The travelers left home on schedule, with Edith waving a handkerchief as their carriage descended the hill. Theodore waved back with his hat. Eleven-year-old Quentin, their youngest child, accompanied his father and brother to the Oyster Bay train station, where the travelers did combat with tearfulness. First they said farewell to the horse. Then Kermit, a boy-man of nineteen, boarded the train, slid into a window seat, and turned his wet face away from the other passengers. His father took cover in platitudes, reminding Quentin to be a good boy, a tactic that largely succeeded: the father’s eyes filled but did not spill. When the train started to roll and Quentin yelled, “Take good care of yourself, Pop,” Pop dammed another cascade by deploying a strategic cough and reaching for Kermit’s shoulder.
The minutiae of the good-byes were preserved by journalists parched for news of Theodore Roosevelt. After almost eight years of conversation with the newsmen who reported on the White House, he had cut them off on inauguration day, March 4, when the presidency passed to his friend William Howard Taft. As soon as the new president uttered the last word of his address, Roosevelt tendered his felicities-“God bless you, old man. It is a great state document”-gathered him up in a hug, then hurried to Union Station for a train to Oyster Bay. Detained in Washington by a blizzard, he avoided the newspapermen who came to the station in hopes of an interview. He wanted the day to be Taft’s.
Next morning, when reporters and photographers climbed Sagamore Hill to record Roosevelt’s first day out of office, he sent them away. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I do not wish you to think I am churlish. This seems like giving you the marble heart, but I have nothing to say and am not going to give interviews to anyone. Also I will not stand for any more photographs.”
Never? they asked.
“Not while I am a private citizen.”
Inquiring how long that might be, they were told, “As long as I can make it.”
However much Theodore Roosevelt might have wished that he wished that, he did not set out for Africa in the garb of a private citizen. He wore a gray-green military greatcoat trimmed with the black braid of his colonel’s rank, which he had earned as a Rough Rider in the Spanish-American War. The war had made him what he most longed to be, a hero, and the hero’s coat selected for the departure must have elated reporters fearing that their best story, one of the longest-running, most colorful serials in American history, had ended on March 4.
The story-by turns exhilarating, exasperating, amusing, and inspiring-had begun with an assassin’s bullet. On September 6, 1901, Leon Czolgosz, a neatly dressed young man with a snub-nosed revolver concealed in a handkerchief, shot President William McKinley in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Asked to explain himself, Czolgosz said he did not believe that one man should have so much and another man nothing. Eight days later, when McKinley died, Vice President Roosevelt was President Roosevelt.
The press chronicled the new president’s life in unprecedented detail for reasons entirely without mystery. Whether one loved or despised Theodore Roosevelt, he was electricity in the flesh. Forty-two when he took office, he was the youngest of the nation’s chief executives. He brought with him to the White House an appealing, pretty wife, just turned forty, and six rollicking children: a daughter born to him and his first wife, who died in childbirth, and four sons and a daughter from his marriage to Edith. The young president had fun, his family had fun, and the public had fun reading about all the fun. Photographed often and reported daily, the escapades of the Roosevelts gave Americans the pleasurable illusion that they knew the first family. No matter how far a citizen lived from Washington or the summer White House at Sagamore Hill, TR and Edith and Alice and Ted and Kermit and Ethel and Archie and Quentin seemed no more remote than the folks next door. The president, an extrovert’s extrovert, invited a familiarity that was unimaginable with McKinley, a man once well described as a bronze in search of a pedestal. Called “Teddy” and “TR” in the headlines, Roosevelt naturally became “Teddy” and “TR” to the populace. “TR” he liked and used occasionally as a signature. To intimates he was “Theodore.”
Alice Roosevelt, soon to be seen smoking cigarettes and roaring around the capital at the wheel of her runabout, seemed as newfangled and spunky as the century itself. When Archie carved his initials into a pew at Christ Episcopal Church in Oyster Bay, his parents learned about it from the newspapers. And the public was surely amused, as TR had been, by the news that the hammering and sawing of bleachers for Taft’s inaugural parade inspired Quentin to sing, “Hurrah, hurrah, father’s going to be hung.”
Out of office, TR said he wanted to be out of the papers. By disappearing into the African interior for a year, he meant to leave the presidential stage to Taft alone. He also meant to disarm the snipers, who, if he stayed, would either say that Taft was acting on Roosevelt’s orders or ignoring them. Wildly popular but not universally loved, TR knew that his departure caused jubilation among monopolists and stock market manipulators. Imagining their glee at his exit, he (along with J. P. Morgan) joked that “Wall Street expects every lion to do its duty.” His more dyspeptic critics feared that the lions would fail. “Mr. Roosevelt is to leave us for a while, and certainly the manner of his going is appropriate,” wrote one. “Shots will sound and blood will flow and his knife will find its living hilt. The scalps and skins of the kings of the jungle will dry upon his tent pegs,” and when he came home, he would resume his career as “the Dominant Note and the Big Noise.”
The train ride from Oyster Bay ended at Long Island City, on the East River. TR linked arms with Kermit and steered him through a cheering crowd to a Manhattan-bound ferry, which landed amid more cheers and blew a three-toot farewell to the hunters. They climbed into a waiting automobile and sped across Manhattan for a subway ride under the Hudson River to the piers of Hoboken, where they would board the SS Hamburg, a German liner headed for Naples. TR had never before traveled by subway (or airplane, although he had gone submarining for an afternoon), but the subway had figured in an inventive piece of patronage dispensed from his White House. In 1905, when Kermit gave his parents a copy of The Children of the Night, by Edwin Arlington Robinson, the president reviewed the book for The Outlook, a dignified journal of opinion. Robinson’s poems showed “a curious simplicity,” the critic thought, and “a little of the light that never was on land or sea.”
After persistent lobbying by Kermit, the president rescued Robinson from a dreary job in subway construction, giving him a sinecure with a salary of $2,000 a year at the U.S. Customs House in New York. The poet so rarely appeared at the office that he had to be reminded-tartly, one imagines-to pick up his pay. Such dereliction ought to have pained a president proud of chopping cords of deadwood from the civil service, but Roosevelt considered Robinson a special case, an expenditure made more for the good of American letters than for the shovel work of the Republic. Anyone could be a clerk, but only a poet could perceive the “silver loneliness” of night. If the Roosevelts spoke of Robinson during their subway ride, the conversation went unrecorded. TR spent the trip peering into the tunnel.
On the pier by nine o’clock, TR and Kermit spent most of the next two hours in a mob of three thousand well-wishers-Rough Riders, Harvard men, friends, and strangers. Unruffled by souvenir hunters clawing at the gilt buttons on his coat or by the jostling that knocked off his hat, TR managed to shake some five hundred hands. He called for the Rough Riders to raise their hands and plowed toward the ones he could see. Over the human din, an indefatigable brass band of Italian immigrants blared “The Star-Spangled Banner” followed by the Italian national anthem followed by “The Star-Spangled Banner” and so on. A lovely hubbub, and it might have continued for three thousand handshakes, but TR shut it off when a reporter asked if he would run for president again. “Good-bye,” he growled. His jaw snapped shut, and he stalked up the gangway.
Strangers often saw ferocity in his large, white teeth, a feature made so famous by cartoonists that small children sometimes confused him with the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.” Those who knew him understood that the bared teeth were benign. It was the snap of the jaw, startlingly loud, that signified his fury. The inquisitive reporter had insulted Roosevelt’s honor. His presidency had lasted seven and a half years, a dram short of the traditional full measure. The two-term limit had not yet been written into law, but it was a sacred American precept, laid down by George Washington himself. Declining a third term, Washington had warned that a president too long in power could easily become a tyrant.
When Roosevelt ran for president in 1904, after filling out McKinley’s term, he invited a crowd to the White House on election night to follow the returns coming in by telegraph. The moment he was certain he had won, he flabbergasted Edith and their guests by announcing that he would not use the technicality of the missing six months to justify a run for another term in 1908. “The wise custom which limits the president to two terms regards the substance and not the form,” he said. “Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.” Now, vacating the presidency just as he had said he would, Roosevelt wanted credit for voluntarily surrendering power he might well have kept.
But the reporter’s question was pertinent as well as impertinent, for Theodore Roosevelt was an artist of power. It was the medium through which he most fully expressed himself, and without power, he was going to be a Mozart shorn of music. A man more introspective than Roosevelt might have wondered why he had not fielded the question with his usual ease, but this man possessed little insight into his personal relationship with power and none into how he would fare without it. Aboard the Hamburg, TR headed for the starboard side of the upper promenade deck and Cabin 1, near the bow. There he visited with a handful of close friends and his sisters, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson and Anna Roosevelt Cowles, known in the family as Bamie. Taft had sent him a handsome gadget, a compact gold ruler with built-in pencil, inscribed with their names and Roosevelt’s customary words of farewell, “Good-bye-Good luck.” Taft had also sent a letter and a photograph of himself in the company of portraits of Lincoln and Washington. Roosevelt replied with two telegrams sending thanks, love, and good wishes.
