Colonel Roosevelt (127 page)

Flora Whitney died in 1986, inevitably wikipeded as “a wealthy socialite.” Having become, at age twenty-one, almost a widow and almost a daughter to Quentin’s parents, she spent a year trying to recover from his death—not to mention the Colonel’s. A statue of Flora carved by her mother early in 1919 shows her hollow-eyed beneath a bandeau, trying to force herself into the depths of a small armchair. In 1920 she married one of Quentin’s Harvard friends, but found him an inadequate substitute. Her second marriage, to the artist George Macculloch Miller III, was successful. Flora fulfilled herself further by becoming the rescuer, dominant executive, and lifetime patron of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The last person anyone would have expected to add to the number of Roosevelt grandchildren was Alice, who in 1925 scandalized
le tout
Georgetown by producing an unmistakable, female miniature of Senator Borah. Alice was then forty-one years old, and delighted at her achievement. “
Hell, yes, isn’t it wonderful?” She never confirmed or denied Paulina Longworth’s paternity. Nick loved Paulina on sight and never treated her as anything other than his legitimate daughter. He became Speaker of the House of Representatives that same year, and remained in that office until a few weeks before his death in 1931.

Alice, first of Theodore Roosevelt’s children to be born, was the final one to die, in 1980. By then she had been for at least six decades the acidulous, eccentric doyenne of Washington society, fawned over by presidents of every political stamp. Invitations to her famous dinners, at which she would convulse guests with imitations of Cousin Eleanor, were as prized as passes to the White House. Her attempts at writing—a family memoir and an aborted newspaper column—had nothing of the charm of her talk, which made something like poetry out of the
non sequitur
. Some of it was captured and distilled by an Englishman, Michael Teague, whose
Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth
was published in 1981. It amounted to a transcribed recording of the kind of erudite wit that used to be prized in the days when the well-born were also, by definition, the well-read.

Edith Kermit Roosevelt died in 1948 at the age of eighty-seven, still living in Sagamore Hill and surrounded with the Colonel’s books, guns, hides, horns, and glittering prizes, as if he were still liable to burst through the door with reporters in tow. By then she had adjusted, if not to bereavement of
him
, to the deaths in war of Quentin, Kermit, and Ted, comforting herself with grandchildren and her
lifelong passion for reading. Her memories in her final,
bedridden days extended back from the present, disagreeably dominated by Harry Truman, through seventeen administrations to that of Abraham Lincoln.
Perhaps the earliest of these impressions (confirmed to her amazement by a visitor with a photograph) was of standing with six-year-old “Teedie” Roosevelt in a window overlooking Broadway, on the day that the Emancipator’s funeral procession came uptown, to a thump of drums.

AFTER THE OLD WOMAN
had been buried beside her husband in Youngs Cemetery, the Roosevelt Memorial Association moved to execute its long-postponed plan to buy and restore Sagamore Hill as a museum. The purchase was announced in 1949, with a certain amount of weariness on the part of Hermann Hagedorn, who had yet to see his idol’s image recover from the desecration inflicted on it by Henry Pringle. Indeed, the RMA would soon have to rename itself the Theodore Roosevelt Association, to make clear to donors which president it wished to celebrate.

The enduring influence of Pringle’s book, however, was salutary, in that it compelled scholars to assess the Colonel as a man, and not a god or monster. Between 1951 and 1954, Harvard University published
The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt
in eight massive volumes. Edited and annotated with impeccable scholarship by Elting E. Morison, John M. Blum, and others, the series effectively
filled a lacuna left by the Memorial Edition of
The Works of Theodore Roosevelt
thirty years before. It was perhaps even more impressive in its totality than the Hagedorn set—and not just because Morison admitted that his team had eliminated ten letters for every one of the fifteen thousand he printed. Excepting those frankly addressed to “posterity,” most were written only to be read by the recipients, and revealed a more personal Roosevelt than books and speeches he had meant for print. And the Colonel in his revelation proved to be, in Julian Street’s updatable phrase, arguably “the most interesting American” who ever lived.

In 1958, the year of the centennial of his birth, Carleton Putnam published
Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years
, a superb piece of scholarship that was intended to be the first part of a four-volume biography. Only one small, significant omission marred the book’s narrative flow: the fact that the young Roosevelt, attending his first Republican convention in 1884, had sought to put a black man in the chair. Putnam proved to be a retired airline executive living in Virginia, whose racial views distracted him to such an extent that his book was not followed by any sequel.

Edward Wagenknecht’s
The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt
also came out in 1958. It was a revelatory character study that avoided psychobiography and presented only facts, culled from what seemed to be a reading of every book and manuscript in the
Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard.
Viewing “T.R.” as a sort of solar system of linked but separate worlds (those of Action, Thought, Human Relations, Family, Spiritual Values, Public Affairs, and War and Peace), it compressed in fewer than three hundred pages the fundamentals of a polygonal personality.

Three years later, a major one-volume biography appeared. It was William Henry Harbaugh’s
The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt
, a determinedly objective book that exposed the work of Henry Pringle as superficial. The ponderousness of Harbaugh’s prose lent weight to his concluding observation:

Signs of the warming trend that Harbaugh spoke of proliferated after Sagamore Hill was declared a National Historic Site in 1962. President Kennedy signed the act of acquisition.
On 22 November 1963 he flew to Texas with a speech he intended to deliver at the Dallas Trade Mart, extensively quoting Theodore Roosevelt on foreign policy. The speech was not given, but subsequent presidents showed an increasing willingness to admire, and even identify with, the Republican Roosevelt.

Richard Nixon invoked the image of “the man in the arena” so often, and with such relish in its details of dust and sweat and blood, as to suggest that he found them masochistically agreeable. After resigning his office on 9 August 1974 he bade farewell to White House staffers with a moving, if irrelevant, quotation from
In Memory of My Darling Wife
, the eulogy Roosevelt had written for Alice Hathaway Lee ninety years before. Weeping, Nixon observed, “That was TR in his twenties. He thought the light had gone out of his life forever—but he went on.”

The Vietnam War era climaxing with Nixon’s debasement saw the rise of a presentist subculture among historians who, rejecting Harbaugh, continued to see Theodore Roosevelt as a bully, warmonger, and racist. He was castigated for being unaware of the civil rights movement, free sex, meditation, and mutually assured destruction. This revisionism nevertheless drew useful parallels, such as that between the massacres of My Lai in 1968 and Moro Crater in 1906—the latter inflicted on Filipino rebels by General Leonard Wood with no dissenting word from his commander in chief.

Although doubts on the New Left about Roosevelt’s imperialistic “Americanism” persisted through the decade, two biographies at the end of it
marked the beginning of a more objective reassessment that steadily gathered force. This writer’s
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
(1979) and David McCullough’s
Mornings on Horseback
(1981) won literary prizes, and reassured post-Watergate readers that whatever Roosevelt “went on” to, after his twenties, had not been an abuse of presidential power. They coincided with the appearance of Sylvia Jukes Morris’s
Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady
(1980), which documented one of the great marriages in American history.

Three decades later, the shifting sands of historiography seem to have allowed the monolith of Theodore Roosevelt to settle. Sand being sand, nothing of his future reputation can be predicted. He is still buffeted by revisionist storms, some emanating from academe and obsessing on the latest
idée fixe
in that quarter, “masculinity.” But the prevailing breeze of popular opinion is favorable. A C-SPAN survey in 2009, rating the leadership of American presidents, placed “T. Roosevelt” at number four, after Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Substantial books on him continue to appear and are eagerly read.
Three recent examples, by Kathleen Dalton, Candice Millard, and Patricia O’Toole, demonstrate that for all the Rough Rider’s machismo, fair-minded women feel no need to condescend to him. Douglas Brinkley’s study of the Rooseveltian conservation record,
The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
(2009) became a national bestseller even though it was over nine hundred pages long.

THE EMPLACEMENT
of Theodore Roosevelt Bridge across the Potomac River in Washington gives many commuters the impression that it, and not the forested island beneath, is the twenty-sixth President’s official memorial. Somewhere among those trees, however, he stands eighteen feet tall, one bronze fist upraised, eternally lecturing the doves and mockingbirds.

Solemn words are carved on granite tablets nearby. But they, and all the millions of others that have been published about him, come no closer to the truth than those of a small boy in Cove School, Oyster Bay, on June 16, 1922. As part of a class exercise paying tribute to the late Colonel, Thomas Maher wrote: “
He was a fulfiller of good intentions.”

THE AUTHOR IS VARIOUSLY
and often profoundly indebted to the following kind people: Terry C. Anderson; Kay Auchincloss; Lowell E. Baier; John M. Bell; Laurence Bergreen; Douglas Brinkley; Matthew J. Bruccoli; Robert B. Charles; Gleise Cruz; Wallace F. Dailey; Michelle Daniel; Judy Davidowitz; Jack Fisher; Josette Frank; John Allen Gable; Megan Gavin; David Gerstner; Matthew James Glover; Lewis L. Gould; Nan Graham; Francine du Plessis Gray; Susan Hannah; Ruth Hartley; George and Nanette Herrick; John Hutton; Gordon Hyatt; Joseph Kanon; Dodie Kazanjian; Patrick Kerwin; Simon Keynes; Elmer R. Koppelmann; Jennifer Kramer; Gary Lavergne; Mary LeCroy; Richard Lindsey; Alice Low; Andrew Marks; Paul Marks; Curt Meine; Timothy Mennel; Marc Miller; Sylvia Jukes Morris; Thomas R. Mountain; John Novogrod; Martin Obrentz; Joseph A. O’Brien; Allen Packwood; John Gray Peatman; Richard Pennington; Jacqueline Philomeno; Christina Rae; Frederick Roberts Rinehart II; Theodore and Connie Roosevelt IV; Tweed Roosevelt; Benjamin and Donna Rosen; Benjamin Steinberg; Joanna Sturm; Michael and Marcia Thomas; Keith Topley; John Frederick Walker; John D. Weaver; Sara Wheeler; Richard Derby Williams.