It is easy to poke fun at the Teddy who exhibited himself, bodily and acrobatically, on the national stage, bagging big game in the Torrid Zone and (in his last years) bawling for a brigade to fight the Kaiser. The Harvard man whose father bought a substitute in the Civil War compensated for the stain on his family’s honor by making a cult of the warrior, the cowboy, and the blood-sportsman. Roosevelt wanted to revive the fighting and breeding man of the atavistic past, but his exaltation of the primitive virtues of the “strenuous life” appears in retrospect to be …