‘The Imperial Cruise’

Chapter 1: One Hundred Years Later

“I wish to see the United States the dominant power on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.” — Theodore Roosevelt, October 29, 1900

When my father, John Bradley, died in 1994, his hidden memory boxes illuminated his experience as one of the six men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. A book and movie — both named Flags of Our Fathers — told his story. After writing another book about World War II in the Pacific — Flyboys — I began to wonder about the origins of America’s involvement in that war. The inferno that followed Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor had consumed countless lives, and believing there’s smoke before a fire, I set off to search for the original spark.

In the summer of 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt — known as Teddy to the public — dispatched the largest diplomatic delegation to Asia in U.S. history. Teddy sent his secretary of war, seven senators, twenty-three congressmen, various military and civilian officials, and his daughter on an ocean liner from San Francisco to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, Korea, then back to San Francisco. At that time, Roosevelt was serving as his own secretary of state — John Hay had just passed away and Elihu Root had yet to be confirmed. Over the course of this imperial cruise, Theodore Roosevelt made important decisions that would affect America’s involvement in Asia for generations.

The secretary of war, William Howard Taft, weighing in at 325 pounds, led the delegation, and to guarantee a Roosevelt name in the headlines, the president sent his daughter Alice, the glamorous Jackie Kennedy of her day, a beautiful twenty-one-year-old known affectionately to the world as “Princess Alice.” Her boyfriend was aboard, and Taft had promised his boss he would keep an eye on the couple. This was not so easy, and on a few hot tropical nights, Taft worried about what the unmarried daughter of the president of the United States was up to on some dark part of the ship.

Theodore Roosevelt had been enthusiastic about American expansion in Asia, declaring, “Our future history will be more determined by our position on the Pacific facing China than by our position on the Atlantic facing Europe.” Teddy was confident that American power would spread across Asia just as it had on the North American continent. In his childhood, Americans had conquered the West by eradicating those who had stood in the way and linking forts together, which then grew into towns and cities. Now America was establishing its naval links in the Pacific with an eye toward civilizing Asia. Hawaii, annexed by the United States in 1898, had been the first step in that plan, and the Philippines was considered to be the launching pad to China.

Teddy had never been to Asia and knew little about Asians, but he was bully confident about his plans there. “I wish to see the United States the dominant power on the shores of the Pacific Ocean,” he announced.

Theodore Roosevelt stands as one of America’s most important presidents and an unusually intelligent and brave man. His favorite maxim was “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” This book reveals that behind his Asian whispers that critical summer of 1905 was a very big stick — the bruises from which would catalyze World War II in the Pacific, the Chinese Communist

Revolution, the Korean War, and an array of tensions that inform our lives today. The twentieth-century American experience in Asia would follow in the diplomatic wake first churned by Theodore Roosevelt.

In the summer of 2005 — exactly one hundred years later — I traveled the route of the imperial cruise.

In Hawaii, I rode the Waikiki waves like Alice had, saw what she had seen, and learned why no native Hawaiians had come to greet her.

Today the United States is asking Japan to increase its military to further American interests in the North Pacific, especially on the Korean peninsula, where both the Chinese and the Russians seek influence. In the summer of 1905, clandestine diplomatic messages between Tokyo and Washington, D.C., pulsed through underwater cables far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. In a top-secret meeting with the Japanese prime minister, Taft — at Roosevelt’s direction — brokered a confidential pact allowing Japan to expand into Korea. It is unconstitutional for an American president to make a treaty with another nation without United States Senate approval. And as he was negotiating secretly with the Japanese, Roosevelt was simultaneously serving as the “honest broker” in discussions between Russia and Japan, who were then fighting what was up to that time history’s largest war. The combatants would sign the Portsmouth Peace Treaty in that summer of 1905, and one year later, the president would become the first American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee was never made aware of Roosevelt’s secret negotiations, and the world would learn of these diplomatic cables only after Theodore Roosevelt’s death.

On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt had proclaimed the U.S. war in the Philippines over, except for disturbances in the Muslim areas. In 1905, the imperial cruise steamed into the port city of Zamboanga, a Muslim enclave 516 miles south of Manila. Princess Alice sipped punch under a hot tropical sun as “Big Bill” Taft delivered a florid speech extolling the benefits of the American way.

A century later I ventured to Zamboanga and learned that the local Muslims hadn’t taken Taft’s message to heart: Zamboangan officials feared for my safety because I was an American and would not allow me to venture out of my hotel without an armed police escort.

The city looked peaceable enough to me and I thought the Zamboangan police’s concern was overdone. One morning I was sitting in the backseat of a chauffeured car with my plainclothes police escort as we drove by city hall. The handsome old wooden building had once been headquarters of the American military. The U.S. general “Black Jack” Pershing had ruled local Muslims from a desk there, and the grassy shaded park across the street was named after him.

“Can we stop?” I asked the driver, who pulled to the curb. I got out of the car alone to take pictures, thinking I was safe in front of city hall. After all, here I was in the busy downtown area, in broad daylight, with mothers and their strollers nearby in a park named after an American.

My bodyguard thought otherwise. He jumped out of the car, his darting eyes scanning pedestrians, cars, windows, and rooftops, and his right hand hovered over the pistol at his side.

It was the same later, indoors at Zamboanga’s largest mall. I was shopping for men’s trousers, looking through the racks. I glanced up to see my bodyguard with his back to me eyeing the milling crowd. The Zamboangan police probably breathed a sigh of relief when I eventually left town.

Muslim terrorists struck Zamboanga the day after I departed. Two powerful bombs maimed twenty-six people, brought down buildings, blew up cars, severed electrical lines, and plunged the city into darkness and fear. The first bomb had cratered a sidewalk on whose cement I had recently trod, while the second one collapsed a hotel next door to Zamboanga’s police station — just down the street from the mall I had judged safe. Police sources told reporters the blasts were intended to divert Filipino and American army troops from their manhunt of an important Muslim insurgent.

Just as President Teddy was declaring victory in 1902, the U.S. military had been opening a new full-scale offensive against Muslim insurgents in the southern Philippines. Pacifying Zamboanga had been one of the goals of that offensive. A century later American troops were still fighting near that “pacified” town.

Today trade disputes dominate the United States–China relationship. In China, I strode down streets where in 1905 angry Chinese had protested Secretary Taft’s visit. At the time, China had suspended trade with the United States and was boycotting all American products. Outraged Chinese were attending mass anti-American rallies, Chinese city walls were plastered with insulting anti-American posters, and U.S. diplomats in the region debated whether it was safe for Taft to travel to China. Teddy and Big Bill dismissed China’s anger. But that 1905 Chinese boycott against America sparked a furious Chinese nationalism that would eventually lead to revolution and then the cutting of ties between China and the United States in 1949.

In 2005, I stood in Seoul, where, in 1905, Princess Alice had toasted the emperor of Korea. In 1882, when Emperor Gojong had opened Korea to the outside world, he chose to make his first Western treaty with the United States, whom he believed would protect his vulnerable country from predators. “We feel that America is to us as an Elder Brother,” Gojong had often told the U.S. State Department. In 1905, the emperor was convinced that Theodore Roosevelt would render his kingdom a square deal. He had no idea that back in Washington, Roosevelt often said, “I should like to see Japan have Korea.” Indeed, less than two months after Alice’s friendly toasts to Korea-America friendship, her father shuttered the United States embassy in Seoul and abandoned the helpless country to Japanese troops. The number-two-ranking American diplomat on the scene observed that the United States fled Korea “like the stampede of rats from a sinking ship.” America would be the first country to recognize Japanese control over Korea, and when Emperor Gojong’s emissaries pleaded with the president to stop the Japanese, Teddy coldly informed the stunned Koreans that, as they were now part of Japan, they’d have to route their appeals through Tokyo. With this betrayal, Roosevelt had greenlighted Japanese imperialism on the Asian continent. Decades later, another Roosevelt would be forced to deal with the bloody ramifications of Teddy’s secret maneuvering.

Since 1905, the United States has slogged through four major wars in Asia, its progress marked best not by colors on a map but by rows of haunting gravestones and broken hearts. Yet for a century, the truth about Roosevelt’s secret mission remained obscured in the shadows of history, its importance downplayed or ignored in favor of the myth of American benevolence and of a president so wise and righteously muscular that his visage rightly belongs alongside Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln in Black Hills granite. A single person does not make history, and in this case, Roosevelt did not act alone. At the same time, by virtue of his position and power, as well as by virtue of his sense of virtue, Teddy’s impact was staggering and disastrous. If someone pushes another off a cliff, we can point to the distance between the edge of the overhang and the ground as the cause of injury. But if we do not also acknowledge who pushed and who fell, how can we discover which decisions led to which results and which mistakes were made?

The truth will not be found in our history books, our monuments or movies, or our postage stamps. Here was the match that lit the fuse, and yet for decades we paid attention only to the dynamite. What really happened in 1905? Exactly one hundred years later, I set off to follow the churned historical wake in Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Here is what I found. Here is The Imperial Cruise.