细节
ROOSEVELT, Theodore. Typed letter signed ("T. Roosevelt"), as former President, to Rev. N. J. M. Bogert, New York, 31 December 1918. 2½ pages, 4to, Kansas City Star stationery.
T. R. BLASTS WILSON: "WE PROBABLY NEVER HAD A PRESIDENT SO DEVOID OF REAL ETHICS..."
A fiery letter from Roosevelt, written less than three weeks before his death. He is enraged at a critic who praised Wilson's diplomacy and condemned T. R.'s militant posture on the war: "...It was I who for two and a half years stood for international justice on behalf of Belgium and against the foul iniquities of Germany, when Mr. Wilson with every specie of misrepresentation was deluding the American people, was putting peace above righteousness, and was actually, in his Presidential Address of 1915, going to the length of saying that he abhorred and condemned Americans who upheld the cause of Belgium...and regarded these men as worse than the German murderers and dynamiters....Mr. Wilson is in no sense of the word an idealist; but he is a doctrinaire. We probably have never had a President so devoid of regard for real ethics, based on conduct, on deeds--he is delighted to use the language of ethics in phrases, so long as they apply only to abstractions and generalities."
Of his critic, Mr. Lynch, Roosevelt says, "I doubt...if I should care to enter into controversy with a gentleman of whom I have never heard. Mr. Lynch has deliberately mis-stated the facts, and when a man deliberately mis-states facts there is little use of entering a controversy with him. I said that not one American in a thousand knew of Mr. Wilson's Fourteen Points. Mr. Lynch cannot deny this, and so he deliberately falsifies the truth and says that I deny that the American people knew that this was a war for world justice and righteousness and for world democracy!" The night before he died, Roosevelt was writing a column for the Star attacking Wilson's plan for a League of Nations. He died in his sleep at 4 a.m. the next morning, 6 January 1919.
T. R. BLASTS WILSON: "WE PROBABLY NEVER HAD A PRESIDENT SO DEVOID OF REAL ETHICS..."
A fiery letter from Roosevelt, written less than three weeks before his death. He is enraged at a critic who praised Wilson's diplomacy and condemned T. R.'s militant posture on the war: "...It was I who for two and a half years stood for international justice on behalf of Belgium and against the foul iniquities of Germany, when Mr. Wilson with every specie of misrepresentation was deluding the American people, was putting peace above righteousness, and was actually, in his Presidential Address of 1915, going to the length of saying that he abhorred and condemned Americans who upheld the cause of Belgium...and regarded these men as worse than the German murderers and dynamiters....Mr. Wilson is in no sense of the word an idealist; but he is a doctrinaire. We probably have never had a President so devoid of regard for real ethics, based on conduct, on deeds--he is delighted to use the language of ethics in phrases, so long as they apply only to abstractions and generalities."
Of his critic, Mr. Lynch, Roosevelt says, "I doubt...if I should care to enter into controversy with a gentleman of whom I have never heard. Mr. Lynch has deliberately mis-stated the facts, and when a man deliberately mis-states facts there is little use of entering a controversy with him. I said that not one American in a thousand knew of Mr. Wilson's Fourteen Points. Mr. Lynch cannot deny this, and so he deliberately falsifies the truth and says that I deny that the American people knew that this was a war for world justice and righteousness and for world democracy!" The night before he died, Roosevelt was writing a column for the Star attacking Wilson's plan for a League of Nations. He died in his sleep at 4 a.m. the next morning, 6 January 1919.