Theodore Roosevelt (American Presidents Series) Book

Louis Auchincloss' Theodore Roosevelt is one of the best entries in Times Books "The American Presidents" series. The book is well organized, and novelist Auchincloss brings to his task not only a singularly useful sociological and cutural perspective but also a superb prose style.

Each entry in the Times Book series is about one hundred and fifty pages, a length that would seem to lend itself naturally to a straightforward chronology of events. Yet, because a president typically presides over a rush of years crowded with incident, a brief narrative so structured'year one with its taxes, tariffs, and perils overseas, followed by year two with a similar though distinct series of ephemeral challenges'may soon become as wearying as a Wikipedia biography, a dense fact-hoard lacking a unifying thread or discernible patterns. Many writers in the series adopt this method, and many of their books suffer because of it.

The best book in the series'Garry Will's James Madison, Gary Hart's James Monroe, Gail Collins' William Henry Harrison, John Seigenthaler's James K. Polk, George McGovern's Abraham Lincoln--take a different approach. Although they maintain chronology when possible, they concentrate on particular themes, thus highlighting the president's central concerns and legacy.

This is what Auchincloss does. Big business, Panama, race relations and hate crimes, ending war between Russia and Japan, preventing war between France and Germany, the panic of 1907, the conservation of the wilderness directed by Gifford Pinchot, TR's attitude toward war, the president's "Bull Moose" radicalization'all come in for individual treatment. Auchincloss even includes an entire chapter of representative'although unrelated--quotations. The result is a vivid portrait of an extraordinary man.

On of the reasons Auchincloss' portrait is so sharp and insightful is that he and his subject come from the same social class: the "old money" aristocrats of New York. Auchincloss graduated Groton School in Massachusetts, the Episcopal preparatory academy which educated all the young Roosevelts (except the frail young Teddy himself), and he later attended an Ivy League university (although he, unlike TR, went to Yale).

The following passage, which describes Theodore's early year at college is a good example both of Auchincloss' easy familiarity with TR's world (including the importance of social class and money) and of his crisp, engaging prose style: By the time he entered Harvard he was sufficiently robust and full of a zest for life, with an income greater than the salary of Harvard's president, Charles W. Eliot. However, college presidents were not then well compensated, and many of the gilded youth of Boston and new York enjoyed greater allowances than young Theodore. But he did well enough for himself; he had his own rooms off campus and a horse and buggy with which to visit the beautiful Alice Lee, a Brahmin from Chestnut Hill...and he eagerly cultivated students of his own social background; it would take him a couple of years to shed his inherited snobbishness, and we find him writing home that he stood nineteenth in his class, with only one "gentleman" ahead of him. But he was well enough liked, if considered a bit eccentric'his friend Robert Bacon would not visit his rooms because of the smell of his zoological specimens'and he was duly elected to the exclusive Porcellian Club. Although Auchincloss grants that Roosevelt can be made to look ridiculous by an unkind culling of his most extreme statements, since "it was his nature to be heartily emphatic, to make his point by gross overstatement," believes also that he "was capable of the most profound political shrewdness, of a deep humanitarian concern, of a hatred of hypocrisy and deceit and a greatness of heart, and that he was "a political idealist" who believed in "astute and well considered compromise," and for this reason "deserves his rank among our great presidents."