Chapter 69

McKinley was patient, collected, surprisingly determined. Everybody indeed in the departments where the brunt must fall if war came seemed steady to me, as I watched things in my frequent visits to General Miles’ Headquarters. Everybody was at his post, everybody except Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He tore up and down the wide marble halls of the War and Navy Building—“like a boy on roller skates,” a disgusted observer growled. More than once he burst into General Miles’ office with an excit…