The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey Read online

  Then, in a voice that filled the auditorium, Theodore Roosevelt launched into the last great campaign speech of his political career: “Friends, perhaps once in a generation, perhaps not so often, there comes a chance for the people of a country to play their part wisely and fearlessly in some great battle of the age-long warfare for human rights.” He still had the old percussive rhythm, exploding his “p”s and “b”s with vigor, but his tone had lost the violence and his words the bitterness of the past. He did not attack his opponents—the coolly academic Wilson or the genial Taft. Instead, he talked in broad terms about character, moral strength, compassion, and responsibility. “We do not set greed against greed or hatred against hatred,” he thundered. “Our creed is one that bids us to be just to all, to feel sympathy for all, and to strive for an understanding of the needs of all. Our purpose is to smite down wrong.”

  To the people in the hall, and to millions of Americans, Roosevelt was a hero, a leader, an icon. But even as he stood on the stage at Madison Square Garden, he knew that in six days he would lose not only the election but also this bright, unblinking spotlight. He would be reviled by many and then ignored by all, and that would be the worst death he could imagine.

  “I know the American people,” he had said prophetically in 1910, upon returning to a hero’s welcome after an epic journey to Africa. “They have a way of erecting a triumphal arch, and after the Conquering Hero has passed beneath it he may expect to receive a shower of bricks on his back at any moment.”

  * * *

  ON ELECTION day, November 5, 1912, Roosevelt’s grim expectations about his candidacy were realized in full. Woodrow Wilson took the White House in a landslide victory, winning 2.2 million more votes than Roosevelt out of the fifteen million cast. Roosevelt did not lose alone, however. He brought Taft, the incumbent Republican president, down with him. Only three and a half million Americans had voted for Taft, some six hundred thousand fewer than voted for Roosevelt and nearly three million fewer than Wilson. The Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, pulled in over nine hundred thousand votes, more than twice the number he had received during his presidential run four years earlier.

  For Roosevelt, who was not used to losing, even his victory over Taft was cold comfort. He had long ago lost his respect for the three-hundred-pound president, dismissing him as “a flubdub with a streak of the second-rate and the common in him.” Besides, everyone knew that Taft hadn’t really been in the race from the beginning. Before the Republican convention, even Taft’s own wife, the fiercely ambitious Nellie, had told him, “I suppose you will have to fight Mr. Roosevelt for the nomination, and if you get it he will defeat you.”

  She was right on both counts. Roosevelt had at first vied for the Republican nomination, and when party bosses ensured Taft’s victory, he had struck back by ensuring their defeat in the general election. As a third-party candidate, Roosevelt could not count on winning, but he could certainly spoil. When backed by a united Republican Party in his earlier election bids, Roosevelt had swept easily to victory over the Democrats. By turning his enormous popularity against his former party, however, he merely split the Republican vote and handed the election to Wilson—a widely predicted result that, when it came to pass, provoked bitter criticism of his tactics. “Roosevelt goes down to personal and richly deserved defeat,” spat an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But he has the satisfaction of knowing that by giving vent to his insatiate ambition and deplorable greed for power he has elevated the democratic party to the control of the nation.”

  Roosevelt had never been willing to share his private pain with the public. In a formal statement, he announced, “I accept the result with entire good humor and contentment.” In private, however, he admitted to being surprised and shaken by the scope of his crushing defeat. “There is no use disguising the fact that the defeat at the polls is overwhelming,” he wrote to his friend the British military attaché Arthur Hamilton Lee. “I had expected defeat, but I had expected that we would make a better showing. . .. I try not to think of the damage to myself personally.”

  The Republican Party’s Old Guard, once a bastion of Roosevelt’s friends and backers, held him responsible for the debacle that had put a Democrat in the White House for the first time in sixteen years. Before the Republican convention, they had assured Roosevelt that if he would only accept the party’s decision to let Taft run for a second term in 1912, they would happily hand him the nomination four years later. But his injured pride and his passion for what he believed to be a battle against the nation’s great injustices had driven him out of the fold. “Many of his critics could account for his leaving the Republican Party and heading another, only on the theory that he was moved by a desire for revenge,” William Roscoe Thayer, Roosevelt’s friend and one of his earliest biographers, wrote in 1919. “If he could not rule he would ruin. The old allegation that he must be crazy was of course revived.”

  * * *

  ROOSEVELT SPENT that winter hunkered down at Sagamore Hill with his wife and their younger daughter, Ethel. He took walks with Edith, answered letters, and worked quietly in his book-lined study. He had few interruptions.

  “The telephone, which had rung like sleigh-bells all day and half the night, was silent,” wrote Roosevelt’s young literary friend and eventual biographer Hermann Hagedorn. “The North Shore neighbors who, in the old days, had flocked to Sagamore at every opportunity, on horseback or in their high fancy traps, did not drive their new shining motor-cars up the new, hard-surfaced road the Roosevelts had put in the year before. The Colonel was outside the pale. He had done the unforgivable thing—he had ‘turned against his class.’”

  Friends and colleagues who had once competed for Roosevelt’s attention now shunned him. Roosevelt, like his wife, had been born into New York’s highest society. From childhood, he had been not only accepted but admired and undoubtedly envied as a Roosevelt, the older son of a wealthy and respected man. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he had been a member of the exclusive and unapologetically elitist Porcellian Club. During the Spanish-American War, he had been glorified as a courageous colonel of his own regiment—Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. And as president of the United States for nearly eight years, he had been at the apex of power and prestige. Now, for the first time in his life, he was a pariah, and he was painfully aware of it.

  Holed up at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt, who was famous for his almost overbearing optimism and confidence, suffered from what his family delicately referred to as a “bruised spirit.” “Of course I am having a pretty hard time, in a way,” he admitted to his son Kermit in early December. “The defeated are always held accountable in every way.” Roosevelt’s family was so concerned about his state of mind that they discreetly asked Dr. Alexander Lambert, Roosevelt’s physician and a former friend of his father’s, to come for a visit. Lambert immediately packed his bags for Oyster Bay. “You cannot imagine how glad I am to see you!” Roosevelt confessed to Lambert. “I have been unspeakably lonely. You don’t know how lonely it is for a man to be rejected by his own kind.”

  * * *

  IF REJECTION was new to Roosevelt, loss and disappointment were not. Although he was only fifty-four years old, he had already lived an extraordinarily full life. Perhaps even more striking than the peaks and valleys of Roosevelt’s life was the clear relationship between those extremes—the ex-president’s habit of seeking solace from heartbreak and frustration by striking out on even more difficult and unfamiliar terrain, and finding redemption by pushing himself to his outermost limits. When confronted with sadness or setbacks that were beyond his power to overcome, Roosevelt instinctively sought out still greater tests, losing himself in punishing physical hardship and danger—experiences that came to shape his personality and inform his most impressive achievements.

  The impulse to defy hardship became a fundamental part of Roosevelt’s character, honed from earliest childhood. Frail and sickly as a child, and plagued by life-threatening asthma, Roose
velt forced himself into a regimen of harsh physical exercise in an effort to conquer his weakness. His sister Corinne remembered her brother as a “fragile, patient sufferer . . . struggling with the effort to breathe” in their nursery on East Twentieth Street in New York City. But before Theodore had reached adolescence, he had already resolved to free himself from invalidism and frailty. Through what Corinne described as “regular, monotonous motion”—swinging from horizontal bars, struggling with heavy, awkward barbells—Teedie, as his family called him, slowly broadened his chest, strengthened his arms, and transformed himself into a young man whose body was as strong and sure as his mind.

  Although it was Theodore’s own iron discipline that brought about this transformation, it was his father’s encouragement that sparked his resolve. Theodore Senior loomed large in the lives of all of his children, but for his older son he was idol, hero, and savior. “One of my memories,” Roosevelt wrote later in life, “is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me.” Desperate for their child to breathe, Theodore and Martha Roosevelt tried anything, making Teedie drink strong black coffee, forcing him to vomit by coaxing syrup of ipecac down his throat, or hovering over him while he miserably smoked a cigar. Finally, Theodore Sr. sat his son down and told him that he had the power to change his fate, but he would have to work hard to do it. “Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body,” he said, “and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.” Teedie, then only about eleven years old, flashed his famous teeth, and, accepting the challenge, cried, “I’ll make my body.”

  Roosevelt did make his body, and he never again allowed it to grow weak or idle. On the contrary, what began as drudgery soon became a compulsion. Throughout his adult life, Roosevelt would relish physical exertion, and he would use it not just as a way to keep his body fit and his mind sharp but as his most effective weapon against depression and despair.

  At Harvard, Roosevelt grew steadily stronger and more vigorous and finally outpaced his asthma. He even began boxing, starting with lessons and working his way up to matches. Early in 1879, Roosevelt won his first boxing match and made a name for himself on campus—not for his strength but for his honor. William Roscoe Thayer, a contemporary of Roosevelt’s at Harvard, would never forget that match. “When the referee called ‘time,’ Roosevelt immediately dropped his hands,” Thayer later wrote, “but the other man dealt him a savage blow on the face, at which we all shouted, ‘Foul, foul!’ and hissed; but Roosevelt turned towards us and cried out ‘Hush! He didn’t hear,’ a chivalrous act which made him immediately popular.”

  During his sophomore year at Harvard, his father—”the best man I ever knew”—died from stomach cancer at the age of forty-six. Blindsided, Roosevelt reeled from the greatest loss of his young life. “If I had very much time to think,” he wrote in his diary, “I believe I should go crazy.”

  After his father’s funeral, Roosevelt fought back. Upon finishing the school year, he fled to Oyster Bay to wrestle with his grief and anger in seclusion. In the small, heavily wooded village where his family had long spent their summers, he swam, hiked, hunted, and thundered through the forest on his horse Lightfoot, riding so hard that he nearly destroyed her. Then, before returning to Harvard, he disappeared into the Maine wilderness with an ursine backwoodsman named Bill Sewall. “Look out for Theodore,” a doctor traveling with Roosevelt advised Sewall. “He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.”

  Roosevelt emerged from that summer determined to survive any loss. And loss would come. Following his father’s death, Roosevelt had a string of successes. He graduated from Harvard with honors, married Alice Lee—a pretty blonde who he was certain would never have him, “but,” he insisted, “I am going to have her!”—and, at twenty-three, was elected New York State’s youngest assemblyman. In 1884, however, when he was only twenty-five years old, Roosevelt was called home by an ominous telegram. When he arrived, he found that the two most important women in his life—his mother and his young wife—were dying. At 3:00 a.m. on February 14, Valentine’s Day, Martha Roosevelt, still a vibrant, dark-haired Southern belle at forty-six, died of typhoid fever. Eleven hours later, her daughter-in-law, Alice Lee Roosevelt, who had given birth to Theodore’s first child just two days before, succumbed to Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder. That night, in his diary, Roosevelt marked the date with a large black “X” and a single anguished entry: “The light has gone out of my life.”

  Desperate to conquer his despair, Roosevelt resorted to the only therapy he knew: physical hardship and danger. He left his infant daughter with his sister Anna and boarded a train for the Dakota Badlands, where he hoped to find the kind of hard existence that might keep his body and mind too busy to ache for Alice. Roosevelt rarely spoke about that terrible night or about his first wife—even to their daughter, who was named for the mother she would never know. He was a different man when he finally returned east for good two years later. He was filled with vigor and perspective after mastering an entirely unfamiliar world of danger on the American frontier—and defeating, by sheer energy and physical exertion, the grief that had threatened to overwhelm him. “Black care,” he explained, in a rare unguarded comment on the subject, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”

  Black care again descended on Roosevelt in 1909, the year he left the White House. It was a transition that was entirely of his making—he had inherited his first term after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901, and so could easily have run again seven and a half years later—but giving up the presidency left him feeling empty and adrift. Though he had done great things during his two presidential terms—from negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War to making possible the construction of the Panama Canal—Roosevelt felt that he had not had an opportunity for greatness. “Of course a man has to take advantage of his opportunities, but the opportunities have to come,” he told an audience in Cambridge, England, in the spring of 1910. “If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don’t get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now.” The disappointment of stepping down before he was ready, before he had been tested by some cataclysmic event, was so great that, two days before leaving office, Roosevelt had admonished his friend Paul Martin, “My dear fellow, for Heaven’s sake don’t talk about my having a future. My future is in the past.”

  As difficult as Roosevelt’s departure from the White House had been, however, it was mild compared with the pain of his electoral defeat in 1912. His second wife, Edith, who had known her husband her entire life and had witnessed firsthand his reactions to sorrow and disappointment, could not have doubted what now lay in store. It was just a matter of time before Roosevelt would break away again, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it. Edith was a private person, and her quiet life at Sagamore Hill was precious to her. But she knew that it was not enough for Theodore. He would not rest until he found some physically punishing adventure that would take him far from home and, Edith feared, place him in grave danger.

  CHAPTER 2

  Opportunity

  IN FEBRUARY 1913, THREE months after Roosevelt’s election defeat, the postman who delivered first-class mail to Sagamore Hill on a horse-drawn wagon arrived with a letter from Argentina. The formal, three-page letter, carefully typed in English on the stationery of the Museo Social in Buenos Aires, was merely one of many invitations from around the globe that arrived regularly for the ex-president. Within a matter of months, however, it would prove to be the very opportunity that Roosevelt had been longing for.

  Founded by a group of forward-thinking businessmen and political figures, Argentina’s Museo So
cial was an institution devoted to the kind of progressive intellectual agenda that most appealed to the former American leader. Although it was only two years old, the social-history museum was ambitious in its lofty goal of “bringing together men and ideas.” It wanted Roosevelt as a guest lecturer, and its president, a man named Emilio Frers, was determined to get him. With the instincts of a seasoned diplomat, Frers aimed directly for Roosevelt’s Achilles’ heel, his vanity, making clear that the former president could define all the terms of this visit if he would only consent to come. “Your presence in this country will be greatly appreciated by our countrymen who have heard so much about you, about your public career and the high ideals you stand for,” he wrote.

  Frers’s words must have been a cool balm to Roosevelt’s wounded pride, but the Argentinian did not stop there, offering to pay the ex-president more than $13,000 ($250,000 in today’s money) for three lectures. Although Frers could not have known it, the question of money was very much on Roosevelt’s mind. He had inherited a substantial fortune from his father, a fortune that had enabled him to go into politics without worrying about supporting his family. After a long, successful political career, however, he could hope to leave little but a famous name to his own children.