Theodore Rex (17 page)

There were days when the visitors besieging him were so numerous that Cortelyou had to empty the antechamber five times before lunch. On such occasions the President could be overstimulated, and his frankness coarsened to rudeness. “I don’t give a damn for the Legislature of Texas!” he roared at Senator Joseph Bailey, making a lasting Democratic enemy. He called to an aide, over the heads of Representative John Dalzell and Senator Julius Caesar Burrows: “Come here, Mr. McAneny, and help me with these two gentlemen. They are boring me about appointments.” Burrows left the White House angrily, muttering, “This young man won’t last long.”

Monitors of Roosevelt’s Western patronage noticed that an ability to shoot straight seemed to appeal to him more than strict fidelity to the Bill of Rights. Civil Service Commissioner William Dudley Foulke recorded his interview with Pat Garrett, slayer of Billy the Kid and candidate for Customs Collectorship of El Paso, Texas:

The appointment dismayed many Texans, not because of Garrett’s bloody record but because he was an agnostic. “
In El Paso,” the President said approvingly, “the people are homicidal but orthodox.”

ON 18 NOVEMBER 1901
, Secretary of State Hay and the British Ambassador, Lord Pauncefote, signed their long-negotiated treaty granting the United States exclusive right to build an interoceanic waterway in Central America. Two days later, the Isthmian Canal Commission, appointed by President McKinley to recommend the “most practicable and feasible” route, reported in favor of Nicaragua. This news was held for release after the opening of Congress, but William Randolph Hearst got an advance copy of the report, and splashed it across the pages of his New York
Journal
.

It was a big scoop, if not much of a story. Popular and Congressional sentiment had been in favor of a Nicaragua Canal for so long that the Commission’s decision was expected. Panama might possibly have been chosen, but that fetid little Colombian province was already a monument to the folly of French canal engineers. After twenty-two years of mismanagement, scandal, disease, and death, all that was left of Ferdinand de Lesseps’s
grand canal du Panama
was a gang of lethargic workers, some crumbling buildings and rusty machinery, and an immense, muddy scar reverting to jungle.

Nicaragua, in contrast, offered a virgin landscape, a healthy climate, one hundred miles of navigable freshwater, and the lowest pass in the Cordilleras. Its leaders were unanimously eager to reach an agreement with the United States, whereas those of Colombia were divided by civil war, unable to treat with their own rebels, let alone representatives of a foreign power.

And yet—this was Hearst’s real news—one sentence in the report implied that the Commission was not wholehearted about its recommendation:

Minus that extra compensation—$109 million—a Panama Canal would cost $156 million, as opposed to $200 million for a Nicaragua Canal. And it
would be finished sooner, thanks to the French excavations. So mere economics had kept the commissioners from endorsing the private preference of the President of the United States.

ROOSEVELT FINISHED READING
his revised Message aloud to the Cabinet on 22 November. All twenty-five thousand words were his own work. Previous Presidents had done little more than to collate and introduce the reports of executive departments. But he was still a writer, with a writer’s reluctance to sign prose he had not composed, or at least edited. Feeling a sudden revulsion for the ink-stained typescript, he sent it off to be printed.

Twelve days still intervened before the reassembly of Congress. He decided that he wanted to be alone with his family for a while, somewhere away from Washington. The executive yacht
Sylph
was rigged, and Navy Yard cannons primed for a twenty-one-gun salute. By 3:30 that afternoon, the Roosevelts were on their way up Pennsylvania Avenue. Passersby were touched to see the President kissing four-year-old Quentin, first on one chubby cheek, then the other.

BACK IN MINNESOTA
, James J. Hill saluted his own child, Mary, in his own fashion, with twenty dollars in gold. He had earned them during his first few days as president of the Northern Securities Company. “It is the hardest job I have ever undertaken,” he said, in the voice of a man whose ambitions were complete.

WHILE THE
SYLPH
cruised the lower Potomac, through chill salt mists, Americans browsed a syndicated newspaper article entitled
TEDDY’S HOROSCOPE.
The astrologist-author noted that Theodore Roosevelt had become President under a remarkable coincidence of Capricorn and Aquarius. This meant that, beginning in 1902, his Administration would bring about many changes, particularly with respect to “laws” and “treaties.” He would increase the nation’s military power, and go on to handle “vast political problems, the like of which we do not dream of today.”

Although Roosevelt was a man much influenced by Mars, he was likely to be peaceable in foreign affairs. His aggression would spill out on the domestic front. (But he would be asking for trouble if he tried to bully Congress.) There was likely to be “a remarkable recrudescence” of social violence soon. While some years of prosperity lay ahead, “a crash is surely coming, and securities will drop to rock bottom.”

The President need not worry about ill health or assassination. But he was
fated to suffer “the death of some intimate friend … or cabinet official, probably the latter.”

JOHN HAY’S AVUNCULAR
fondness for Theodore Roosevelt had became almost grandfatherly as he watched him struggle toward statesmanship.
The President, he wrote a friend, was “a young fellow of infinite dash and originality.”

Although Hay was sometimes embarrassed by Roosevelt’s gaucheries, he forgave them as
folies de jeunesse
. Youth, as the President kept saying, was “a curable disease.” How boyish of Theodore not to notice, that final freezing Friday before Congress assembled, that the Cabinet Room fire was unlit, and that some of his older officers were still in their overcoats! And how charmingly unpretentious—when he at last
did
notice—to light the logs himself, and coax them to flame!

SHORTLY BEFORE NOON
on Tuesday, 3 December 1901, a committee of senators and representatives called upon the President. They announced that the Fifty-seventh Congress was in session, and “ready to receive any communication” he might want to make. The delegation bowed out, and returned to Capitol Hill by official carriage. After a polite interval, one of Roosevelt’s own monogrammed vehicles followed. It drew up outside the House of Representatives, and a White House secretary jumped out with an enormous manila envelope.

Octavius L. Pruden had carried thirty presidential messages up the Capitol steps, but this was the heaviest yet. It consisted of two duplicate eighty-page volumes—one for the House, one for the Senate. Each was silk-lined, leather-bound, gold-stamped, and sealed with the presidential wafer.
A Secret Service man, marching beside Pruden, kept guard over the precious cargo.