Theodore Rex (95 page)

Roosevelt was reinforced in his own opinion that Lord Lansdowne did not really want peace. Cecil Spring Rice tried to make him understand that the Foreign Minister could not force an ally into accepting peace terms contrary to that ally’s interest. Had Lansdowne done so, “we would have broken our word.” But this did not mean Britain looked for a settlement so humiliating for the Tsar that it would amount to a military defeat. “If Russia is excluded from the Pacific she must seek an exit for her energies elsewhere—in Persia, Afghanistan, or in the Near East.”

“
Now, oh best beloved Springy,” Roosevelt replied, “don’t you think you go a little needlessly into heroics when you say that … ‘honor commands England to abstain from putting any pressure whatever on Japan to abstain from action which may eventually entail severe sacrifices on England’s part?’ ” He did not notice the French having any such shrinking scruples about
their
alliance with Russia, even though they had more to worry about in eastern Europe than the British in Asia Minor.

Knowing he could rely on Spring Rice’s discretion, he wrote that Lord Lansdowne and Prime Minister Balfour “ought to know” that it had been Japan, not any other power or person, that had first asked him to intervene in the crisis. Their precious ally, therefore, was probably in a less advantageous position than they imagined.

Roosevelt’s admiration for Japan had by now passed its peak. He was still
amazed that the little Island Empire had managed to humiliate Russia on land and sea, while actually increasing her exports and building up her industrial might. The very efficiency with which she had accomplished such miracles, however, made him wonder what future expansion Japan was capable of.
Eight years before, in a strategic question posed to planners at the Naval War College, he had written,
Japan makes demands on Hawaiian Islands. This country intervenes. What force will be necessary to uphold the intervention, and how should it be employed?
Now, he was even more convinced that the United States had to commission more warships, build them bigger, and launch them faster. Or what had happened at Tsu Shima might happen in Pearl Harbor—and not too far ahead, either:

The oracular tone of this “posterity letter,” addressed to Spring Rice, betrayed anger and embarrassment over an upsurge of anti-Japanese prejudice in California. Members of the state legislature had officially declared all immigrants from Japan to be “immoral, intemperate, [and] quarrelsome.” Roosevelt considered this resolution, passed unanimously, to be “in the worst possible taste.”
He was afraid that it might compromise his image as a neutral broker between what Ambassador Cassini was pleased to call the “white” and “yellow” parties to the peace conference.
He asked Lloyd Griscom to inform the Japanese Foreign Office that the vote in Sacramento did not represent American popular feeling.

HAPPILY, THE PRESIDENT
could rely on two more effective emissaries to communicate this message in a way certain to beguile Prime Minister Taro Katsura’s government. Alice, now twenty-one, and Taft were an odd couple to send halfway around the world on a steamer named, significantly enough,
the
Manchuria
. But her floaty-hatted, butterfly charm and the Secretary’s jovial purposefulness (as palpable, yet unbruising, as his embonpoint) had captivated huge crowds in Honolulu.

“FLOATY-HATTED, BUTTERFLY CHARM AND … JOVIAL PURPOSEFULNESS.”
Alice Roosevelt and William Howard Taft en route to Japan, 1905
(photo credit 24.1)

A complement of about thirty members of Congress and their wives, plus staff and servants, gave Taft’s party the air of a presidential delegation—which in fact it almost was. He insisted that his main purpose was to take the congressmen on a tour of the Philippines (putting paid, presumably, to any
lingering illusions they might have about the readiness of islanders for independence), but
Roosevelt had asked him to visit Japan first, for public as well as secret reasons.

Alice was by now an assured celebrity, inured to
the flare and smell of press photography, and incessant speculation about her romantic intentions.
She was, if anything, wilder than ever, smoking cigarettes whenever she felt like it, mastering the abdominal jiggles of the
hula
, and occasionally firing impromptu fusillades with her pocket revolver. Taft felt obliged to remind her that he was responsible to the President for her conduct abroad.

When they arrived in Tokyo on 25 July, Alice dazzled the Japanese to such an extent that the Congressional wives might just as well not have disembarked. For all her independent Western ways, she took to the local culture at once, lunching with the Mikado, posing prettily with Princesses Nashimoto and Migashi-Fushimi, and sitting cross-legged for hours without fatigue.

She was also present when Taft dined with Prime Minister Katsura, but had no idea that the two men were engaged in business that directly affected her father’s peacemaking.
On 27 July, they agreed on a “memorandum of conversation,” which Taft thought important enough to flash to the White House, in a cable of Brobdingnagian length.

Although the memorandum was only agreed
on
, not agreed
to
, it was plainly an informal declaration of intent regarding the security concerns of Japan in East Asia, and of the United States in the eastern Pacific. Since the conversation enjoyed executive privilege—Taft representing his President, Katsura his Emperor—legislators in neither country were required to ratify it, or even know about it. Unenforceable yet morally binding, friendly yet wary, its importance lay in its timing, just weeks before the presumed negotiation of a peace treaty that would recognize Japan as a power of the first rank. Taft wanted a statesman’s assurance that Hawaii and the Philippines would not be menaced in future years. Katsura wanted Korea.

As the Prime Minister observed, Korea had been “the direct cause” of the Russo-Japanese War. Japan was entitled to suzerainty over the peninsula as “the logical consequence” of her military successes.
Allowing Koreans to mismanage their destiny, as they had in the past, would merely invite further wars, or an indefinite extension of this one.

Regarding the Philippines—which Katsura understood was a subject of peculiar importance to Taft—Japan’s “only interest” would be to see the archipelago governed “by a strong and friendly nation like the United States.” If the word
like
conveyed a slight hint of ambiguity, Taft did not seem to notice it, so encouraged was he by the Prime Minister’s emphatic tone.

Taft said that, in his judgment, “President Roosevelt would concur” with Japan’s views on Korea. However, he cautioned that he had no authority to nullify the American-Korean protection treaty of 1882. The most he could do, if the Prime Minister needed further evidence of concurrence, would be to
communicate the substance of their conversation to Roosevelt and Elihu Root—who had just been sworn in as Secretary of State, and whom he felt some “delicacy” in supplanting.

“
If I have spoken too freely or inaccurately or unwittingly,” Taft wired Root afterward, “I know you can and will correct it.… Is there any objection?”

Roosevelt answered with two terse sentences.

As far as Roosevelt was concerned, Korea was better off as a Japanese colony than a Russian one, or even a Chinese one. And American interests were greatly enhanced. Unless Count Katsura was as big a liar as Count Cassini, he knew now that Japan would not take advantage of the fragility of the Philippines’ civil government. Hawaii, too, was safe. Japan’s postwar development of Korea should create another immigrant market, and slow the “yellow” influx that Californians were objecting to. Last, a gratified Japanese delegation to the peace conference must surely, now, listen to his pleas for magnanimity toward the Russians.

ALICE, UNAWARE OF
why Katsura smiled at her with such satisfaction, passed her five days in Tokyo in a daze half ecstatic and half erotic. Her philandering
idée fixe
, Congressman Nicholas Longworth, was a member of Taft’s party, and dancing with him on warm nights aboard ship had reduced her to a state of almost desperate lust. “Oh my heart my heart. I can’t bear it. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.… He will go off and do something with some horrible woman and it will kill me off.… Oh my blessed beloved one my Nick.” She kept reminding herself that he was bald and had a roll of fat at the back of his neck, but in vain; one moment alone with him in some dark corner, and she was again in raptures.

At a dinner entertainment at the Maple Club, she tapped Lloyd Griscom on the shoulder. “Do you see that old, bald-headed man scratching his ear over there?”

“Do you mean Nick Longworth?”

“Yes. Can you imagine any young girl marrying a fellow like that?”

Since her father had never once mentioned her mother to her, she had no way of knowing that Theodore Roosevelt had had a similar conversation, at a similar event, when he, too, had been twenty-one, despairingly in love with Alice Hathaway Lee. Her determination was as great now as his had been then.

“Why, Alice, you couldn’t find anybody nicer,” Griscom said.

On the night of 29 July, she stood with Taft on the balcony of Shimbashi station and waved good-bye.
Her last impression of Tokyo was a medley of thousands of paper lanterns, densely packed people, grinning—or snarling—teeth, and barking roars of
“Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”
The roars were interspersed with a chant that, so far as Alice could make out, meant, “Japan a thousand years, America a thousand years.”