American Lion
Edmund Morris gives it another try.

By Max Boot, editorial-features editor of the Wall Street Journal
December 15-16, 2001

Theodore Rex, by Edmund Morris (Random House, 772 pp., $35)

errorism on the scale of September 11 is new to America, or to anywhere else for that matter. But there is nothing unprecedented about political attacks on U.S. soil. On September 6, 1901 — 100 years, almost to the day, before the carnage at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — the president of the United States, William McKinley, was gunned down by a Polish-American anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. Theodore Roosevelt succeeded McKinley, and devoted a good portion of his first message to Congress to denouncing foreign terrorists, in words that seem strikingly relevant to the present day.

The wind is sowed by the men who preach such doctrines, and they cannot escape their responsibility for the whirlwind that is reaped. . . . They and those like them should be kept out of this country; and if found here they should be promptly deported to the country whence they came; and far-reaching provision should be made for the punishment of those who stay.

There was no mention of the civil liberties of law-abiding immigrants, no bows toward America's great respect for the Polish people, no genuflections toward anarchist doctrine. Instead Roosevelt warned in stern tones: "The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is kindled it burns like a consuming flame."

Edmund Morris quotes these words near the beginning of the long-awaited second volume of his Roosevelt biography. This book was gripping enough prior to September 11, but has acquired added resonance in the atrocity's aftermath. As I read, I could not help wondering how the 26th president would have handled the present crisis, and pining, in these dark days, for his soaring eloquence, his boundless energy, and his indomitable warrior spirit. Though George W. Bush has been a capable president, he's no Teddy Roosevelt. But then, who is?

Edmund Morris has the curious distinction of having written both one of the very best political biographies and one of the worst. He began his career with a masterpiece, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979). Its success led to Morris's appointment in 1985 as Ronald Reagan's court chronicler, and the publication, 14 years later, of Dutch. The book was subtitled A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, but was really the memoir of a biographer overwhelmed by a subject he did not understand. Morris tried to mask his failure of comprehension by resorting to all sorts of weird literary devices, the most notorious being the creation of a fictional "Edmund Morris" whose life kept intersecting with the future president's. The resulting book was self-indulgent, solipsistic, silly.

Morris has now redeemed himself with Theodore Rex, devoted entirely to TR's presidential years, 1901-1909. (A third and final volume is promised.) There are no scenes here of Edmund smoking a cigar and shooting the breeze with Teddy; this is an old-fashioned narrative that hews for the most part to the historical record but nevertheless manages to scale high peaks of literary achievement. Every reader will have favorite moments. I was particularly dazzled by the evocation of the summer White House at Oyster Bay; one can almost hear the squeals of the Roosevelt children scampering through the daisy fields.

If there is one fault, it is that the narrative is largely devoid of analysis. Coming to the end of its 555 pages, the reader hungers for some sense of what it all meant, but Morris does little to satisfy this craving. He offers a mere three paragraphs of summation, in which he blandly notes TR's legacy of new national parks and refers to a "folk consensus" that he was "the most powerfully positive American leader since Abraham Lincoln."

This lack of reflection is disappointing, because TR and his legacy loom very large today. He is much invoked by Republicans who think that their party is once again in the grip of wealthy reactionaries, and that it will take a man of Roosevelt's independence to steer it back toward a progressive path. John McCain's backers tout him as the new TR; a prominent McCainite website regularly castigates ruling Republicans in a column called "The Bull Moose," named after the third party TR founded after bolting the GOP in 1912.

What are the parallels between TR and McCain? What ideology did TR represent? And who best champions his ideals today? Edmund Morris does not address these questions, but Theodore Rex — together with other recent volumes about TR — does provide raw material for such a consideration.

Start with foreign policy. Though TR gained a reputation as a reckless war hawk, his own presidency did not see a single major war. Instead he became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. This was no accident, for (like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) he often displayed a caution in diplomacy at odds with his popular reputation.

His geopolitical skill was on full display during a 1902 showdown with Germany. Venezuela had reneged on its debt; Germany responded — as Western countries did, in those days — by dispatching gunboats. TR deemed Germany's deployment a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, and sent the bulk of the Navy — under Admiral George Dewey, the hero of the Spanish-American War — on "maneuvers" to the region. He did not bluster in public, or issue "demands" that might back Kaiser Wilhelm II into a corner; instead he told the German ambassador in a private chat that "I should be obliged to interfere, by force if necessary, if the Germans took any action which looked like the acquisition of territory in Venezuela or elsewhere along the Caribbean." After the Kaiser took the hint, TR did not gloat. In order to avoid embarrassing Berlin, he apparently went so far as to order all evidence of this exchange expurgated from the archives.

As this incident makes clear, Roosevelt was hawkish but not recklessly so. His philosophy was a simple one: peace through strength. He did not believe the U.S. should go around irritating strong powers unless it had the means to impose its will. He condemned as "prize jackasses" those who combined "the unready hand with the unbridled tongue" — a criticism aimed at Woodrow Wilson, but one that applies equally to Bill Clinton, another interventionist who lacked the will to implement his good intentions.

This is not to suggest that Roosevelt disdained all considerations of morality in foreign policy; the attempts by Henry Kissinger and other advocates of realpolitik to claim him for their camp won't wash. As police commissioner of New York, TR had atop his desk a tablet inscribed, "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords." He acted on this belief when he helped whoop America into a war to liberate the Cuban people from "murderous oppression," and when he refused to support a pro-American president of Panama who had gained power through election fraud.

Roosevelt was neither an "idealist" like Jimmy Carter nor a "realist" like George H. W. Bush. Instead, like Reagan and FDR, he combined these two strands, and used American might to champion American ideals. Today, Sen. McCain is an eloquent champion of this brand of foreign policy, but his views are not so different from those of President George W. Bush or, for that matter, those of centrist Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Richard Holbrooke. This muscular idealism is the dominant tradition in U.S. foreign policy.

TR's domestic views are harder to translate into the modern context. On most issues he was (like Disraeli and Bismarck) a conservative reformer, disdaining both reaction and revolution. He condemned the "malefactors of great wealth" and insisted upon vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws. In response to scandals uncovered by "muckrakers" — a term he popularized — Roosevelt created the Department of Commerce and Labor, and signed into law the Pure Food and Drug Act. But he was as troubled by the misbehavior of labor unions as by that of corporations, and he never went nearly as far as most reformers wanted him to. His great passion (aside from warfare) was the outdoors; his big achievement the expansion of the national parks. But even here he was no extremist: He disdained John Muir's purist brand of conservation in favor of Gifford Pinchot's pragmatic approach, which allowed logging and mining of national forests.

James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn suggest in The Three Roosevelts (Atlantic Monthly Press, 678 pp., $37.50) that there was an essential continuum between the views of TR and those of his relatives Franklin and Eleanor. They quote William Allen White, who knew both TR and FDR: "When the New Deal came with its program, it went little further than Colonel Roosevelt's Progressive Party had gone twenty years before." Burns and Dunn argue that the TR reform legacy was carried on by JFK, LBJ, and Carter, only to be snuffed out by Ronald Reagan.

The implication is that TR, had he lived so long, would not only have joined the Democratic party but also stayed within its ranks as it moved ever further left; but it's more likely that he would have become disaffected and — like Reagan — abandoned the Democrats. TR was, for example, eager to expand federal protection of the wild, but would he be in favor of more federal parks today, when Washington already owns almost 60 percent of the land in the western states? TR's abiding passion was not for big government per se, but rather for reform measures aimed at those who abused their power. Today those abuses are as likely to be found in bloated government bureaucracies or in labor unions as in the corporate sector.

Who best embodies the Republican reformist impulse today? McCain supporters think the answer is obvious, but it isn't. True, McCain has some claim to the mantle because of his support for campaign-contribution limits. (TR, too, proposed campaign-finance restrictions in 1912, though he had been perfectly happy to accept huge checks from wealthy donors for his 1904 reelection campaign.) But George Bush might with equal plausibility claim the mantle with his advocacy of faith-based initiatives and Social Security privatization.

The struggle over TR's policy legacy will continue, but his qualities of character were an equally important factor in his elevation to Mount Rushmore. With his boyish enthusiasms, ranging from bear hunting to simplified spelling, TR charmed the world. His mannerisms — the chopping hands, flashing teeth, and exclamations of "Bully!" — have passed into legend. His occupations, from author to rancher to cavalry commander to police commissioner, are enough to fill a dozen résumés. Even more impressive, if less obvious to the public, was his erudition; TR was the greatest intellectual to occupy the White House in the 20th century.

The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Cooper Square Press, 464 pp., $32), edited by H. W. Brands, demonstrates that he was a vigorous, elegant, and often humorous writer. Nothing better conveys the breadth of his learning than a 1903 letter responding to a question about what he had read during the first two years of his administration. To quote only a small sample:

Parts of Herodotus; the first and seventh books of Thucydides; all of Polybius; a little of Plutarch; Aeschylus' Orestean Trilogy; Sophocles' Seven Against Thebes; Euripides' Hippolytus and Bacchae; and Aristophanes' Frogs. . . . [Biographies, in French, of Prince Eugene, Adm. de Ruyter, Turenne, and Sobieski]. . . . Macbeth; Twelfth Night; Henry the Fourth; Henry the Fifth; Richard the Second . . . Church's Beowulf; Morris' translation of the Heimskringla. . . . Sienkiewicz's Fire and Sword . . . Rob Roy; Waverly . . . Pickwick Papers; Nicholas Nickleby; Vanity Fair.

Today, politicians don't even write their own speeches; Roosevelt churned out speeches, innumerable letters, and a steady stream of books and articles. And therein lies the vast gulf between Roosevelt and his would-be imitators. It takes more than "progressive" noises, or even wartime heroism, to make another TR. There was, alas, only one.

— Boot is author of the forthcoming book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.