Colonel Roosevelt (81 page)

FIVE MINUTES AFTER
being left alone on deck, Roosevelt was felled by a violent attack of malaria. He remained feverish, on and off, for the next forty-eight hours. At one point, his temperature rocketed to 105°F, higher than it had been in Brazil. Then suddenly he was better. But he found his voice was now weaker than ever, and reiterated to reporters on board that he would not be a campaigner for any office in the fall.
T. R. OFF STUMP
,
The Washington Post
headlined, on receiving the news by wire.

If Woodrow Wilson inferred from this that the nonpartisan politesse Roosevelt had displayed, over lemonade in late May, was going to become the keynote of his retirement, a letter from Ambassador Page made clear that the Colonel had lost none of his fighting spirit. “
When Roosevelt was here,” Page wrote, “he told a friend of his that he was going home [to] rip the Administration to shreds for its many sins and many kinds of inefficiencies and he mentioned the ‘dead failure in Mexico.’ ”

Actually, Roosevelt was more bothered by what he considered to be an insult on the part of William Jennings Bryan’s State Department to the most glorious achievement of his presidency. In six weeks or so, the gates of the Panama Canal would be opened to world commerce. Bryan had chosen to herald the event by signing a treaty with Colombia that expressed “sincere regret” for the conduct of the United States in 1903, when President
Roosevelt
had rejected the Colombian Congress’s demand for a surcharge of $5 million on the transfer of its land rights in Panama, and encouraged the Panamanian Revolution. Bryan now proposed to pay Colombia a compensatory $25 million.
Roosevelt angrily insisted, in an interview with James T. Du Bois, a retired diplomat aboard the
Imperator
, that the revolution was right and proper. For fifty years before, Panama had been trying to opt out of the Colombian federation, to which it bore about as much geographical relation as Cuba did to the United States. “I simply lifted my foot!”

Du Bois was still reeling when the ship got to New York late on the evening of 24 June. “
If anybody thinks the ex-President is a sick man,” he remarked, “I would advise him to get into a conversation with him on a subject in which he is interested for two hours and he will entirely change his mind.”

BEFORE PROCEEDING TO
Oyster Bay on a friend’s private yacht, Roosevelt put out a two-thousand-word press release. It more than fulfilled Page’s prediction that he was not going to mince his language in criticizing the administration:

He reviewed at length, in tones of righteous indignation, the slippery negotiations by which Colombia had persuaded the United States to commit to a canal across Panama rather than Nicaragua, then tried to “blackmail” Uncle Sam—first by more than doubling its own agreed-on sales price, then by threatening to confiscate the construction rights that the State Department had separately arranged to buy from a French company for $40 million.

He went on to indict the President’s Mexican policy, which he described as “a course wavering between peace and war, exquisitely designed to combine the disadvantages of both, and feebly tending first toward one and then toward the other.” One of Wilson’s occasional “spasms of understanding” had been to realize that allowing weapons and munitions to flow unhindered into Mexico would encourage countries supportive of Huerta, such as Germany, to gain a strategic foothold there. So Wilson, abandoning all pretense of neutrality, had resorted to sudden, irrational violence at Vera Cruz.

In doing so, he had sacrificed nineteen more American lives than Roosevelt had done in
his
Central American adventure of eleven years before. Which made it all the more grotesque that Secretary Bryan now sought to appease Bogotá for the sin of interventionism. The Colonel’s belittling images—
figure of fun, mushy amiability, wavering, feebly tending, spasms of understanding
—were effectively chosen. Wilson’s foreign policy had indeed been marked by vacillations and overreactions puzzling to anyone unaware that he and Bryan saw the world through evangelical spectacles. They regarded showy potentates, whether kings or corrupt power-grabbers like Huerta, with such contempt that they were ready to run guns in order to extend the reach of Christian democracy.

“
We have gone down to Mexico to serve mankind if we can find a way,” the President said, rhetorically including the American people in his pilgrim’s progress.

ROOSEVELT’S HOPE WAS THAT
, by making a patriotic issue of the indemnity treaty, he could encourage Republicans and Progressives in the Senate to reject it. And since he was, in spite of himself, getting involved in politics again, what to do about the partisan division that he had caused in 1912? The Progressive Party had weakened badly since then, and so had he—not only physically but in terms of separatist will. Although he could never forgive Elihu Root and the other “thieves” who (he still believed) had stolen his renomination, he remained in his heart a Republican. He longed to see Progressivism lose its capital
p
, and become once again the liberal conscience of Abraham Lincoln’s party. Unfortunately, that was unlikely to happen as long as Old Guard relics like Boss Barnes of New York and Senator Penrose of Pennsylvania remained in control of the RNC.

He had just settled in at Sagamore Hill when William Draper Lewis, who was running for governor in Penrose’s home state, came to remind him that he had promised to speak in Pittsburgh on the last day of the month. The event was to be a double one, kicking off not only Lewis’s campaign but also
a run for the U.S. Senate by Gifford Pinchot. It was to take place in Exposition Hall, so Roosevelt could not cite the doctor’s order he had received in London
against speaking out of doors. He felt bound, in any case, to make a few carefully scripted appearances on behalf of candidates who had once campaigned for him.

Edith was sufficiently concerned about her husband’s fever attacks to demand that he submit to a complete medical examination before he did any more politicking. Dr. Alexander Lambert told him that his spleen was enlarged and that he was suffering from a “loss of vitality” ascribable to malaria. If he did not have at least four months’ complete rest, his ill health might well become chronic. “
You may expect to spend the rest of your days tied to a chair.”

Roosevelt allowed the diagnosis, if not the warning, to be leaked to the newspapers. It worried the millions of ordinary Americans who had always regarded “Teddy” as indestructible. When he showed up at Christ Church in Oyster Bay on Sunday, 28 June, an old villager reached out in sympathy.

“
Oh! I guess I’m all right,” Roosevelt said, taking his hand and shaking it. “All I need is a little rest.”

ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND
was equally dismissive of a bullet wound he received that same day in Sarajevo, Bosnia. “
Es ist nichts,
” he said as he bled to death in his open automobile. “It is nothing.”

His assassination—and that of his pregnant wife, shot in the seat beside him—was, on the contrary, everything that Gavrilo Princip could wish for: a double blow to the jugular and abdomen of the heir to the Habsburg dynasty that had abused Balkan Slavs for so long. The nineteen-year-old student, a Bosnian recruited by Serbia’s Black Hand terrorist movement, could not believe his luck. He had been standing on Franzjosefstrasse, bareheaded in the early summer sunshine, depressed over the failure of a comrade, Nedeljko Čabrinović, to kill the royal couple with a grenade earlier in the day. Then he saw their open-top car take a wrong turn off Appel Quay and pass right by him. The lethal logistics that seem to operate at such moments had transformed error into opportunity. Two point-blank targets presented themselves, and Princip’s gun did what it was designed to do.

BY THE TIME
Roosevelt came downstairs for breakfast at 8:30 on Monday, the atrocity in the Balkans was front-page news across the United States. English-language headlines were not as large as they might be, considering their import: the words
SERBIA
,
BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA
, and, for that matter,
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
had yet to become commonplaces of American reporting. European envoys in Washington, however, were under no illusions as to the gravity of the crisis touched off by Princip’s bullet.

Apparently, Franz Ferdinand had crossed the Danube into Bosnia in order to witness an exercise by two corps of the Austrian army—staged with the obvious intent of cowing local unrest. Had he any awareness that he was entering a land of long memories, he might have chosen a day other than the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, when a single Serb had gone behind the Turkish lines and knifed Sultan Murad I to death.

Teenage boys, Princip and Čabrinović could hardly have been aware of the full range of ironies, historical, cultural, and strategic, impinging on the archuke’s visit. Franzjosefstrasse, the thoroughfare into which his driver had accidentally turned—thronged with tarboosh-wearing Muslims, bulging with Russian Orthodox domes, and bearing the name of an octogenarian Austrian Catholic—was in itself symbolic of the combustible elements that had long threatened an explosion in the Balkans. By killing Franz Ferdinand in such a place, at a moment when both Austria and Germany were spoiling for war against the East, the conspirators had acted with more lethal consequences than they knew.