On the night of election day he issued a statement in which he said: “Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.” Of this he writes:
The reason for my choice of the exact phraseology used was twofold. In the first place, many of my supporters were insisting that, as I had served only three and a half years of my first term, coming in from the Vice-Presidency when President McKinley was killed, I had really had only one elective term, so that the third term custom did not apply to me; and I wished to repudiate this suggestion. I believed then (and I believe now) the third term custom or tradition to be wholesome, and therefore, I was determined to regard its substance, refusing to quibble over the words usually employed to express it. On the other hand I did not wish simply and specifically to say that I would not be a candidate for the nomination in 1908, because if I had specified the year when I would not be a candidate, it would have been widely accepted as meaning that I intended to be a candidate some other year; and I had no such intention, and had no idea that I would ever be a candidate again. Certain newspaper men did ask me if I intended to apply my prohibition to 1912, and I answered that I was not thinking of 1912, nor of 1920, nor of 1940, and that I must decline to say anything whatever except what appeared in my statement. [17]
[17] “Autobiography,” pp. 422-3.
From March 4, 1905, until March 4, 1909, he was an elected President, not a President who had succeeded to the office through the death of another. When the end of his term approached he threw his influence in favor of the nomination of Mr. William H. Taft, Secretary of War in his Cabinet. He could have had the nomination himself if he had wished it; indeed he had to take precautions against being nominated. But Mr. Taft was nominated, and in November, 1908, was elected over Mr. Bryan, who was then running for the Presidency for the third time.
President Roosevelt and President-elect Taft drove up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol together, March 4, 1909, in a cold gale of wind, which had followed a sudden blizzard. The weather was an omen of the stormy change which was coming over the friendship of these two men. An hour or two later it was President Taft who drove back to the White House, while Mr. Roosevelt, once more a private citizen, was hurrying to his home in Oyster Bay, to get ready for his hunting trip to Africa.
This was the vacation to which he had been looking forward for years. He had long been a friend of a number of famous hunters, and had corresponded with and received visits from some of them. Chief among these was Mr. Frederick Selous, one of the greatest of African hunters. Those who have read any of Rider Haggard’s fine stories of adventure (especially “King Solomon’s Mines” and “Allan Quartermain”) will be interested to know that Mr. Selous was the original of Quartermain. Adventures like these of Selous, the opportunity to see the marvelous African country, and the chance to shoot the dangerous big game, made Roosevelt long to visit Africa.
So he headed a scientific expedition sent out by the Smithsonian Institution to collect specimens for the National Museum at Washington. With him went his son Kermit, a student at Harvard; and three American naturalists. They left America only two or three weeks after his term as President had ended, and they came out of the African wilderness at Khartoum about a year later. With friends whom they met in Africa, English and American hunters, and a long train of native bearers and scouts, they visited the parts of Africa richest in game, and killed lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, zebra, giraffe, buffalo, and dozens of other kinds of animals. Mr. Roosevelt and Kermit shot about a dozen trophies for themselves; otherwise nothing was killed which was not intended as a museum specimen or for meat. No useless butchery of animals was allowed; often at great inconvenience and even danger, animals were avoided or driven off rather than let them be killed needlessly. Some of the finest groups of mounted animals in the country are now standing in the National Museum, as a result of this trip.
They saw many wonderful sights. They saw a band of Nandi warriors, fierce savages, naked, and armed only with shields and long spears, attack and kill a big lion. Kermit Roosevelt took photographs of most of the large game, coming up to close quarters in order to get his pictures. He took two or three photographs of a herd of wild elephants in the forest, going at great risk within twenty-five yards of the herd to be sure to get a good view.