Colonel Roosevelt (122 page)

On election day, 5 November, Roosevelt hobbled into the blacksmith’s shop that served as Oyster Bay’s polling place and cast his ballot. Edith accompanied him. For all his support of universal suffrage, she was still not able to vote. They had the satisfaction of hearing next morning that the Democrats had lost both houses of Congress, in a Republican triumph devastating to Wilson’s hope of dominating the postwar international scene. Speaker Champ Clark was dethroned. Political analysts put most of the blame on the President for demanding a vote of confidence. Roosevelt congratulated himself as “probably the chief factor” in preventing Wilson from doing “what he fully intended to do, namely, double-cross the Allies, appear as an umpire between them and the Central Powers and get a negotiated peace which would put him personally on a pinnacle of glory in the sight of every sinister pro-German
and every vapid and fatuous doctrinaire sentimentalist throughout the world.”

He was equally contemptuous of the Kaiser, after reading on 10 November that Wilhelm II had resigned in the face of mass desertions and mutinies in all German services. The Red Flag was now flying in eleven German cities—even over the imperial harbor at Kiel—and the Reichstag was in danger of being taken over by a combination of socialist soviets. An armistice delegation representing its centrist majority was suing for peace in the Forest of Compiègne.

“
If I had been the Kaiser,” Roosevelt snorted, “when my generals told me that the war was lost, I would have surrounded myself with my six healthy and unharmed sons, and would have charged up the strongest part of the Allied lines in the hope that God in his infinite goodness and mercy would give me a speedy and painless death.”

Flat on his back that same day, he heard that Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., had gone AWOL from military convalescence and reassumed command of the Twenty-sixth Infantry Regiment, just in time to participate in Pershing’s final offensive. Kermit had gotten to the Front too, and fought in the same division. Quentin was avenged. Family honor was satisfied.

AROUND THREE O’CLOCK
the following morning, floodlights illuminated the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Newspaper presses throughout the city thumped out an announcement by the State Department: “The Armistice has been signed.” At 6
A.M.
, local time, hostilities would cease on the Western Front.

Steam whistles began to blow long before dawn, in a continuous wail punctuated by motor horns and church chimes. By seven all Manhattan was throbbing, as fire crackers, cap pistols, brass bands, air-raid sirens, and even cow bells added to the cacophony. Impromptu parades joined together and marched up Fifth Avenue. Soldiers and sailors grabbed girls off the sidewalks and kissed them with a promiscuity unimaginable in prewar days. Airplanes roared overhead at dangerously low altitudes. There was a crescendo of noise through the day, approaching its climax in the late afternoon, just as Roosevelt was driven into town and returned to the hospital room he had occupied in February. It had windows facing toward Broadway, only one block distant. For as long as he remained awake, he could hear roaring and music in Columbus Circle.

Dr. John H. Richards announced overnight that the Colonel was back in Roosevelt Hospital because he needed to be “near his physician.” His ailment, diagnosed as “lumbago,” was not considered serious. “His blood pressure and heart action are those of a man of forty years.”

Subsequent bulletins, issued every few days by Richards and others, were equally positive, but vague enough to confuse reporters as to what, exactly, was wrong with Roosevelt. If he was in no danger, why had his wife moved into an adjoining room? And why was his treatment taking so long?
On 21 November, a rumor that he was facing an operation impelled his old literary friend Hamlin Garland to come and see him.

“I found him in bed propped up against a mound of pillows,” Garland wrote in a diary entry. “He looked heavier than was natural to him and his mustache was almost white. There was something ominous in the immobility of his body.”

After some chat about their youthful experiences out West, Garland said that he and a few friends would like permission to buy the field in France where Quentin was buried and turn it into a memorial park, “so that when you and Mrs. Roosevelt go there next summer, you will find it cared for and secure.”

Roosevelt’s eyes misted over. “That’s perfectly lovely of you, Garland.” But he needed to consult Edith before coming to a decision.

Corinne Roosevelt came in with a cake, and Garland rose to go. The Colonel would not let him. “Sit down!”

For half an hour the three of them talked about books and poetry. Roosevelt mentioned politics only once. “I wanted to see this war put through and I wanted to beat Wilson. Wilson is beaten and the war is ended. I can now say
Nunc dimittis
, without regret.”

Garland came back four days later to ask again about the memorial. Roosevelt seemed stronger: his operation had been merely a dental procedure, to remove two formerly abscessed teeth. Yet he emanated sadness, and his voice had a moribund sound. The stillness of his body, mummified in thick blankets, again struck Garland. It contrasted strangely with the movement of his arm as he reached out to shake hands. He was evidently in worse condition than the hospital would admit.

Edith, Roosevelt said, was opposed to the idea of a park around Quentin’s grave. She felt that her son had been “only an ordinary airman,” doing his duty. Many others had fallen: “Quentin was no more hero than they, and should not be honored above his merits because he was our son.”

Other visitors came. All paid affectionate respects. Some sought the Colonel’s counsel, as if they feared they might soon be deprived of it. William Howard Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and Henry White wanted to discuss the League of Nations issue, which Wilson was determined to press. Messianic as ever, the President had announced that he would personally represent the United States at a postwar peace conference scheduled to begin in Paris in the new year of 1919. White was the single Republican on his negotiating team—
and a weak choice, in Lodge’s opinion, altogether too obsequious
to men of power. Wilson had not chosen a senator of either party to accompany him. He appeared to think that his foreign prestige would be enough to enshrine the Fourteen Points in a treaty so perfect, it could not fail to be endorsed.

Roosevelt was mostly silent as he listened to these senior statesmen of the GOP debating peace policy. White got the impression that he was not averse to the League, leaning more to Root’s cautious approval than to Lodge’s harsh opposition. But in letters and articles dictated to Miss Stricker and a new personal assistant, Miss Flora Whitney, the Colonel made clear that he liked best Sir Edward Grey’s old idea of a League that would not require great powers to scale down their defenses.
He scoffed at the hypocrisy of Wilson’s grand-sounding phrase
self-determination for all peoples
, noting that the President was in no hurry to grant liberty to Haiti or Santo Domingo.

Two of his future biographers stopped by with honey on their lips, looking for last-chapter material. Lawrence Abbott told him that his speeches at the Sorbonne and London’s Guildhall in 1910 had “contributed directly” to the success of France and Britain in winning the war. Joseph Bucklin Bishop showed him the typescript of an epistolary volume that Scribners wanted to put out, under the title
Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children
. The Colonel read it entranced. “I would rather have that book published than anything that has ever been written about me.”

November gave way to December. By now Roosevelt was walking again, but only for short painful periods. Even sitting in a chair hurt. He was in his fourth week of hospitalization, on top of the week he had spent bedridden at Sagamore Hill. Unable to write anything but brief notes, he allowed Flora to think she was helping him with her laborious stenography.
She was learning shorthand as part of her recovery process. Their relationship was quasi-familial, tender and sorrowful on both sides.

He did what he could to hinder Wilson’s diplomacy, after the President set sail for France in a confiscated German liner renamed the
George Washington
. In letters addressed to Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Balfour, as well as such other foreign opinion-makers as Lord Bryce and Rudyard Kipling, Roosevelt argued that the Democratic Party’s defeat in the recent Congressional election amounted to a vote of no confidence in the administration. In any other free political system, he told Balfour, the chief executive would have had to resign. Speaking for the Republican Party, he declared that a majority of American opinion stood for “absolute loyalty to France and England in the peace negotiations.” That meant a retreat from the Fourteen Points, which he thought were susceptible to interpretation in Germany’s favor, and an abandonment of any presumption by the United States to act “as an umpire between our allies and our enemies.”

Except for describing himself as “one of the leaders” of this new majority,
Roosevelt did not say what was now acknowledged by political strategists: the 1920 GOP presidential nomination would be his if he wanted it. A number of Republicans and former Progressives called to sound him out about running. He declined to encourage them.

“I am indifferent to the subject,” he said, lying back on his pillows. “
Since Quentin’s death, the world seems to have shut down upon me.” But when William Allen White reported that Leonard Wood was a candidate, he said with studied casualness, “Well, probably I shall have to get in this thing in June.” Then he produced an article he had dictated that amounted to an advance campaign platform.

“
I tell you no secret when I say that the cards are arranged for the nomination of T.R.,” Hiram Johnson wrote a journalist on 14 December. “He has gained immeasurably in public esteem, I think.”

If so, the gain was registered at home, not abroad. That evening’s newspapers broadcast the story that Woodrow Wilson was being received in Paris with a hysteria that far eclipsed the welcome given Roosevelt in 1910. A crowd of two million had greeted the President as the savior of Western civilization, showering him with roses as he rode up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe.

ROOSEVELT WOKE THE
following day with his left wrist in such agony it had to be splinted. Much more alarmingly, he showed symptoms of a pulmonary embolism. The hospital kept this secret from the press.
His temperature shot up to 104°F, then subsided. Dr. Richards had been talking of sending him home, but it was obvious now that he should be watched day and night. Edith could do nothing but sit at his bedside while he slept, reading Shakespeare in an effort to stay calm. “
Poor dear, I wish I could take the pain.… There are so many things which he wants to do and cannot.”

He was buoyed by the appearance of Eleanor, back from France, except that she brought news that her husband had been left with a permanent limp. Roosevelt wished Ted could have been sent home on sick leave, like Archie. But he and Kermit were stuck in Europe, pending discharge from service.

Stuck too, the Colonel resigned himself to the prospect of Christmas in hospital.
He would have to forgo his thirty-year ritual of playing Santa Claus at the Cove School in Oyster Bay. Archie was appointed to substitute for him.

Margaret Chanler paid a visit, and was disconcerted by her old friend’s listlessness. “
I am pretty low now,” he admitted, taking her by the hand, “but I shall get better. I cannot go without having done something to that old gray skunk in the White House.”

He did get better, enough that Edith got permission to take him home for Christmas. They agreed that it would be best to leave early on the holiday itself,
when no press photographers would be around.
Corinne came in on Christmas Eve and found Roosevelt in his bathrobe, bandaged but bright-eyed. He told her that there seemed to be “a strong desire” among Republicans to nominate him for the presidency in 1920. His health, however, might prevent him ever again entering public life.