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Learning that Theodore Roosevelt was hospitalized in February of 1918, William Howard Taft sent him a telegram.
Leave it to the sensitive, congenial Taft to make the first move...
Roosevelt and Taft had been the best of buddies. They met during the 1890s working government jobs in Washington and became fast friends. Their families often dined together and most days they walked to work together pattering about the issues of the day.
If opposites attract then this was a case in point. The energetic, confident, take charge, go it alone Roosevelt and the more thoughtful, slower moving, kind, accommodating, team oriented Taft.
Later, Taft would serve in Roosevelt's cabinet and was immediately the advisor on which the president relied most heavily.
But when Taft followed Roosevelt to the presidency and didn't pursue Roosevelt's policies at the pace and standard Roosevelt preferred, their friendship began to erode.
About midway through Taft's term Roosevelt began chiding him publically for his perceived shortcomings. This, of course, deeply hurt and offended Taft.
(There was also a misunderstood event in which Roosevelt's daughter had visited the White House and didn't feel like she was accorded the proper respect by the Tafts. One of those supposed slights that a simple conversation would have settled.)
Their relationship was all but destroyed when Roosevelt challenged Taft for the presidential nomination in 1912 and, after losing, took on the sitting president in the general election having been nominated by the new Progressive Party.
As the stupid vitriol of the campaign rose, the expedient attacks on each other became personal. They not only questioned each other's politics, they came to question each other's motives.
They both lost, of course, to the democrat Woodrow Wilson.
And then for years, they didn't talk at all. If they had to be at the same event, as ex-presidents will from time to time, they shook hands coldly with nary a word nor eye contact.
And then six years after the election Roosevelt was sick and Taft sent him that telegram.
As I wrote in this same space six years ago discussing the Jefferson-Adams friendship renewal after their falling out, "Mortality is always the prism of more important things."
After surgery Roosevelt's first communication was a return telegram to Taft: "Am rather rocky, but worth several dear Men," he joked. "Greatly touched and Pleased by Your Message."
A short while later Roosevelt sent Taft a draft of a speech he was to make to get his opinion on it. Taft read it thoroughly and sent along a couple of recommendations, both of which Roosevelt used.
Though tensions were obviously easing, they had not yet seen each
other in person. That took an amazing coincidence of schedule.
Doris Kearns-Goodwin relates in her meaty book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism that, on May 16, 1918 Taft arrived for a conference at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago.
"As Taft was retiring to his room upstairs, the elevator operator informed him that Colonel Roosevelt was presently seated alone in the dining room. 'I hear he's leaving right away,' the young man remarked. Taft did not hesitate. 'Then I'll ask you to take me back downstairs,' he responded.
"Hurrying across the Blackstone's dining room, which was bustling with nearly a hundred diners, he spotted the Colonel at a small table by the corner window.
"'Theodore!' he exclaimed. 'I'm glad to see you!'
"Roosevelt rose from his seat and grasped Taft's shoulders. 'Well, I am indeed delighted to see you. Won't you sit down?'
"All across the room, customers rose from their dinners and wait staff paused, recognizing the significance of the meeting.
"Suddenly, the chamber erupted into applause."
The two ex-presidents had an earnest conversation only cut short because Roosevelt had to catch the night train to Des Moines, Iowa.
Within a year, Theodore Roosevelt would be dead.
Taft was one of just five hundred guests to attend his private funeral service. As Roosevelt's close personal friend, he was escorted by Roosevelt's son Archie to a front pew.
In the intervening months there had been much correspondence between Roosevelt and Taft. Their exchange doesn't have the romance cache of the Jefferson-Adams letters from a century before, but they had the same effect. A friendship renewed as if never interrupted.
And I think again about how silly we are when we let ambition and misunderstanding destroy those things that are most dear. And I ask myself again why we so often leave it to mortality to make us prioritize.
Ah, to ever live, not for the expediencies of a certain day, but with the long view in mind.
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