Colonel Roosevelt (78 page)

Helmet in hand, looking thin and spent, Roosevelt listened patiently as Rondon read an extensive summary of what they had achieved together. The subsequent ritual was anticlimactic, being a repetition of the one already conducted more than a month before.
The dedicatee seemed less moved by it than by having to say goodbye to Rondon and Lyra.

“R
OOSEVELT HAD TO BRACE HIMSELF TO STAND THROUGH THE LONG CEREMONY
.”
From right of the flag-draped marker: two
camaradas,
the two colonels
,
Lt. Lyra, Cherrie, Kermit, unidentified Brazilian officer
.
(photo credit i16.2)

WHEN THE AMERICAN PARTY
awoke on Wednesday morning (Roosevelt lying face downward because of the agony of his latest abscess) they found themselves cruising down the Rio Madeira aboard the SS
Cidade de Manáos
. “The throbbing of her engines seems good to us,” wrote Cherrie. “She is a fast boat and is carrying us rapidly toward the Amazon.”

In their sleep, they had been delivered from a river no longer mysterious, but known, every kilometer of it recorded in ink, and some paid for in blood.
Roosevelt’s estimate, subject to official verification, was that they had explored 1,500 kilometers, or nearly one thousand miles, of a watercourse longer than the Rhine—or in his preferred phrase, “the largest unknown river in the world.” That more than fulfilled the hope he had expressed to Ethel five
months before, that his expedition would represent “
some small achievement of worth.”

At 2:30
P.M
. the Amazon manifested itself, so sluggishly that it failed to impress. It looked like a muddy lake, flooded to immobility by the rainy season just ended.
Roosevelt did not have the energy to include a description of it in his latest sheaf of manuscript, entitled “Down an Unknown River.” For weeks he had been unable to eat more than a few spoonfuls of solid food; now he was living on nothing but eggs and milk. Either because he was too weak to exercise his habitual circumspection about personal matters, or because his relief at having survived was so strong, he permitted himself an unusual degree of sentimentality in bringing the manuscript to an end:

Roosevelt did not know it, but Rondon had discreetly timed his arrival in Manáos for the small hours of Thursday, 30 April. This was to spare him the embarrassment of having many people see him carried down the gangway in a prone position. Even so, a reception committee was on hand, and he had to endure its welcome. A luxurious private “palacette” was provided him, courtesy of the governor of Amazonas. A sack of family mail awaited. Kermit, ecstatic, stayed up the rest of the night reading letters from Belle.

“
Father about the same, but much more cheerful,” he noted in his diary.

Arrangements were made to ferry them the rest of the way down the Amazon on a cargo boat, along with Cherrie, Miller, and forty-eight tons of freshly harvested nuts. Such was the power of Roosevelt’s name that a British Booth Line steamship, the
Aidan
, was standing by at Belém do Para, ready to take him directly to New York.

Before leaving Manáos on the first day of May, he had his rear abscess lanced. This procedure left him still unable to walk, and he was taken aboard the cargo boat on a stretcher. The subsequent river voyage took four days. He spent all of it in the captain’s cabin, writing letters to his family and friends. One note was addressed to Arthur Lee in London. It showed that Roosevelt’s spirit was still strong, leaping ahead to future activity:

HE WAS PROFOUNDLY
affected, on reaching Belém, to find that Rondon had somehow contrived to beat him there. The little Brazilian wanted to make sure he got off safely.

They each needed self-control for this second farewell.

“
I hope and pray that you will visit my country,” Roosevelt said.

“I will do so,” Rondon replied, “when I can help you be reelected President of the United States.”

THE FIRST PUBLISHED DESCRIPTIONS
of Theodore Roosevelt returning to New York on 19 May 1914—haggard, malaria-yellow, limping on a cane, his belt hauled in six inches—were graphic enough to persuade political observers in Washington that he was now, in more ways than one, a spent force.
He claimed that he had put back twenty of the fifty-five pounds he had lost on his journey into hell (“I don’t look like a sick man, do I?”), but word went around that he had suffered a relapse of fever before disembarking from the
Aidan
. When a private yacht transferred him to Oyster Bay, he had needed two helpers to climb the slope of the beach below Sagamore Hill.

Consequently, the Colonel’s energetic demeanor only a week later, when he marched into Woodrow Wilson’s White House, took reporters by surprise. His gray suit hung slack, and his collar stood away from his neck. But the cane was gone and he was as ebullient as ever as he recognized some familiar faces—including that of Jimmy Sloan, the veteran secret service agent.

The President had heard he was coming to town to address the National Geographic Society on 26 May, and had invited him to lunch. Roosevelt was as wary of getting cozy with Wilson as with Taft, four years earlier, and had pleaded a late train journey. This enabled him to get away with a mere courtesy call.

At three o’clock he was shown into the Red Room, where his host was waiting. It was a freakishly hot afternoon, so Wilson suggested a glass of lemonade on the southern portico. For the next half hour the two men were able to take stock of each other, in a conversation that avoided politics.

THEY
WERE NOT STRANGERS
, having been distantly acquainted since 1896, when Roosevelt was a police commissioner of New York City and Wilson a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton. As later chance would have it,
Wilson had been in Buffalo at the time of Roosevelt’s emergency inauguration as President, and had visited him after the ceremony to pay his respects. Now their positions were reversed.

Roosevelt had always breezily been inclined to like Wilson, as part of his general bonhomie toward everybody until they crossed him. Wilson’s attitude was ambivalent. He admired the Rough Rider’s exuberant activism and envied his popularity, but had been alarmed to see him elevated to supreme power. “
What is going to become of us with that mountebank in charge?” Soon, however, he had been compelled to admit that Roosevelt was “larger” than most Americans realized, “a very interesting and a very strong man.”

When Wilson became president of Princeton in 1902, Roosevelt had congratulated him for exemplifying “that kind of productive scholarship which tends to statesmanship.” Wilson had early on detected those same qualities in himself, along with “latent powers of oratory.” But as he became more and more a candidate for office, and less and less an academic, his misgivings about Roosevelt returned. “I am told that he no sooner thinks than he talks, which is a miracle not wholly in accord with an educational theory of forming an opinion.”

Roosevelt’s reciprocal attitude of incurious goodwill had begun to change in 1911, when he saw Wilson’s political fortunes rising in contrast to his own. It irritated him to see an academic, peace-minded intellectual—exactly the kind of “dialectician” he had always despised—achieving reform after progressive reform as governor of New Jersey, then, as his Democratic opponent in 1912, coolly poaching most of the tenets of New Nationalism and adapting them as the New Freedom. Now here was Wilson, serene after a year in the White House, taking so many steps forward and back with regard to Mexico that wags were talking of a new dance—the “Wilson Tango.”

Wilson had at first pursued a paradoxical policy of refusing to recognize the assertive populist government of General Huerta, on the ground that it had seized power by bloody means. He resented having to choose between either of Huerta’s more capital-friendly rivals, Venustiano Carranza and Emiliano Zapata, saying that “
morality and not expediency” should be the code of American conduct abroad: “It is a very perilous thing to determine the foreign policy of a nation in terms of material interest.” This distanced him from William Howard Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy, but he had come to realize that other powers were profiting from his unwillingness to do business with
Huerta.
So he had lifted an embargo, imposed by the Taft administration, on the shipment of arms to Carranza and Pancho Villa. Enraged, Mexican authorities had stepped up their harassment of Americans south of the border.