Word: roosevelted
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...Edmund Morris: A great president should embody with out any equivocation the hopes and desires of the American people at the time of his election. I think in the case of Theodore Roosevelt, the new young president (he was the youngest we've ever had, by the way) embodied the intoxicating feeling at the turn of the century that America had at last become a world power. Reagan, at the moment of his accession, embodied a general national desire to put aside all the self-doubt and gloom of the 1970s and recover the optimism and patriotism of the 1950s...
...Thought that he was gorgeous? He was. Theodore Roosevelt, on the other hand, was not gorgeous, he was very ugly. But somehow his physical apparatus was overwhelmingly tactile. When Theodore Roosevelt walked into a room and when Reagan walked into a room, you could see people luxuriating in their physical aura. A lot of Hitler's power had to do with his strange beak, the fat curved back, awkward gestures and that hyptonisingly strange face. Never underestimate the power of the body in politics...
...feel a lot of pressure after writing Theodore Roosevelt? Is that why you did something so unexpected with Dutch...
...fact I'd already written half of another Theodore Roosevelt volume, which I've put aside. That book eliminates the narrative voice, the editorial voice, to an almost total extent. I wanted to see if I could write a biography of a President who lived between 1901 and 1909 in which there was absolutely no intrusion of the present. The reader gets the feeling from the first page to the last that they're back in the first decade of the century. So it couldn't be more different than the approach I took writing about Ronald Reagan...
...purpose in writing the book? Well, just simply to tell a story -- which is all I've ever wanted to do in my life, is just to tell a story. What drew me to Theodore Roosevelt, and what drew me to Reagan is the fact that both had extraordinarily interesting life stories. And were both extraordinarily interesting characters. I did not want to write about Reagan for any political reasons, his politics bore me. I did want to make money, so that was certainly a consideration. But on the other hand, if I'd only been after money...