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Summary
Summary
Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain "Colonel Roosevelt," he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Crowned heads vied to put him up in their palaces. "If I see another king," he joked, "I think I shall bite him."
Had TR won his historic "Bull Moose" campaign in 1912 (when he outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might have averted World War I, so great was his international influence. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially just.
This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award--winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex , is itself the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, it recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. 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?
Colonel Roosevelt begins with a prologue recounting what TR called his "journey into the Pleistocene"-a yearlong safari through East Africa, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian. Some readers will be repulsed by TR's bloodlust, which this book does not prettify, yet there can be no denying that the Colonel passionately loved and understood every living thing that came his way: The text is rich in quotations from his marvelous nature writing.
Although TR intended to remain out of politics when he returned home in 1910, a fateful decision that spring drew him back into public life. By the end of the summer, in his famous "New Nationalism" speech, he was the guiding spirit of the Progressive movement, which inspired much of the social agenda of the future New Deal. (TR's fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged that debt, adding that the Colonel "was the greatest man I ever knew.")
Then follows a detailed account of TR's reluctant yet almost successful campaign for the White House in 1912. But unlike other biographers, Edmund Morris does not treat TR mainly as a politician. This volume gives as much consideration to TR's literary achievements and epic expedition to Brazil in 1913--1914 as to his fatherhood of six astonishingly different children, his spiritual and aesthetic beliefs, and his eager embrace of other cultures-from Arab and Magyar to German and American Indian. It is impossible to read Colonel Roosevelt and not be awed by the man's universality. The Colonel himself remarked, "I have enjoyed life as much as any nine men I know."
Morris does not hesitate, however, to show how pathologically TR turned upon those who inherited the power he craved-the hapless Taft, the adroit Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson declined to bring the United States into World War I in 1915 and 1916, the Colonel blasted him with some of the worst abuse ever uttered by a former chief executive. Yet even Wilson had to admit that behind the Rooseveltian will to rule lay a winning idealism and decency. "He is just like a big boy-there is a sweetness about him that you can't resist." That makes the story of TR's last year, when the "boy" in him died, all the sadder in the telling: the conclusion of a life of Aristotelian grandeur.
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
Arthur Edmund Morris was born in Nairobi, Kenya on May 27, 1940. He studied literature, art, and music at Rhodes University in South Africa before leaving in 1961. He worked in the advertising department of a men's clothing store in South Africa and as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968.
He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980 for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. His other books included Theodore Rex, Beethoven: The Universal Composer, Colonel Roosevelt, and Edison. He was best known for Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, where he inserted himself as a fictional narrator. He also wrote about travel and the arts for numerous publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harper's Magazine. He died after a stroke on May 24, 2019 at the age of 78.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Having followed his 1979 classic, Pulitzer-winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, with a fine account of his presidency, Theodore Rex, in 2001, historian Morris returns to top form in this enthralling story of Roosevelt's life after leaving office in 1909. As Morris says, TR's presidency was an impossible act to follow. The outgoing chief executive (1858¿1919) welcomed his successor, William Howard Taft, and left the country for a year, but on his return plunged back into politics, angry at Taft's backsliding on reform. The rank-and file adored Roosevelt, but Republican leaders didn't, so he abandoned the party for the historic three-way 1912 campaign, during which two progressives, Roosevelt and Wilson, battled it out, and Taft came in third. Despite losing, only death interrupted Roosevelt's outpouring of political maneuvering, journalism, scholarship, exploration, and profuse, generally unwelcome advice to President Wilson. Like Robert Caro with Lyndon Johnson, Morris has devoted a career to one man with equally impressive results. This is a witty, insightful biography combined with a vivid political history of America from 1910 to 1919, centered on a relentlessly energetic ex-president. It is a joy to read. 64 illus.; 2 maps. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Morris completes his fully detailed, correlatively dynamic triptych of the restless, energetic, on-the-move first President Roosevelt, following The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), the title self-explanatory in terms of its coverage of TR's life, and Theodore Rex (2001), about his presidency. Now the author presents Colonel Roosevelt, the title by which Roosevelt chose to be called during his postpresidential years (in reference, of course, to his military position during the Spanish-American War). This is the sad part of TR's life; this is the stage of his life story in which it is most difficult to accept his self-absorption, self-importance, and self-righteousness, but it is the talent of the author, who has shown an immaculate understanding of his subject, to make Roosevelt of continued fascination to his readers. In essence, this volume tells the story of TR's path of disenchantment with his chosen successor in the White House, William Taft, and his attempt to resecure the presidency for himself. The important theme of TR's concomitant decline in health is also a part of the narrative. We are made aware most of all that of all retired presidents, TR was the least likely to fade into the background.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The final volume of Edmund Morris's biography of Theodore Roosevelt, soldier, hunter, explorer, president. FOR my paternal grandfather, born in 1884, Theodore was the Great Roosevelt. He always regretted he'd been too young to vote for him in 1904, rushed to the polls to do so when Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose in 1912 and to the end of his long life proudly called himself a "progressive Republican" in honor of bis hero. For my father, who was born in 1910 and first went to the polls in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932, Franklin was the Roosevelt to admire; to him, the younger Roosevelt's dead fifth cousin seemed shrill and overwrought, a perpetual adolescent. On the evidence offered in "Colonel Roosevelt," the third and concluding volume of Edmund Morris's monumental life of the 26th president, both of my forebears had a point. Morris is a stylish storyteller with an irresistible subject. The seismic personality that one White House visitor said had to be wrung from one's clothes when leaving Roosevelt's presence infuses every one of his trilogy's nearly 2,500 pages. The first volume, "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" (1979), traces its subject's rocketlike rise from asthmatic infant to accidental president at 42, the youngest chief executive in our history. "Theodore Rex" (2001) chronicles Roosevelt's seven years and 196 days at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, during which he redefined the president's role at home and the United States' role abroad, while proving himself, as Morris writes, "the most powerfully positive American leader since Abraham Lincoln." More than a century later, polls of presidential historians continue to list him among the top five holders of that office, a fact that would have pleased Roosevelt himself but also might have surprised him: he was convinced no president could be considered great who had not met and mastered a grave national crisis. "If Lincoln had lived in a time of peace," he once said, "no one would have known his name." "Colonel Roosevelt" covers the nine short years left to him after he left office. Morris has lost none of his narrative skill over the last 31 years. His new book is filled with vivid set pieces, from the train ride across the sunburned plains of East Africa with which it opens to the snowy graveside ceremony at Oyster Bay with which his story ends. Morris sticks close to his fast-moving subject, managing to keep pace as Roosevelt blows away three giraffes and a family of rhinoceros in a single morning; attends the funeral of Edward VIII, becoming the top-hatted symbol of democracy among the crowned heads present; dashes off a brisk, entertaining autobiography in which he admits to not a single error of substance; comes close to death while exploring an unmapped river in Brazil; and defends himself against a charge of libel with such exaggerated vehemence that the plaintiff's attorney tells him, "You need not treat me as a mass meeting." Morris admires Roosevelt, but does not venerate him. He has written elsewhere of the flaws he considers most grievous: a "blood lust impossible to excuse, . . . a tendency to preach, a need for enemies and an almost erotic love of the personal pronoun." All four were given free reign during Roosevelt's last years. While power almost always became him, powerlessness did not, and in his struggle to win back what he had voluntarily relinquished, his ego was increasingly inseparable from his principles. "When you are dealing with politics," he told his friend the humorist Finley Peter Dunne, "you feel that you have your enemy in front of you and you must shake your fist at him and roar the Gospel of Righteousness in his deaf ear." As he got older, he had more and more difficulty differentiating between the Gospel of Righteousness and the Gospel of Roosevelt. The savagery with which he took out after his two successors had its roots in serious differences over policy: Taft's belief that power was properly enshrined in the judiciary was a betrayal of everything Roosevelt had tried to do as president; Woodrow Wilson really was slow to arm the country. But Roosevelt's animosity was also fueled by the fact, maddening to him, that each lived in the White House while he no longer did. Morris recounts his battle first to wrest control of his party from Taft and the conservatives and, when that failed (only because of "naked robbery" by "the forces of reaction," Roosevelt insisted), to lead a third-party campaign he understood to be doomed almost from the start. Roosevelt's courage cannot be questioned. Who else would have insisted on delivering an 80-minute speech with a would-be assassin's bullet freshly lodged in his chest? And the Progressive platform on which he ran was a bold, even visionary document: it recognized labor's right to organize and promised to curtail campaign spending, promote conservation and provide federal insurance for the elderly, the jobless and the sick. But the evangelistic fervor with which he campaigned probably alienated more voters than it attracted. He had the satisfaction of swamping Taft on Election Day, but the victory went to Wilson, giving the Democrats the White House for the first time in a quarter of a century. In 1916, Roosevelt gritted his formidable teeth and returned to the Republican Party. By then, the likelihood of war consumed him. He was proud that during his own administration "not a shot was fired at any soldier of a hostile nation by any American soldier or sailor." But he also still believed what he had first told the Naval War College in 1897: "No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war." Combat had made him a national hero, and he seems to have seen a return to the battlefield - almost almost any battlefield - alternately as a route back to power or a way of providing himself with a fittingly heroic end to his headlong life. Twice, he volunteered to rally new regiments of Rough Riders and lead them into Mexico, only to be disappointed when border tensions eased. When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, he was half blind, overweight and already suffering from the host of ills that would combine to kill him two years later, but he nonetheless hurried to the White House without an appointment, to ask permission to raise a division of volunteers and rush them to the front in France. Wilson received him cordially enough, but his secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, issued a flinty rejection: despite whatever "sentimental value" there might be in sending a former president to the front, he wrote, command positions would be given only to regular officers who "have made a professional study of the recent changes in the art of war." Roosevelt wrote an 18-page protest: "My dear sir, you forget that I have commanded troops in action in the most important battle fought by the United States Army during the last half-century." He had failed, Morris writes, to persuade Wilson to "grant him his desperate desire, . . . nothing less than death in battle: he knew he would not come back. Denied this consummation, he would have to cede it to one or more of his sons. 'I don't care a continental whether they fight in Yankee uniforms or British uniforms, or in their undershirts, so long as they're fighting.'" He tried to ensure that each of his four boys was not only in uniform but nudged as close as possible to the front line. "You and your brothers are playing your parts in the greatest of the world's . . . crowded hours of glorious life" he told his eldest son, Ted. "You have seized the great chance, as was seized by those who fought at Gettysburg, and Waterloo, and Agincourt, and Arbela and Marathon." He presented a stoical public face when his youngest son, Quentin, was shot out of the sky over France: "Quentin's mother and I are very glad that he got to the front and had a chance to render some service to his country, and to show the stuff there was in him before his fate befell him." But privately, he was shattered; a friend came upon him "sobbing in the stable . . . with his face buried in the mane of his son's pony: 'Poor Quentyquee...'" HE never recovered. His health continued to decline. But he clung to the hope that he could regain control of his party, redirect its energies toward reform and retake the White House in 1920. When the editor William Allen White visited his hospital room in the winter of 1918 and happened to mention another potential presidential candidate, Roosevelt was quick to interrupt. "Well," he said, "probably I shall have to get in this thing in June." Then, Morris reports, "he produced an article he had dictated that amounted to an advance campaign platform." But in the end, my grandfather's Roosevelt died, the country got Warren Harding instead, and it would be left largely to my father's Roosevelt to make good on the promises in the Progressive platform. Blood lust: Roosevelt on safari in 1909. Who else would have delivered an 80-minute speech despite a bullet lodged in his chest? On a river expedition in Brazil in 1913. Geoffrey C. Ward's next book is "A Disposition to Be Rich," a life of his great-grandfather, the notorious 19th-century swindler, Ferdinand Ward.
Choice Review
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Morris introduces readers to Theodore Roosevelt's postpresidency travels, business ventures, and never-ending political activities in this third and final volume of his magisterial biography of the 26th president (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, CH, Sep'79; Theodore Rex, CH, Sep'02, 40-0499). Morris recounts familiar events--the African safari, European tours, TR's disillusionment with Taft's policies, the Republican Party's implosion and subsequent rapprochement, costly libel suits, the Bull Moose campaign, the interventionist crusade, TR's intense dislike of the "logothete" (Woodrow Wilson), the near-fatal Amazon adventure, and the Roosevelt family's wartime service and sacrifice--with his usual literary flair, masterful storytelling, and extensive documentation. Scholars and history buffs alike will appreciate the inclusion of well-chosen essays, letters, speeches, and other archival materials culled from a wide selection of Roosevelt's own works and those of the colonel's equally passionate detractors. Morris ultimately tells TR's story through several different lenses, including Roosevelt's and those who knew him the best--family members, friends, heads of state, scholars, politicians, and political adversaries. In the process, readers cannot help but acquire a deeper, more nuanced understanding of a great, albeit very human and flawed US leader and "world citizen.. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. J. L. Brudvig Dickinson State University
Kirkus Review
With appropriate crescendo and coda, the concluding volume of the author's sweeping biography of Theodore Roosevelt, followingThe Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) andTheodore Rex (2001).Morris opens this account of the last decade of Roosevelt's life in 1909, when, just out of office, TR was somewhat at a loss about to what to do. He had, after all, been a model for the "strenuous life" he recommended, commanding soldiers and sending imperial fleets off to impress American power on the world. He had written books and countless articles, some, uncomfortably, equating birth control with "race suicide"one reason, suggests the author, that the New Left of the 1960s considered him "a bully, warmonger, and 'overt racist.' " He had served two terms as president but decided not to go after a third, even though, in those days, he could have served forever. With no particular place to go, TR headed out on safari to Africa, shooting nearly everything he saw. Then he traveled the world, returning to America just in time to fall into often-bitter feuding with his successor, William Howard Taft. As Morris writes, TR transformed into a reforming leftist, "with enough administrative and legislative proposals to keep the federal government busy for two decades," while Taft and Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson occupied places to the right. When Wilson took office, TR became one of his sternest critics, likening him in one renowned speech to Pontius Pilate. Yet, writes Morris, even his admirers found reason to think the one-time master of the bully pulpit a mere bully. The Colonelfor so he insisted on being calleddid not end his days well. Presciently, he foresaw his decline almost exactly when it occurred, a sad disintegration into a melancholic and inactive ill health. However, as the author notes at the end of his fluent narrative, for all the criticism of TR in his day and after, he has risen to the top tier of presidents, and is increasingly seen as a friend deemed him: "a fulfiller of good intentions."Roosevelt never fails to fascinate, and Morris provides a highly readable, strong finish to his decades-long marathon.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This is the final volume in Morris's biographical trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt (TR), after The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex. Though he breaks no new ground, he covers the major aspects of TR's postpresidential life, including an African safari, his ill-fated third-party presidential bid, and a near-fatal Amazon expedition. Out of power, TR half understood that his fate was sealed by previous political missteps and his own mortality, as well as by his ideology. A Social Darwinist, he was driven to prove that natural selection was on his side, although this was tempered by the noblesse oblige instilled in him by his father. At his peak TR was the right man for the time, guiding an isolationist adolescent nation to world power just as he had transformed himself. Yet this final volume captures the sadness that inevitably caught up with him. Morris clearly identifies with his hero while at the same time pointing out TR's flaws as well as the limitations of those who opposed him, especially Woodrow Wilson. VERDICT Morris skillfully holds readers' attention throughout the book, which is as filled with adventure as Volume 1, even as TR's life inevitably moved downhill. In completion of the most objective and worthwhile TR biography, this is an essential purchase.-William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
chapter 1 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. ƒ 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. ƒ 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. ƒ 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." ƒ 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. ƒ 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. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.