A Treasury of Great American Scandals (11 page)

The frustration in Washington over McClellan's failure to give chase was growing daily. “It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass,” General Halleck remarked. “I have tried my best, but without success.” When McClellan complained that his cavalry force was too exhausted to move, Lincoln sent a reply dripping with acid: “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?” The president's stinging telegram made McClellan “mad as a March hare,” as he told his wife. “It was one of those dirty little flings that I can't get used to when they are not merited.” And yet he still did not move against the enemy.

President Lincoln, in a final effort to get the general off his rear, wrote McClellan that it was imperative that he overcome his chronic reluctance to fight once and for all. Was he not being overcautious when he assumed his army could not do what the enemy was constantly doing?—that is, moving—the president wondered. “Should you not claim to be his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?” The advance into Virginia that the president proposed “is all easy if our troops march as well as the enemy; and it is unmanly to say they can not do it.” McClellan got the message, or so it seemed, and began crossing the Potomac with the bulk of his army. But he wasn't happy about it and had to be continuously prodded by Washington.

“If you could know the mean & dirty character of the dispatches you would boil over with anger,” McClellan whined to his wife. “Whenever there is a chance of a wretched inuendo [
sic
]—there it comes. But the good of the country requires me to submit to all this from men whom I know to be greatly my inferiors socially, intellectually & morally! There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual [Lincoln] than that of the ‘Gorilla.' ”

Ignoring the “Gorilla”'s order to move swiftly to get between Lee and his destination of Richmond, McClellan instead proceeded with extreme caution, taking eleven days to cover the first thirty-five miles. It was no trouble at all for the Confederate army—who marched twice as fast, taking half the time—to cross McClellan's line of advance. Lincoln had seen it coming. “I began to fear he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy,” the president said later. “I saw how he could intercept the enemy on the way to Richmond. I determined to make that the test. If he let them get away, I would remove him.” And so he did. On November 5, 1862, General George B. McClellan, “the Young Napoleon,” got the boot.

When “Mush” Came to Shove

 

 

 

The friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft was not one of equals. Think of the coolest kid on the play-ground allowing the fat kid with no friends to tag along with him. Then imagine the cool kid's chagrin upon discovering the fat kid has a mind of his own and is no longer willing to play follow the leader. Such was the Roosevelt-Taft dynamic, and it resulted in a bitter breach.

Secretary of War Taft, having no real political base of his own, was content to serve President Roosevelt and unconditionally support his progressive agenda. His loyalty was rewarded when Roosevelt tapped him as his successor. The president had promised the nation that he would not seek a third term of office and needed a compliant replacement to carry on his policies. Taft, the amiable yes-man, seemed a natural choice. He was, said Henry Adams, “a fat mush,” apparently easy to manipulate. But appearances deceived.

The president had considered a number of potential successors before reluctantly settling on Taft. Having picked his replacement, Roosevelt went to work to ensure Taft's nomination at the Republican convention. His efforts were well rewarded. By the time the convention opened on June 16, 1908, Taft already had 563 delegates, considerably more than the 491 needed to nominate. But despite the numbers, there was someone else the conventioneers wanted more than Taft—Roosevelt himself. The mere mention of his name brought about thunderous cheers and a chant of “Four, four, four years more!” Taft's worried supporters ordered the band to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but it wasn't enough to stifle the spontaneous demonstration. It went on for forty-nine minutes as Roosevelt listened in on the telephone from the White House with obvious glee. He was “in as gay a humor as I have ever seen him,” observed his aide, Archie Butt.

Over at the War Department, meanwhile, Taft's ambitious wife, Helen, listening to the same demonstration, was decidedly less pleased. She was downright irritated, in fact, convinced that the president was actually going to allow himself to be nominated again. The cheers for Roosevelt stopped only when Henry Cabot Lodge announced to the delegates that the president's decision not to run a third time was “final and irrevocable. . . . Anyone who attempts to use his name as a candidate for the presidency impugns both him and his good faith.”

The next day, Helen Taft listened tensely as her husband was nominated. A rather contrived and feeble cheer followed. “I only want it to last more than forty-nine minutes,” she said of the demonstration. “I want to get even for the scare that Roosevelt cheer . . . gave me yesterday.” Alas, despite the best efforts of Taft's campaign managers to keep it going, the applause petered out after only twenty-five minutes.

Roosevelt pronounced himself “
dee-
lighted!” with Taft's nomination, and though he did not actively campaign for him (in an era when it was considered unseemly for a president to do so), he was an avid supporter from the sidelines as well as a virtual dispensary of advice. There were lots of things to remember, the president told Taft, but above all, “you big, generous, high-minded fellow, you must
always
smile, for your nature shines out so transparently when you smile.” Though Taft was a plodding, unenthusiastic campaigner—he hated “buttering people up” and being “exposed to all sorts of criticism and curious inquisitiveness”—he did what he had to do. And he kept with the progressive Roosevelt program. “I agree heartily and earnestly with the policies which have become known as the Roosevelt policies,” he declared.

After a decisive win over the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, President-elect Taft told a crowd that his administration would be a “worthy successor to that of Theodore Roosevelt.” But William Howard Taft was no Theodore Roosevelt. He was far more conservative. “With his reverence for legalisms,” writes Nathan Miller in his biography of Roosevelt, “[Taft] believed a president should be less of an activist and should observe the law more strictly than Roosevelt had done.” That the man Roosevelt believed to be his political clone should show himself otherwise shattered a friendship and opened in its place a fierce political rivalry.

The breach grew slowly at first. In a letter to Roosevelt, President-elect Taft wrote, “You and my brother Charley made that possible which in all probability would not have occurred otherwise.” Roosevelt was stunned to read his efforts on Taft's behalf mentioned in the same sentence as Taft's deep-pocketed brother, as if they were comparable. It was like saying, Roosevelt later observed, that “Abraham Lincoln and the bond seller Jay Cooke saved the Union.”

Taft's cabinet announcements were a further blow. Before the election, he had indicated that he would keep any member of Roosevelt's cabinet who wished to stay. “Tell the boys I have been working with that I want to continue with all of them,” he had said. But after his election, Taft decided that the cabinet would be more loyal to the outgoing president, and was determined to replace them with his own people. Roosevelt, who was planning an extended African safari after leaving office, accepted the decision with equanimity, although underneath he was surprised and hurt. “Ha ha!” he wrote jovially to Taft at the end of the year. “
You
are making up your Cabinet.
I
in a lighthearted way have spent the morning testing the rifles for my African trip. Life has its compensations.”

The apparent good cheer masked Roosevelt's growing apprehensions about his successor. “He's all right,” the president said to a newsman during his last day in office. “He means well and he'll do his best. But he's weak. They'll get around him.” To emphasize the point, Roosevelt pushed his weight against the newsman's shoulder. “They'll—they'll lean against him.” Roosevelt was already disillusioned by some of Taft's emerging policies, and the tension between the two friends was obvious as they prepared to change places. “It can be truthfully said,” wrote White House chief usher Ike Hoover, “that there has seldom been such bitterness between an incoming and outgoing administration. This applies to the entire families.”

Poor weather forced the inauguration of William Howard Taft inside the Capitol, a dreary foreboding of what was to come in the new administration. Taft simply lacked the Roosevelt magic. Certainly he was decent and honest, but he was lazy
¹¹
and almost entirely devoid of his predecessor's political acumen and appeal. In allying himself with the conservative Old Guard in Congress, particularly Speaker of the House “Uncle Joe” Cannon, he alienated Roosevelt's progressive Republicans, or Insurgents, as they were called. Everyone in the Republican party wanted a piece of the new president, and Taft was ill-equipped to deal with them. He was, said Senator Jonathan Dolliver of Iowa, “a ponderous and amiable man completely surrounded by men who know exactly what they want.” And his presidency was failing, hampered by Taft's inability to steer his own ship.

News of Taft's problems reached Roosevelt in Africa, distressing the former president who had placed so much faith in him. Particularly galling was Taft's handling of conservation, an area most dear to Roosevelt. The new president replaced Roosevelt's Interior secretary, James Garfield, with Richard A. Ballinger, a man known to favor the rapid exploitation of the nation's resources, and demanded the resignation of Gifford Pinchot, chief of the Forestry Service and a disciple of Roosevelt's conservation policies.

“I cannot believe it,” Roosevelt wrote Pinchot from Africa. “I do not know any man in public life who has rendered quite the same service you have rendered.” In a follow-up letter, Roosevelt emphasized that it would be “a very ungracious thing for an ex-President to criticize his successor; and yet I cannot as an honest man cease to battle for the principles [for] which you and I and Jim [Garfield] . . . and the rest of our associates stood.” The Pinchot dismissal, in short, was another wedge driven between the new president and the old.

Shortly after returning home from his African trek and subsequent tour of Europe, Roosevelt received a letter from Taft. “It is now a year and three months since I assumed office,” the president wrote, “and I have had a hard time—I do not know that I have had harder luck than other Presidents, but I do know that thus far I have succeeded far less than others. I have been conscientiously trying to carry out your policies but my method of doing so has not worked smoothly.” Taft at least got that right, even if he significantly understated his plight. The Insurgents were in open rebellion. Roosevelt responded to Taft's letter, noting that he was “much concerned about some of the things I see and am told; but what I felt it best to do was to say absolutely nothing—and indeed to keep my mind open as I keep my mouth shut!”

Roosevelt had intended to stay far away from politics upon his return to the United States, but he was greeted with an emerging movement by Pinchot and other Insurgents to split from Taft and the conservative Republicans and form a third party with Roosevelt as the leader. “Back from Elba,” became the rallying cry. But Roosevelt was not prepared to take this drastic a step, considering it political suicide as well as an opening for the Democrats to take the White House in 1912. He warned Pinchot to ease up on President Taft as he would most likely be the Republican candidate. “Taft has passed his nadir,” he wrote, “and independently of outside pressure he will try to act with greater firmness, and to look at things more from . . . the interests of the people, and less from the standpoint of a technical lawyer.” It was almost as if Roosevelt was trying to convince himself.

The former president had good cause to wish for Taft's success. He was, after all, directly responsible for his being in the White House. Taft's failure would be his failure. But all the wishes in the world could not alter Roosevelt's ultimate realization that his man was a flop and the major cause of a broken Republican party. “Taft is utterly hopeless,” he said to a friend. “I think he would be beaten if nominated [in 1912], but in any event it would be a misfortune to have him in the president's chair for another term, for he has shown himself an entirely unfit President.” The time had come, Roosevelt reluctantly concluded, to answer the call of the Insurgents and run again.

“My hat is in the ring!” the former president proclaimed in February 1912. “The fight is on and I am stripped to the buff.” It was a brutal match, with the two former friends battering one another mercilessly. Roosevelt called his successor a “fathead” with “brains less than a guinea pig.” Taft labled his onetime benefactor a “dangerous egotist” and “demagogue.” “In every announcement he makes you would think he was the whole show,” Taft taunted at one rally. “It is ‘I, I, I.' If you feed that vanity and that egotism by giving him something Washington did not get, Jefferson did not get, and Grant could not get [meaning a third term], you are going to put him in office with a sense of his power that will be dangerous for this country.”

Roosevelt's enormous popularity showed itself when he beat the president in nine state primaries, including Taft's home state of Ohio, and won 278 delegates to the incumbent's 48. Yet despite the popular will, the conservative Republicans, who controlled the party machinery, rammed through Taft's nomination at the convention in Chicago. Roosevelt's supporters, charging “fraud,” “robbery,” and “naked theft,” stormed out of the convention, met with Roosevelt, and convinced him to run on an independent ticket. “If you wish me to make the fight, I will make it,” Roosevelt declared at a rally of the newly formed Progressive, or “Bull Moose”
¹²
Party, “even if only one state should support me.”