The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (151 page)

Inside the house a telephone shrilled. While Fisk answered it, Roosevelt stood in the sun chatting to one or two companions. Then Fisk appeared at the door and beckoned him in wordlessly. To the puzzlement of other people on the lawn, the door was locked as soon as the Vice-President had stepped through it. Keys were heard turning in all the other doors in the house, and volunteer guards stood at the windows. They would answer no questions as to what was being discussed on the telephone. Yet somehow a realization swept through the crowd that the President had been shot, perhaps killed.

Meanwhile Roosevelt had put down the receiver and was addressing the house company. “Gentlemen, I am afraid that there is little ground for hope that the report is untrue. It comes now from two sources and appears to be authentic.” He gave them the facts. A young anarchist had approached the President in Buffalo’s Temple of Music with a handkerchief wrapped around his right hand. McKinley, thinking it a bandage, had reached to shake his left hand, whereupon a revolver concealed in the handkerchief blasted two
bullets into the President’s breast and belly. He was now undergoing exploratory surgery, and the assailant, whose name was Leon Czolgosz, had been apprehended. “Don’t let them hurt him,” McKinley had murmured before lapsing into deep shock.
⁷

While Senator Redfield Proctor apprised the crowd of the details, Roosevelt and his aides left immediately for Buffalo.

McKinley’s condition next morning, Saturday, 7 September, gave encouragement to his attending physicians. The breast wound was no more than a gash on the ribs, but the abdominal penetration was deep and serious. Both walls of the stomach had been torn open; the bullet was buried somewhere irretrievable. The most dangerous threat was of gangrene; however there were no visible signs of sepsis.
⁸

McKinley was a man of strong constitution, and he rallied amazingly over the weekend. By Tuesday, 10 September, his condition was so improved that Roosevelt (who had comported himself with extraordinary dignity and concern throughout) was told he no longer need remain at the presidential bedside. In fact it would be best, from the point of view of publicity, if he quit Buffalo altogether.
⁹

The Vice-President left that afternoon for a short vacation in the Adirondacks, where Edith and the children were waiting for him in a mountain cabin.

H
E COULD NOT HAVE CHOSEN
a destination more likely to reassure the American people that the national crisis was over, and that his services would not be required in some dread emergency. The cabin stood at Camp Tahawus, “the most remote human habitation in the Empire State,” on the slopes of Mount Marcy, highest peak in the Adirondacks. Half a century before, Tahawus had been a little mining community; now, thanks to the enterprise of Roosevelt’s wealthy friend and fellow conservationist James McNaughton, it had been transformed into a luxury resort for hunters, fishermen, and climbers.
¹⁰

On arrival at the camp Roosevelt stopped at Tahawus Club, the old village lodging-house, and arranged for two ranger guides to
accompany him on an ascent of the mountain, beginning on 12 September.
¹¹
This done, he went on up the slope to his cabin in the trees.

By nightfall on the twelfth, Roosevelt and his climbing party, consisting of Edith, Kermit, ten-year-old Ethel, a governess, James McNaughton, three other friends, and the two rangers, were at Lake Colden, altitude 3,500 feet, where they spent the night in two cabins. The next morning, Friday the thirteenth, was cold and gray: an impenetrable drizzle screened off the mountain above them, and the women and children elected to return to Tahawus. But Roosevelt, who could never resist the highest peak in any neighborhood, in any weather, exhorted his elder male companions to continue climbing with him. Leaving one guide to escort the downward party, he ordered the other to lead his own up into the mists. At about nine o’clock they set off along the cold, slippery trail.
¹²

A
T 11:52 A.M
. R
OOSEVELT
found himself on a great flat rock, gazing out (could he but see it!) across the whole of New York State. Rolling fog obscured everything but nearer grass and shrubs, yet the sense of being the highest man for hundreds of miles around, cherished by all instinctive climbers, was no doubt pleasing to him. As if in further reward, the clouds unexpectedly parted, sunshine poured down on his head, and for a few minutes a world of trees and mountains and sparkling water lay all around, stretching to infinity.
¹³

Roosevelt was not a reflective man, nor was he prone now in his early middle age (he would be forty-three in six weeks’ time) to long for the past as much as he used to. But the news of President McKinley’s accident, and the unavoidable horrid thrill of being, if only for a few hours, the likely next President of the United States, seems to have temporarily awakened his youthful tendency to nostalgia. Writing to Jacob Riis a few days before, he had said that “a shadow” had fallen across his path, separating him from “those youthful days” which he would never see again.
¹⁴

Here, if ever, was an opportunity to look around him at all these lower hills, and to think of the hills he had himself climbed in life. Pilatus as a boy; Katahdin as an underclassman; Chestnut Hill as a
young lover; the Matterhorn in the ecstasy of honeymoon; the Big Horns in Wyoming, with their bugling elks; the Capitol Hill in Albany, that freezing January night when he first entered politics; Sagamore Hill, his own fertile fortress, full of his children and crowned with triumphant antlers; the Hill in Washington where he twice laid out John Wanamaker; that lowest yet loftiest of hills in Cuba, where like King Olaf on Smalsor Horn he planted his shield; now this. Would he ever rise any higher? Or was McKinley’s recovery a sign that the final peak he had so long sought would after all be denied him?

Mists rolled in again, and Roosevelt descended five hundred feet to a little lake named Tear-of-the-Clouds, where his party unpacked lunch. It was about 1:25 in the afternoon.
¹⁵

As he ate his sandwiches he saw below him in the trees a ranger approaching, running, clutching the yellow slip of a telegram.
¹⁶
Instinctively, he knew what message the man was bringing.

B
EFORE LISTING THOSE WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED
in various ways to the writing of this biography, I must single out a few names for special mention. Dr. John Allen Gable, Executive Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, minutely scrutinized my manuscript, corrected errors of fact and judgment, and made no attempt to influence my interpretations of TR’s character—beyond constructing some logical arguments which I was free to accept or reject. In most cases I accepted them. Those which I rejected are nevertheless so valid that I have incorporated them in my Chapter Notes. My debt to Dr. Gable is large.

So, too, is my debt to Joseph Kanon, who honed the manuscript with the elegant precision of a born editor. To Carleton Putnam, a man I have never met, I express gratitude and admiration for his
Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years
(Scribner’s, 1958), an essential source for students of TR’s youth. It is a tragedy of American biography that this grave, neglected masterpiece was never followed by other volumes. Peggy Brooks and Ann Elmo were the first to suggest, on the basis of a few articles and a screenplay, that I should write a book about TR; if the result bulks somewhat larger than the “short” work they envisioned, my thanks to them have increased proportionately.

I also thank the following, in alphabetical order: John Alsop of Avon, Connecticut, for permission to study his valuable collection of Roosevelt and Robinson papers, now transferred to Harvard;
Georges Borchardt, my agent; John C. Broderick, Chief of Manuscripts at the Library of Congress; the Hon. Alan Clark, M.P., of Saltwood Castle, Kent; Mr. Sheffield Cowles for reminiscences of his uncle TR; Barbara Dailey for hospitality to a starving, snowbound researcher in the Great Blizzard of February 1978; Wallace Dailey for his amazingly efficient work as Curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard, not to mention his performances of Bach after hours; the late Mrs. Ethel Roosevelt Derby, TR’s younger daughter; the European-American Bank, for not blanching at the sight of the word “Writer” on a loan application form; John J. Geoghegan, my publisher, for his patience and generosity; Kathleen Jacklin, Archivist of the Cornell University Libraries; Peter Lacey,
artiorum patronus;
Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, TR’s elder daughter, for contributing many bright fragments of memory to the mosaic of my Prologue; Linda and Noel Rae, for the use of a peaceful house in the country; Larry Remele, Historian/Editor of North Dakota’s excellent State Historical Society; Mr. Archibald Roosevelt, son of TR, for uncannily and unconsciously recreating TR’s smile for me; Mrs. Philip Roosevelt for showing me letters by and about Alice Lee; Mr. and Mrs. P. James Roosevelt for encouragement, advice, and hospitality; Gary Roth, Curator of Sagamore Hill National Historical Site; Guy St. Clair of the Union League Club; James Terleph, for a psychological critique of my earlier chapters; Angus Wilson for tolerantly answering yet another letter about Rudyard Kipling; and Mitchell York, a highly capable editorial assistant.

Finally I would like to invoke the name of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who composed the most inspiring of literary aphorisms, “Every word that you write is a blow that smites the Devil.”

T
HIS BIBLIOGRAPHY LISTS ONLY THE MAJOR SOURCES
of information and quotations in
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
. The abbreviations preceding each item will be used in the Chapter Notes below. Unpublished sources are coded in capitals, published sources in combined capitals and lower case. Thus ADA. signifies Henry Adams in manuscript, and Ada. Henry Adams in print. All other sources, including dissertations, documents, periodical articles, and minor books, will be cited in full when they first appear in the Chapter Notes. Listings are alphabetical by surname except for Theodore Roosevelt, who appears throughout as TR.