Theodore Rex (90 page)

Hay looked out his window and saw nothing but the frozen gray of early February. “
The weather remains gloomy,” he wrote in his diary, “
et moi aussi.”

Heart pain kept him awake at night, and when he slept he was often plagued by nightmares. Once he dreamed he was going to be hanged. Mrs. Hay conspired with Adams to ship him to Bad Nauheim, Germany, for a cure, but he would not hear of leaving town until after the President’s Inauguration. That was more than a month away. Congress was still in session, and he had to calm the agitation of Takahira and Cassini, both of whom visited on him what they could not properly communicate to Roosevelt.

Cassini waved aside Japan’s recent victories as
“éphémères.”
The American people should know that Russia had four hundred thousand soldiers in Manchuria, not to mention Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski’s “fine fleet,” still desperately steaming toward the war theater. “Russia is neither defeated nor ruined.”

The President also showed signs of rising agitation. Those who knew him understood that he was merely working up steam for the Inauguration. Henry James thought the Rooseveltian machine was “
destined to be overstrained” one day. He had to admit that, at present, “it functions astonishingly, and is quite exciting to see.”

With that, James left town. So did many Democrats wanting to put as much distance as possible between themselves and “Theodore the First” on the day of his coronation. “
Roosevelt has the world in a sling right now,” Henry Watterson wrote from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean. “But, wait a little.”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT TOOK
his second oath of office in sharp, cold sunshine on 4 March 1905. Exactly four years before, he had stood on this same Capitol platform, watching President McKinley being sworn in by this same little Chief Justice. Then, heavy rain and a dogged phalanx of mostly incumbent Old Guard Republicans had reinforced his sense of having been forced
into political immobility. Now, a blustering wind tore at his hair and speech cards as he stepped forward to address the crowd. It tossed the dozens of flags rising to either side of him, so violently that some wrapped around their staffs in tight spirals of red, white, and blue. Other flags, suspended between the marble columns behind him, whipped and cracked. The caps of several Annapolis and West Point cadets went spinning through the air. Women clutched at their hats (none more determinedly than Alice Roosevelt, who wore a flimsy white-and-black satin wheel, undulant with ostrich plumes), while men jammed their toppers down. The whole scene, from the ten-acre crush of spectators in the plaza to hundreds more onlookers perched dangerously on every one of the Capitol’s upper protuberances (not to mention boys clambering in trees, and a whirl of pigeons around the dome), was one of constant movement, as if Roosevelt’s energy had animated the entire body politic.

“THE WHOLE SCENE … WAS ONE OF CONSTANT MOVEMENT.”
Roosevelt’s Inauguration, 4 March 1905
(photo credit 23.1)

“
My fellow citizens, no people on earth … with gratitude to the Giver of Good … under a free government … things of the body and the things of the soul … justice … power …”
The wind snatched at his shouted phrases, now muffling them, now hurling them at one group of listeners, while others heard not a word.

Roosevelt read with difficulty, his silk pince-nez ribbon slapping the side of his face.
Nobody, with the exception of his wife and Dr. Rixey, knew that he was losing sight in his left eye—the legacy of a recent boxing blow. He was obliged to keep a tight grasp on his cards with both hands.
Close observers noticed a strange, heavy gold ring on his left third finger. It contained a strand of Abraham Lincoln’s hair. John Hay had given it to him with a request that he wear it when he was sworn in: “You are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln.”

Hay could not have made a gesture more certain to move Roosevelt, whose worship of the Emancipator was admixed with pride that Theodore Senior had once been an habitué of Lincoln’s White House—indeed, had met the young John Hay there. The effect of the gift was to imbue the President, at least temporarily, with a Lincolnesque devotion to the Constitution as “
a document which put human rights above property rights.”

Unremarked in Roosevelt’s letter of thanks to Hay (which had expressed “love” for the first time in his male, non-family correspondence) was the fact that some sort of valediction was implied: if not from President to President, then at least from the man who had served them both, in youth and age, and was now palpably ceding his last responsibility as Secretary of State. Roosevelt had declined Hay’s pro forma resignation, but clearly any settlement of the Russo-Japanese War was going to have to be put into younger, stronger hands—hands calmed, one hoped, by this precious token of statesmanship.

“
Much has been given us,” the President bellowed, leaning forward into the wind, “and much will rightfully be expected of us.”

THE LENGTH OF HIS
Inaugural Address was in reverse proportion to the size of those expectations.
He spoke for no more than six minutes, employed few rhetorical flourishes, and said nothing of substance. Thousands of spectators cheered with some bewilderment, not understanding that the President,
with a new Senate convening in special session and foreign ministries looking to him to mediate the Russo-Japanese War, was deliberately presenting as bland a public face as possible.

Afterward, Roosevelt joked to Henry Cabot Lodge, “Did you see Bacon turn pale when he heard me swear to uphold the Constitution?” Senator Augustus Bacon of Georgia, a strict constructionist, overheard this remark, as intended. “On the contrary, Mr. President, I never felt so relieved in my life.”

Count Cassini led the diplomatic corps offstage, his chest virtually armor-plated with gold and silver orders. A commensurate glittering defensiveness had begun to characterize St. Petersburg’s attitude toward any peace overture that might be construed as further meddling by the United States in Russian affairs.
So impregnable was this breastwork that John Hay could not answer when Minister Takahira asked if Cassini believed external peace might help Russia achieve internal peace, or vice versa.

At two o’clock, the President entertained two hundred guests at lunch in the White House, while thirty-five thousand Rough Riders, Negro Republicans, Harvard alumni, anthracite miners, Indians (Chief Geronimo prominent in war paint and feathers), cowboys, Grand Army veterans, ward heelers, Filipino scouts, Oyster Bay neighbors, and bandsmen massed at the eastern end of Pennsylvania Avenue. High above the banners and placards being readied for display (
WE HONOR THE MAN WHO SETTLED OUR STRIKE
)
floated an enormous and not very threatening Big Stick.

During the ensuing parade, which lasted three and a half hours, Roosevelt scorned his glass-enclosed reviewing stand and stood alone in the constant wind, waving his tall hat, bowing, clapping, and laughing.
Whatever tomorrow’s newspapers might say about him being still the youngest of Presidents, he was now the same age Theodore Senior had been when he had died—a sobering thought to his sisters, if not to himself. Four more years of strenuous responsibility loomed. Nor was he as constantly healthy as he pretended to be. The “Cuban fever” he shared with so many of these Rough Riders (trotting by with rebel yells) had to be kept down with drugs; his joints were stiffening, no matter how much he exercised; and his blood pressure, always abnormally high, was being worsened by hardening arteries.

“
The President will of course outlive me,” Hay wrote in his diary, “but he will not live to be old.”

ON 10
MARCH
, Roosevelt decided it was time “to let the Japanese Government understand that we should be glad to be of use” in any effort to arrive
at a negotiated settlement.
He cautioned Hay that this stated willingness must not sound too much like an “offer.” If he was to be a peacemaker, he could not let the Tsar think he had solicited the job. Hay obediently bypassed Takahira and gave Lloyd C. Griscom, the young United States Minister to Japan, carte blanche to leak the President’s availability.

The leak coincided with the Japanese capture of Mukden, after weeks of savage fighting.
Even Count Cassini had to admit to feelings of despair. He came to see Hay, who was preparing to leave for Europe, and spoke at such length about Russia’s “tremendous sacrifices and misfortunes” in wartime that the Secretary, losing patience, asked, “When will come the time of your diplomats?”

Cassini sank into even deeper gloom. “
We are condemned to fight. We cannot honestly stop.”

Hay left Washington on 17 March and journeyed north to New York. So, by a separate train, did Roosevelt. The Secretary went to stay overnight in his daughter’s suite at the Lorraine Hotel. He had no sooner settled in than a crescendo of hooves in the street below signaled the approach of the presidential cavalcade. Hay got to a window in time to see his employer sweep by, en route to Delmonico’s restaurant.