Theodore Rex (31 page)

THE ONLY MEMBER
of Roosevelt’s family who expressed discontent that summer was eighteen-year-old Alice—brittle, boy-crazy, and by her own admission “bored to extinction” at Oyster Bay. She yearned for the elegant youths of Newport and Saratoga and for her adored maternal grandparents in Boston, and in particular she lusted after money. Her own considerable private income was not enough. “I want more,” she scribbled in her diary, “I want everything.… I care for nothing but to amuse myself in a charmingly expensive way.” She prowled round the dark house, a caged blond cheetah among its skins and stuffed trophies.

Heedless on the piazza overlooking the bay, her father used the long afternoons to catch up with his reading. His “beach book” for the season was Nicolay and Hay’s
Abraham Lincoln: A History
, in ten volumes. Unfazed, he read it straight through, along with his usual supply of dime novels and periodicals.

Since Roosevelt was a devotee of
Review of Reviews
, edited by his good friend Albert Shaw, he probably noticed the extraordinary face reproduced in halftone on page 37 of the July issue. Pale eyes absolutely lacking in self-doubt, an unfurrowed brow, haughty nostrils, a long cruel mouth over a tremendous jaw—features both intellectual and tough, adamantine in their cold, smooth pallor: it was the beaky professor who had visited with him in Buffalo the day after his inauguration.

Woodrow Wilson, the magazine reported, was about to become president of Princeton University. “Every great step that he has taken has been one of conscious choice, leading to a definite, logical end.” Still only forty-five, Dr. Wilson had farther yet to go.
Already “one of the political parties” wanted to send him to the New Jersey State Senate, “and recently a Western newspaper has pointed him out as the right kind of man to be a candidate for President of the United States.”

ON 14 JULY
, Elihu Root delivered to Sagamore Hill the first politically charged document of the season. It was a transcript of General “Kill and Burn” Jake Smith’s court-martial in Manila.
The general’s fellow officers had predictably found him guilty only of excessive zeal, and they “admonished” him to mend his ways.

For a moment Roosevelt was tempted to accept the verdict, in the spirit of his recent amnesty declaration. Military authority no longer applied in the Philippines; ugly memories of the pacification campaign should be encouraged to fade. Part of him sympathized with General Smith. As a former commanding officer himself, Roosevelt had no illusions about the nature of guerrilla warfare. “
I thoroughly believe in severe measures when necessary, and am not in the least sensitive about killing any number of men when there is adequate reason.”

Smith, however, had condoned the killing of women and children—“shooting niggers,” to use the general’s own phrase. Roosevelt could not tolerate such genocidal rhetoric, nor could he discount the brutalizing effect it must have had on junior officers. The court-martial, he decided, had been a miscarriage of justice. He ordered Smith’s prompt dismissal from the Army.

After dinner, Roosevelt and Root sat up late in their tuxedos working on another Philippines problem: how to buy and secularize Vatican holdings in the archipelago, to the gratification of natives, without alienating American Catholics.
Both of them got deep satisfaction out of such chesslike exercises in policy. At 2:00
A.M.
, they closed the last folder and went out onto the lawn overlooking Oyster Bay. Root puffed a cigar. He had been touched by the President’s cry of comradeship at Harvard. Roosevelt, in turn, felt convinced that of all the men in his Cabinet, Root alone had the qualities to succeed him as President.

Friends again, they stood surrounded by the tranquillity of wealth, protected by the trappings of power. Below them, Root’s naval transport lay black on the moonlit water. Farther off floated another recent arrival, slender, white, and glistening: Roosevelt’s own official vessel, USS
Mayflower
. Personally, he did not much care for yachts. But this 273-foot refitted dispatch boat, with its twelve guns and white-and-gold reception rooms (not to mention its wine cellar, silk paneling, and a solid marble bath), was clearly more suited to his dignity than the
Sylph
or tubby little
Dolphin
. He looked forward to a tour of inspection in the morning.

ABOUT FIVE HOURS LATER
, sailors were swabbing the
Mayflower’s
decks, and its officers were dressing below, when a rowboat began to splash across the bay. Pulling the oars was a stocky man in a sleeveless swimsuit. The sailors paid no attention until there was a creaking of the gangway ladder, and the President appeared beaming in their midst.

“
Bully! Bully!” Roosevelt exclaimed, as he rushed around admiring fixtures and fittings. By the time the officers came on deck in their hastily buttoned tunics, he was already rowing back to Sagamore Hill for breakfast.

“ROOT ALONE HAD THE QUALITIES TO SUCCEED HIM AS PRESIDENT.”
Elihu Root as Secretary of War
(photo credit 8.2)

ROOSEVELT’S DECISION TO
dismiss General Smith won universal praise. Democrats congratulated him for acknowledging that there had been both cruelty and injustice in the Philippines campaign. Republicans felt that he had upheld the national honor.

Even the Anti-Imperialist League conceded that the President had out-maneuvered them at every turn. His seemingly haphazard actions since General Miles’s opening shots in February now looked more like a careful battle plan. First, a broadside against the general’s character and reputation; next, a series of aggressive moves that were actually retreats—his acceptance of the Gardener Report, his demand for an investigation, his self-distancing from Root.… Each of these feints had coincided with, and neutralized, some strike by the League, Congress, or the press. Then his double dispatch of envoys—Lodge to the Senate with a promise of justice in Manila, Root to Cuba with a grant of independence. Finally, the coup de grâce: Roosevelt had himself invaded Harvard Yard and captured the mugwumps in their own stronghold. Magnanimous in victory, he had offered amnesty to the Filipinos, and buried the hatchet in one of his own generals.

Anti-imperialism, Charles Francis Adams wrote Carl Schurz, was a lost cause, thanks to Theodore Roosevelt. “
I think he has been very adroit. He has conciliated almost every one.”

ALMOST UNNOTICED IN
the bluster of the President’s Harvard speech had been a hint that he would soon have to choose a nominee for the Supreme Court. Justice Horace Gray’s resignation letter was now on file. Roosevelt had already offered the seat to William Howard Taft, knowing that the Governor longed, above all things, for a judicial appointment. But Taft had regretfully declined, citing unfulfilled business in the Philippines.

With Justice Gray gone, the Court seemed to stand evenly divided on the status of the Philippines as “unincorporated” American territory. A similar balance of opinion seemed likely to confront the
Northern Securities
suit, currently grinding its way through circuit-court review. Roosevelt therefore had to be sure that whoever he chose to replace Gray shared the Administration’s colonial and antitrust philosophy.

He dreamily informed Henry Cabot Lodge, who thought that an ideal candidate was available in Massachusetts, that the next Justice should be a patrician person with enlightened instincts at home and conservative views abroad, somebody who would unite “aloofness of mind” with “broad humanity of feeling.” Not only that, this person should have a respectful sense of what the Administration wanted of him: