Theodore Rex (94 page)

HIS UNCHARACTERISTIC CIRCUMSPECTION
lasted after he returned to work on 12 June. “
The President is usually a very outspoken personage, but for ten days he has been absolutely dumb,” complained George Smalley, the Washington correspondent of
The Times
of London. “The State Department has not known what is going on. The Cabinet does not know—Taft excepted.”

What was “going on” was a new phase of negotiations so delicate as to make the previous ones seem easy. Russia and Japan each felt that they had lost face in agreeing to talk peace, and each now sought to regain it by disagreeing as much as possible on all follow-up details, such as where to meet and when, and how to ensure equal negotiatory strength. Roosevelt was by no means “dumb” in his official communications with both foreign ministries, addressing them in a third-person style that nicely mixed courtesy and contempt for their posturing:

There was a world of sensitivity in his use of the words
assent
and
asked
. He did not want even to hint on paper that he considered the war to have been “
the triumph of Asia over Europe.” But in plain speech to Cassini, he did not hesitate to state that he had not sympathized with Russia from the start of the war, and considered her entire military effort to have been “a failure.” She would lose no matter how long she kept on fighting, so she had better start making concessions now. To Takahira, he said that obstinacy over peace terms would prolong the war at least another year and cost Japan untold “blood and money.” Japan had already won so much, “the less she asked for in addition the better it would be.”

Smalley was wrong about Taft being well-informed on the President’s current diplomacy. Since coming back from Colorado,
Roosevelt had confided only in members of his
secret du roi:
Edith, Henry Cabot Lodge, Speck von Sternburg, and Jules Jusserand. Even to such intimates, he told only what he wanted to tell. Like a mirror-speckled sphere at a prom, sending out spangles of light, he beamed fragmentary particulars at different dancers. They circled beneath him (or did
he
revolve above them?) in movements of accelerating, apparently random intricacy. The resultant sweep and blur was enough to make any bystander dizzy, because it looked centrifugal; Roosevelt, however, felt only a centripetal energy, directed inward.

As he mediated between Russia and Japan, he was secretly doing the same between Germany and France.
Wilhelm II had become so strident in calling for a conference on the Moroccan question (ranting about a Franco-British plot to contain the Reich) that Roosevelt saw the danger of a “world conflagration” that would make the war in the Far East look like a border skirmish. The French government must accept the idea of a conference. He was accepting it himself, if only to make Wilhelm feel wanted. “Let not people in France take it amiss if I am found particularly flattering toward the Emperor,” he told Jusserand, before handing Speck von Sternburg a memo of near-Levantine obsequiousness.

The French Ambassador himself needed stroking, because his superior and patron, Delcassé, had just resigned over the Morocco problem.
Roosevelt made a point of consulting Jusserand as if he were an honorary Cabinet officer, and told a bewildered congressman, “He has taken the oath as Secretary of State.”

Another—and surprised—recipient of presidential confidences was Sir Mortimer Durand, unaware that Roosevelt privately rated his intelligence at “about
eight guinea-pig power.”
A summons to the White House at 10:00
P.M.
;
the Washington Monument dark against the full moon; fireflies striking sparks over the lawn; magnolia blossoms stirred by the southern breeze. A long wait, then one of the President’s patented sudden entrances. Two cane chairs drawn up on the porch. A torrent of Rooseveltian talk.

“
He told me,” Sir Mortimer informed Lord Lansdowne, “that he wished me to know the exact course of the recent negotiations, England being the ally of Japan.… He had told no single person except Taft [sic]—Hereafter a month or so hence, he might tell Lodge and one or two others, i.e. everyone.”

The British Ambassador might have been less beguiled by this frankness had he been aware that Roosevelt had already given Lodge almost a mirror version of it. (“You are the only human being who knows … except Edith, though I shall have to in the end tell both John Hay and Taft.”)
Lodge, in turn, did not know some of the things that Sir Mortimer now knew: that the President had “lashed out savagely” when Count Cassini implied that Russia was going along out of sheer magnanimity, and had told Takahira to be content with the Tsar’s willingness to appoint plenipotentiaries, because the very word meant “persons with full powers.”

So with speech both soft and hard, white lies and colorful confidences, Roosevelt coaxed the peace process along.
Durand noted how happy he was that June, how proud of his quiet game, and how “perfectly confident of success.”

JUSSERAND HAD NO
sooner gotten used to being teasingly addressed as “John Hay” than the real owner of the name sailed home to claim it. “Cordial congratulations on your peacemaking,” Hay wrote after disembarking in New York. “You do not need any Secretary of State.”

The weather in the capital was already hot, and Roosevelt urged Hay to go straight on to his place in New Hampshire. Hay, however, seemed determined to come south.

“
I suppose nothing will keep John away from Washington,” the President wrote Clara Hay. “But he must not stay here more than forty-eight hours.… He must rest for this summer.”

She knew as well as Roosevelt that Hay would not see another. His German “cure” had been ineffectual, and he hardly had the strength to walk, let alone work. Some obscure desire to reconnect with the scenes of his youth in the nation’s capital drove him.
In the mid-Atlantic, he had dreamed of reporting back to the White House and being greeted not by Theodore Roosevelt, but by Abraham Lincoln. The vision had filled him with an overpowering melancholy.

“I am going to Washington simply to say
Ave Caesar
to the President,” Hay wrote, in the last of his letters to Henry Adams.

A White House dinner invitation awaited him when he got in on 19 June. He declined, but crossed the square later and found the Roosevelts still at the table. Refusing to be tempted by ice cream, fruit, and coffee, he joined the President on the same porch that had recently accommodated Durand.
Roosevelt was in cordial humor, and gave Hay a full report on the peace negotiations.
As they talked, there was a strange guttural sound in the darkness, and an owl flew over their heads. It perched on a window ledge and looked down on them with an expression that struck Hay as wise, yet also full of scorn.

NEWS OF THE SECRETARY’S
death on 1 July from a coronary thrombosis reached Roosevelt that day, just after he had moved to Sagamore Hill for the summer.
Simultaneously, William Howard Taft headed to San Francisco, accompanied by Alice Roosevelt and a large Congressional party, to embark on a slightly mysterious “goodwill tour” of the Far East.

Taft’s renewed assignment to diplomatic business underlined a need, now critical, for a strong Secretary of State—someone who could be relied on to restore morale at the State Department after more than two years of moribund leadership. “
Elihu,” the President said after Hay’s funeral, “you have got to come back into my Cabinet.”

Root sat silent, eyes downcast. In his seventeen months away from the government, he had attained happiness and wealth at the New York bar. His wife, who hated Washington, was re-established in Manhattan society, and Thomas Hastings was building them both a splendid town house on Park Avenue. Listening to the President’s words, Root felt nothing but an immense tiredness.

He exchanged glances with Roosevelt, then heard himself accepting.

ROOSEVELT WAS QUITE
willing to ease Root’s return to service by relieving him of responsibility for the current peace negotiations.
Apart from an emerging consensus that the conference might possibly be held in Washington, as more neutral than any other major world capital, Russia and Japan seemed more determined than ever to find reasons to go on fighting.

A sense gathered among scholars of foreign policy that more had passed than the last nineteenth-century Secretary of State, and more was coming than the mere settlement of a Far Eastern quarrel. Other current developments presaged ill for world peace: a sudden decline in French diplomatic prestige, triggered by Delcassé’s resignation; a reciprocal increase in the strategic power of Germany;
mutiny aboard the battleship
Potemkin
at Odessa, along with enough riots and strikes elsewhere in Russia to convince George Meyer that the Tsar’s subjects were in a prerevolutionary state; a loss
of imperial will in Britain, in the wake of the Boer War debacle (to Roosevelt’s exasperation, Lord Lansdowne would not even lean on Japan, his Far Eastern ally, to moderate her peace terms, as Delcassé had done on
his
ally, Russia). Flabby Sir Mortimer, with his disinclination to shin up large, steep obstacles in Rock Creek Park, struck Roosevelt as a pretty good symbol of a culture that had lost its force.

Wilhelm II seemed to feel differently. In a manipulative letter, dated 13 July, he warned Roosevelt that the British were opposed to “the great work that the President is so ardently pursuing for the benefit of the whole world.” They sought an indefinite prolongation of the war, in order to weaken both belligerents and ultimately bring about the partition of China.