Word: roosevelt
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...offers Morris the chance to redeem himself by returning to the field of his first triumph. And let the record show that at no point in this book does Morris introduce himself into a subplot of the action. On the mid-September day in 1901 when Vice President Roosevelt gets word that President William McKinley has succumbed to an assassin's bullet, Morris isn't the messenger who brings the telegram. When Teddy plots to uncouple Panama from Colombia--so that the U.S. could have a freer hand to build its great canal across the isthmus--Morris is not bending...
Morris also has in Roosevelt, as he did not have in Reagan, a first-rate central character, whose style and substance foreshadowed the presidencies that would follow. His athletic vigor prefigured John F. Kennedy's. If anything, Roosevelt's White House jujitsu lessons make J.F.K.'s touch football look borderline effete. ("Muscular Christianity without the Christianity" is how somebody once described Teddy's manner.) His use of federal power against the massive industrial monopolies of his day opened the way to the decisive expansion of Washington under his younger relative, F.D.R. Though he came from old money, his inexhaustible democratic...
...rough-and-tumble handling. Morris is surprisingly stingy with background. The General Post Office controversy, the Cuban reciprocity treaty: What things of consequence were at risk there? Don't ask Morris. He's good with the sizzle, not so good with the stakes. When he tells the story of Roosevelt's intervention in the Pennsylvania coal miners' strike of 1902, he deftly sketches in the players--George F. Baer, the imperious representative of the mine owners; John Mitchell, the charismatic union chief--but barely reports the conclusions of the fact-finding commission that Roosevelt forced upon them...
Indifference to the big picture was a shortcoming of Morris' first volume too. Roosevelt was one of the most complicated figures in American history. What should we make of the unblushing imperialist who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Or the economic conservative who attempted to make the Republican Party a friend to the workingman? When this book ends, with Roosevelt turning over the White House to his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, you can laugh and marvel at what Teddy has done, but Morris has made it hard to evaluate...
Saturnine Henry Adams, who never much cared for the sunny, tireless Teddy, concluded that Roosevelt "showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter--the quality that medieval theology assigned to God--he was pure act." Morris seems to think so too. But even if he doesn't quite have Teddy's act together, you put down this middle volume looking forward...