Theodore Rex (92 page)

Around midnight, Loeb was awakened by the sound of footfalls scrunching in the drifts outside. Roosevelt’s bunk was empty. Fresh snow was falling outside the cabin’s open door. Not for several moments did Loeb make out the pajama-clad figure of the President of the United States walking barefoot to and fro in the whiteness, with Skip clasped in his arms.

Incredulous, Loeb called out. Roosevelt stopped and turned. “Is that you, Billy?”

Loeb could see that he was completely disoriented with Cuban fever. The President allowed himself to be led back inside, but held fast to Skip. Loeb silently prodded Lambert awake.
They treated Roosevelt with lemon juice, calomel, and quinine, then tucked him into bed like a child, the dog still close to his chest.

The next morning at eight, he was dressed and ready for breakfast. He looked seedy, but talked for an hour about the Japanese proposal, as if not quite sure how to respond. Certainly he did not intend to come running back. He dictated a telegram for Loeb to send Taft from Glenwood Springs:

A spell of bad weather set in.
Roosevelt spent the next few days recovering from his malaria and reading Pierre de La Gorce’s
Histoire du Second Empire
. Jules Jusserand, who understood better than anyone else in Washington that the key to the President’s heart was his mind, had made sure that he packed all seven volumes, along with Albert J. M. de Rocca’s
Mémoires sur la guerre des Français en Espagne
.

Roosevelt read at less than his usual breakneck speed, hampered by rusty French and the occlusion of his left eye. In the process, he pondered every word, and was “
struck by certain essential similarities in political human nature, whether in an Empire or a Republic, cis-Atlantic or trans-Atlantic.”

This was not quite the reaction Jusserand had hoped for. It was altogether too large-minded for a President whose sympathy France needed in Morocco and the Far East.
At least, though, Roosevelt was not reading Clausewitz, or samurai sagas, or Ieronim Pavlovich Taburno’s
Pravda o Voine
.

WHAT NONE OF THE
diplomats appreciated, as they obeyed their instructions, was Theodore Roosevelt’s lifelong obsession with balance. He loved the poised spin of the big globe in his office, the rhythm of
neither-nor
sentences,
the give-and-take of boxing, the ebb and flow of political power play. His initial tilt in the Russo-Japanese War
(“Banzai!
How the fur will fly when Nogi joins Oyama!”) had straightened like the needle of a stepped-off scale. He instinctively sought neutrality now, as more and more potentates yielded to parochial fears: the Tsar of defeat and deposition, the Mikado of impoverishment, the Kaiser of encirclement, King Edward VII of invasion, Sultan Abd al-Aziz of serfdom, Delcassé an end to
la glorie de la France
—not to mention whatever Korea’s impotent Emperor and China’s aged Empress must be feeling.

“THE KEY TO THE PRESIDENT’S HEART WAS HIS MIND.”
Roosevelt reading with Skip in Colorado, May 1905
(photo credit 23.2)

Although Roosevelt had plainly been irresponsible in heading west at such a time, his isolation had the effect of making him seem all the more “above”
the fray, eminently desirable as a peacemaker. And in
remaining
aloof, at least for a while longer, he kept all parties guessing as to how he would proceed.

ROOSEVELT HAD BEEN
interested to discover, after killing his third black bear, that “
in her stomach … there were buds of rose-bushes.” His task now was to corner the biggest bear of his career, badly worried by yellow hounds, and bring forth the flowers of peace. He had already tried, and failed, to do so through George von Lengerke Meyer,
his new ambassador to St. Petersburg.
Meyer had managed to see Nicholas II and present an offer of mediation worded almost as delicately as Hay’s earlier murmurings to Takahira. But Tsarina Alexandra had monitored the interview, and Nicholas, cowed by her fierce stare, had changed the subject without committing himself.

The Tsarina’s problem with peace was a
double
loss of face for Russia, if her husband was seen as suing for peace out of weakness. Not only would Japan look like an external victor, but Russia’s peace party, dominated by the formidable Count Sergei Witte, would gain great power within the Empire. And there was always the imponderable of revolutionary discontent, seething among intellectuals and the peasantry.

“
Did you ever know anything more pitiable than the condition of the Russian despotism in this year of grace?” Roosevelt wrote Hay. “The Tsar is a preposterous little creature as the absolute autocrat of 150,000,000 people. He is unable to make war, and he is now unable to make peace.”

The only Russian left who might still effectively make both was Admiral Rozhdestvenski. His fleet was stronger than Japan’s, and Roosevelt noted that France had given him a base in Eastern waters. But in the coming battle, “
my own belief is that Japanese superiority in morale and training will more than offset this.”

A steady succession of snowstorms and blizzards made Roosevelt rather regret his self-enforced sojourn on New Castle Mountain. On 6 May, he was at last free to descend to Glenwood Springs. He subsequently recorded in “A Colorado Bear Hunt,” his first piece of published nature writing as President,

ROOSEVELT’S SOJOURN IN
the mountains had understandably caught the attention of the popular press. Humorists such as the poet Wallace Irwin made the most of it—noting that Dr. Lambert had been invited along as much for his camera as for his company:

The fact that an urgent telegram had been delivered by William Loeb was also noted. But Roosevelt so adroitly concealed its content that the message was thought to be about further mischief-making by Cipriano Castro:

Irwin did not doubt, therefore, that the President had decided to return home early to “spank” a Latin American republic, as lustily as he had done in 1903. This misperception suited Roosevelt’s purposes. The longer the press
thought he was concerned only with Monroe Doctrine matters (Santo Domingo would prove to be the first test of his Corollary),
the better he could secretly answer the biggest challenge of his career.

THE BATTLE OF
Tsu Shima on 27 May 1905 was the greatest naval engagement since Trafalgar. Russia’s Baltic Fleet was annihilated in a holocaust of two thousand shells per minute. Japan sank twenty-two Russian ships, including four new battleships, and captured seven others. She lost only three torpedo boats in the process, and killed four thousand men. Admiral Rozhdestvenski was taken prisoner. The Tsar’s humiliation was complete. Only his limitless supply of military manpower, and the nearly eight thousand miles separating Tokyo from St. Petersburg, served to protect the Romanoff dynasty from rout.

Roosevelt was awed by how decisively Japan had proved herself “
a civilized, modern power”—civilization, to him, being synonymous with strength.
Although he confessed to Cecil Spring Rice that he loathed the Tsarist form of government, he felt a deep sympathy for ordinary Russians and their culture, so much more congenial to him than that of Nippon. If this culture was to survive Tsu Shima, and not regress into some dark age of the Russian soul, Nicholas II must be coaxed at once into the peace process.