Word: roosevelted
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With most biographies, it's only the specialist reader who bothers to flip back to the footnotes. Not so with Theodore Rex (Random House; 772 pages; $35). The second volume of Edmund Morris' projected three-volume set on the life of Teddy Roosevelt is likely to have just about everybody taking a peek back there once or twice. People are going to want to reassure themselves that the gifted but infamous Morris has not made up some of his nicely observed details, and not just because so much of this book has the hurtling pace and alert eye of good...
...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...
Yale marked its tercentenary this year, reaching a milestone Harvard celebrated in 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904 and a former Crimson president, was re-elected in a landslide...