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Random House
December 2010
On Sale: November 23, 2010
784 pages
ISBN: 0375504877
EAN: 9780375504877
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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