The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt Review
Books of The Times
Final Scenes From a Life of Keen Adventure
Theodore Roosevelt lived for threescore hale, hearty, prodigiously adventurous years. Edmund Morris has devoted more half that time to writing a magisterial three-volume Roosevelt biography. He began by writing a screenplay about the young Roosevelt'due south cattle ranching years in the Dakota Territory. This led to the biography'due south Pulitzer Prize-winning beginning book, "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," in 1979. It took more than than two decades for Mr. Morris to complete his installment nigh the Roosevelt presidency, "Theodore Rex," which arrived in 2001.
At present with "Colonel Roosevelt," the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt'due south life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two before installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his ain life's work, he has reason to be immensely proud.
"Theodore Rex" ended with one of the bully presidential cliffhangers. Once the fiery, incorrigibly antagonistic Roosevelt left the White Business firm at the age of 50, what could he practise for an encore? He had one glimmer of an idea: to disappear, or at to the lowest degree do so equally completely as a man leading a big safari and press contingent through Africa could. The new president, William Howard Taft, expressed his regret at Roosevelt'due south deviation by presenting him with a gold ruler, non the most essential of safari tools.
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"Colonel Roosevelt," which takes its title from Roosevelt's favorite way of being addressed during his emeritus years, follows the African journey with Mr. Morris'south characteristic care. He uses principal sources, sometimes fifty-fifty rough drafts of letters and documents, and goes well beyond Roosevelt's own writing — which is exhausting even to contemplate, since he in one case claimed that he wrote betwixt 100,000 and 150,000 letters a yr. (He kept diaries, wrote manufactures and volume-length travelogues and nature guides too.) The close attention to item in "Colonel Roosevelt" as well extends to its choices of photographs. Mr. Morris seems to take been adamant to use startling lifelike picture rather than blandly studied ones.
Post-safari in 1910 America's showiest ex-president went to Europe and constitute himself greatly in need. "Even the Calvinist University of Geneva was threatening hospitality," Mr. Morris writes, in the dry out, understated mode that contrasts so well with his subject's firecracker personality. While in Europe, Roosevelt fulfilled Taft'south request that he join hordes of royalty at the funeral of Edward VII. As he wound up putting it, "I felt if I met another male monarch I should bite him!" Roosevelt likewise saw enough to sense dire trouble brewing. "I'm absolutely certain we're all in for it," he presciently told his wife, Edith, later sizing upward Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.
Back stateside Roosevelt made a concerted try to avert speaking ill of Taft. And Mr. Morris describes exactly how that effort brutal apart as Roosevelt developed presidential aspirations for 1912. "Although he was not running, he was running," Mr. Morris writes. "Fifty-fifty as he maintained his vow of silence, he was shouting from the hustings." As "Colonel Roosevelt" describes how Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" entrada, via the breakaway Progressive Party, managed to hobble the Republican Taft and elect a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, this book is at its nearly intensively political. Campaign events and calculations boss this role of the story. And Mr. Morris'south research is thorough enough to amplify an already well-documented office of the Roosevelt story.
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But the book returns to more than novel, less familiar territory after the election is over. At that bespeak Roosevelt, a free-range public official rather than a legitimate one, could begin squaring off against President Wilson over when and how the United States might enter the looming European war.
Mr. Morris's analyses cast interesting light on the differences between these deeply incompatible men. "He named no plants and heard no birds," he writes of Wilson, contrasting this with Roosevelt'south consuming beloved of nature. On the other paw, this book argues that Wilson'south grasp of human nature and his political instincts far exceeded Roosevelt's initially dismissive opinion of them.
Eventually, Mr. Morris says, the outmaneuvered Roosevelt would marvel "at Wilson's Bach-like power to combine every theme with its own inversion," ; Wilson could seemingly praise Roosevelt while actually delivering a dismissal. And Roosevelt could smoke at "that lily-livered skunk in the White House" and watch his ain reputation exist outshone.
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The after years covered hither include terribly painful parts of Roosevelt'due south story. He experienced the waning of both his political powers and physical ones. When he became the defendant in a libel suit brought by the New York Republican Political party boss William J. Barnes Jr. (the book includes bits of courtroom testimony), he faltered.
"The spectacle of Theodore Roosevelt straining both to hear and think clearly was a shock to many observers," Mr. Morris writes. "He had ever been famous for the perfection of his retention, but hither he was unable to pulsate up facts in his own defense force." Still, he emerged victorious, his favorite mode to emerge from whatever battle.
The cease of Roosevelt's life was a bitter time. The state of war had begun. The four Roosevelt sons and their father had all trained for preparedness; two boys would be wounded; a tertiary would be killed in French republic. "What made this loss and so devastating to him was the truth it conveyed," Mr. Morris writes about Roosevelt'south reaction: "that expiry in boxing was no more than glamorous than death in an abattoir."
Roosevelt'southward lifelong romanticizing of war was 1 of the many things that failed him as his own life ebbed. He died on January. 6, 1919, supposedly of a pulmonary embolism, only Mr. Morris has elicited the opinions of 2 doctors who reviewed his medical history and saw the possibility of a eye attack.
Mr. Morris, who has come to know Roosevelt so well that he has taken great leaps of presumption, like the 2008 Op-Ed article in The New York Times in which he purported to interview Roosevelt virtually John McCain and Barack Obama. All the same, he has earned the right to speculate about the most intimate aspects of his bailiwick'southward documented life. So he does embellish that 2010 medical diagnosis. "If so," Mr. Morris writes, "he could be said in more than ways than i to have died of a cleaved eye."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/books/18book.html
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