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division commanders to discuss the inexcusable delays of the government in arranging fast transportation for the victorious troops. A communication had to be addressed to the War Department, but the regulars naturally feared the injury to their careers involved in angering Secretary Russell Alger or President McKinley himself. It was Roosevelt, of course, who took the matter in hand and drafted a round-robin letter to be signed by all present and sent to the Associated Press:
    We, the undersigned officers … are of the unanimous opinion that this Army should at once be taken out of the Island of Cuba and sent to some point on the Northern seacoast of the United States … that the army is disabled by malarial fever to the extent that its efficiency is destroyed, and that it is in a condition to be practically entirely destroyed by an epidemic of yellow fever which is sure to come in the near future.… This army must be moved at once or perish. As the army can be safely moved now, the persons responsible for preventing such a move will be responsible for the unnecessary loss of many thousands of lives.
    The secretary of war was outraged; so was the president; there was talk of a court-martial for Roosevelt, but within three days Shafter’s army was ordered to Montauk, Long Island. No one really cared to take on the hero of San Juan Hill.
    But of course there had to be jokes. Finley Peter Dunne, “Mr. Dooley,” spoofing Roosevelt’s published account of the war in a piece entitled “Alone in Cuba,” rephrased the boast of the author, now a candidate for the governorship of New York, that he had killed a Spaniard with his pistol: “I fired at th’ man nearest to me an’ I knew by th’expression iv his face that th’ trusty bullet wint home. It passed through his frame, he fell, an’ wan little home in far-off Catalonia was made happy be th’ thought that their riprisintitive had been kilt be th’ future governor of New York.” One is glad to learn that TR was amused by this and actually told Dunne so.
    Roosevelt maintained a constant correspondence with Lodge, even from the front lines, and used the senator to bring his complaints on military incompetence to the attention of the government. He was not temperate in his language. “Not since the campaign of Crassus against the Parthians has there been so criminally incompetent a general as Shafter, and not since the expedition against Walcheron has there been grosser mismanagement than in this.”
    He urged Lodge to see that he be awarded the Medal of Honor. “I don’t ask this as a favor; I ask it as a right.… If I didn’t earn it, then no commissioned officer ever can earn it.” But his complaints had been too harsh and too public; the army brass could never forgive, and he never received the coveted medal. Regular service officers have long memories, and the refusal of President Wilson, two decades later, to allow him to form a regiment to take to France, strongly supported by the army chiefs, may have contained an element of this old resentment.
    On January 16, 2001, Congress did award the medal posthumously to TR.

Four
    TR’s wartime popularity almost required the New York Republicans to run him as candidate for the governorship, as they had no other candidate so likely to win. But Thomas Platt, the “easy boss,” would rather have lost the election than gain a chief executive who would loosen his iron grip on the party. Holding forth in his usual corner of the lobby of a Manhattan hotel, he met with Roosevelt to hash out the terms under which he and the ebullient colonel might agree to operate the state. The two men could not have been more different: Platt, dry, concentrated, essentially humorless, the quintessential machine politician, by no means indifferent to the welfare of his constituents but resolutely determined that he and his selected men, and only