(5 of 10)
On Feb. 15, 1898, when the U.S. battleship Maine blew up and sank at Havana with the loss of 266 U.S. lives, the U.S. Navy was ready. Then T.R. added the final touch himself with a fantastic display of leadership and gall.
One day slow-boating Navy Secretary John D. Long took the afternoon off. T.R., leaning on his powers of Acting Secretary, without reference to Long or anybody else, began sending out orders to concentrate U.S. ships of war, ammunitions and supplies. He even cabled a specific in-the-event-of-war operation order to Commodore George Dewey, commanding the Asiatic squadron, ordering him to prepare for action and to make sure that the Spanish Asiatic squadron did not leave the Asiatic coast. Next day Long came back to grumble only that T.R. had "gone at things like a bull in a china shop." When war came, it was T.R.'s early-warning order that made possible Dewey's great victory at Manila Bay. T.R. said in a letter to a friend: "I have been a very useful man in this."
Charge! Charge! On April 30, 1898, five days after the declaration of war, T.R. telegraphed Manhattan's Brooks Brothers for "a blue cravenette lieutenant colonel's uniform without yellow on the collar and with leggings." He ordered his optician to make up a dozen pairs of steel-rimmed spectacles. He ordered "a couple of good, stout, quiet horses for my own use—not gun-shy." That done, T.R. helped raise, train, lead and inspire the blue-shirted, slouch-hatted Rough Riders—the ist U.S. Volunteer Cavalry—a wonderful T.R. concoction of sinewy ranch hands and fuzz-cheeked Ivy Leaguers, jaunty Southwesterners and ex-badmen, topped off by a T.R. type named "Dead Shot" Joe Simpson, who could "put a rifle bullet through a jack rabbit's eye at 1,000 yards while riding a wild horse."
T.R. went into Cuba as second-incommand of the Rough Riders, was in the landing at Daiquiri, the advance to Sibo-ney, the heavy skirmish at Las Guasimas. When Rough Riders' Colonel Leonard Wood was promoted to brigadier general, T.R. took over the command. Then, decked out in a sombrero and blue polka-dot handkerchief, on horseback at the head of his men, T.R. caught the nation's imagination by leading the Rough Riders on his slamming, successful charge through waist-high undergrowth against the Spanish defenses outside Santiago.
"That Damned Cowboy." Only six weeks after landing with his Rough Riders at Montauk Point, N.Y. on the trip home from war, T.R. got the G.O.P. nomination for New York State governor; six weeks after that he was elected. For two years he was one of the best governors New York ever had—"better," T.R. himself told a relative, "than either Cleveland or Tilden." Longtime Working Politician Roosevelt would cooperate with Boss Tom Platt's state G.O.P. machine, then fight it, then cooperate again, as he put it, in anything that did not infringe "the Eighth Commandment and general decency." T.R.'s maxim: "It may be the highest duty of the patriotic public servant to work with the big boss on certain points."
Such an operator Boss Platt wanted out of New York State, and Boss Platt thought he knew just the place—the Vice Presidency of the U.S. In the summer of 1900 the G.O.P. National