Colonel Roosevelt (115 page)

By then the war might be over—or so Lloyd George and Clemenceau, two deeply worried ministers, kept warning Wilson. Their messages combined impatience at the slowness of American mobilization with a craven dependence on the administration’s goodwill. Britain had lost an estimated four hundred
thousand men in its last six-month offensive, with a blindly determined General Haig sending his last reserves to die in the
mud and
Scheisse
of Passchendaele. Wilson could not help being sympathetic, although he had lost much of his earlier sentimental attachment to Great Britain. He saw that its protectiveness toward France was really motivated by fear that a victorious Reich might threaten its overseas empire, and prevent the British Petroleum Company from acquiring significant real estate in Mesopotamia.

Logistically and psychologically, the Allies would seem to need all the good luck that Ned and Evalyn McLean wished them. But Wilson’s sharp-pencil mind, never clearer than when plotting dynamic curves against a timeline, saw that the Central Powers were not
yet
as strong as they needed to be, to win the war. Their principal weapon—the U-boat—had been made much less lethal by new detection techniques and American-built patrol craft and destroyers. The German navy was still landlocked. Perhaps most to the point, Marxist discontent was surging powerfully among Europe’s labor and peasant classes. The Bolsheviks had called upon Western workers to throw over their governments. Trotsky sounded not unlike the Pope in urging a peace conference, before the belligerents became so degenerate as to keep fighting for the sake of fighting.

Wilson’s phenomenal instinct for the right moment prompted him to move toward a sudden announcement of settlement terms that he believed the whole world would ascribe to.
On Saturday, 5 January, he huddled with Colonel House, who at his behest had spent several months soliciting and collating the recommendations of experts on the European situation. Even as the two men met, Lenin was moving murderously to overturn the results of an election that had, to Bolshevik rage, placed a liberal majority in control of Russia’s constituent assembly. By late Sunday night, totalitarianism reigned again in the land of the tsars, and Wilson had a typed “Statement of the War Aims and Peace Terms of the United States,” for democratic governments to consider, negotiate, and adopt—he hoped, at a conference to end all wars.

The statement listed a series of talking points. They were bound, at first, to antagonize the parties that Wilson most wanted to bring together: Germany, France, and Britain. All three nations still claimed they were at war for defensive reasons. So, less plausibly, did America. But it was the only belligerent sure to gain strength, no matter how long it fought. Wilson was gambling on the exhaustion, not to say internal rebellion, of the others. Sooner rather than later, a
pax Americana
should prevail.

Wilson presented his “Fourteen Points” to Congress on Tuesday afternoon, carefully speaking in plain language that ordinary people could understand. Not for him, this time, the fine style and sly syntax that so irritated Roosevelt. His propaganda chief, George Creel of the Committee on Public Information, had arranged for the address to be broadcast around the world
via a Marconi station in New Jersey, equipped with a one-hundred-thousand-cycle alternator. Wilson was not bothered by the sight of empty seats in the House chamber, including a few in the row reserved for cabinet members. He was addressing the larger audience he liked to refer to, with a sense of suzerainty, as “mankind.”

It was an audience largely ignorant of American foreign policy, and therefore unaware that not one of the Fourteen Points was new. Lansing had presented each of them in various diplomatic communications. But they gained in impact now by being presented all together, just when their relevance was broadest. Wilson said he wanted to see open peace negotiations; absolute freedom of the seas; radical disarmament; impartial settlement of colonial disputes; recognition of Russia’s right to shape its own future “unhampered and unembarrassed” by outside constraints; the evacuation by Germany of Belgium, Alsace, and Lorraine, and by Austria-Hungary of the Balkans; Serbian access to the Mediterranean; an ethnic redrawing of Italy’s northern frontier; national liberation of Ottoman provinces from Turkish rule; free passage through the Dardenelles; an independent Polish state with seaboard facilities; and—closest to his heart—“
A general association of nations [with] specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

The last point was yet another bang on the peace-league gong that Roosevelt and others had sounded over the years. This time, however, its reverberations refused to die. Creel printed the President’s speech for translation and distribution as far away as China and Lapland (and projection over German territory in scattershot “leaflet shells”), achieving a saturation of international opinion that made Woodrow Wilson, the former girls’-school teacher and parochial Presbyterian, look like the only visionary statesman in the world.

THE FOURTEEN POINTS
registered seriously, if not favorably, on both sides of the Western Front. “
Le bon Dieu n’avait que dix,” Clemenceau grumbled.
^*
Britain balked at Wilson’s freedom-of-the-seas demand, which would compromise its blockade capability. France wanted stronger language to guarantee war reparations. Vague conciliatory noises came from Germany and Austria. But on the whole, the President seemed to have succeeded brilliantly in drafting a text negotiable by all the governments concerned. No immediate move could be expected toward the great peace conference he envisaged. If and when it happened, the United States had earned a coequal place at the table. Not a few political prophets saw Wilson himself sitting there as chief negotiant.

“
I am sorry from the bottom of my heart for Colonel Roosevelt,” William Howard Taft said to a dinner companion. “Here he is, the one man in the country most capable of doing things, of handling the big things in Washington, denied the opportunity.… My heart goes out to him.”

Roosevelt emerged from his doldrums, as he had so often before, by launching into a period of manic public activity. Pausing only to write his January quota of articles for
Metropolitan
magazine and the
Kansas City Star
, plus an introduction to Henry Fairfield Osborn’s
The Origin and Evolution of Life
, he delivered
ten speeches in nine days in New York, to audiences as diverse as the National Security League and the Boy Food Scouts of P.S. 40. Ray Stannard Baker caught up with him at a memorial service for Joseph Choate, and noted how his personality galvanized the somber proceedings.
Witty and graceful, able both to conjure up the ghost of Sir Horace Walpole in the same breath as a Latin epigram
(suaviter in modo, fortiter in re)
,
^*
he seemed almost the Bull Moose of old. Jack Cooper’s Reducycle had trimmed his waistline by several inches. “Roosevelt remains a virile and significant figure in American life,” Baker wrote.

Republican strategists in Washington were of similar opinion. Already thinking ahead to November’s congressional elections and the presidential campaign of 1920, they lured Roosevelt down late in the month for four days of policy talk.
He took Edith with him, and Alice again made her town house available as a place where the Colonel could hold court, in the manner of a deposed king plotting a return to the throne. Father and daughter enjoyed the comings and goings of Party stalwarts who believed that Wilson’s current pride preceded a fall from public esteem. But for Edith, who had not seen the capital since she left it in 1909, the visit was painful. M Street was noisy and dirty now with automobile traffic. There were uniforms everywhere, and ugly wooden army buildings. She could not sit in Henry Adams’s parlor without seeing, across Lafayette Square, the radiant mansion where she had brought up Archie and Quentin, married Alice off, and entertained so many of the world’s best people. Its gates were shut to her, its servants obeyed another Edith. Adams was clearly dying, a little gray dormouse of a man. Henry Cabot Lodge had lost his wife’s reflected charm. Springy was gone from the British Embassy, a failed envoy, maligning his replacement, Lord Reading, with the single word
Jew
. Boozy Nick and brittle Alice went their separate ways.

“
Mother found much sadness,” Roosevelt reported to Kermit after returning home. “Our old friends are for the most part dead or else of hoary age.” A quotation from Oscar Wilde occurred to him:
The dust is dancing with the dust, the dead are whirling with the dead
.

TWO MONTHS’ WORTH
of snow lay thick around Sagamore Hill in early February, and still the iron cold persisted. On the morning of Tuesday the fifth, when the Colonel motored to Manhattan to work in his
Metropolitan
office, the thermometer dropped to seven degrees below zero.

For obvious reasons, he did not inform Josephine Stricker, his secretary, that he had a
severe pain in the rectum.
An abscess had formed there, brought on by an attack of fever. Since returning from Brazil, Roosevelt had noticed a correlation between these proclivities of his system. The abscess had been lanced less than twenty-four hours before in Oyster Bay, but he did not feel much relief. His habit was to ignore body signals, so he kept his morning appointments, lunched at the Harvard Club, and dictated through the afternoon to Miss Stricker.

Around four o’clock he felt his trousers filling with blood and fled to the Langdon Hotel, where he kept a suite of rooms. Miss Stricker followed, unsuspecting, and continued to take dictation until she noticed his face was white. She gave him a glass of whiskey that seemed to revive him, but then he staggered to the sofa and fainted, leaving a trail of blood across the carpet. By the time his city physician, Dr. Walton Martin, arrived to treat him, his temperature was 103°F and he sat in a red puddle. He had to be forced to go to bed. Edith found him there later, in care of three implacable nurses. “What a jack I am,” he said. “Did you ever see such a performance?”

His pain increased during the night, aggravated by an ominous throbbing in both ears. On Wednesday morning Dr. Martin and an otologist, Arthur B. Duel, agreed that he had to be taken to the Roosevelt Hospital on West Fifty-ninth Street, for examination and surgery under general anesthesia.

The name of the facility, deriving from a great-uncle who had founded it in 1871, was coincidental: it was known for its modern technology, and was rated as one of the finest hospitals in New York. Roosevelt declined an ambulance, and asked to be chauffeured in his own car. A distraught Ethel Derby visited him before he was wheeled to the operating theater. “
Father looks terribly white and seems so sick,” she wrote her husband. “I can’t bear to have him suffering so.”

Roosevelt’s only complaint was to say that he was weary of malaria relapses, and would like “to be fixed up once and for all.”
At 4:10
P.M
. he was anesthetized. The rectal abscess proved not to have leached into his intestines, as Dr. Martin had feared. But a contributory fistula was found and had to be removed. Two more, potentially lethal abscesses were discovered in his left and right aural canals. Dr. Duel punctured both ears. Knowing his patient’s tendency to bleed heavily, he had to work at risky speed to avoid another hemorrhage.
As it was, the operation took almost an hour and a half. An exhausted Martin told Edith and Ethel afterward that the Colonel “
should have no further trouble.”

On the contrary, Roosevelt was so ill the following morning that newspapermen posted a death watch in the hospital lobby. His fever resurged. He was racked by labyrinthine dizziness, vomited repeatedly, and complained of being deaf in the left ear. His eyes kept oscillating from side to side. Duel and Martin could not hide their pessimism.

A fall in his temperature to 99°F proved only temporarily encouraging. That evening his condition became desperate. He was given morphine to ease the agony that pulsed from all three of his wounds. Shortly before dawn next morning, Friday, 8 February, it was announced that Theodore Roosevelt was fighting for life. At 9
A.M
. a rumor hit the wires that he had died.