Theodore Rex (98 page)

“WHEN LUNCH WAS OVER, ROOSEVELT AND HIS CHIEF GUESTS POSED FOR A FORMAL PHOTOGRAPH.”
Left to right: Sergei Witte, Baron Rosen, the President, Baron Komura, and Ambassador Takahira, 5 August 1905
(photo credit 24.3)

That evening, a guest at Sagamore Hill thought the President looked weary but content. “
I think we are off to a good start,” Roosevelt said, admitting that he had been afraid of making a slip during the day. “I know perfectly well that the whole world is watching me, and the condemnation that will come down on me, if the conference fails, will be world-wide too. But that’s all right.”

THE FIRST INDICATION
that something had gone seriously wrong at Portsmouth came on Friday, 18 August, when Kentaro Kaneko hurried out to Oyster Bay from New York.
The self-important Baron, who served as a messenger from Komura, was beginning to irritate reporters with his almost daily pilgrimages up Sagamore Hill. They suspected that Kaneko was none too bright. He could hardly order a cup of tea without mentioning his Harvard education, and reverently quoted the President’s aphorisms (“The railroad train is doubtless stronger than a bull, but that doesn’t say the train wants a bull on the track”) as if he understood them.

His news today, however, was urgent. The peace negotiations were on the verge of deadlock. Witte, whose overbearing garrulousness (and clever cultivation of American press opinion) grated more and more on Komura, was insisting that Russia would give up no territory and pay no indemnity. Japan had moderated her peace terms at Roosevelt’s suggestion, dropping Vladivostok and changing the word
indemnity
to
reimbursement
, but Witte was plainly hardening, rather than commensurately softening, Russian attitudes. He refused in particular to concede Sakhalin, which he described as “a watchman at our gates.” All he was willing to consider was some sort of arrangement recognizing Japanese economic interest in the island.

Later that evening, Roosevelt received related news from George Meyer in St. Petersburg. It indicated that Witte was acting on royal authority. Nicholas II, who had made plain at Tsarsköe Selò how precious Sakhalin was to Russia, was increasingly under the sway of war advocates. To them, an indemnity under any name would be an admission that the Motherland was conquered. No Japanese jackboot had yet trodden her soil—unless one counted the non-continental mass of Sakhalin.

Roosevelt detected a resurgence of the Russian lack of logic that had so infuriated him with Count Cassini. His Majesty would not give up Sakhalin, yet Sakhalin was already occupied by the Japanese. Russia was not conquered—she had merely been beaten in every land battle of the war, and lost almost all of her navy. Her soil was undefiled, but if she did not soon treat with Japan, she could say good-bye to eastern Siberia.

A fantasy began to grow in him. He would like to march the Tsar and his ministers to the end of Cove Neck, and “run them violently down a steep
place into the sea.” But reality beckoned. The peace conference would soon founder if Russia could not be persuaded to sacrifice some of her “honor.”
He told Kaneko that he would appeal, if necessary, to the Tsar, and enlist the aid of the Kaiser and President Loubet of France as well.

The courier returned home satisfied.
That night, Roosevelt, having heard from Speck von Sternburg that Britain and France were conspiring to step in as peacemakers, sent a telegram to the Russian delegation in Portsmouth, in care of Herbert H. Peirce.
It was galvanizing enough for the Assistant Secretary to wake Baron Rosen up at 2:00
A.M.
and tell him he was expected at Sagamore Hill in the early afternoon.

All diplomatic niceties, evidently, were being waived in this hour of crisis. The President of the United States was no longer a neutral mediator between belligerents. He was prepared to intervene, and to do so peremptorily. Rosen had no choice but to obey his summons.

Roosevelt was playing tennis in white flannels when Rosen found him at four o’clock. Disconcertingly, he kept returning to the game at pauses in their conversation, as if to mime the serves and returns of diplomatic dialogue.
He said that three of Russia’s principal concerns at Portsmouth—imprisoned war vessels, naval limitation, and Japanese control of Sakhalin—were resolvable, in his opinion. Japan would back down on the first two, and the Tsar must accept the last as a fait accompli. Occupied ground was enemy ground.

“
We Americans,” Roosevelt said, by way of example, “are ensconced at Panama and will not leave.”

It was not the most fortunate comparison, but Rosen was more interested in what the President proceeded to say about Sakhalin.
Roosevelt seemed to know that Witte had reluctantly begun to talk about dividing the island—the northern half to be Russian and strategic, the southern Japanese and commercial.

He asked Rosen if his delegation would transmit a proposal to the Tsar as “an idea expressed in private conversation” with the President. This was that Russia should buy her half from Japan, as holders of the real estate in question. Without even mentioning the word
indemnity
, a negotiable quantity of money would begin to flow in Tokyo’s direction. The talks would be reanimated, tempers would cool, and the unmentionable could perhaps be submitted to allies for arbitration.

Rosen, politely masking his resentment at being manipulated, agreed to carry the proposal back north for his chief to relay to St. Petersburg. Witte reluctantly obliged on 21 August, advising Count Lamsdorff, “
If it is our desire that in the future America and Europe side with us, we must take Roosevelt’s opinion into consideration.”
On Monday, the President felt uneasy enough about Russian duplicity to cable Meyer and ask him, once again, to read a personal message to Nicholas II:

Roosevelt used the words
substantial
and
substantially
with little consideration for an Emperor whose idea of conciliation was “
not an inch of land, not a rouble of indemnities.”
The cable went off, coded to cheat Russian surveillance, with carbon copies referred to the ambassadors of Germany and France. He sent a much colder message to Baron Kaneko: “
I think I ought to tell you that I hear on all sides a good deal of complaint expressed among the friends of Japan as to the possibility of Japan’s continuing the war for a large indemnity.”
Then, putting his trust in the hands of Meyer, he soothed himself by reflecting that Ramses II had not scrupled to treat with the Hittites in 1272
B.C.
, after years of militant blustering.

“
I cannot trust myself to talk about the Peace Conference,” Henry Adams wrote Elizabeth Cameron from Paris. “I am too scared. Literally I am trembling with terror.… The general
débâcle
must now begin.”

THE SIGHT OF
Sergei Witte standing huge and rumpled to the right of the President of the United States did not beguile Nicholas II, when, on 23 August, Meyer showed him a batch of photographs from the
Mayflower
. Nor was the Tsar disposed to be reasonable, as he had been during their last interview.
He remarked rather peevishly that his cousin Wilhelm had just sent him a letter urging peace, and added that it was “quite a coincidence” that such missives always seemed to precede audiences with the American Ambassador.

“
Russia is not in the position of France in 1870,” Nicholas said, refusing again to pay any indemnity. Meyer had to argue for two hours before he consented to pay at least “a liberal and generous amount” for the care and maintenance of Russian prisoners of war. This encouraged the Ambassador to press him on Sakhalin. Nicholas at last said that Japan could keep “that portion” of the island she had once had clear title to.

On the same day, Roosevelt, who by now had become a one-man electrical storm of cables to St. Petersburg, Peking, Paris, London, and Tokyo, again wrote Kaneko. Dropping all diplomatic politesse, he went to the edge of brusqueness in implying that Japan was being both greedy and inconsiderate at the conference table.
Another year of war would merely “eat up more money than she could at the end get back from Russia.” Then followed a moral lecture, in language a Nipponese aristocrat was not used to hearing:

The letter was wired to Tokyo, while Meyer, at Roosevelt’s insistence, kept pressuring the Tsar for further concessions. Both initiatives failed, or seemed to fail. In the absence of changed instructions, the peace conference went into recess.