Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [307]
Sounding rather like a small boy, he claimed not to have expected four all at once, but had asked for them only because he wanted to be sure of getting two.
ROOSEVELT’S ENDORSEMENT of the recommendations of the Inland Waterways Commission was not unallied with his own profound enjoyment of anything rocky, slimy, hardscrabble, and dangerous. In Washington, he had become a confirmed river rat, frequently cruising down the Potomac or up the Anacostia in the Sylph, and hiking, wading, and climbing for miles along the wild banks of Rock Creek. Invitations to accompany him on what he was pleased to call “walks” usually bore the cautionary superscript, Put on your worst clothes. This gave notice that, sooner or later, he and his companions would end up in water, irrespective of whether it was freezing, mud-choked, or dangerously turbulent.
“But, Mr. President,” Jules Jusserand was reduced to saying, “I have no worst clothes left.”
Roosevelt was so much at home in the creek that he often walked straight across it, absorbed in conversation, not seeming to notice the water around his hips, even when he was jostling ice floes. He was impervious to cold, and when necessary would start swimming, while his companions succumbed to cramps. “To succeed in such cases,” one of his former Rough Riders advised Jusserand, “you must have a good layer of fat under your skin.”
The little Ambassador was not well padded, but he was as tough as an Alpine montagnard and had become Roosevelt’s favorite exercise partner. He even accompanied the President on an excursion across a Potomac water pipe, so high and slimy that they were forced eventually to admit defeat. Roosevelt, who wanted to follow the pipe to its destination on a midriver island, hailed a passing rowboat and asked to be ferried there. As the boat pushed out into the current, Roosevelt put his arm around Jusserand’s neck, struck an attitude, and intoned: “Washington and Rochambeau crossing the Delaware.”
Shortly after the battleship vote, in warm May weather, the President led Jusserand, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bacon, and three other hikers on a strenuous, cliff-hanging expedition along the Virginia side of the Potomac, near Chain Bridge. When all were pouring with perspiration, Roosevelt suggested a swim and stripped naked. His party followed suit, but Jusserand absentmindedly kept on his black kid climbing gloves. “Eh, Mr. Ambassador,” Roosevelt called from the water’s edge, “have you not forgotten something?”
Jusserand shouted back, “We might meet ladies.”
The river was still cold, and when the swimmers returned to shore they were obliged to step wet into their clothes, and pull their socks on over mud-plastered feet. A further rock-climb was prescribed to restore body heat. Jusserand admired the President’s bearlike ascent of a cliff so precipitous that it defeated everyone else except the athletic Bacon. When, finally, they trooped back to their waiting carriages, the Assistant Secretary’s trouser leg was slit from hip to ankle.
“PUT ON YOUR WORST CLOTHES.”
Roosevelt (invisible) leads a Rock Creek Park expedition (photo credit 30.1)
ON 12 MAY, forty-five state and territorial executives dined at the White House on the eve of the Governors’ Conference. They were joined by thirty other dignitaries and Roosevelt acolytes at a vast horseshoe table in the State Dining Room. The President sat with Chief Justice Fuller on his right