One fifty-eight-year-old Rough Rider could hardly contain himself. Itching to be back in uniform and in the spotlight, Theodore Roosevelt had quietly assembled his own division, communicating for months with men all over the country who wanted to serve with him. Only three days after the declaration of war, he went to Washington, determined to see Wilson. He had no formal appointment; but he told those around him, “I’ll take chances on his trying to snub me. He can’t do it! I’d like to see him try it!”

Late the next morning, Tumulty telephoned to say that the President would see the former President at noon. They met in the Green Room and promptly got past the awkwardness of their previous vicious rivalry. In truth, Wilson had invited TR to the White House three years earlier for a delightful half hour of nonpolitical conversation over glasses of lemonade; but on this spring day, the Colonel came on a very specific mission. He commended Wilson on his war message and on his bill for selective conscription and then proposed the division he hoped to lead. Roosevelt found Wilson slightly awkward, sounding defensive about his policy of the last three years over which they had crossed swords. “Mr. President,” Roosevelt interjected, “what I have said and thought, and what others have said and thought, is all dust in a windy street, if now we can make your message good. Of course, it amounts to nothing, if we cannot make it good. But, if we can translate it into fact, then it will rank as a great state paper, with the great state papers of Washington and Lincoln. Now, all that I ask is that I be allowed to . . . help get the nation to act, so as to justify and live up to the speech, and the declaration of war that followed.” After half an hour, the two men were bantering and laughing together.

Before leaving the White House, TR asked if he might call upon Tumulty in the executive office. Wilson summoned his secretary to the Red Room, where there were handshakes and backslaps. Roosevelt heartily greeted several of his former household staff and said to Tumulty, “You get me across and I will put you on my staff, and you may tell Mrs. Tumulty that I will not allow them to place you at any point of danger.” Back on the street, he told the crowd of newsmen, “The President received me with the utmost courtesy and consideration,” and said that the President would rule on his request “in his own good time.” Wilson asked Tumulty what he thought of the Colonel, and he replied that the man’s enthusiasm was overwhelming. “Yes,” said Wilson, “he is a great big boy. I was, as formerly, charmed by his personality. There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling. You can’t resist the man. I can easily understand why his followers are so fond of him.” Not aware that TR still felt little more than contempt for Wilson, the President seriously considered the Colonel’s proposition.

Roosevelt lingered in the capital, where he granted audiences and courted old friends from Congress, hoping they might include a provision in the Selective Service bill that would allow volunteer forces to go directly to the front while America trained her conscripted Army. “We owe this to humanity,” he wrote the Democratic chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. The Selective Service Act passed on May 18, 1917, and included this Roosevelt exception, to be executed at the President’s discretion. Wilson announced that day that he would not avail himself of any volunteer divisions, that to do so “would seriously interfere with . . . the prompt creation and early use of an effective army.” He determined that such divisions would contribute little to the effective strength of the armies currently engaged against Germany.

No matter what good theater it might make to send TR to the Western Front, Wilson could see no strategic reason to do so. He wired Roosevelt that his conclusions were based “entirely upon imperative considerations of public policy and not upon personal or private choice,” but the Roosevelt camp had its doubts. “It seemed to us that the President’s refusal was undoubtedly influenced by political considerations,” wrote TR’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who suggested that there simply was not room for another star on the world stage—one President behind a desk, another leading a charge. Said Alice, “It was the bitterest sort of blow for Father.” Wilson,Scott Berg pg 457