Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

Having finished this book last night at 2:30 in the morning after a bout of insomnia I can attest that the Edmund Morris three volume set on the life of Theodore Roosevelt might be the best I have read. Of course Dumas Malone's Jefferson set is not one I have tackled yet and Robert Car's LBJ set has not been finished. That set, too, is a wonder.

Truman and TR have long been my two favorite Presidents and this book did nothing to change that. Morris certainly took his time between volumes.

Teddy Roosevelt had a life of adventure long before he became President yet he was very young when thrust into the Presidency upon the death of McKinley by an assassin's bullet. In 1908 Roosevelt chose not to run for another term as President considering the 7 years he had served by the end of his elected term to be close enough to the two term limit that President's had traditionally self imposed on them.

Things changed when Roosevelt's handpicked successor William Howard Taft did not follow the course that T R thought he had defined.

This, the third book in the series tells the story of Roosevelt's life after the Presidency. His trip to Africa, his tour of Europe as the Leader of the World even after he had relinquished his Presidency. The election of 1912 brought the split and the formation of the progressive Bull Moose party. If Republicans had picked the right horse we would not have Woodrow Wilson as President and certainly would have been more prepared for World War I and perhaps involved earlier. The what if's of what this might have meant to History are intriguing. Perhaps the Bolshevik's would not have succeeded in Russia if the war had not become so desperate for them with America's earlier entry. We will never know.

The story of his trip to South America has been well documented in other books and was a story that could and has easily merited full volumes. Roosevelt was a factor in the election of 1916.

Much of the later book tells of his development of his children, their development, and eventual part in World War I.

Roosevelt disagreed with Wilson's approach to World War I both before and after the United States entering. It was an assumed fact that Roosevelt would be the Republican nomination for the Presidency in 1920. It did not happen as Roosevelt's health deteriorated quickly. It was, again, a great loss to the world.

I cannot be impartial. When reading biographies of people in history we know how they end. They die. The world moves on. Reading this book I did feel a sadness when he died, the same thing happened to me at the end of the Truman bio. No matter how great the LBJ biography series by Robert Caro is, and it is wonderful, I do not see myself having the same feeling when the fourth book is published and we come to the end of LBJ.

T R was a force of life. He was not perfect. He was a man. He was a leader of great ability. Most people and even most Presidents have nothing like the influence he had on this country. When Obama was elected the pundits spoke of perhaps a new FDR, with big business, The Supreme Court, and the Republicans all in the boat together perhaps what we really need is another T R.