Theodore Rex (43 page)

South of the corridor, the three smaller state parlors had been relined with silks and velvets, but they kept their traditional color schemes, at Roosevelt’s command. A pair of exquisitely carved Empire-style mantels adorned the Green and Red Rooms. The Blue Room in between was stiff with corded silk. Two new silver-knobbed side doors allowed for a speedier flow of handshakers past the President at receptions.

The most Rooseveltian—and least authentic—of McKim’s restorations was the State Dining Room. Almost two thirds larger than the old, with seating for more than one hundred guests, it was oak-paneled and mahogany-furnished, the chairs padded with tapestry. A disgruntled-looking moose, and some dozen other North American game mammals, stared glassily out from the walls, bracing for years of presidential monologues.

Roosevelt, marching through, did not affect any aesthetic rapture. Subtlety, balance, refinement of line, harmonies of color and texture escaped his
eye, as music bypassed his ears. To him, game heads were not decorative statements so much as reassuring tokens that he was
(pace
Mississippi!) a mighty hunter. Gentlemen of his class—McKim included—felt at home dining beneath tusks and antlers, ensconced in oiled wood. Even effete little Henry Adams liked this room.

Breeding, however, saved Roosevelt from the pretensions of the
nouveau riche
. Having deaccessioned the china hen, he felt no urge to replace it with a Japanese miniature tree, or a collection of Bavarian steins. He was too much of a professional himself to venture any amateur design suggestions. Indeed, his only mild criticism was that here and there McKim had not been austere enough.

Upstairs, Edith Roosevelt had fewer scruples. Fortunately, her fondness for brown-and-green upholstery, and pink-and-green garlanded curtains, left intact the structural grand plan. Two big new bedrooms where the executive suite used to be increased the White House’s total of domestic apartments to seven. Now that Kermit had followed Ted to Groton, there was plenty of room for houseguests. The oval library had been turned into an elegant parlor, suitable for the entertainment of fashionable ladies. Next door, the former Cabinet Room became Roosevelt’s writing “den,” with leather chairs, a deep fireplace, and yards of books. Knowing her husband’s love of all things nautical, Edith set an old desk carved from the timbers of HMS
Resolute
in the center of the room. Here, late at night, after she had gone to bed, he could work on the final draft of his Second Annual Message.

THE DOCUMENT WAS
half the length of its predecessor and clearly the work of a cautious Chief Executive. Roosevelt had little to say on matters of domestic policy, except to demand a special fund for antitrust prosecutions, and to insert the word
urgent
into his repeat request for a Department of Commerce. He took a peaceable survey of international affairs, noting that
the United States and Mexico had just become the first powers to submit a legal dispute to The Hague.

“
As civilization grows,” he wrote, “warfare becomes less and less the normal condition of foreign relations.” Yet he could not resist pointing out a corollary responsibility for the strong to maintain order. “More and more the increasing interdependence and complexity of international political and economic relations render it incumbent on all civilized and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the world.”

By this he did not mean to threaten well-behaved Latin American nations. On the contrary, they could look for protection against European aggression, under guarantee of the Monroe Doctrine. The Western Hemisphere was secure. “There is not a cloud on the horizon at present … not the slightest chance of trouble with a foreign power.”

With these bland words, Theodore Roosevelt revealed—or, rather, further concealed—an unguessed aspect of his character; namely, that of
the covert diplomat practicing Louis XV’s
secret du roi
.
Foreign policy was, he acknowledged, “the subject on which I feel deepest.” The very depth of his feeling convinced him that negotiations, in times of crisis, should be private and verbal, hence undocumented.

He had a far-flung network of intermediaries and informants, men of diplomatic or intellectual or social stamp, by no means all Americans. Most of them were globe-trotting friends from prepresidential days, such as Cecil Spring Rice of Berlin, Constantinople, and St. Petersburg; Henry White,
chargé d’affaires
at the American Embassy in London; and Arthur Hamilton Lee, a Tory member of the British Parliament. Their urbane, literate reports kept him up to date with court affairs and privileged gossip. As members of the
secret
, they were able to negotiate without paper, and keep agreements quiet, protecting the sensitivities of parties. They in turn could trust Roosevelt’s absolute discretion.

Not until after he left the White House would he reveal, confidentially, that in late 1902 “the United States was on the verge of war with Germany.” Even then, his allusions to “the Venezuela business” were to be cryptic and contradictory, enough for a generation of historians to call him a liar. Seven decades had to pass before cohering bits of evidence suggested that the basic facts of the story were accurate, and that Roosevelt had remained silent about it in order to spare the dignity of an emperor.

The full extent of the crisis would have to be inferred circumstantially, from an extraordinary void in the archives of three nations—deletion after deletion hinting at some vanished enormity, a painted-out battle of Titans visible in
pentimento
through layers of pale wash.

ROOSEVELT HAD SEEN
the crisis coming for eleven months. It involved a familiar situation: failure by a Latin American republic to repay European loans. Venezuela, bled white by civil war and corruption, owed some sixty-two million bolivars to an impatient consortium headed by Great Britain and Germany.
These powers, acting in unlikely alliance, were now proposing to blockade Venezuela with a multinational armada until Caracas paid up. Both nations had scrupulously assured the United States that they were interested in debt collection only, and had no desire to establish footholds in the Western Hemisphere.

The President sympathized with their frustration.
Ever the stern moralist, he blamed Cipriano Castro,
caudillo
of Venezuela, for ignoring honorable obligations. The fact that Castro was only five feet tall, and simian in appearance, confirmed his general prejudice against Latin Americans as political primates, low in the pantheon of nations. To evolve, they must be taught
responsible behavior. Or as he robustly advised a contemporary houseguest, the German diplomat Speck von Sternburg: “If any South American country misbehaves toward any European country, let the European country spank it.”

Baron von Sternburg, about to return to Berlin, was a charter member of the
secret du roi
. British-born and-educated, married to a pretty blonde from Kentucky, he had known Roosevelt since 1889. He understood that uninhibited private language did not necessarily translate into policy. However, this was no longer the young Civil Service Commissioner blustering away at the Cosmos Club. This was the President of the United States, dominating a new, austere White House that gave off a chilly radiance of power.

When Roosevelt condoned the “spanking” of New World republics, then, one had to remember a significant qualifier in his First Annual Message:
“provided that punishment does not take the form of acquisition of territory by any non-American power.”

Current Anglo-German assurances of benign intent suggested that this qualifier was being heeded. Roosevelt believed, at least, what Britain said. The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty amounted to a guarantee that King Edward’s government had no designs on the Western Hemisphere. But
a secret memorandum from Rear Admiral Henry Clay Taylor, Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, warned that Germany was otherwise inclined. Taylor wrote that the Kaiser’s navy would bombard Venezuela within weeks if President Castro resisted the blockade. She would then “certainly demand indemnity for her expenses.” But Castro had no money. Thus, in logical steps:

    §Venezuela … could offer nothing but territory, or mortgage her revenue in such a way as to place herself in complete political dependence on Germany.

§The United States could not allow either of these, and yet Germany’s right to indemnity would be incontestable.

§The only courses open to the United States [would then be] payment of the indemnity, taking such security as she can from Venezuela, or war.

    “
The first method,” Taylor concluded, “is cheapest, the second most probable.”

His argument had crude force. Roosevelt was saddened by the whole situation. “I have a hearty and genuine liking for the Germans, both individually and as a nation.” His identification with German culture was deep and strong, dating back to his days as a teenage student in Dresden. German blood flowed in his veins. He could recite long passages of the
Nibelungenlied
by heart; Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck rated among his personal heroes.

Part of him welcomed the idea of German capital investment in Latin
America, on the ground that countries such as Venezuela would benefit from development by a superior civilization. Another part of him agreed with Taylor that Germany wanted more than dividends in the New World. There was an ominous sentence in her proposal to cosponsor the blockade: “We would consider the temporary occupation on our part of different Venezuelan harbor places and the levying of duties in those places.”

The adjective
temporary
reminded him that in 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II had “temporarily” acquired Kiauchow, China, on a lease that had somehow lengthened to ninety-nine years. Germany’s well-known shortage of
Lebensraum
—in Spring Rice’s phrase, its “curbed feeling”—translated into an explosive need for new horizons. Burgeoning yet hemmed in, the Reich had to feed a million new mouths a year, and market a gross national product that was doubling every decade. Its army was already the most formidable in the world; now it was building a huge new navy. This combination of social, economic, and strategic aggrandizement, to a President who had recently reread Theodor Mommsen’s
History of Rome
, portended the rise of a new, militaristic imperium in Europe, just as the sun was beginning to set on British South Africa.

What better place to establish a collection house today, a colony tomorrow, than lush, crippled Venezuela? Spring Rice and von Sternburg had given Roosevelt, over the years, a shrewd
idea of the
Weltpolitik
of Germany’s militarist ruling class. Expansionists such as Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow regarded the Monroe Doctrine as an insult, at best a hollow threat. Alfred von Tirpitz, Secretary of State for Naval Affairs, made no secret of his desire to establish naval bases in Brazil (where three hundred thousand Germans lived already), and in the Dutch Caribbean islands.

Germany, therefore, stood isolated in Roosevelt’s sights as he braced himself for the shock of foreign aggression in South America. He could not guess that at even deeper levels of secrecy, Wilhelmstrasse strategists were working on a plan for the possible invasion of the United States. The plan called for Tirpitz to dispatch his fleet to the Azores at the first signal of transatlantic hostilities. From that point, the fleet would steam south and take “Puerteriko,” then launch surprise attacks along the American seaboard. A likely landing place was Gardiners Bay, on Long Island—which meant that when German troops advanced on New York City, they would march right past Roosevelt’s house.