Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

reviewed September 2013

Edmund Morris’ third and final installment of the life of Theodore Roosevelt. His first dealt with the life of TR from birth to his Vice-Presidency. The second, while he was president, and this one, his life after his residence in the Oval Office. So the author has his subject broken down in nice, digestible chunks in terms of his subject’s milestones for these separate works. All three books were brilliant, yet I found the second to be a minor disappointment compared to the first (which won the author a Pulitzer Prize). Whereas I’m not sure if this one is as good as the first, it’s definitely better than the second. As I mentioned in my review of the second (titled “Theodore Rex”), it was not necessarily the writing that was inferior, but the fact that the man’s life was a bit constrained during his presidency.

If you were to ask “How can a biography about a President be constrained when it talks about the years when he was president?”, well, you’ve never met Theodore Roosevelt. The man had prodigious stamina, a wide variety of hobbies, boundless energy, and an incredible will to live his life to the fullest. Now that he’s done being president when this book begins, he’s somewhat free to going back to being the man he once was.

That’s not to say it’s easy. It seems that everyone wants him back in office as president (his successor, William Howard Taft, managed to mess thing up quite a bit once he took over in The White House), and although Roosevelt doesn’t really want to go back to being president, he almost feels obligated. Without going into too much detail, he’s dragged back into the race of 1912, yet he has to form a third “independent” political party (The Bull Moose Party) if he has any chance of succeeding. He doesn’t succeed, but what third party candidate ever does? Because of his strong impact and showing though, Taft loses the election, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson is elected. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the 1992 election when Ross Perot took a lot of thunder out of George Bush’s engine, and some argued opened up the door for Bill Clinton to win the race. Anyway, more on Woodrow Wilson later.

This was really the only tedious part of the book. After reading so many political books of presidents of late, I tend to grow weary with all of the details surrounding the campaigns, the conventions, the mud slinging, the delegate counts, etc. Such details don’t make an exciting read. Fortunately, it’s a minor portion of the book, and Roosevelt almost seems a bit relieved when he’s not elected.

Well, Roosevelt being Roosevelt, he soon decides to embark on another worldwide adventure. This time, he’s heading to South America to the Brazilian jungle. Along with son Kermit, and a team of other explorers, they set out on a borderline suicidal journey into the deep, forbidden unknown. As this team of dedicated explorers trudge through areas that were literally unexplored by any at this point, you have to ask yourself, “What exactly was the appeal?” The author goes into great detail of the piranha infested, diseased laden climate, and the reader almost gets sick himself as he hears of all of this misery that the travelers endure. At one point, you wonder if the explorers doubt their own survival, when they appear hopelessly lost with supplies running down to a bare minimum. Well, most do survive, and Roosevelt even manages to discover an unknown river that is aptly named after him. The episode is quite an exciting read, and the events almost warrant a spiel in, and of, itself.

The second half of the book is where the book really picks up steam. Tensions are building up worldwide amongst the superpowers in Europe during the second decade of the twentieth century. Roosevelt knows that a major war is around the corner, and after the Archduke of Austria, Franz Ferdinand, is assassinated, it’s no shock that this event eventually plunges the continent into “The War to End all Wars”. The question then becomes, “What role does the United States play?”

For obvious reasons, the majority of the country takes the isolationist view, and President Wilson is only too happy to stump this particular ideology. The Colonel (what Roosevelt is now known as during his post presidency) knows better, however. He knows that the U.S. will have to step in at some point, and his thinking is that the sooner the U.S. enters, the better off everyone will be. So a lot of name calling and cries of incompetency are now heard from The Colonel about the current president. Not surprisingly, it makes for a bit of an icy relationship with the current occupant of The White House.

If you could criticize anything about Roosevelt, it’s that he was a bit too hawkish when it came to war. Remember, this was the man who charged up San Juan Hill with his group of Rough Riders a couple of decades ago bringing a swift end to the Spanish - American war. Roosevelt, like many of his contemporaries, saw war as a necessary evil that all would probably have to endure during some juncture of their lifetime.

When the U.S. is brought into the conflict in 1917, not only does Roosevelt want a commission to lead some of the fighting, but he’s also insistent that all four of his sons join the war. He wants them on the front lines, not in some cushy behind-the-lines duty out of harm’s way. We never really know what his boys feel about this attitude, yet there’s never any grumbling, and you have to assume that they were all ready and eager to follow in their father’s footsteps. Sadly, the youngest boy Quentin - a top notch fighter pilot, is, in fact, killed in action and the event scars Roosevelt and his wife Edith deeply.

You have to wonder why he was so gung-ho about his insistence when it seemed to hit him and his family so hard. Whether this event had any impact on the failing health of this ex-president is pure speculation, but as we read in the final chapters, right around the time the war ends, Roosevelt is fading fast. He’s lived an incredibly full life, and his body is simply worn down at this point, and it can’t recover from all of the past punishments.

So TR gracefully passes away at the age of 60, and the book spends a lot of time (well, one long chapter) talking about the after effects, and the man’s legacy. Of course, any political figure will have those on opposite sides of the fence arguing about the legend of the individual, but from reading the three volumes from Edmund Morris, you walk away with the overall impression that Teddy Roosevelt deserves the accolades that were heaped on him, and not only was he one of the best president’s in the country’s lifetime, but arguably one of the best, energetic human beings that modern history has known.

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