The Politics of Intervention

2 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION

decision to give some preference to ability over seniority
brought officers of most unconventional accomplishments to
important commands.
Perhaps the most stunning military career after 1898 was
that of Leonard Wood. Born in 1860 of an old New England
family of slight means and stern convictions, Wood took a
medical degree at Harvard and, in 1885, joined the Army
as a contract surgeon.^2 Commissioned and later awarded the
Medal of Honor for his endurance in the pursuit of Geronimo,
Wood became family physician to Presidents Cleveland and
McKinley. During his years in Washington, he won highly
placed friends, including Theodore Roosevelt. At the outbreak
of the war with Spain, Colonel Wood and Lieutenant Colonel
Roosevelt raised the First Volunteer Cavalary and campaigned
gloriously in Cuba. Roosevelt, admirer and patron of the
ambitious doctor-soldier, wrote of Wood in 1899:

He combined, in a very high degree, the qualities of entire manliness

with entire uprightness and cleanliness of character. It was a pleasure

to deal with a man of high ideals, who scorned everything mean and

base, and who also possessed those robust and hardy qualities of body

and mind, for which no merely negative virtue can ever atone. He was

by nature a soldier of the highest type.^3

Wood had his enemies in the Army and in Washington, for

he was outspoken, incorruptible, politically astute, a born

publicist, and endlessly confident in his principles and abilities.

He had risen quickly past more senior and (in their view)

deserving officers, and his critics never missed a chance to

attack him. He was a commander who often won unswerving

loyalty from his subordinates. In all, Leonard Wood was

one of America's greatest and most controversial soldier-

administrators.

Roosevelt considered Brigadier General James Franklin Bell

to be as able a soldier as Leonard Wood.^4 After his graduation

from West Point in 1878, Bell served a long apprenticeship

on the plains. In 1899 he was still just another graying captain

of cavalry. As the colonel of a volunteer regiment, however,