekend of heavy rain. All sixteen ships of the battle fleet lay waiting for him, blindingly white in the eight o’clock light, as the Mayflower creamed into the Roads and proceeded past each gold-curlicued bow. The air drummed with 336 cannon blasts, not quite dividing into twenty-one-gun strophes.
“By George!” Roosevelt exulted to Secretary Metcalf. “Did you ever see such a fleet and such a day?”
When the presidential yacht came to anchor, gigs and barges brought aboard “Fighting Bob” Evans—a surprisingly small, fierce-faced man, limping with rheumatism—four rear admirals, and sixteen commanding officers. Roosevelt made no speech after shaking all their hands, only drawing Evans aside for a few minutes and muttering to him with earnest, snapping teeth. Bystanders watched the admiral’s cocked hat bobbing like a gull as Roosevelt bit off sentence after sentence. What scraps of dialogue floated on the breeze were mostly banal: “I tell you, our enlisted men … perfectly bully … best of luck, old fellow.”
Less audibly, the President was giving Evans secret orders to stay in the Pacific for several months, then proceed home via the Indian Ocean and Suez Canal. Cameras clicked as the two men bade each other farewell. The commanders returned to their ships, and, as the Mayflower got under way for Cape Henry, one by one the battleships weighed anchor and hauled around in stately pursuit. They overtook Roosevelt at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and ground past him in a perfectly spaced, three-mile-long column. He watched with intent seriousness, periodically doffing his top hat, until the Kentucky, the last unit of the Fourth Division, moved by in a vast white wall, all its sailors saluting.
CHAPTER 30
Moral Overstrain
He’s a gr’-reat man, an th’ thing I like best about him is that in th’ dark ye can hardly tell him fr’m a Dimmycrat.
“THE REACTION AGAINST ROOSEVELT, socially, is violent,” Henry Adams wrote to a friend as the last tremblings of the great panic subsided. “And, like all Presidents, he will probably find himself, in his last year, a severely dethroned king.”
When Adams used the adverb socially, he tended to restrict its compass to the community he belonged to with a sense of tranquil entitlement: old-moneyed, Ivy League, Yankee. The President himself was of this ilk, although his blood was not as blue as Adams’s, and his portfolio nothing like as black. Yet there were—always had been—“foreign” elements in Roosevelt, differences of will rather than mere quirks of character, disturbing to men and women who would otherwise have found him congenial. Ever since he had forsaken his background, at age twenty-three, for what he called the “governing class” of practical politicians, there had