Theodore Rex (3 page)

AT ABOUT
3:30, the lights of Aiden Lair Lodge appeared in the mist. The landlord, Mike Cronin, was waiting outside with his rig. Roosevelt climbed down onto the wooden landing. “
Any news?”

“Not a word.” Cronin spoke awkwardly, uncertain how to address his passenger. “Jump in right away, and we’ll be off.” He fumbled with a lantern. Roosevelt said, “Here, give it to me!” and joined him on the driver’s seat.

The new horses, two big black Morgans, started off swiftly. Cronin was an expert whip, and hoped to break his own daylight record of just under two hours to North Creek. The horses knew every curve of the sixteen-mile road, but the descent grew slippery, and one of them stumbled. Conscious of the precious value of his cargo, Cronin dragged on the reins.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter!” Roosevelt exclaimed. “Push ahead!”

(photo credit prl.1)

Most of the time, the road was invisible, except when log bridges drummed suddenly under the buckboard’s wheels, and errant boulders loomed out of the mud, necessitating detours. Roosevelt kept holding his watch to the lantern. “Hurry up! Go faster!” Their speed increased on the steep descent. Cronin worried aloud about skidding off a bend and falling hundreds of feet into the bogs beneath. But Roosevelt was calm. “If you’re not afraid I am not.”

SINCE PUBERTY HE
had taught himself to pluck the flower safety out of the nettle danger. Although his physical courage was by now legendary, it was not a natural endowment. He had been a timid child in New York City, cut off from schoolboy society by illness, wealth, and private tutors. Inspired by a leonine father, he had labored with weights to build up his strength. Simultaneously, he had built up his courage “by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness.” With every ounce of new muscle, with every point scored over pugilistic, romantic, and political rivals, his personal impetus (likened by many observers to that of a steam train) had accelerated. Experiences had flashed by him in such number that he was obviously destined to travel a larger landscape of life than were his fellows. He had been a published author at eighteen, a husband at twenty-two, an acclaimed historian and New York State Assemblyman at twenty-three, a father and a widower at twenty-five, a ranchman at twenty-six, a candidate for Mayor of New York at twenty-seven, a husband again at twenty-eight, a Civil Service Commissioner of the United States at thirty. By then he was producing book after book, and child after child, and cultivating every scientist, politician, artist, and intellectual of repute in Washington. His career had gathered further speed: Police Commissioner of New York City at thirty-six, Assistant Secretary of the Navy at thirty-eight, Colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the “Rough Riders,” at thirty-nine. At last, in Cuba, had come the consummating “crowded hour.” A rush, a roar, the sting of his own blood, a surge toward the sky, a smoking pistol in his hand, a soldier in light blue doubling up “neatly as a jackrabbit” … When the smoke cleared, he had found himself atop Kettle Hill on the Heights of San Juan, with a vanquished empire at his feet.

From that viewpoint, the path to the presidency looked clear. Returning home a hero, Roosevelt had been elected Governor of New York within two weeks of his fortieth birthday. He had toured the Midwest and been greeted everywhere as if he was a presidential candidate. Dutifully supporting William McKinley for renomination in 1900, he had begun to assemble his own campaign organization for 1904. Everything in his hard philosophy assured him that the White House would be his one day.
He had fought all his life for supreme power, for “that highest form of success which comes … to
the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil.”

Yet just when his momentum seemed irresistible, there had come that sickening sideways pull into the Vice Presidency, followed by a political dead halt. And now this even more violent lurch back on course!

His path ran, appropriately, past a cemetery: the churchyard of Minerva. Wet gravestones gleamed as the buckboard raced through the village. Beyond, slopes gave way to swamps, and the road began to flatten out. A pallor in the mist signaled dawn. At five o’clock, Cronin announced that they were only two miles from North Creek. Roosevelt ordered a stop “to let the horses blow.” He straightened his tie and smoothed his suit, saying there might be some “notables” waiting at the station.

The final dash was dramatic enough to satisfy Roosevelt’s love of stagy arrivals. Sun-reddened cliffs disclosed the racing floodwater of the Hudson River, and Cronin’s horses, refreshed by their brief pause, thundered thrillingly over the bridge into town. The noise acted as a drumroll, heralding their entrance onto Main Street. Voices shouted “There he comes!” The buckboard flew past darkened housefronts and stoops still bare of the morning milk. Its wheels had hardly come to rest at the depot when Roosevelt jumped down to discover, if not “notables,” at least a small crowd of local citizens and the neat, bespectacled figure of his secretary, William Loeb, Jr. A special train stood waiting. The time on the station clock read twenty-two minutes past five.

Loeb wordlessly handed over John Hay’s telegram from Washington. Roosevelt unfolded it. There was a moment of silence, broken only by the impatient hissing of the locomotive. He stared at the eight words in his hand:

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.

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 into a clear sky, and light flooded the Hudson Valley. Black night had given way to bright morning. Soon he would take the oath as President of “the mightiest Republic upon which the sun has ever shone.”

AT TWO MINUTES
before eight, the train stopped briefly at Albany. Loeb emerged to tell waiting reporters that Roosevelt was “very tired,” and would have no statement to make until after his inauguration. Breakfast was whisked aboard, along with the morning newspapers. Within five minutes, the special was on its way again, accelerating to sixty miles an hour.

Roosevelt, sucking down some badly needed coffee, had as much to learn from
DEATH EXTRA
dispatches as millions of other Americans that morning. The President’s last hours were chronicled in poignant detail. Here was Senator Mark Hanna, who loved McKinley like a brother, dropping onto gouty knees and pleading, “William, William, speak to me!” Here were doctors squirting stimulants into the dying man’s heart, to shock him into momentary recognition of his wife. And here, framed in black, were the President’s last words, pious enough to heave all the bosoms in Christendom: “Nearer, my God to Thee
 … His will be done!”