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Colonel Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt Series Book 3) Kindle Edition
This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, marks the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive.
Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine?
Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, this masterwork recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history.
“Hair-raising . . . awe-inspiring . . . a worthy close to a trilogy sure to be regarded as one of the best studies not just of any president, but of any American.”—San Francisco Chronicle
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateNovember 23, 2010
- File size13542 KB
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"Now with Colonel Roosevelt, the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud." –Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Exemplary… Consistently rich and on point, with rapidly developing events providing a backdrop for the balanced examination [Morris] presents of his subject…The TR trilogy is masterful, and can rightfully take its place among the truly outstanding biographies of the American presidency." –LA Times
"Reading Edmund Morris on Teddy Roosevelt is like listening to Yo-Yo Ma play Bach: You know from the first note you’re in inspired hands. In Colonel Roosevelt—the final installment in a trilogy that began with The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex—Morris registers the Bull Moose’s last decade in handsome, sweeping prose that avoids the valedictory chord struck by biographers who, nearing the end of their prodigious labors, resort to swooning across the chapters, unwilling to let go of their muse." – The Washingtonian
"Colonel Roosevelt, the third part of his three-volume biography of Roosevelt, is a worthy and extremely engaging culmination of Mr. Morris' work. It is popular history at its best." –Claude R. Marx, The Washington Times
Praise for the classic biographies by Edmond Morris
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“One of those rare works that is both definitive for the period it ...
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Loss of Imperial Will
Equipped with unobscured intent
He smiles with lions at the gate,
Acknowledging the compliment
Like one familiar with his fate.
the kiss that theodore roosevelt longed for did not materialize when he stepped ashore in Khartoum on 14 March 1910. Instead, he had to return the salute of Sir Rudolf Anton Karl von Slatin Pasha, G.C.V.O., K.C.M.G., C.B., inspector-general of the Sudan, and pass an honor guard of askaris into the palace garden, where the elite of Anglo-Sudanese society awaited him amid the silver paraphernalia of afternoon tea. He was informed that Edith's train from Cairo was delayed, and that she and Ethel would not arrive for another couple of hours. In the meantime, Slatin would not hear of the Colonel checking in to a hotel. A suite for his party had been readied in the palace, and a private yacht was standing by for sightseeing during his stay.
What Roosevelt wanted to see, more than anything but Edith's face, was Omdurman. The battlefield, where General Kitchener's Twenty-first Lancers had staged the last great cavalry charge of the nineteenth century, lay only ten miles away. Kitchener had been on his mind in recent days, if only because HMS Dal, the boat that had brought him north from Gondokoro, had been the triumphant commander's flagship. On its boards, twelve years before, Kitchener had proclaimed British control over the entire Nile Valley, from Uganda to the Mediterranean.
The success of that dominion-or condominium, as the Foreign Office called it, as a sop to Sudanese, Egyptian, and Turkish sensibilities- was palpable in Khartoum's tranquil, orange-blossom-scented air. Rebuilt by Kitchener from the ruins of a thirteen-year Muslim interregnum, the city was laid out like the Union Jack, its crossbars lined with stone villas and its triangles filled with seven thousand trees. Once the most violent flashpoint on the African continent, it now lazily breathed pax Britannica. In the sunburned, aristocratic faces of his hosts, in their perfect manners and air of unstudied authority, Roosevelt recognized the attributes he had always admired in the English ruling class, along with "intelligence, ability, and a very lofty sense of duty."
Yet he was aware of the constant menace of Arab nationalism, obscure yet encircling, like the mirages wavering on the desert horizon. The haze that hung over the city seemed, to his vivid historical imagination, to be red with the blood of General Gordon, murdered in this very palace by Mahdist dervishes.
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khartoum's north station was cordoned off when he met the Cairo express at 5:30 p.m. He climbed into his wife's private car the moment it came to a halt, and remained inside for a long time. Finally the two of them emerged arm in arm, with Kermit and Ethel close behind. All four Roosevelts were laughing.
Edith's smile transformed her normally stiff public face, exposing perfect teeth and lighting up the blue of her eyes. At forty-eight, she was no longer slender, but had just enough height to carry off the consequences of never having had to cook for herself, and her wrists and ankles and sharp profile were as elegant as ever. She had suffered during her year-long separation from Theodore, more from worry about him on safari than distress about herself: books and music and children had always been her solace.
That evening, Roosevelt changed into a tuxedo and replaced the wire spectacles he had worn on safari with beribboned pince-nez. Transformed thus, he looked dapper for the first time in nearly a year, and worthy of the place card that confronted him at Slatin Pasha's table: the honorable colonel roosevelt.
So far he had managed to keep at bay the reporters that Henry Cabot Lodge had warned him about. They were clamoring for statements on a hot local news item-the murder, by a Nationalist student, of Egypt's Coptic prime minister, Boutros Ghali Pasha. Roosevelt had heard about this incident before arriving in Khartoum.
He was not unwilling to speak about it, but preferred to wait until he made a scheduled address on the issue of condominium at Cairo University in two weeks' time. As for commenting on American issues, he needed first to go through a fat sack of telegrams and letters from home. John Callan O'Laughlin of the Chicago Tribune had collared the sack and was offering to serve as his traveling stenographer, as F. Warrington Dawson had in British East Africa. Roosevelt was fond of O'Laughlin, an experienced foreign policy man, and admired his sass. (It had been "Cal" who, scattering piastres like couscous, chartered the steamboat that met the Dal at Ar Rank.) However, another contender for secretarial honors was at hand: Lawrence F. Abbott, president of The Outlook. Roosevelt felt that, as an employee of that magazine himself (he was listed in its masthead as "Contributing Editor"), he could not turn Abbott down. His work for Scribner's Magazine was done, and he must look to The Outlook for income-and, not incidentally, space to promulgate his political views.
So O'Laughlin was consoled with a promise of special access, the press corps invited to accompany the Omdurman excursion, and Abbott granted a close-up position from which to observe, and record, the Colonel's return to public life.
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edith kermit roosevelt was a woman of impeccable sang-froid-
a phrase that came naturally to her, as did other Gallicisms deriving from her Huguenot ancestry. About the only scrutiny that shook her public composure was that of the camera lens. As mistress of the White House, she had managed to avoid it almost entirely. But now, to her consternation, she found a battery of photographers waiting at Omdurman. Worse still, they continued clicking as camels kneeled to carry the Roosevelt party to the battlefield.
In the event, she withstood the swaying journey better than her husband, enjoying herself as Slatin Pasha pointed out the plain on which Arab bodies had piled up in masses under the fire of Kitchener's artillery. Roosevelt chafed, not having been in a saddle of any kind for more than a year. But Slatin was impressed by his knowledge of every detail of the battle.
They dismounted by the dry watercourse where four hundred cavalrymen, trailed by vultures, had collided with Arab troops in a charge as suicidal as that of Pickett at Gettysburg. It had occurred only two months after Roosevelt's own charge up the Heights of San Juan in 1898. "All men who have any power of joy in battle," he had written, then, "know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart."
Slatin certainly knew, having fought for British control of the Sudan no fewer than thirty-eight times, endured eleven years of Arab imprisonment, and been to watch the presentation of Gordon's head to Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad.
Roosevelt stood on the crest of Jebel Surgham, from which Winston Churchill had looked down on wave after wave of black-clad Arabs, firing bullets into the air and waving banners imprinted with verses from the Koran. Now he saw only empty sand, and the shabby sprawl of Omdurman Fort, and the Mahdi's tomb rising like a ruined beehive. His soul revolted against all he had read about "the blight of the Mahdist tyranny, with its accompaniments of unspeakable horror." Those sons of the Prophet had tortured and killed two-thirds of their own number-mostly blacks in the southern Sudan-in a fanatic interpretation of jihad. If that was what today's Egyptian Nationalists looked for, as they smuggled in bombs through Alexandria and called for the murder of every foreign official in the condominium, then it was plainly the duty of the British government to stand for humanity against barbarism.
Omdurman fascinated Roosevelt so much that he was loath to leave. By the time the camelcade got back to the riverbank it was already dark, and a quarter moon had risen. Khartoum's stately buildings glowed white across the Nile.
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cal o'laughlin and abbott were generous in sharing all the domestic news the Colonel had missed, or failed to register, in nearly a year. The contents of his mail sack amplified every story they had to tell, from betrayal of the Roosevelt legacy on the part of Taft administration officials to what looked like significant stirrings of strength in the Democratic Party, long dormant as a national political force.
One long, anguished letter, from his protégé Gifford Pinchot, was especially disturbing. It confirmed a rumor Roosevelt had heard some weeks before (courtesy of the naked messenger from Gondokoro) and refused to believe. Taft had dismissed Pinchot as chief forester of the United States.
It was understandable that the President might find such a passionate reformer difficult to deal with. But of all men, Pinchot was the one most identified with Roosevelt's conservation record, and by extension, with all the progressive reforms they had worked on together after 1905-reforms that Taft was supposed to have perpetuated.
"We have fallen back down the hill you have led us up," Pinchot wrote, "and there is a general belief that the special interests are once more in substantial control of both Congress and the Administration." He portrayed a well-meaning but weak president, co- opted by "reactionaries" careless of natural resources. Wetlands and woodlands Roosevelt had withdrawn from commercial exploitation had been given back to profiteers. The National Conservation Commission was muzzled. Pinchot's longed-for World Conservation Conference had never happened. His main villain was his boss, Interior Secretary Richard A. Ballinger, whom he had publicly accused of trading away protected waterpower sites in Alaska, and allowing illegal coal claims in a forest that had been Theodore Roosevelt's final presidential gift to the American people.
Taft, consequently, had had no choice in dismissing Pinchot from office.
Other letters made clear that "the Ballinger-Pinchot Controversy" had become a flashpoint of American political anger, as recriminatory on both sides as the Coal Strike of 1902. Except now, the sides were not free-market adversaries, but the left and right of a Grand Old Party that Roosevelt thought he had left unified.
Taft had endorsed an equally divisive overhaul of the nation's revenue system, already infamous as "the Payne-Aldrich tariff." Touted as a downward revise of protectionist duties on products ranging from apricots to wool, and debated in the Senate with extraordinary acrimony, it had somehow become law, to the continuing enrichment of America's corporate elite.
"Honored Sir: Please get back to the job in Washington, 1912, for the sake of the poor," one plaintive note read.
Captain Archibald Willingham Butt, the gossipy military aide who now served Taft as he had once served Roosevelt, reported that the President had been cast down by a stroke suffered by Mrs. Taft, the previous spring. "I flatter myself that I have done something in the way of keeping him from lapsing into a semi-comatose state by riding with him and playing golf.?.?.?."
Roosevelt paid no attention to several appeals for him to run for mayor of New York, or senator in the New York state legislature- stopgap positions, obviously, from which he would be expected to launch another run for the presidency in 1912. "My political career is ended," he told Lawrence Abbott. "No man in American public life has ever reached the crest of the wave as I appear to have done without the wave's breaking and engulfing him."
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the late evening of 17 March found the Colonel, his party, and press pool clattering north by train toward Wadi Halfa. He was not sorry to leave Khartoum, where an excess of formal engagements, climaxing in a thousand-plate dinner, had tried his patience after nearly a year in the wilderness.
At least, one delicate encounter, with a group of "native" army officers whom Slatin suspected of anti-British sentiments, had gone well. Roosevelt had reminded them of their sworn duty to the Crown, without saying anything controversial about Arab nationalism, and they had been polite enough to cheer him.
There was no question in his mind that all the North African lands west of Suez were better off as imperial protectorates. He admired what the French had done in Algeria, and hoped they would do the same for Morocco. Likewise, he thought that the British should continue to govern Egypt-if only to protect it from the Turks and that self- proclaimed "friend of three hundred million Muslims," Kaiser Wilhelm II. His own country was constitutionally unfit for empire, yet he approved of its missionary work in the Nile Valley and in Lebanon. He had not hesitated, as President, to send gunboats into the Mediterranean whenever American interests seemed threatened, and he had followed up with the Great White Fleet in 1908, signaling that the United States would henceforth be a strategic presence in the Near East.
On the morning of the eighteenth, desert sands disclosed themselves, undulating unbroken to the horizon. Phantom lakes shimmered, running like mercury with the progress of the train. This Nubian landscape was the last depopulated country Roosevelt would see. For several months, he was told, a series of imperial or royal capitals had been bidding for the privilege of entertaining him. So many invitations were already on hand that Lawrence Abbott warned he would need another secretary, if not two, when he got to Europe. "Darkest" Africa had polished his public image to a dazzle of celebrity.
The appearances he had long promised to make at the universities of the Sorbonne, Berlin, and Oxford were now but stops on an ever- expanding grand tour of Europe. In Rome, both the Pope and the King of Italy insisted on receiving him. So did the Emperor of Austria- Hungary, who expected him to visit both Vienna and Budapest. Next in line were the President of France, the Queen of Holland, and the monarchs of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where the Nobel Prize committee wished him to make an address on world peace. Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to show him the German army, and King Edward VII the British. Not only têtes couronnées, but aristocrats, intellectuals, industrialists, press lords, and politicians of every persuasion clamored for a few moments of the Colonel's time. Even the Calvinist Academy of Geneva was threatening hospitality.
Roosevelt's reaction was a half-humorous, half-resigned willingness to do what diplomacy required-as long as his schedule permitted, and he was treated as a private American citizen. He prepared himself for the coming ordeal in typical fashion. Around sunset, Abbott became concerned by his absence from the family car.
I searched the train for him and finally discovered him in one of the white enameled lavatories with its door half open.?.?.?. He was busily engaged in reading, while he braced himself in the angle of the two walls against the swaying motion of the train, oblivious to time and surroundings. The book in which he was absorbed was Lecky's History of Rationalism in Europe. He had chosen this peculiar reading room both because the white enamel reflected a brilliant light and he was pretty sure of uninterrupted quiet.
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roosevelt was not new to the scholarship of William Edward Lecky (1838-1903). In his youth, he had found the great historian too Old World, too Olympian. Now he was mesmerized by an intellect that encompassed, and gave universal dimensions to, the odyssey he had embarked on. Lecky showed how Europe had passed, age by age, from heathenism through paganism, early Christianity, Islamic infiltration, totalitarian Catholicism, Reformation, and Renaissance- arriving finally at an Enlightenment based on scientific discovery, materialistic philosophy, and the secularization of government. Roosevelt's present passage out of the Pleistocene into lands still medieval-Muslim in atmosphere duplicated this vast arc of human progress.
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- ASIN : B003EY7IQI
- Publisher : Random House (November 23, 2010)
- Publication date : November 23, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 13542 KB
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- Print length : 785 pages
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About the author
Edmund Morris is one of America's best political biographers and journalists. He is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. He lives in New York and Washington, DC.
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Every once in a while a character springs to life about whom it can be said that he or she is truly an extra-ordinary person, and have that be, quite literally, true. There is often much to admire about such a person, and that is true of T. R. There is also, just as often, much which may be criticized, and that is true of T. R. also, and in spades. However the net result of such a life is that it inspires the rest of us very-ordinary folk to shoot a little higher, strive a bit more and to recognize that, after all, one individual can make a difference.
Edmund Morris' trilogy is superb. I read them as they were published though with a bit of a delay. Biographies fall into that category of "night-time, before I go to sleep, read a few pages and turn off the light", reading. When each book runs upward of 700 pages of tightly constructed prose, it takes a bit of time to get through on that type of schedule. Each of these books however are amenable to that approach. One must be able to "pick up where one left off" without having to go back and review. The writing must stimulate mental images which involve the reader in the material. The subject matter must be interesting and personal and not just endless recounting of facts, figures, policy details, etc. which numb the mind and break the concentration. These books all possess those qualifications and are highly readable.
But if Morris' writing is the proper instrument to convey the information, it is ultimately the subject which determines the worth and no mortal sinner ever walked this earth who was more interesting than T. R.
The man was simply prodigious. How do you encompass a man who: (1) wrote a detailed study of the Naval War of 1812 before he was 25, a work which continues to this day to be a primary reference for any scholarly commentary on that subject, (2) was a recognized expert naturalist who not only wrote regular articles on various aspects of it but was also commissioned by the Smithsonian to supply samples, specimens and analysis of flora, fauna and geography across the globe, (3) was a cowboy & deputy sheriff in the still wild west, (4) raised the "Rough Riders" and lead them in battle in Cuba, (4) was an effective and energetic Police Commissioner in New York City, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York, Vice-President and then President of the United States, (5) winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and was actually deserving of it, (6) was the organizing power and principle for a serious third party alternative to the Democrat and Republican political system, (7) carried an assassin's bullet in his chest until he died, (8) fought off multiple bouts of malaria contracted in his explorations in South America and Africa, and .... well, it goes on and on. T. R.'s correspondence ranged from kings to plumbers. He was never late for a publishing deadline and had a nearly infallible memory for details of reading, conversations and acquaintances. His preserved correspondence numbers in the hundreds of thousands of pages in a day when hand writing or dictation was all that was available.
No one was neutral about T. R. His infectious charm made him at home with virtually every head of state in his life-time and many sought his advice even after he had passed his political zenieth. He was a man to be reckoned with in whatever he undertook to do.
The best description of him, I suppose, is that he was a boy who never quite grew up. Whether playing with his kids or his beloved grand-children, he delighted in energetic activity. Passionate in everything, he was explosive in his anger, mostly controlled to some extent in his public dealings but never so in private. His disgust, mostly well merited, with Woodrow Wilson verged on mania.
One of his first public actions was to propose, as a brand new, virtually unknown delegate, that a black man be nominated to the chair of his state political convention. This was unheard of in the late 1800's but it is representative of T. R.'s mind-set. He was a compromiser par excellence in pursuit of objectives but he never abandoned those objectives and saw compromise as only a step in the process.
T. R. was not religious and hence there was lacking in him that spiritual depth that would have, perhaps, reigned in some of his more egregious characteristics. He was, in his own terms, an advocate of "righteousness" (hence my title above). But T. R.'s brand of "righteousness" took Stoic, Spartan pride to new heights. He was fiercely moral but only according to his own defintion of it. There was a blood-thirsty tinge to most of his life and he thought war a means of purifying the national character and developing its virtue. This lead to him flinging his four sons off to the front in WW I and using all of his political skill to get them posted to combat elements. His sons served with distinction but one, his youngest, did not survive and the others were all deeply affected by the horror that they saw.
T. R. never quite recovered from that.
I do not agree with all of T. R.'s political agenda but his far sighted vision and impact cannot be denied. Perhaps his greatest legacy, humanly speaking, is the National Park system and the present ecological emphasis. He was an elitist in virtually every aspect of his personal life but he never lost sight of the common man during a time when the common man was not very high in political concerns. His brand of Progressiveism is foundational to that which goes by the name today but I doubt seriously that he would agree with where it is now registering. His nationalism would place him far afield from the present advocates of that system.
All in all, this is a man who registers most vividly what America once was and will never be again, for good or for evil.
I would most highly recommend Morris' work. Too many Americans today are ignorant of their history and their heritage. These books will acquaint the reader with not only a man but the nation in which he lived and one cannot help but gain from having that additional depth in his perspective.
In 1979, I bought the first of the trilogy and am sad that there is no more.
TR spent most of his life as if he were strapped to a rocket. He at one time or another was a thorn in the side of everyone, and even his own party.
After leaving the White House and turning over his objectives to Taft, he went to Africa on a long hunt, bagging game for the Smithsonian and writing a journal or book of the event. He was out of touch with about everything, going for long periods of time without seeing a newspaper. He and his son Kermit and a host of guides, porters, and hangers on tramped through Africa in search of game. See The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey From there he went to Europe as a result of the death of the king of England, and was hailed by all the crown heads of Europe as a great man and leader. He stayed with these people and talked with them, and knew many of the players that would conduct a deadly game starting in 1914.
But, when he learned of the problems Taft was having implementing his ideas, he became angry and focused and when he returned to America, the people cheered him and TR immediately began to plot as to what to do about Taft.
Politics, being the fickle thing it is was not kind this time to TR. Taft retained the Republican nomination, TR began the Progressive Party and the way was paved for Wilson to gain the White House.
After the election, TR went to Brazil to chart a river believed to tie into the Amazon, called the River of Doubt.
This is probably the most difficult part of the book, not because the story is not well told, but only because you cringe that TR at this stage of his life would suffer through hordes of mosquitoes, insects, snakes, hostile Indians, difficult portages though the journey, the death of some of the members and at one point, TR as close to death as he had ever been. During this torturous journey, TR lost seventy pounds.
TR returned home, and by the summer of 1914, war had begun in Europe. Here is TR, demanding that he raise his own division of cavalry and go to the front, demeaning Wilson for his neutrality even as the years went on and American lives were lost at sea due to submarine attack. As soon as the Germans invaded Belgium and destroyed the priceless library at Louvain, TR wanted to get the US involved. Had this happended, there is no estimate of how many million lives would have been saved, including TR's son Quentin.
He became more and more angry and frustrated with Wilson. He fought hard to put pressure on Wilson to abandon neutrality. In some ways, he reminds me of Churchill during his Wilderness Years, when he warned of the upcoming dangers of Hitler, and the need to arm and prepare the nation for war. While Churchill was about the same age at this time as TR was during the start of WWI, there was no sense that this was the end for Winston, but we know that TR was coming to his end. He had said that he would live to about 60, and he did.
He died I think of a broken heart over the loss of his son and two other sons wounded in battle, and the bitterness he felt because Wilson drug his feet and the Americans entered the war after too many millions of people had died.
I say this was reverence. TR was probably the closest to insanity of any president in regards to his focus, his constant motion, reading, writing, learning, conversing, capaigning and spoiling for a fight. There is no other that can come close, not even Jackson, who also carried a bullet with him to the grave.
I would not want to be on the wrong side of him.
All in all, I believe this trilogy of Roosevelt is likely the finest biography written of anyone since Churchill's biography of Marlborough.
I would also recommend Brinkley's Wilderness Warrior to go with this remarkable collection.
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The paperback book itself contains 766 pages of which about 150 are devoted to source notes. This is proof in itself that Mr Morris has done a massive amount of research, much of it original and hitherto unpublished. Research is vital to success in biographies, no matter how well-known the subject of the biography. Hundreds of books have been written about the first President Roosevelt (a distant cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the second one) and this trilogy must be the definitive study and it is, in my opinion, by far the best that I have read.
'Colonel Roosevelt' takes the reader through the subject's extraordinary adventures (some of them not for the squeamish) in Africa, his 'state visits' to many European nations and his failed attempt to regain the presidency as a Progressive in 1912. The campaign included a serious assassination attempt which 'Bull Moose' Roosevelt brushed off: he just carried on speaking. He succeeded then in humiliating his own Republican protégé, the fat and lazy William Howard Taft, and letting in another political enemy, the then less progressive Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.
Smarting from the 1912 election, the Colonel took off for a tour of South America which came close to killing him - again. He campaigned unsuccessfully for the Republicans in the 1916 election and against the over-intellectual and over-idealistic President Wilson subsequent to the election.
Despite illnesses stemming in part from his jungle trips, Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt was still considered a likely winner for the GOP in 1920. This was not to be for the Colonel died - of a broken heart (?) - at his home, Sagamore Hill, Cove Neck, New York, on the 6th of January, 1919, at the age of only 60.
I'm not an enthusiast for the Republican Party but Colonel Roosevelt, the progressive, was its most remarkable leader. He was truly progressive, well ahead of the thinking of his times. He was almost European in his outlook and his sophistication and, though an enthusiast for the Allies' cause in the so-called 'Great War,' he was also a lover of peace. There has not been a Republican like him since his sad passing. Subsequent GOP and Democrat leaders (including cousin FDR himself) appear as pygmies when measured in historical terms.
Edmund Morris's extraordinary and extraordinarily researched and well-written trilogy is an essential for any serious student of American politics and world affairs in the 20th century.
A footnote: I was probably mistaken in my suspicions regarding the relationship of Colonel Roosevelt and Major Archibald Willingham de Graffenreid Clarendon (Archie) Butt. The latter, quite possibly a 'gay,' left his former boss and close friend to become just as close to the fat and lazy Taft. Butt went down with the Titanic in 1912 and Taft was truly bereft - as was Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt.
Mr Morris's biography of the Colonel meets Roosevelt's criteria. It reads like an exciting novel - but one where the reader knows the basic elements of the plot beforehand. And which of us does not re-read a great novel even though we know the story line?
I read the first two volumes years ago, but when I enquired about this third volume I was told it had not been published. How glad I was to find recently, after re-reading the other two that it was now available.
The whole series is surely one of the finest biographies ever written. Roosevelt was one of the most complex but inspiring of politicians, and Mr Morris lets us enjoy and wonder at his career.