One hundred years ago Friday–Sept. 14, 1901–this country faced a crisis different from today’s. President William McKinley, who had been shot by a fanatic, lay dying in Buffalo. Rushing to McKinley’s bedside, where he’d been summoned from a climbing expedition in the Adirondacks, was the vice president, Theodore Roosevelt. Before the day was out, Roosevelt had taken the oath of his new office.
Not everyone agreed on which was the greater calamity–McKinley’s death or Roosevelt’s accession to the presidency.
Sen. Marcus Hanna of Ohio, the national Republican chairman, had furiously opposed putting Roosevelt on his party’s ticket in 1900, at one point warning, “Don’t any of you realize there’s only one life between this madman and the White House?” When Roosevelt became the nation’s youngest chief executive to date, Hanna is said to have fumed: “Now look! That damned cowboy is president of the United States!”
The point of Hanna’s rants a century ago resonates, however inexactly, today: How assertive should presidents be? There is much talk across America about whether George W. Bush is the right person to be leading this country in the wake of an attack such as Tuesday’s.
We shall soon find out. Calamities make or break presidents. How Bush responds in coming weeks and months will indelibly write his political future–and the history of his presidency.
All that is clear now is what we’ve always known: Bush does not have the gifts of style that many of his predecessors (John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, to name three) could summon in the early moments of a crisis. But it is forces more powerful than the words Bush does or doesn’t say that have driven American opinion and resolve. Besides, as more than one veteran of Washington has noted, all presidents do what they’re told by their security advisers during an unfolding emergency.
Bush’s fate rests less with fleeting style than with substance. No one owes the president fealty; Americans will be free to judge whether he acts wisely or whiffs. That said, it would be fair to withhold judgment while he ponders his moves. At a moment as grave as this one, the world doesn’t need a reckless U.S. president.
There is little doubt how Roosevelt would have reacted in such a situation. Historians like to say he invented the modern, activist presidency; many of his predecessors had been stuffy and remote. Roosevelt had been shaped in part by a sickly childhood that made him an outdoorsy fitness buff, and in part by a trauma of coincidence: on the same day in 1884, both his mother and first wife died. Before becoming vice president, his extraordinary career included stints as New York City police commissioner, assistant secretary of the Navy, rough-riding hero of the Spanish-American War and governor of New York. His motto, cribbed from a West African proverb: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Roosevelt didn’t speak softly, but he loved to wield that stick. He saw the scope of his power as whatever the Constitution didn’t prohibit. “Government was a vehicle for his own swashbuckling,” says presidential historian Richard Norton Smith. Though as president he didn’t get the war he longed for–any would have sufficed–Roosevelt sent Navy warships on a world tour to display U.S. military might, sought to dominate the Western hemisphere and, among other raw acts of intimidation, bullied Colombia to keep it from halting construction of the Panama Canal.
Before leaving office in 1908, Roosevelt earned a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a treaty between Russia and Japan. But he also declared he wouldn’t run for president in 1916, Smith says, unless the American people were feeling heroic. If he were president this week, his instincts would not tell him to bide his time. There might already be dusty craters of destruction between Turkey and India–the expanses of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Bush has said he will do what is necessary to respond to Tuesday’s attack. That, and not a tantrum of indiscriminate revenge, is what the American people want. For all the time he’s spent on that ranch down in Crawford, Bush is shrewd not to have reacted like a cowboy.
