Colonel Roosevelt (79 page)

Just when Roosevelt was floating free of the Dúvida’s last rapids,
Wilson had gone before Congress to say that if such “annoyances” were to continue, they could burgeon into an outrage “of so gross and intolerable a sort as to lead directly and inevitably to armed conflict.” He asked for advance approval of any military action he might deem necessary to take.

This kind of personal appeal was something new in presidential politics. Roosevelt would never have gone to the Capitol, top hat in hand, to beg legislators for any indulgence whatsoever.
His
method had been to bombard them—and the press—with written messages that amounted to draft bills, ready to be signed into law. One such had featured what was now known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine:

Wilson at least seemed to have come to his senses on that score.
In a development straight out of the Corollary, he had acted to prevent the unloading, at the port of Vera Cruz, of a consignment of German arms ordered by Huerta. He was convinced that these weapons might be used against the United States, and had directed the seizure of the entire town. This the Marine Corps had proceeded to do, at the cost of nineteen American and two hundred Mexican lives.

Roosevelt had thrilled to the news of this
casus belli
when it reached him in Manáos. By the time he got home, however, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile had intervened as mediators, saving both Wilson and Huerta from a war that neither of them wanted.

FOR A WHILE AFTER
the Vera Cruz incident, Woodrow Wilson had looked sepulchral, his normally pale skin blanched to the color of parchment. “
I never went into battle, I never was under fire,” he admitted to a naval audience. “But I fancy there are some things just as hard to do as to go under fire.”

If any haggardness lingered as he sat making polite conversation with Roosevelt, it was due less to the burden of being commander in chief than
worry about his wife, critically ailing upstairs with Bright’s disease. Roosevelt, haggard himself, made a polite inquiry about her health. For the rest of the interview, he and the President were content to talk about books and his expedition (Roosevelt joking that British geographers doubted there was any such thing as the “River of Doubt”).

“H
IS FORTE WAS ABSTRACT, ANALYTICAL THOUGHT
.”
President Woodrow Wilson
.
(photo credit i17.1)

On the former subject, they had little to share. Wilson was not the sort of man to enjoy
Booth Tarkington’s
Penrod
, a novel for boys that Roosevelt was currently devouring. Nor, for that matter, was he likely to curl up with
Life-Histories of African Game Animals
,
the Colonel’s latest two-volume work of zoography. He had come to reading and writing late, after struggling with disabilities as a child, and when he did, his fields of interest had been as few as Roosevelt’s were many.

During their prepresidential careers (Wilson was almost two years older), they had both written histories and biographies that showed they understood the American dynamic—its geographical push westward, and the centripetal
forces that had worked against secession and defederalized the Constitution. But their respective attempts at a
magnum opus
—Roosevelt’s four-volume
The Winning of the West
, and Wilson’s five-volume
A History of the American People
—had nothing in common except the palpable ache of each author to be making history rather than writing it. Wilson had no gift for narrative, and absolutely no feel for the physical things Roosevelt reveled in: hunting, warfare, exploration, danger. He named no plants and heard no birds. Surprisingly, for a professor, he had been less willing than Roosevelt to scour archives and even attics for original documents. His forte was abstract, analytical thought, especially on governmental and legal issues. Questions of process and synthesis, the objective calculation of power balances (or imbalances, as in
Congressional Government
, his 1885 exposé of committee rule on Capitol Hill), and the logical resolution of conflicting ideas were the sort of cerebral challenges that delighted him. Roosevelt could no more have written Wilson’s
Division and Reunion
, about the polemics of the Civil War, than the President could have published
The Rough Riders
.

Had Wilson not been so formidably sure of himself, with his calm gray gaze and air of aloof command, he might well have been intimidated by the recovering invalid opposite him. Aside from the facts that Roosevelt had served two successful terms as president, and would now be serving a third, if the Republican Party had not been so hostile to progressive reform, there was the prodigality of his worldly experience to take into account. At least a cat’s quota of lives, and easy adaptation to environments as irreconcilable as Nahant, Nairobi, and the piranha pools of Brazil were embodied in the cheerful sunburned man who sat drinking the President’s lemonade.

When Roosevelt rose to go, Wilson escorted him to the north door of the White House and waved goodbye as he limped back to his automobile. A crowd of several hundred spectators had collected around it. “Hurrah for Teddy!” a young man yelled. “Hurrah for our next President!”

Roosevelt, grinning, took off his panama hat and bopped the youth’s head with it.

Afterward, Joseph Tumulty asked Wilson what he thought of the Colonel.

“
He is a great big boy,” Wilson said. “There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling. You can’t resist the man. I can easily understand why his followers are so fond of him.”

IT WAS STILL HOT
at 8:30
P.M.
, when Roosevelt arrived at the District of Columbia Convention Hall. The huge room was built over a street-level market, so a miasma of rotting vegetables saluted the nostrils of the four thousand people waiting to hear his lecture. Almost the entire membership of the National Geographic Society was present, in a show of solidarity against transatlantic
critics who were alleging that the Colonel had explored very little, and discovered nothing new, in Brazil. An editorial in the
Daily Graphic
had compared him to Baron Münchhausen as a fantasist of improbable adventures.

He came perspiring up the stairway, and was formally escorted into the hall by a group of geographers walking backward and applauding. The ovation was thunderous, especially when he took the stage and flashed his white-tile grin.
Veteran observers of the capital scene could not recall any former president since Ulysses S. Grant being more loudly cheered. Those more future-minded looked ahead to the possibility of Roosevelt challenging Wilson in 1916.

“ ‘H
URRAH FOR OUR NEXT PRESIDENT
!’ ”
A thinner Roosevelt revisits Washington, 19 May 1914
.
(photo credit i17.2)

“
I’m almost regretful to see you all here,” he joked. “I have got to make a rather dry speech.”

He proceeded, with the aid of a blackboard, a stereopticon screen, and three printed maps, to lecture learnedly on his expedition. “It is almost impossible for me to show you on these standard maps what I did, because the maps are so preposterously wrong. For instance, here are the headquarters of the Tapajoz de Juruena.…” To those in the audience who could think of Theodore Roosevelt only as a politician, the experience of seeing him, with
his strangely drawn face and eroded voice, assessing bottom-flow rates at 4,500 cubic meters per second in the seventh degree of southern latitude was so bizarre that he might have been an impersonator. George Cherrie, Leo Miller, Anthony Fiala, and Father Zahm were conversely reminded that the man they had huddled with in Mato Grosso hailstorms was not, after all, their intimate, but a public figure making arch reference to them as “exhibits A, B, C, and D.”

Again and again Roosevelt emphasized that he had not discovered the Dúvida, but had merely—with the professional assistance of Brazilian surveyors—“put it on the map.” He refrained from mentioning that the river now bore his name, and did not say that it had nearly killed him, except to admit that there had been times when life in camp “lacked a good deal of being undiluted pleasure.”

He was plainly exhausted afterward. But that did not prevent
a
pium
-like swarm of Congressional Progressives pursuing him to the Party headquarters and talking politics until it was time for him to take the midnight sleeper back to New York.

TWO WEEKS LATER
, in the kind of translocation only Roosevelt could find natural, he sat at lunch with the King and Queen of Spain in the fragrant garden of their summer palace outside Madrid. The guests of honor were Kermit and Belle Willard, who were due to be married twice over the next two days—first by a local magistrate at a civil ceremony, then in an Episcopalian service in the private chapel of the British Embassy, so as not to profane Spain’s Catholic orthodoxy. Belle’s father, Joseph E. Willard, was on hand in his capacity as the American ambassador, and Alice Longworth substituted for
Edith Roosevelt, who at fifty-three was suffering vague female ailments, and had declined to accompany her husband overseas.