Down the Nile: Khartoum to Cairo

Abstract

A few days before the Dal reached Khartoum, a flotilla of boats carrying the journalists barred from the safari intercepted Roosevelt on the Nile. Among the newspapermen was at least one friendly face, John “Cal” O’Laughlin of the Chicago Tribune, who, as an acting assistant secretary of state at the end of TR’s administration, had been present at the final “tennis cabinet” gathering a year before. O’Laughlin recalled his first glimpse of a beaming TR on the deck of the Dal, dressed in khaki and under an American flag swinging his olive green helmet in reply to the frantic hat waving of the press who crowded the railing of his vessel, the Abbas Pasha. Roosevelt had lost the care worn look O’Laughlin remembered from the last White House days, his face was brown, his moustache lightened by the sun showing “more than a few gray hairs.” He heartily welcomed the journalists as the “vanguard” of the civilization he had left behind a year before.¹