Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one
whose greatness increased out of office. When he toured Europe in
1910 as plain "Colonel Roosevelt," he was hailed as the most famous
man in the world. Crowned heads vied to put him up in their
palaces. "If I see another king," he joked, "I think I shall bite
him."
Had TR won his historic "Bull Moose" campaign in 1912 (when he
outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might
have averted World War I, so great was his international influence.
Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would
unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the White
House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the
United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially
just.
This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize and National
Book Award-winning author of "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" and
"Theodore Rex," is itself the completion of a trilogy sure to stand
as definitive. Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor,
and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest
fact, it recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life
in American history. What other president has written forty books,
hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an
assassin's bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the
Rhine?
"Colonel Roosevelt "begins with a prologue recounting what TR
called his "journey into the Pleistocene"--a yearlong safari
through East Africa, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian. Some
readers will be repulsed by TR's bloodlust, which this book does
not prettify, yet there can be no denying that the Colonel
passionately loved and understood every living thing that came his
way: The text is rich in quotations from his marvelous nature
writing.
Although TR intended to remain out of politics when he returned
home in 1910, a fateful decision that spring drew him back into
public life. By the end of the summer, in his famous "New
Nationalism" speech, he was the guiding spirit of the Progressive
movement, which inspired much of the social agenda of the future
New Deal. (TR's fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged
that debt, adding that the Colonel "was the greatest man I ever
knew.")
Then follows a detailed account of TR's reluctant yet almost
successful campaign for the White House in 1912. But unlike other
biographers, Edmund Morris does not treat TR mainly as a
politician. This volume gives as much consideration to TR's
literary achievements and epic expedition to Brazil in 1913-1914 as
to his fatherhood of six astonishingly different children, his
spiritual and aesthetic beliefs, and his eager embrace of other
cultures--from Arab and Magyar to German and American Indian. It is
impossible to read "Colonel Roosevelt "and not be awed by the man's
universality. The Colonel himself remarked, "I have enjoyed life as
much as any nine men I know."
Morris does not hesitate, however, to show how pathologically TR
turned upon those who inherited the power he craved--the hapless
Taft, the adroit Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson declined to bring the
United States into World War I in 1915 and 1916, the Colonel
blasted him with some of the worst abuse ever uttered by a former
chief executive. Yet even Wilson had to admit that behind the
Rooseveltian will to rule lay a winning idealism and decency. "He
is just like a big boy--there is a sweetness about him that you
can't resist." That makes the story of TR's last year, when the
"boy" in him died, all the sadder in the telling: the conclusion of
a life of Aristotelian grandeur.
General
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