Colonel Roosevelt (1 Viewer)

[Combat]

The final book in Edmund Morris' excellent trilogy on Teddy Roosevelt comes out on Nov. 23:

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.

 

[Combat]

NY Times review:

Theodore Roosevelt lived for 60 hale, hearty, prodigiously adventurous years. Edmund Morris has devoted more than half that time to writing a magisterial three-volume Roosevelt biography. He began by writing a screenplay about the young Roosevelt’s cattle ranching years in the Dakota Territory. This led to the biography’s Pulitzer Prize-winning first volume, “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” in 1979. It took more than two decades for Mr. Morris to complete his installment about the Roosevelt presidency, “Theodore Rex,” which arrived in 2001.

Now 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’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.

“Theodore Rex” ended with one of the great presidential cliffhangers. Once the fiery, incorrigibly combative Roosevelt left the White House at the age of 50, what could he do for an encore? He had one glimmer of an idea: to disappear, or at least do so as completely as a man leading a large safari and press contingent through Africa could. The new president, William Howard Taft, expressed his regret at Roosevelt’s departure by presenting him with a gold ruler, not the most essential of safari tools.

“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’s characteristic care. He uses primary sources, sometimes even rough drafts of letters and documents, and goes well beyond Roosevelt’s own writing — which is exhausting even to contemplate, since he once claimed that he wrote between 100,000 and 150,000 letters a year. (He kept diaries, wrote articles and book-length travelogues and nature guides too.) The close attention to detail in “Colonel Roosevelt” also extends to its choices of photographs. Mr. Morris seems to have been determined to use startling lifelike picture rather than blandly studied ones.

Post-safari in 1910 America’s showiest ex-president went to Europe and found himself greatly in demand. “Even the Calvinist Academy of Geneva was threatening hospitality,” Mr. Morris writes, in the dry, understated style that contrasts so well with his subject’s firecracker personality. While in Europe, Roosevelt fulfilled Taft’s 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 king I should bite him!” Roosevelt also saw enough to sense dire trouble brewing. “I’m absolutely certain we’re all in for it,” he presciently told his wife, Edith, after sizing up Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

Back stateside Roosevelt made a concerted effort to avoid speaking ill of Taft. And Mr. Morris describes exactly how that effort fell apart as Roosevelt developed presidential aspirations for 1912. “Although he was not running, he was running,” Mr. Morris writes. “Even as he maintained his vow of silence, he was shouting from the hustings.” As “Colonel Roosevelt” describes how Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” campaign, via the breakaway Progressive Party, managed to hobble the Republican Taft and elect a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, this book is at its most intensively political. Campaign events and calculations dominate this part of the story. And Mr. Morris’s research is thorough enough to amplify an already well-documented part of the Roosevelt story.

But the book returns to more novel, less familiar territory after the election is over. At that point 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’s consuming love of nature. On the other hand, this book argues that Wilson’s 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 ability to combine every theme with its own inversion,” ; Wilson could seemingly praise Roosevelt while actually delivering a dismissal. And Roosevelt could fume at “that lily-livered skunk in the White House” and watch his own reputation be outshone.

The later years covered here include terribly painful parts of Roosevelt’s 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 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 always been famous for the perfection of his memory, but here he was unable to drum up facts in his own defense.” Still, he emerged victorious, his favorite way to emerge from any battle.

The end of Roosevelt’s life was a bitter time. The war had begun. The four Roosevelt sons and their father had all trained for preparedness; two boys would be wounded; a third would be killed in France. “What made this loss so devastating to him was the truth it conveyed,” Mr. Morris writes about Roosevelt’s reaction: “that death in battle was no more glamorous than death in an abattoir.”

Roosevelt’s lifelong romanticizing of war was one of the many things that failed him as his own life ebbed. He died on Jan. 6, 1919, supposedly of a pulmonary embolism, but Mr. Morris has elicited the opinions of two doctors who reviewed his medical history and saw the possibility of a heart 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 about John McCain and Barack Obama. Still, he has earned the right to speculate about the most intimate aspects of his subject’s documented life. So he does embellish that 2010 medical diagnosis. “If so,” Mr. Morris writes, “he could be said in more ways than one to have died of a broken heart.”

 

[Fraxinus]

Devoured the previous 2 books at least twice, so this is a definite.