Less widely recognized is that Theodore Roosevelt was one of the foremost statesmen of modern history.  He possessed a lucid and refined understanding of the complex world of his era.  In particular, he grasped the centrality of power in international relations.  According to Henry Kissinger, writing in 1994, TR “approached the global balance of power with a sophistication matched by no other American president.”

  And Roosevelt was a virtuoso in the realm of execution, pursuing his foreign policy objectives with remarkable skill and effectiveness.  Indeed, the author of the TR essay in a book titled Statesmen Who Changed the World asserts “that in the foreign policy arena Roosevelt was probably the greatest of all U.S. presidents.”

Thus, it is not really surprising that in 1906 Theodore Roosevelt became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, an international prize that had been awarded annually beginning in 1901.  Well before the Russo-Japanese War Roosevelt had developed the qualities that would make it possible for him to win the Nobel Prize.  As Jerry Hendrix emphasized during yesterday morning’s symposium, TR had shown his awareness of the importance of power and of how to leverage it in the peaceful pursuit of vital interests by turning back a German challenge to the Monroe Doctrine and by acquiring the Panama Canal Zone for the United States.  And he had demonstrated his capacity to master the details of a complicated negotiation, to identify the elusive potential common ground, and to steer the negotiation under pressure to a successful outcome as he orchestrated a resolution of the Anglo-American dispute over the boundary between Alaska and Canada in 1903.  In all these cases, moreover, Roosevelt had adroitly employed his trademark informal, personal diplomacy, so he was well-prepared to utilize this approach when the opportunity arose to mediate the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

Anxious about perceived Russian encroachments on its interests in Manchuria and Korea, Japan opened the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904 with a sudden, devastating strike against the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in Manchuria.  Over the next sixteen months Japanese forces would repeatedly prevail decisively in major engagements on land and sea, culminating in the destruction of a Russian fleet in the straits of Tsushima in May 1905.

While far more sympathetic to Japan than to Russia, TR fully comprehended the multidimensional international context of the war, and he believed it would be destabilizing for either combatant to be pushed entirely out of the East Asian picture.  With France allied with Russia, and Great Britain allied with Japan, Roosevelt also perceived a danger to the new and very promising Anglo-French entente cordiale.  From the outset TR was determined to do all that he could to bring this war to a satisfactory conclusion—a conclusion that would re-establish an East Asian balance of power and preserve the existing balance in Europe.  In seeking to mediate, it was not personal glory the President was after but rather stability and the restoration of peace.  Importantly, considering Russia’s and Japan’s relationships with the other great powers—and considering the impossibility of unbrokered direct talks between the two warring nations—Roosevelt really was the only plausible mediator.

TR had contemplated mediating even before the war began, but he knew that he could not force the issue.  Upon the outbreak of the war, the President declared a U.S. policy of “strict neutrality,” and then he watched closely as events unfolded, hoping for an opportunity to stop the fighting.

Roosevelt’s patiently awaited opportunity at last arrived following the total Japanese victory at Tsushima.  The Russian regime of Tsar Nicholas II had suffered military humiliation and was on the edge of political collapse, while the Japanese government was under severe financial strain on account of the high cost of the war.  At the end of May, Japan’s foreign minister instructed the country’s ambassador to the U.S. to solicit discreetly mediation by Roosevelt, who then sprang into action.  In a detailed confidential letter to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge dated June 5 (parts of which I published in the Summer 2007 TRA Journal, TR narrated recent developments:

At the Japanese government’s request, but to use their own expression “on my initiative,” . . . I told [the Russian ambassador] to say to the Czar that I believed the war absolutely hopeless for Russia; that I earnestly desired that she and Japan should come together and see if they could not agree upon terms of peace; and that I should like to propose this if I could get the assent of Russia and then of Japan, which latter I thought I would be able to get.

Russia consented, provided that Japan would consent before knowing of Russia’s acceptance.  Roosevelt performed this dance with agility, and the two belligerent powers agreed to undertake peace negotiations, the location and the arrangements to be decided.

Pleased with his achievement but also realizing that the hardest work was just beginning, Roosevelt plunged into the task of setting up a conference, resembling “a circus juggler as he solved [various] problems.”  

With Japan and Russia unable to agree on any European or Asian venue, and with the mid-summer weather in Washington, D.C., too uncomfortable, Roosevelt began to focus on the Portsmouth Navy Yard in New Hampshire as a particularly suitable site.  As Jerry Hendrix demonstrates in an article in Naval History—and as he explained yesterday—Portsmouth was sufficiently near the Summer White House in Oyster Bay for TR to monitor the conference and to intercede as needed, and it was a secure location where U.S. Marines could ensure the upholding of protocol.

Naturally Roosevelt would have preferred to gain agreement on key issues prior to the convening of the Portsmouth Conference, and his inability to do so made June and July a rather frustrating time for the President.  Meanwhile, Japan seized possession of Sakhalin, a Russian island north of Japan which was to become a crucial sticking point, during the month preceding the conference.

So TR launched the conference in late July and early August by meeting at Sagamore Hill with the leaders of the two delegations and then hosting a formal reception aboard the presidential yacht Mayflower on August 5.  Acutely aware of the sensitivity of this occasion, where even mentioning one nation before the other in a combined toast might give offense, TR expressed his wishes for “the welfare and prosperity of the sovereigns and peoples of the two great nations, whose representatives have met one another on this ship.”  He added “my most earnest hope and prayer, in the interest . . . of all mankind that a just and lasting peace may speedily be concluded among them.”   Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Baron Roman Romanovich Rosen, observed in a later memoir that the President had “presided with admirable tact over the delicate ceremony.”

The delegates gathered in Portsmouth on August 8, with Assistant Secretary of State Herbert Peirce the highest-ranking American present, and in their deliberations they adhered to Roosevelt’s “suggestion that they discuss the most difficult terms last”; TR was seeking to create “a climate for compromise.”   Physically the President was at Sagamore Hill and was now in the background.  Paradoxically, however, he was the most important—indeed, the indispensable—participant in the conference.

One way that Roosevelt kept his eye on the proceedings at Portsmouth was by monitoring the telegraphic messages streaming out of the shipyard, as Jerry Hendrix has discovered.  While TR did not actually read any of these communications, “he was aware of who sent telegrams, when they were sent, how long they were, and how many [there] were.”

Of greater consequence were Roosevelt’s direct interactions with key players.  The issues were multifaceted—the historian Eugene Trani refers to “some of the most complex negotiations in modern peacemaking” —and it was an extremely difficult challenge for TR to keep up with these negotiations and to guide them.  Perhaps the two most important figures in Roosevelt’s backstage peace conference diplomacy were Baron Kentaro Kaneko from Japan and George Meyer, appointed by TR in December 1904 to serve as U.S. ambassador to Russia.

A distinguished statesman who had been a schoolmate of Roosevelt at Harvard, Kentaro Kaneko was sent to America by the Japanese government in 1904 to cultivate the goodwill of the American people, and especially their President.  Kaneko soon became a member of Roosevelt’s informal Tennis Cabinet, a small circle of friends who joined TR for rock climbing and other recreational activities as well as for discussions of affairs of state.  Although he had a good relationship with the Japanese ambassador, Kogoro Takahira, TR regularly communicated with the Japanese government via Kaneko prior to and during his mediation. In June and July 1905, before the conference opened, Roosevelt met with Kaneko and urged him to encourage his government to pursue a moderate, reasonable peace.  During the decisive month of August 1905, Kaneko visited Roosevelt at the Summer White House at least six times.   On August 18, as Roosevelt was preparing to issue a personal appeal to the Russian tsar, Kaneko helped the President draft this appeal, an astonishing example of their intimacy and of Roosevelt’s fundamentally pro-Japanese outlook. 

About a week after the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth, Roosevelt wrote these revealing words to his Japanese friend:

Will you permit me at this time to say to you how much I have enjoyed our intercourse during the last year and a half, and how deeply I appreciate the services you have rendered throughout that period in keeping our two countries in close touch?  You have rendered me an invaluable assistance by the way in which you have enabled me to know at first hand so much that it was important for me to know, and also by the way in which you have enabled me to convey to your own Government certain things which I thought it desirable to have known and which I hardly cared to forward through official channels.

As for TR’s friend George Meyer, another Harvard schoolmate, he was transferred from Rome to St. Petersburg shortly after Roosevelt’s close English friend Cecil Spring Rice, a diplomat then stationed in Russia, urged Roosevelt to send “a really good Ambassador here.”   In his confidential letter of appointment, Roosevelt instructed his new ambassador to Russia to observe carefully and to report regularly and in detail “everything we ought to know” about the war, about Russian diplomacy, and about Russia’s internal turmoil.  Roosevelt emphasized that he needed to be informed promptly of “each phase of any new situation.”  The President noted America’s long-standing difficulties with Russia over East Asia, not the least of which was Russia’s “literally fathomless mendacity.”  TR emphasized to Meyer, who had been anticipating a more desirable transfer to Paris, that the Russian ambassadorship had become “the most important post in the diplomatic service,” and that “you are the man” for that job.   The choice of Meyer proved to be a wise and even an inspired one, for Meyer was highly effective both as a reporter and as an agent of Roosevelt’s diplomacy.

As the peace talks proceeded, in line with Roosevelt’s counsel Japan abandoned its most extreme demands.  The Japanese delegation in Portsmouth did continue to insist, however, on a Russian indemnity and on retaining Sakhalin Island, demands that TR believed to be reasonable.  But the dysfunctional and self-deluding Russian government of Nicholas II adamantly rejected these demands, and so the prospects for peace appeared dim.

Nonetheless, the President was determined to persist, and in mid-August, to quote Eugene Trani, “Rooseveltian diplomacy behind the scenes increased to a feverish [pace].”   Via Assistant Secretary of State Peirce, Roosevelt requested that the leader of the Russian delegation, Sergei Witte, dispatch a representative to Sagamore Hill “so that I may through him send you a strictly confidential message.”   Witte delegated Ambassador Rosen, but Rosen’s visit to Sagamore Hill was entirely unsatisfactory to Roosevelt.  The frustrated President then blew off some steam on August 21 in a private letter to a close friend.  Thinking especially about the Russians, TR commented on the stubbornness of the peace envoys:

To be polite and sympathetic and patient in explaining for the hundredth time something perfectly obvious, when what I really want to do is to give utterances to whoops of rage and jump up and knock their heads together—well, all I can hope is that the self-repression will be ultimately helpful for my character.

Around this time, fortunately, the vigilant Roosevelt discovered that the Japanese government was more desperate for peace—and therefore more willing to compromise—than the President had previously understood.  In addition to the terms that had earlier and rather easily been agreed upon, among them Japanese control over Korea, it now appeared possible that peace could be attained on the basis of no Russian indemnity and the division of Sakhalin Island between the two belligerents.  TR enlisted the support of German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who could sometimes influence his cousin the tsar, on behalf of such a compromise, and he assigned Ambassador Meyer to speak to the tsar in person. Finding the tsar to be “a man of no force, no breadth of mind,” Meyer very impressively mobilized just the right arguments to persuade Nicholas to consent to a division of Sakhalin.

Still, the week between August 23, when Meyer met with the tsar, and August 29, when final agreement was achieved, was filled with tension and frayed nerves in Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Oyster Bay, and Portsmouth.  Although prepared to divide Sakhalin, Japan now wanted Russia to pay it for returning the northern half, which Russia was not willing to do.  For his part, Roosevelt was incredibly busy during these pivotal days, pressing both sides and working every possible channel in his quest to break the deadlock.  But ultimately the question of peace or continued war was beyond the President’s control, and as the final meeting of the chief Russian and Japanese delegates convened in Portsmouth—with the Russians ready to break off the talks and depart—Roosevelt could only wait and hope.  In Portsmouth, at the last moment, Japan yielded; Sakhalin would be divided at the fiftieth parallel without payment, with Japan retaining the southern half.  Peace had been achieved!  Hearing the wonderful news, Theodore Roosevelt “descended the stairs at [Sagamore Hill] holding a telegram and smiling from ear to ear.”   A week later the formal signing of the treaty took place.

Despite internal unhappiness with the treaty in both Russia and Japan, both governments appreciated the difficulty and the significance of Roosevelt’s diplomatic feat.  In his book The Treaty of Portsmouth: An Adventure in American Diplomacy, Trani offers the following summary assessment of TR’s work:

It was clearly a Roosevelt-managed peace.  The conference had assembled on his initiative.  He had convinced the Japanese and the Russians of the need for it.  Although the war would have ended sometime, it seems that peace would have been precious long in coming if Roosevelt had not been at work.  His preaching made the powers think of moderate terms.  His influence was especially apparent on the Japanese. . . .  Roosevelt kept the conference going by constant contact with the plenipotentiaries and their governments.
During the tense closing phase of the conference, Trani contends, TR’s communication through Meyer with the Russian government was particularly consequential.

As we all will soon see, the commemorative plaque on the “Peace Building” at the Portsmouth Navy Yard reads in its entirety as follows:

  IN THIS BUILDING
   at the invitation of
THEODORE ROOSEVELT,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
was held the
    PEACE CONFERENCE
  between the
ENVOYS OF RUSSIA AND JAPAN,
      and
SEPTEMBER 5, 1905, at 3:47 P.M.,
was signed
THE TREATY OF PORTSMOUTH,
    which ended the war between the two empires.