Colonel Roosevelt (93 page)

“
I particularly wished not to make any wanton or malicious attack on him.”

Ivins tried to disconcert him by revealing that many of the things he had said about the plaintiff in court were taken, word for word, from his general remarks on corruption in that Barnes-free book. “
It is because of your excellent memory, is it not?”

Roosevelt let the sarcasm go. He had noticed that he had an avid audience in the jury. They leaned forward every time he spoke,
as if activated by a jolt of electric current. He began to address them directly, and Ivins scolded him.

Returning to Roosevelt’s autobiography, Ivins quoted a line about Senator Platt,
Some of his strongest and most efficient lieutenants were disinterested men of high character
, and asked if Barnes was included. The Colonel hedged.
“Mr. Ivins, that is not a question that I could answer by a yes or no. Do you wish me to answer how I feel about it?”

“If you cannot answer it, I do not care for your feelings. I want to know whether you can answer yes or no.”

Andrews ruled that Roosevelt must respond accordingly. The stenographer repeated Ivins’s question.

For the first time, the defendant was beginning to sound like a small boy trying to fib his way out of a situation. By using the phrase
some of
to qualify his praise of Platt’s aides in 1899–1900—a group effectively consisting only of Barnes—Roosevelt the autobiographer had adopted a technique he affected to despise in other writers: the employment of “weasel words” that sucked the specificity out of statements.
Some of
enabled him to plead that he had not, in fact, ever thought of Barnes as a “disinterested man of high character.” He now cast about desperately for another literary device to save himself, and thought of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel about a man both good and evil. That was it: Barnes was “
Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” He said he had known only the former during his time as governor.

Ivins noted that he had, nevertheless, retained Barnes in a position of high Republican responsibility long after becoming President in 1901. Roosevelt said he had done so as a consequence of his vow to honor President McKinley’s legacy. Ivins asked if that had still been the case on 29 January 1907, when he wrote to Barnes on White House stationery:
It was a pleasure to send your reappointment
[as surveyor of the port of Albany]
to the Senate today. Sincerely, Theodore Roosevelt
.

Ivins let this protestation speak for itself. But he submitted for the jury’s further consideration a long series of cordial notes from Roosevelt to Barnes, indicating that Mr. Hyde had not begun to prowl the streets of Albany in his full monstrosity until the Progressive/Republican split of 1912.

THE DEFENDANT REMAINED
in the witness stand for four more court days. He suffered further lapses of memory, principally on questions of campaign financing. Ivins tried to represent them as selective amnesia, but they looked to impartial observers like the forgetfulness of a man with larger things on his mind. The trial so far amounted to an entertaining exposé of unremarkable political facts. Both parties to Barnes’s lawsuit were—always had been—pragmatic politicians, the one looking for votes and reliable appointees, the other able to supply them, but at a price. As a young governor, Roosevelt had understood that reform legislation was impossible unless he could rely on a Party majority that was boss-controlled and lubricated with corporate contributions. As a power broker, Barnes knew that cooperation with the minority machine was sometimes necessary; the will of the people might even demand it.

Ivins’s evidence showed only that early on, Roosevelt had been naïvely eager to believe that Platt’s machine men were altruistic. He was certainly so himself (
even the most wheedling letters Ivins obtained from the archives showed him to have been active in the public interest). But he had often kept his long-distance glasses on, rather than focus too closely on what the Easy Boss was doing.

Under hard interrogation by William L. Barnum, one of Ivins’s associates,
Roosevelt admitted that he had once appointed a Democrat to office because Platt needed to do Tammany Hall a favor. Barnum said that in exchange, the man’s sponsor, a state senator, had asked them both to cooperate on a $12 million appropriation for one of his real estate interests. Had such a bill been passed? The Colonel could not remember.

“
A little matter of twelve million wouldn’t make any impression on you?”

“After sixteen years,” Roosevelt snapped, “during which I have had to do with billions of expenditures, the item does not remain in my mind.”

It irked him that day after day of cross-examination was being devoted to
his
operations in Albany, long ago, rather than to Barnes’s later behavior as the successor of Boss Platt. Justice Andrews seemed to be in no hurry to summon witnesses like Cousin Franklin, who could testify to the venality of
the plaintiff in recent years. The trial threatened to drag on indefinitely.
Barnes quit attending on 26 April, saying that he would return only when called for.

“ ‘W
HAT RELATION ARE YOU TO THE DEFENDANT
?’ ”
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt
.
(photo credit i21.2)

Roosevelt finally stepped down as a witness at noon on the twenty-ninth, with his reputation for total recall much damaged. Nevertheless, Bowers succeeded in introducing some damning evidence against Barnes, including ledger-book proof that the boss had enriched himself on state printing contracts. Whether that made him corrupt or not, the jury would have to decide.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt’s appearance in court on Tuesday, 4 May, created a stir.

“
What relation are you to the defendant?” Bowers wanted to know.

“Fifth cousin by blood and nephew by law,” Franklin replied, grinning. The line was obviously well rehearsed.

He confirmed that Barnes and Boss Murphy had been partners in legislative shenanigans to which he had been privy. But the lift he gave to the Colonel’s case was mainly psychological. As a senior official of the Wilson administration, he was manifestly an important man. His department was on high alert over attacks on transatlantic shipping by German submarines. No fewer than twenty-three merchantmen had been torpedoed since the beginning of May—among them an American oil freighter, the
Gulflight
, with three lives lost—and persistent rumors were circulating that a major liner was being targeted for destruction soon.

Franklin did not comment on the
Gulflight
incident to reporters, but his cousin was under no such compunction. It had been “an act of piracy, pure and simple,” the Colonel declared out of court.

DURING THE NEXT TWO
days Roosevelt returned to the stand again and again, clarifying and amplifying his testimony for Bowers. When not being questioned, he looked bored. He flinched as Ivins, given the chance to cross-examine, said with mock exhaustion, “
I don’t know that I care to have anything more to do with Mr. Roosevelt.”

The old lawyer was trying for a laugh, but what sounded like a collective groan ran through the courtroom. His witness was, after all, a former head of state.

That night, Thursday, 6 May, an ominous letter reached Roosevelt in the house of his local host, Horace S. Wilkinson. It came from Cal O’Laughlin, who was always ahead of the news, and transmitted the written warning of a “high German official” that the administration’s shipping policy was putting
American national unity “to a dangerous test.” Citizens of German or Irish ancestry had the right to protest, even sabotage, a neutrality so obviously favoring Great Britain. Their target might be the Cunard flagship
Lusitania
, currently en route from New York to Liverpool.

She had sailed on the first day of the month, amid
a strange flurry of other threats—some wired pseudonymously to passengers as they checked in to their cabins—that she might be struck by a U-boat.
An advisory signed and paid for by the German Embassy in Washington had appeared alongside her final sailing notice in several newspapers, reminding travelers “intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage” that a state of war existed between the Reich and Great Britain. Any vessel flying the Union Jack in “waters adjacent to the British Isles,” was therefore “liable to destruction.”

Roosevelt was infuriated by the arrogant tone of the document O’Laughlin enclosed.
“It makes my blood boil to see how we are regarded,” he wrote back. “Lord, how I would like to be President in view of what he says about the huge German-Irish element and the possible sinking of the
Lusitania.
” Personally, he would hang any such scaremonger, “and I would warn him that if any of our people were sunk on the
Lusitania
, I would confiscate all the German interned ships, beginning with the
Prinz Eitel.
”

Perhaps it was just as well that Roosevelt was out of office in his current mood. He confessed to O’Laughlin that “if I didn’t keep a grip on myself,” a provocation of this kind “would make me favor instant war with Germany.”

He was back in court the following day, Friday, to hear Bowers begin to wind up the case for the defense. For hours, legal arguments droned back and forth between floor and bench, and Roosevelt looked, if possible, even more bored than he had the day before. Ivins took pity on him and walked over with a little green-covered edition of the plays of Aristophanes. “
I came across this yesterday, Colonel, and it struck me that it was a first-class translation, and that if you cared to amuse yourself with anything of this sort while this uninteresting testimony is going on, you might enjoy it.”