The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (117 page)

Such criticism, of course, was only to be expected from “white-livered” expatriates, and Roosevelt took no notice of James’s remarks, if he even bothered to read them. From now on he would pour out a swelling flood of patriotic speeches and articles, aided by such other expansionists as Mahan, Brooks Adams, and Albert Shaw, until the last remaining dikes of isolationism burst under the pressure.
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T
HE
N
AVY
D
EPARTMENT’S
new war plan was ready on 30 June, three days before Secretary Long returned from vacation. Roosevelt had no authority to approve it, but it was a document that gladdened his eyes nevertheless. All the more aggressive features of the earlier plans had been restored, and the weaker ones eliminated; in addition there were some new, flagrantly expansionist proposals which proved prophetic to a degree.
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In brief, the plan postulated a war with Spain for the liberation of Cuba. Hostilities would take place mainly in the Caribbean, but the U.S. Navy would also attack the Philippines, and even the Mediterranean shores of Europe, if necessary. The Caribbean strategy called for a naval blockade of Cuba, combined with invasion by a small Army force. No permanent occupation of Cuba was suggested, but the plan proceeded to discuss the Philippines, in tones hardly calculated to reassure Republican Conservatives: “we could probably have a controlling voice, as to what should become of the islands when a final settlement [with Filipino rebels] was made.”
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R
OOSEVELT’S
M
ETROPOLITAN
C
LUB CIRCLE
widened in the early days of summer to include two new associates—Captain Leonard Wood, the President’s Assistant Attending Surgeon, and Commodore George Dewey, president of the Board of Inspection and Survey. He met the former at a dinner party early in June.
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When he met the latter is not known, but the name “Dewey”
appears in his correspondence for the first time on 28 June.
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Both men were to play major roles in his life, and he in theirs.

Wood was a doctor by profession and a soldier by choice; he excelled in both capacities. His looks were noble, his physical presence splendid as a Viking’s.
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Tall, fair, lithe, and powerfully muscled, he walked with the slightly pigeon-toed stride of a born athlete, and was forever compulsively kicking a football around an empty lot, the leather thudding nearly flat as he drove it against the wall.

Roosevelt, who as Civil Service Commissioner had won fame as the most strenuous pedestrian in Washington,
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was impressed to discover that this newcomer could outpace and outclimb him with no signs of fatigue. “He walked me off my legs,” the Assistant Secretary told Lodge, with some surprise.
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Ever the boy, he hero-worshiped Wood (although the doctor was two years his junior) as a fighter of Apaches and a vanquisher of Geronimo. Wood’s personality was clear, forceful, honest, and unassuming. Best of all, he was an ardent expansionist, and could not stop talking about Cuba as a wound on the national conscience. Roosevelt decided that this quiet, charming man with excellent military connections (Wood was married to the niece of U.S. Army Commanding General Nelson A. Miles) must needs be cultivated.

Little old Commodore Dewey was a total contrast.
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Nut-brown, wiry, and vain, he was in his sixtieth year when Roosevelt befriended him, but the size of his personal ambition was in inverse proportion to his age and height. Over three decades of undistinguished peacetime service had not quenched his lust for battle, kindled as a lieutenant under Farragut in the Civil War. Now, with retirement only three years off, Dewey was forced to accept the fact that glory might never be his.
⁶⁰
Yet the Commodore still bore himself with fierce pride, immaculate in tailored uniform and polished, high-instepped boots. He was without doubt the smartest dresser in the Navy. “It was said of him,” wrote one reporter, “that the creases of his trousers were as well-defined as his views on naval warfare.”
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With his beaky nose and restless, caged strut, Dewey looked like a resplendent killer falcon, ready to bite through wire, if necessary, to get at a likely prey.

The Commodore had attracted Roosevelt’s admiring attention as long ago as the Chilean crisis of 1891, when he voluntarily
bought coal for his ship instead of waiting for official battle orders.
⁶²
Any officer whose instinct was to stoke up
before
a crisis—at his own expense—could be trusted in wartime. Like Wood, Dewey was a dedicated expansionist,
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lunching and dining daily at the Metropolitan Club; like Wood, he was a man of action rather than thought. Roosevelt began to muse ways of giving him command of the Asiatic Squadron when Rear-Admiral Fred V. McNair retired later in the year.
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In the meantime, their friendship ripened. Often, on a sunny afternoon after work, they could be seen riding in Rock Creek Park together.
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A
T THE BEGINNING OF
J
ULY
it was the Assistant Secretary’s turn to take a brief vacation. He headed north for a reunion with Edith—pregnant, now, with his sixth child. Distracted as he was with naval affairs and plans for the coming war (whose certainty he never questioned), Roosevelt allowed himself ten days of quiet domesticity at Oyster Bay. The white marble city on the Potomac was all very well, he told Bamie, but “permanently, nothing could be lovelier than Sagamore.”
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And nothing could be more satisfying than to see his own progeny growing sturdy and sunburned in his own fields. Roosevelt confessed to Cecil Spring Rice that “the diminishing rate of increase” in America’s population worried him in contrast to the fecundity of the Slav. Looking around Sagamore Hill, he gave thanks that his own family, at least, had shown valor in “the warfare of the cradle.” With various cousins who had come to stay, there were “sixteen small Roosevelts” in his house.
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Edith, watching him crawling through tunnels in the hay-barn in pursuit of squealing boys and girls, was inclined to put the number one higher.

The eldest cousin was a good-looking lad of fifteen from Groton, named Franklin. He had been invited to Oyster Bay earlier in the year, after a lecture by Roosevelt to his schoolmates on life as a Police Commissioner of New York City. The talk, which kept the boys in stitches of laughter, impressed young Franklin as “splendid.” From this summer on he deliberately modeled his career on
that of “Cousin Theodore,” whom he would always describe as the greatest man he ever knew.
⁶⁸

On 11 July, Roosevelt enjoyed one of the privileges of his new job by cruising from Oyster Bay to Newport in a torpedo-boat.
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The swiftness and responsiveness of the little vessel delighted him. “Like riding a high-mettled horse,” he wrote. He did not, like some critics, find its thin-shelled vulnerability a tactical disadvantage: “with these torpedo boats … frailty is part of the very essence of their being.”
⁷⁰
Such comments suggest that Roosevelt was not altogether a landlubber, although in general he did prefer the abstract flow of arrows on paper to the heaving, splashing realities of naval movement.

After witnessing some trials at Newport he set off for a tour of the Great Lakes Naval Militia stations in Mackinac, Detroit, Chicago, and Sandusky.
⁷¹
His speech to the latter establishment, on 23 July, contained a violent reply to Japan’s protest against the annexation of Hawaii. “The United States,” Roosevelt thundered, “is not in a position which requires her to ask Japan, or any other foreign Power, what territory it shall or shall not acquire.” The
Tribune
called his outburst a “distinct impropriety” and suggested that he “leave to the Department of State the declaration of the foreign policy of this government.”
⁷²

John D. Long, who was a man of delicate nervous constitution,
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had barely recovered from his subordinate’s previous speech to the Naval War College before the news from Sandusky came in. “The headlines … nearly threw the Secretary into a fit,” Roosevelt told Lodge, “and he gave me as heavy a wigging as his invariable courtesy and kindness would permit.”
⁷⁴

Abject apologies smoothed the incident over, but Long must have had some scruples about putting Roosevelt in charge of the Department through Labor Day as planned. However the need to resume his vacation was paramount, and on 2 August, Roosevelt found himself installed as “the hot weather Secretary.”
⁷⁵

H
E NOW ENTERED UPON
one of those periods of near-incredible industry which always characterized his assumption of new responsibility
—whether it be the management of a ranch, the researching of a book, or, as in this case, the administration of the most difficult department in the United States Government.
⁷⁶
Quite apart from its complex structure, with seven bureaus issuing streams of documents on such subjects as naval law, steam engineering, diplomacy, finance, strategy, education, science, astronomy, and hydrography, there was the huge extra dimension of the Navy itself—a proud, hierarchical institution, traditionally resistant to change and contemptuous of civilian authority.
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The multiple task of reconciling the various bureaus with one another, and the department with the fleet, while simultaneously dealing with Congress, the White House, the press, and countless industrial contractors was enough to frustrate anybody but a Roosevelt. “I perfectly revel in this work,” he exulted to Long. For the first time in his life he had real power in full measure. As Acting Secretary he was answerable only to his chief and President McKinley, both of whom were away from town for at least six weeks. Praying that the latter would come back a few days before the former—since he wished to have a private talk with him—Roosevelt abandoned himself to the drug of hyperactivity. “I am having immense fun running the Navy,” he told Bellamy Storer on 19 August.
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