Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [5]
THE PRESIDENT DIED AT TWO-FIFTEEN THIS MORNING
Looking suddenly worn and weary, he pocketed the paper and strode across the wet platform. A private car was ready for him. He darted up the steps, turned, and waved once. Loeb followed him inside. The train began to move before the door swung shut behind them.
ROOSEVELT’S FIRST WORDS, as he settled into his plush seat, were that he wanted to get to Buffalo “as soon as possible.” Loeb had anticipated this wish, and secured the fastest locomotive on the Delaware & Hudson Railroad. Three years of experience had taught him that his boss was always in a hurry. That dart up the train steps was typical: he could remember Governor Roosevelt doing the same up all seventy-seven stairs of the State Capitol in Albany.
Mount Marcy’s cloud banks began to lift, and the other peaks glowed in the sun as the special raced south toward Albany. But fog lingered in the Hudson Valley, and the crew of the locomotive could only trust in its emergency right-of-way. Roosevelt dictated a series of telegrams, including one to Edith that was as terse as Hay’s to himself. “Darling Edie” always knew what to do. She and the children would find their own way down the mountain and home to Oyster Bay. His work finished, he dismissed Loeb and sat staring out into the flying mists.
At about seven o’clock there was a scream of brakes, and a crash that shook the whole train. It jarred to a halt. Word came back that the locomotive had collided with a handcar in the fog: two men were nearly killed.
Roosevelt did not need to be told what might have happened had the handcar been another train. For fifteen minutes, while a gang cleared the track, he had leisure to ponder the mortal vulnerabilities of power. This accident was nothing compared to the threat of another Czolgosz lurking in wait for him. Anarchism, that plague of European government, was a virulent strain in America, fed by social unrest, and fear of it was spreading. Just the other day an old black man had taken him by the hand and said, “Look out they don’t get you, Mr. Vice-President.”
Personally, Roosevelt was not worried about assassination. If a bullet came from behind, he could do nothing about it, and would “go down into the darkness,” that being his fatalistic image of death. If the attack was frontal, as on McKinley, he had confidence in the abnormal speed of his reflexes, and the power of his 185-pound body. Last winter, in Colorado, he had leaped off his horse into a pack of hounds, kicked them aside, and knifed a cougar to death. What a great fight that had been!
His larger concern was the effect of morbid micro-organisms like Czolgosz on the American body politic. As President he intended to “war with ruthless efficiency” against them, just as he had warred against his own diseases in youth. Roosevelt had never hesitated to identify himself with the United States. Personal and patriotic pride throbbed as one in his breast. When, accepting the vice presidency, he saluted “a new century big with the fate of mighty nations,” it was clear which nation, and which leader, he believed would ultimately prevail.
Is America a weakling to shrink from the world work of the great world-powers? No. The young giant of the West stands on a continent and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand. Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks in the future with eager eyes and rejoices as a strong man to run a race.
Youth, size, and strength: these things, surely, would render America proof against the anarchic strain. At forty-two, he, Theodore Roosevelt, was the youngest man ever called upon to preside over the United States—itself the youngest of the world powers. The double symbolism was pleasing. He refused to look at the future through “the dun-colored mists” of pessimism. Even now (as his train jerked into motion again), the fog outside was evaporating