Theodore Rex (89 page)

As if in earnest of that spirit, the little meteorological balloons continued to rise for the rest of the year, shining and swelling and bursting.

MARGUERITE CASSINI HAD
just dressed in satin and chinchilla for a ball on 2 January 1905 when she came across her father in the vestibule of the Russian Embassy. His hands held a batch of telegrams, and were shaking. “Go back upstairs and take off those clothes!” he growled at her. “You’re going nowhere tonight. Port Arthur has been surrendered!”

The Ambassador’s choler concealed, perhaps, his embarrassment at having first heard about the surrender a few hours earlier, during the White
House New Year’s reception. John Hay had discreetly murmured the news before Theodore Roosevelt trumpeted it to other diplomats. Only a lifetime’s training in court politesse had enabled Cassini to move on, and greet Minister Takahira as if nothing had happened.

While Europe reacted in shock—Roosevelt’s ten-month certainty that Japan would win the war had been shared by only the French—rumors ran along Embassy Row that the United States would press for a peace settlement. Hay denied them all.
Rheumatic, perpetually coughing, seizing every chance to stay in bed, the Secretary had lost his appetite for hard work.
More and more since the election, Roosevelt was taking the controls, and accelerating the pace, of foreign policy.

Hay had been Secretary of State for six years now. Working with characteristic quietness and dedication—qualities that had endeared him in youth to Lincoln—he had built a series of agreements and alignments that peacefully buttressed the United States against the rivalries of Europe, Central Asia, and the Far East. The current Anglo-American rapprochement was largely his, as was the Open Door in China, and the reaffirmed Alaskan boundary, and the Paris and Panama Canal Treaties. He brought a high moral tone to the often mendacious business of diplomacy, without compromising any of his country’s commercial interests.
All that remained for him to complete his life’s work (for he knew himself to be dying) was to negotiate a peace in Manchuria that would keep the Open Door ajar and save Russia from revolution.

However, Count Cassini seemed confident that the Tsar’s endless military reserves would humble Japan sooner or later. Those twenty-four thousand troops lost at Port Arthur were as replaceable as grapes in the Trubetskoy vineyard.
The Russian Baltic Fleet was on its way around the world to wreak revenge on Admiral Togo. But Cassini may have been merely posturing; before the war, he had seemed to favor a peaceful Russian foreign policy, especially
vis-à-vis
China. As Hay reminded Roosevelt, “
dealing with people to whom mendacity is a science is no easy thing.”

All
he
knew in January 1905 was that if the belligerents did not soon agree to a cease-fire, his heart would give out in the attempt to negotiate one. Along with all his Cabinet colleagues, Hay had handed in his resignation. But this was a formality, returning to Roosevelt the power of appointment—or reappointment. The Secretary could only hope against hope that he would not be needed in the new Administration.

Politely disapproving, he stood by as two junior members of the
secret du roi
arrived from overseas for White House consultations. One was the President’s Harvard classmate Baron Kentaro Kaneko, and
the other his former best man, Cecil Spring Rice, still attached to the British Embassy in St. Petersburg.

MEANWHILE, HENRY ADAMS
tried again and again to plot the power curve of 1901 through 1904, and relate it to force fields other than
Roosevelt’s personality. He wanted to include his Dynamic Theory of History in an intellectual memoir he had begun to write, provisionally entitled “The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity.” Adams figured that he would need about two years to finish the book, which he would then publish privately, in a limited edition, for members of his immediate circle. John Hay would be the first to see it—if Hay lived long enough—and of course the President must get a copy, too.

What would Roosevelt make of Adams’s Roosevelt, the godlike perpetrator of “pure act”? Insofar as he
was
pure act, he might be amused but not particularly interested. The President was not a speculative, nor a spiritual man. He was in too much of a hurry to make the world over, today or preferably yesterday, to care what Adams (or for that matter Hay) might think of him. They were both of them sixty-six; he twenty years younger. “
With him wielding unmeasured power with immeasurable energy in the White House,” Adams wrote, “the relation of age to youth—of teacher to pupil—was altogether out of place; and no other was possible.”

Unless, of course, one continued one’s own education by watching the sometimes disorientating spectacle of youth in flight from the past. Roosevelt’s
Energetik
, his dirigible ability to change course at a moment’s notice, his tendency to write exuberant
O
s in the air, made Adams doubt his own trail across “
the darkening prairie of education.” To a historian born in 1838, “
always and everywhere the Complex had been true and the Contradiction certain.” Here was Roosevelt trumpeting either- or banalities, lecturing intellectuals as though they were children, and yet repeatedly prevailing in the most intricate political situations. Might the President’s simplicity be that of an
idiot savant
who instinctively understood how Complexity worked, even to the point of using Contradiction to generate extra energy? If so, he was certainly not simplistic. He was, on the contrary, formidable: twentieth-century in his eager embrace of Chaos, eighteenth-century in his utter self-certainty. To Roosevelt, as to Kant, “
Truth was the essence of the ‘I.’ ”

ANOTHER HENRY WHO
had long observed Roosevelt with bemusement visited the White House that January and was taken aback by its new splendor and protocol. Henry James attended the annual Diplomatic Reception, not inappropriately, as America’s most distinguished expatriate writer. Like Adams before him, he was swept upstairs afterward for “supper” in a sea of velvet-and-gold lace uniforms and found himself sitting one dowager away from Roosevelt.

“
The President is distinctly tending—or trying—to make a ‘court,’ ” he wrote later. Yet he could not help being flattered at his placement above so
many representatives of empires. Elsewhere, at a point hardly less privileged, next to Mrs. Roosevelt, sat the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Democracy still reigned at the heart of the Republic; art mattered here as much as politics.

“
Theodore Rex,” James allowed, “is at any rate a really extraordinary creature for native intensity, veracity, and
bonhomie
—he plays his part with the best will in the world and I recognize his amusing likability.”

THE IMAGINATION MUST
be given not wings but weights
. Francis Bacon’s dogged dictum, which Adams had so long thought salutary, seemed negated by this new century with its young men impatient of gravity and its young powers—America, Japan, Germany—pushing back the borders of old empires. The only constant now was change. Here was Roosevelt, whose main responsibilities were to keep the United States safe and solvent, collaring Capital and Labor in either hand and splicing oceans more than one thousand miles south of Key West.
Here was Arthur Balfour, at last report the Prime Minister of Great Britain, embracing a New Theory of Matter, and informing the world that all of human history, “down to say, five years ago,” was nothing but an illusion. Here was Kaiser “Willy” suddenly facing west, and leaving “Nicky,” his poor little
crétin
cousin, to face Red revolution at home and Yellow Peril in the Far East.

Adams belonged to the minority of Washington intellectuals that dreaded a Japanese victory. Russia was, he acknowledged, a moribund empire, but at least its crown and its army held the peasants at bay, not to mention the new Mongols crowding Port Arthur. If the Tsar was deposed, “
I foresee something like a huge Balkan extending from Warsaw to Vladivostok; an anarchy tempered with murders.”
Nearer home, France—Russia’s ally—could become vulnerable to German imperialism. Hay’s attitude was frustratingly ambivalent: while aware of the ruin Russia’s defeat would visit upon his Open Door policy, he nevertheless worked for Theodore Roosevelt, and the President’s proclamation of neutrality compelled him to be discreet.

What tormented Adams was the possibility that Roosevelt’s electoral triumph—which the world had gasped at—might persuade one or the other power to ask the President to mediate a peace settlement. Surely the Virgin, if she still had any say in world affairs, would allow Hay that final honor.

BOTH KANEKO AND
Spring Rice made social calls on the ailing Secretary of State. They were politely vague about their conversations with the President, Kaneko saying only that Roosevelt kept insisting that Japan should not be “exorbitant” in her demands for a price to end the war. The Baron was in no
hurry to return home, and hinted at the possibility of “important news” from his government in the spring.