Colonel Roosevelt

The Most Famous Man in the World We have become accustom to former presidents writing their memoirs, establishing the presidential library and undertaking a good cause here and there. That's what ex-presidents do. Jimmy Carter has led an exemplary post-presidential life and has, with single-minded determination, come close to eradicating a deadly disease in Africa. Bill Clinton's Foundation has focused on AIDS and third-world development with considerable success. George W. Bush is still settling into the post-White House role and reportedly his recent book has become a best-seller on, of all places, college campuses. As impressive as they have been, none of these recent ex-presidents come anywhere close to matching the life Theodore Roosevelt lived from 1909 to 1919. He packed a near lifetime of activity, scholarship, authorship and politics - including his own and many other campaigns - into the ten years after he left the White House. This amazing Roosevelt history is superbly recounted in Edmund Morris's new biography - The Colonel. The volume is the third in Morris's life of T.R. and it will doubtless stand for a long, long time as the authoritative source on the larger-than-life personality who in his time was called "the most famous man in the world." One things our recent ex-presidents are loath to do is criticize their successors. Clinton and Bush 43 have been particularly careful - we can excuse Clinton's role in stumping for his wife - not to mix their former status with current politics. Teddy had no such reservations. He literally sought every opportunity to bash his own hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and the man who wrenched the progressive label from him Woodrow Wilson. Yet even without his deep and prolonged forays into partisan politics post-White House, Roosevelt would have been a world celebrity on the order of, say, Bono or Michael Jackson. The guy was a rock star before we had rock stars. He seemed to know everyone and write about everything. The press of the day covered his African safari, his European tour, complete with marching in the funeral procession of England's Edward VII, his near-death expedition into the Amazon jungle and, of course, his 1912 run for the presidency that included Roosevelt being shot in Milwaukee. Were this life a novel, it simply would not be believable. We have certainly had supremely accomplished presidents since Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson earned a PhD, served as a university president and was a fine writer before the presidency. Herbert Hoover was a world-class engineer who also wrote well. John Kennedy won, with a little help from Ted Sorensen, the Pulitzer Prize. None could touch the breadth and depth of Roosevelt's writing - books, hundreds of magazine pieces, essays, speeches and letters, thousand and thousands of letters. This is a great book about a great man and, a little prediction, Morris will win another Pulitzer for producing what, as the New York Times said, "deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject." In the end, as with much great literature, T.R. story is tragedy. Roosevelt's enless agitating for American involvement in World War I served, in Morris's telling, to glorify the tragic, wasteful, useless war that came to define the 20th Century. The senseless slaughter - only later did Roosevelt come to realize that war is not glory - also cost the life of the youngest Roosevelt, Quentin, who died flying over German lines in 1918. Quentin's father, worn out and dispirited, died the next year. Theodore Roosevelt was only 60; the youngest man to ever serve as president and still and forever one of the greatest.

To Be Thankful

A Grand Canyon Looking for something to be thankful for this holiday season? Lift a glass to the memory of the 26th President of the United States. He saved the Grand Canyon - saved it, I'm convinced, so that I could have the marvelous experience of standing at its rim on a cold, clear Christmas Day knowing that there are some things too perfect to let the heavy hand of man intrude. Theodore Roosevelt called the Grand Canyon "the most wonderful scenery in the world" and compared it to "ruined temples and palaces of bygone ages." It is a temple and thank God Roosevelt had the vision and grit to protect it from the zinc and copper miners who were - its hard to believe today - determined to exploit the Canyon in the early days of the 20th Century. On May 6, 1903, as part of his celebrated "loop tour" that took Teddy to Yellowstone, Yosemite and eventually the Grand Canyon, Roosevelt stood at the south rim and spoke words that still ring with universal truth and his vision. TR's trip, the longest and most ambitious ever taken to that point in presidential history, is recounted beautifully in Douglas Brinkley's fine book The Wilderness Warrior. Reflecting on the majesty of what the locals called "the big ditch," Roosevelt said simply, "You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children and your children's children and all who come after you as one of the great sights for Americans to see." When Congress failed to act on his request to protect the Canyon as a National Park, Roosevelt took his own action on January 11, 1908. Now, there's something to be thankful for.

Teddy...a Socialist?

Oh...My...God... Apparently in the supercharged environment of today's American politics the worst thing that can be said of someone is that they are...a socialist! Comes now the wingnut set in the person of Glenn Beck leveling that scurrilous charge at, of all people, the 26th president - Theodore Roosevelt. Glenn must be off his meds, or he's been reading different history than me. Beck, one of the new generation of agitators from the far right (they also exist on the far left) who live to create heat (never light), spoke recently to a very conservative audience in Washington, D.C. and managed to lay a good percentage of the problems of the 20th Century at the door of "progressives" like Roosevelt. What a profound misreading of American history, but then again what do you expect from cable TV bloviators who willy-nilly re-write history to fit the politics of the moment. Never missing a beat, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs let it be known that his boss, not unfamiliar with being tarred with the "s" word, is reading Edmund Morris' wonderful biography, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. I recommend it if you want the real story about Teddy. My old buddy Joel Connelly, writing in the Seattle PI, was one of many to address the "kookiness" of history as misrepresented by Glenn Beck, the darling of the Tea Party crowd. Jonathan Alter in Newsweek had a similar take. If Beck's take on T.R. weren't so laughable it would be, well, laughable. That some people actually listen to this guy is, however, frightening. Truth be told, the "progressive" movement of the early 20th Century was a pragmatic and very American response to the very real possibility that real socialists would gain a substantial following in American politics. When Teddy Roosevelt bolted the Republican Party in 1912 to run on the Progressive ticket - the Bull Moose ticket - he faced not only the conservative incumbent GOP President William Howard Taft, but progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson and a real socialist, Eugene V. Debs. In that four-way contest, one of the most electrifying elections in American history, Debs garnered nearly a million votes running under the Socialist Party banner. In other words, Debs had a following and Roosevelt and Wilson, the progressives of the day, were dealing with the reality of that following. Their vision of America prevailed. What did T.R.'s "progressives" stand for? Well, direct election of United States Senators, an income tax, regulation of monopoly, women's suffrage and pure food and drug laws, among other things. Later progressives, including Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, advocated additional reforms, including what became Social Security and regulation of utilities. Franklin Roosevelt brought such reform to reality in the 1930's, continuing the progressive trend in American politics. This wasn't socialism, it was progress. It is simply a perversion of our history for anyone to suggest that the whole series of progressive reforms that began with the first Roosevelt have anything to do with socialism. It would be more accurate to say that the progressive agenda of the early 1900's saved the country for capitalism and headed off socialism. FDR's New Deal did much the same 20 years later during the darkest days of the Great Depression. Neither Roosevelt harmed capitalism, rather their response to the issues of their times saved capitalism. Progressive reforms helped usher in the strong, diverse, resilient capitalist democracy that has long made the United States the envy of the rest of the world. It is a free country and Glenn Beck can extend and revise his fiction all he wants, but the facts get in the way. Teddy Roosevelt, like all of the greatest of the great presidents, was a flawed leader. He was a romantic about war. He had an ego the size of North Dakota where he retreated after his wife and mother died a few hours apart on the same day. He had a tendency, like most presidents, to push the bounds of executive power in dangerous directions. But, he was also brilliant, a genuine scholar, a fine writer, an historian, a soldier, naturalist and a visionary. It is not an accident that he is with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln on Mt. Rushmore. He deserves to be there. Edmund Morris, Ronald Reagan's official biographer, is my authority. Perhaps the most famous speech Teddy ever delivered - the man in the arena speech - sums up this remarkable man; a great president, and his importance to his times and ours. Think of a clown like Glenn Beck when you read this. "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." Roosevelt made that speech in 1910. In Paris. In France. At the Sorbonne! Sounds like something a socialist would have done. I'll bet Glenn Beck is outraged.

How the West Was Saved

Conservation Visionaries... Douglas Brinkley's fine new book - The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America - tells the great story of how Roosevelt, the New Yorker born of privilege who became a westerner by choice, came to preserve during his presidency vast amounts - 230 million acres total - of national forest land, monuments, wildlife refuges and parks. Roosevelt's remarkable foresight keeps on giving. More than 100 years after TR's aggressive use of Executive Orders and the Antiquities Act marked him as the nation's foremost conservationist, we are still debating what to do with all he set aside. Thank the 26th president for not foreclosing our options all those years ago. When some westerners speak dismissively of the unique American legacy of public ownership of vast amounts of beautiful, rugged, economically valuable, and often largely untouched land they tend to refer to the acreage as "federal land." But that is inaccurate. The land belongs to all of us just as TR envisioned and every generation since Roosevelt has faced the task of reconcilining its stewardship responsibilities with the unrelenting pressure - and unrelenting need - to harvest timber, extract minerals, generate energy and generally support a modern society. The debate over that stewardship of public land has often been shrill and polarizing, but that may be changing at least a little. In a thoughtful piece in The Atlantic Jonathan Weber, publisher of NewWest.net, an on line magazine covering the west, extolled what may be a gathering trend - attempting to resolve age old disputes about western land management using collaboration and compromise right here in the west rather than resorting to bombast and lawyers. Weber points to the approach pioneered in Idaho by Rick Johnson, the Executive Director of the Idaho Conservation League (ICL), that has helped engineer recent new wilderness protection for the magnificant Owyhee Canyonlands in extreme southwestern Idaho and will soon, we can hope, finally see through the Congress the long sought, often delayed protection of the Boulder-White Cloud Mountains in central Idaho. Johnson - no relation, but a friend - has learned what some in the conservation community, and the national media, have yet to see: pragmatic, common sense conservation must be built from the ground up and it will always involve compromise. ICL has made common cause with two pretty conservative Idaho Republicans - Senator Mike Crapo and Congressman Mike Simpson - in the interest of moving the ball on wilderness protection, while also acknowledging the local need for economic stablity and jobs. Montana's new Democratic Senator John Tester is working the same trapline and I"ll be surprised if we don't see more use of the model across the vast American west. It seems to be working. I marvel at Teddy Roosevelt's vision that encompassed creation of the remarkable system of national forests that provide us raw materials, fish and wildlife habitat, recreation and solitude. At the same time the man who hunted every type of African game and proudly saw to it that mounted heads graced the walls of his home and many musuems was also the bird loving creator of Deer Flat and Minidoka Wildlife Refuges in Idaho. When I spent last Christmas at the picturesque old El Tovar lodge on the south rim of the Grand Canyon - the park was saved by Roosevelt from the designs of early Arizona miners - and walked in the snow along the trial overlooking what may be the most spectacular site in the country, I couldn't help but feel immense gratitude for the old Rough Rider's certainty that this marvelous place must be conserved for all of us and forever. Thankfully TR had the vision to act as he did; mostly unilaterally and often in the face of powerful opposition. But, thanks as well for a new generation of westerners, of many political stripes, who realize a different time demands a different approach. The great writer Wallace Stegner often made the point that westerners live with many myths, including the myth that the west was built by the hands of rugged individuals acting on their own. Not true, Stegner said. The west has been built through cooperation and government action including reclamation projects created 100 years ago and 2009 stimulus spending on everything from renewable energy to road and transit projects. The west's story has always involved much hard give and take. The west's true rugged individuals realize that fact and are willing to summon the courage and sustain the energy to work and worry over the compromises that continue to make the west a place of hope, opportunity and awe. As Roosevelt once said: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." Good advice and not a bad slogan for the future of the American west.