Colonel Roosevelt (92 page)

Roosevelt sat mutely listening, his elbow on the defense table, his head wedged against one fist. He seemed unaware of the stares of fifty reporters ranged near him. Each had a small silk American flag to raise whenever a dispatch was ready to be picked up by court attendants.

It occurred to Louis Siebold, Washington correspondent of the New York
World
, that the Colonel was more than just tired, or worried about his ill wife. He was depressed.

After lunch, Ivins called Roosevelt as his first witness.

“That is all,” Ivins said, returning to his table. Roosevelt sat dumbfounded while the silk flags fluttered, releasing the news that the plaintiff had already rested its case.

Bowers, courtly and trim-bearded, came to the Colonel’s rescue with some questions about the highlights of his career. Inevitably these led to the Battle of San Juan. Had Bowers consulted Elihu Root beforehand, as Ivins had, he might have learned that the quickest way to get his client to make a fool of himself was to mention Cuba.

Roosevelt recited his later résumé. Since coming back from Brazil, he said, he had worked as a writer, with some side activity in politics.

Bowers asked him to describe his early relations with Senator Thomas Platt, the “Easy Boss” of New York State and Barnes’s political mentor. It was an adroit defense move, because it forestalled what was sure to be the prosecution’s main line of questioning. Ivins jumped up. “
Why all this 1899? Case is
in praesenti
, if your Honor please.” Andrews overruled him.

Roosevelt said that he had worked with Platt throughout his two years as governor, and thus gotten to know Barnes as their mutual go-between. Bowers asked if he remembered any meetings in which Platt or Barnes had tried to
stop him calling for a franchise tax on big businesses. Roosevelt said he did, but to the attorney’s frustration, he could not recall how many, or what either man had specifically asked him to do. “
Mr. Barnes spoke of our duty to protect corporations.… I cannot give you the language, the exact language.”

The spectacle of Theodore Roosevelt straining both to hear and think clearly was a shock to many observers. He had always been famous for the perfection of his memory, but here he was unable to drum up facts in his own defense. When he did think of something, it was too late:

Roosevelt was not used to being silenced. Clearly, Andrews was a different breed of judge from the one who had treated him so well in Marquette. Whether out of anger or annoyance, he sharpened up, and Bowers was able to elicit germane evidence by a different line of questioning. On one occasion, the defendant now recalled, Barnes had cynically said, “
The people are not fit to govern themselves. They have got to be governed by the party organization, and you cannot run an organization, you cannot have leaders, unless you have money.” Barnes and Platt had often lobbied him in this fashion, insisting that reform legislation, or failure to reappoint conservatives to office, would result in corporate campaign funds being withdrawn from the GOP. As for his allegations of bipartisan corruption, he remembered Barnes pleading the case of a Democratic legislator named Kelly, who protested against the franchise tax bill in behalf of two wealthy businessmen, Robert Pruyn and Anthony N. Brady.

This sounded more like the old Roosevelt, with
precise citation of names and growing animation on the stand. The rest of the afternoon went well for him, although he played into Ivins’s hands by describing Barnes as “
a very able man,” and saying that they had cooperated amicably for ten years.

THROUGHOUT THE FOLLOWING DAY
, Roosevelt made the most of Bowers’s gentle interrogation. He became comfortable with court procedure, learning not to be upset by Ivins’s objections, and conversationally drawing the judge
as well as the jury into his accounts of private lobbying by Barnes in the New York State Capitol, Senator Platt’s “Amen Corner” in Manhattan, and even Sagamore Hill and the White House. Some anecdotes sounded prosy, as if he had gotten them by heart. Ivins was seen staring at him quizzically whenever he became orotund. But there was no denying that the Colonel was back on form, and the silk flags shook often as he scored point after evidentiary point against Barnes.

The most telling was his introduction of a letter from the boss, begging him not to propose a state printing house in his 1900 gubernatorial message. For years, Barnes’s own printing company had been the contractor of choice for the Albany legislature.
It is not my desire to intrude my personal matters upon you
, Barnes had written,
but I wish merely to state that the establishment of a state printing house here would be a serious, if not a fatal, blow to me financially
. Andrews permitted Bowers to read the governor’s curt rebuff:
There is a perfect consensus of opinion that there should be a state printing office
.

In other testimony, Roosevelt exposed Barnes’s animus against the progressive administration of Governor Hughes, admitting that he did not care for Hughes himself. He tellingly dropped the name of “my cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt,” who, as a Democratic state senator, had had to fight Barnes and Murphy in combination to get an electoral reform bill passed. Young Franklin was now in Washington, and, if the tense state of affairs there permitted, would come north to confirm this collusion.

Partnership between bosses was not illegal, but the Colonel made it sound like the pact between Wilhelm II and Franz Ferdinand. He quoted Barnes as saying before the Saratoga convention in 1910 that direct nominations, “if ever adopted by the state, will lead to untold evils in public life and place therein the cheapest citizens.” Such prejudice was liable to impress members of the jury, none of whom looked as if he could afford Barnes’s standard of living.

Bowers asked when he had last seen the plaintiff. Roosevelt said it had been at the annual Lincoln Day banquet in New York in 1911. Effectively and dramatically, he described how Barnes had boasted that conservatives were now in control of the state GOP, jeering that progressives and their ilk “were out.”

The Colonel looked a happier man when the court adjourned at 5
P.M
.

BY NOW THE TRIAL
was being treated as a major story in New York newspapers, shouldering aside headlines bearing the words
YPRES
and
DARDENELLES
.
Court artists rejoiced in the contrasting physical presences of Roosevelt and
Barnes (ignoring each other in court) and Ivins, with his skullcap and spats, looking like an illustration from a Dickens novel.

Thursday was the day the old lawyer had been waiting for, and he lit into Roosevelt with relish.

“I have also been an officeholder,” he tried to add, but Ivins had already managed to imply that, by spreading himself too thin, he could be seen as a dilettante.

Roosevelt smelled danger, and was uncharacteristically terse as Ivins pressed him to talk more about himself. A series of easy autobiographical questions soothed him. He began to answer at greater length. Ivins congratulated him on his memory. “
It is pretty good,” Roosevelt admitted.

Ivins switched to a much more detailed interrogation. He focused on one of the low points of Roosevelt’s career:
the tax-avoidance controversy that had nearly disqualified him from the gubernatorial nomination in 1898, until Elihu Root rescued him with an argument just short of fraud. Campaign finance was one of Ivins’s specialties—he had published
a little book on the subject—and it was emphatically not one of the defendant’s. Roosevelt soon had cause to regret that he had been tricked into praising his own memory. After drawing a few more blanks, he fell back on vehement protestations that he stood for “righteousness” in politics.

Justice Andrews sat expressionless between his two bowls of carnations. Roosevelt began to flounder, punching the air as he had in the courthouse in Marquette, Michigan.

Pleased to have exposed the defendant as both complacent and excitable, Ivins went on to taunt him about his infallibility (“
You did not at that time have an attack of righteousness?”) and reprimand him for making speeches (“You need not treat me as a mass meeting, because I am not.”). Roosevelt managed to control his temper through the rest of the day, arguing that he could not be blamed for using the services of political bosses when they saw their way clear to supporting his policies.

Ivins kept harping on his literary productivity. One exchange between them caused gasps around the courtroom:

When he returned to the witness chair on Friday, Ivins asked why, after more than ten years of working with Barnes, he had excluded the boss from his autobiography.