When President Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, returned to Mother Harvard to accept an honorary doctorate in 1902, he bellowed disapproval at his alma mater. Biographer Edmund Morris tells the story with typically vivid prose: “Harvard, to Theodore, was a temple defiled by mugwumps, who congregated here to exchange the dull coins of anti-imperialism. Roosevelt launched into a stentorian defense of his island administrations and the public servants who sacrificed their careers to help ‘weaker friends along the stony and difficult path of self-government.’” Earlier that day, Roosevelt had made the eyes of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, go wide by slamming a large pistol onto a guest room dresser and declaring his habit of packing heat in public places, including, it seems, Harvard’s normally gun-free commencement platform.

The scene is a representative one in the political life of a man whose energy, earnestness and sheer charisma drove those who met him to awe. Morris’ new biography, Theodore Rex, covers in dramatic detail the Roosevelt administrations (1901-9) and, more importantly, their leader, whom more than one commentator characterized as the supreme political personality of his time. The previous installment of Morris’ Roosevelt trilogy, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980.

It is a great irony that one of the United States’ most erudite presidents was also one of the least suited for the patient, critical style of university life. Roosevelt’s senior thesis at Harvard had grown within a couple years of his graduation into a full-scale volume of naval history that remains today the definitive work in its field. And yet he could not shake his disdain for an institution that despite its resources had produced only one of the three men most prominent in American colonialism—Secretary of War (later State) Elihu Root, Philippines Governor (later President) William Howard Taft and Governor of Cuba Gen. Leonard Wood (M.D. 1883).

What comes across with striking clarity in this biography are two things: Roosevelt’s vigor and his endless supply of moral confidence. As a politician and as a private person, the man was nervy. Morris’ title refers to a comment from Henry James that fairly summed up his autocratic style of leadership as he tore through opposition—foreign and domestic—to achieve what he considered the only moral outcomes. Opposition, such as he saw at Harvard, was lazy and callow: “Those who remain on the sidelines he saw as cowards, and consequently as personal enemies.”

Earnestness grows tiresome fast, however, and it is a strength of both the biographer and his subject that it is leavened with snapshots of Roosevelt’s extraordinary energy and curiosity. At various points in the narrative we are informed that Roosevelt was studying jujitsu, conducting ornithological surveys, reading unreal amounts of literature and nonfiction, steering submarines, publishing papers on natural history, setting the Guiness record for shaking hands and killing bears—all while in office. When he invited foreign emissaries for weekend jaunts, he advised them to wear clothes they didn’t care about, since they were sure to get sloppy with mud. A favorite pastime was to hack at Gen. Wood with a large wooden stick, then allow Wood to thrash him in return. “They beat each other like carpets,” Morris writes. Roosevelt was a perennial child, a condition that in its best moments meant a great lust for anything new, active, original or strenuous.

Morris’ previous biography was the bestselling pseudo-memoir Dutch, the only authorized biography of Ronald Reagan. The two presidents have much in common and are still very different: both had tremendous charisma and popularity—enough to merit personal biographies as much as political ones. Both presidents, as Morris’ title suggests, secretly wished to rule their country like kings. But Roosevelt has the edge on Reagan as a thinker and scholar, and unlike Reagan (who had such the soul of a performer that Morris himself felt it appropriate to make things up in his biography), Roosevelt spoke with nothing but guileless sincerity.

Theodore Rex could be criticized as a presidential hagiography. It is a portrait of a man of few obvious personal faults, and his political ones often seem irrelevant. Morris’ biography might have pointed out more prominently the ambiguous legacy of Roosevelt’s colonialism, or that it was not Roosevelt but his obesely benign successor William Howard Taft who had the most success busting trusts and regulating the robber barons. And he offers less psychologizing in this volume than in his account of Roosevelt’s early years; there is little talk, for instance, of Roosevelt’s father, whom he adored and feared to an uncommon degree. These flaws are dwarfed, however, by the real subject of the biography, which is the original and charismatic persona Roosevelt lent to the presidency. What Roosevelt brought to the office was more a matter of style rather than substance, and that style is here presented with admirable skill and clarity.

theodore rex

by

Edmund Morris

Random House

555 pp., $35.00