At first blush, this is counterintuitive, for T.R., as he was widely known, was an Alpha president for an Alpha age. As the United States began to flex its muscles on the world stage, he was everywhere — building up the Navy, charging up San Juan Hill and generally doing the kinds of things men liked to do. He compared himself to a Bull Moose, talked of big sticks and celebrated masculine achievement whenever he could. Famously, he lionized “the man in the arena,” his face “marred by dust and sweat and blood.” For T.R., life was a public bromance.
But he was not, actually, alone in the arena. As O’Keefe shows, with meticulous research, Roosevelt’s wife and sisters were always there, in the background, cleaning up messes and helping him to make good decisions. The title is slightly misleading; this is not a potboiler about romantic escapades, but rather a careful study of a president whose career was shaped from the outset by exceptional advisers.
O’Keefe covers Roosevelt’s entire life. The book will not supplant the richly textured biographies written by David McCullough, Edmund Morris and Kathleen Dalton, though the author draws upon them, nor does it try to — it pursues a particular agenda, and with vigor. The chief executive of a foundation behind a presidential library built to honor Roosevelt in North Dakota, O’Keefe is clearly bullish on the Bull Moose.
But at the same time, his book brims with perceptive insights about the challenges faced by a young man who was not always in control of himself. Roosevelt came very near to marrying his second wife, Edith, before he ever knew his first. “Teedie” and “Edie” were in love as teenagers. But one day, seemingly furious after a difficult rejection, he rode recklessly, harming his horse and nearly harming himself. When a dog came too close, he pulled out a pistol and — shades of Kristi Noem, the current South Dakota governor — shot it dead, “rolling it over very neatly as it ran alongside the horse.”
After that painful episode, Roosevelt fell in love with another woman, Alice Lee, whom he met while at Harvard (where his undergraduate thesis was titled “Practicability of Giving Men and Women Equal Rights”) and married after a long and at times difficult courtship. But her early death, in childbirth, nearly unmoored him, and his attempt at healing, by traveling to the Badlands of the Dakotas, was made possible only by the willingness of Bamie to care for his infant daughter.
