COVER rules The Making of America: (Roosevelt) (Roosevelt) At home and abroad, he was the locomotive president, the man who drew his flourishing Fighting the Fat Cats (Roosevelt) nation into the future To put the brakes on the growth of huge, monopolistic corporations, Teddy took on one The War of 1912 (Roosevelt) of the nation's richest men: J. Pierpont Morgan T.R. failed in his brash bid to regain the White House, but his Bull Moose Party pushed ideas Lessons from a Larger-than-Life President that would animate the century (Roosevelt / Viewpoint)

The Police Commish (Roosevelt) An American Princess With righteous fury and mixed results, Irreverent Alice Roosevelt Longworth Roosevelt tried to weed out corrupt cops and exasperated her father Teddy and enchanted suppress vice in big, bad New York City in the Washington's elite 1890s A Step Back For Blacks The Self-Made Man (Roosevelt) Despite a promising start, the Progressive-era He was a sickly child. But through sheer will, President failed to provide a for all muscular effort--and a lot of time in the great outdoors--he became a powerful, passionate The Roosevelt Legacy Bush adult Shouldn't Carry On (Roosevelt) Conservatives unhappy with the President's (Roosevelt) limitless ambition and world-saving impulses Roosevelt nearly died while exploring an wish he would find a different 20th century uncharted stretch of the Amazon. It was his Republican hero than Teddy final adventure Why we should study Charging Into Fame Theodore Roosevelt (Roosevelt) One "crowded hour" on a hillside in Cuba Because he was a natural maverick and made Roosevelt a national hero. A look behind reformer who did what he thought was right the legend — whether with regard to the environment, immigration, or America's role abroad Birth Of A Superpower (Roosevelt) Roosevelt's expanded Navy vanquished Spain and helped the U.S. project its might around the world

How To Shrink The World Roosevelt called building the "by far the most important action" he had taken in foreign affairs. Why did he succeed where others had failed? He made his own Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 The Making of America — Theodore Roosevelt By Richard Lacayo

Presidents come and go, but monuments are always with us. There's a reason Theodore Roosevelt is the only 20th century President whose face is carved into , the only one who could hold his own with Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson. Roosevelt not only remade America, but he also charmed the pants off everybody while he did it. And just short of a century after he left the White House, in 1909, the collective memory of his strength and intellect and charisma still lingers. How many times over the years since have Americans settled their affections on some thoughtful, vigorous man who reminded them a bit of Roosevelt? What was Ernest Hemingway if not a later edition of Teddy, without the burden of office but still equipped with T.R.'s literate machismo? And who could look at John F. Kennedy, scrimmaging with his clan at Hyannis Port, and not be reminded of another young President, tussling with his kids at ? Is it any surprise when more recent Presidents try to borrow a bit of his halo? Bill Clinton had Teddy's bust on his desk. George W. Bush let it be known that he spent last Christmas vacation reading a Roosevelt biography, his second since he got to the White House.

Teddy stays with us because he seems so much like one of us. Although he was born in 1858, it's the 20th century he decidedly belongs to, the century he brought America into on his terms. Roosevelt's years in the White House were one of those hinges upon which the whole of American history sometimes turns. When he arrived there, he already understood the energies that had been building in the U.S. for decades after the Civil War: the explosion of its industrial power, the ineluctable impulse to expand. He used his presidency to discharge those energies in ways that left the U.S. profoundly changed. Again and again, he framed the questions we still ask. How much influence should the government have over the economy? How much power should the U.S. exert in the wider world? What should we do to protect the environment? The answer he liked best--More--didn't satisfy everyone. It still doesn't. But anytime we offer our own, we know that we do it with him looking over our shoulders.

Where was his impact the greatest? Start with the economy. When Roosevelt first came to the presidency, after the assassination of William McKinley, the U.S. was emerging as one of the world's wealthiest nations. It was first in the world in its output of timber, steel, coal, iron. Since 1860 the population had doubled, exports had tripled. But that bounding growth had brought with it all the upheavals of an industrial age--poverty, child labor, dreadful factory conditions. Year after year, workers faced off against bosses with their fists clenched.

Roosevelt came to believe that government had the right to moderate the excesses of free enterprise. Although his exercises of power seem modest to us now--the breakup of monopolies, the , the meat-inspection and industrial-safety laws--it was a shock to the system at the time. Roosevelt--a Republican!--insisted that one of the things government must govern is the economy. Today, when the Justice Department goes after Microsoft or Enron, when the Environmental Protection Agency adjusts mileage standards or the Fed tweaks the prime, somewhere his ghost is smiling.

By the time he returned to politics in 1912 to make an attempt at a third term in the White House, running under the banner of the Progressive Party, he felt free to set out an even more radical vision of what must be done. Social Security, regulation of stock trading, a minimum wage--those ideas would not be adopted until the presidency more than two decades later of his distant cousin Franklin. But T.R. set them seriously in motion.

As at home, so in the world: in all places Roosevelt was an activist. He was the first President to urge wholeheartedly that the U.S. accept its role as a global power. God knows, he accepted it. He looked at the U.S. the way we now understand the universe, as a thing that began expanding the moment it was born. (It tells you something that he never got over the habit of casting covetous glances toward Canada.) But not until just before he reached the presidency had the nation finally burst through its continental confines. In 1898 the Spanish-American War and its aftermath had placed under U.S. supervision a whole collection of territories and dependencies: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Suddenly, to Roosevelt's utter delight, the U.S. was acting on a world stage, across two oceans. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy under McKinley--a job that should have been nearly meaningless but that he turned into a power center--he had urged on the war. As a Rough Rider, he had fought in it. As President, he would make Americans understand that their new global prominence was a long-term proposition.

He was right, of course. Roosevelt sounded the first chords of the American Century. But the Spanish-American War was a quick and easy victory. Although it was followed by a bloody anti-American insurgency in the Philippines, one that dragged on through Roosevelt's presidency, for the most part he did not live to see the lethal predicaments a global power can face. We can't know what he might have thought about Vietnam, much less Iraq. His expansionist impulse had its idealistic side; he too talked about spreading democracy. And you could see its legacy in developments after his death, like the Marshall Plan. But every time the U.S. contrived to overthrow an elected leader abroad who proved resistant to U.S. aims, some of Teddy's legacy was also at work. There could not have been a more literal legacy than the 1953 coup engineered by the U.S. to oust Mohammed Mossadegh, the Iranian Prime Minister who attempted to nationalize Iran's oil industry. The CIA officer in Tehran who choreographed the overthrow was Roosevelt's grandson Kermit.

Another of Roosevelt's legacies was an unambiguous gift to the future. Teddy was never more himself than when he was outdoors. He loved nature, knew the songs of dozens of birds, loved to ride, climb, hike and shoot. As a boy he wanted to be a naturalist, and as a President he became the first to make environmentalism a political issue. Under the tutelage of his friends--naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir, who convinced Teddy that the Federal Government would be a better protector of parkland than the states, and U.S. Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot, who wanted strict controls over commercial use of woodlands--Roosevelt learned to shape his love of nature into a policy to defend it. The year after leaving the White House, he explained his philosophy to an audience in Kansas. He recognized the right, he said, even the "duty" of his generation to use the nation's natural resources. "But I do not recognize the right to waste them," he added. "Or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us." We are those generations, and we have him to thank not only for the 150 national forests he created, the 51 national wildlife refuges, the five national parks, but also for the very idea that air, water, forests and animal life were somehow in our collective safekeeping. If he were alive today, he would be deeply interested in such matters as global warming and the preservation of species.

Roosevelt was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud's, but a less self-analytical man would be hard to imagine. He was outer directed in every way and keenly receptive to the possibilities of the moment. Henry Adams, the most nuanced mind of Roosevelt's day, was exactly right when he called him "pure act." Roosevelt entered the White House after three decades during which Congress had consistently had the upper hand over the President. He lost no time in making it plain that he was a different breed. The "imperial presidencies" that followed his, from those of Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, all owe something to his example. When Congress did nothing to curb the power of the trusts--huge monopolistic corporations--Roosevelt simply directed his Justice Department to start bringing suits. When Congress balked at embarking on the Panama Canal, Teddy found a way to go forward. "I took the Isthmus," he later explained, "started the canal and then left Congress--not to debate the canal, but to debate me." He added dryly, "But while the debate goes on, the canal does too." No one would ever have to wonder what he meant when he said, "While President, I have been President--emphatically."

He did everything emphatically. Above all, he had a supreme sense of the great future in store for the U.S. No one was ever more certain of the nation's destiny. Few Presidents were more formidable in shaping it. More than that, he gave the nation a picture of itself as a place that could not fail to succeed, because it produced people who were vigorous and commanding--people like Teddy Roosevelt. It's not just that he was excited to be an American. He made it more exciting to be one.

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207820,00.html Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 The War of 1912 By Patricia O''Toole

When Theodore Roosevelt challenged for the Republican presidential nomination in 1912, few cheered. Enemies accused him of monumental egotism, and most admirers, foreseeing his defeat, were worried that posterity would frown on his quest for an unprecedented third term. But as Roosevelt saw it, he had to involve himself. He had left the White House in 1909 with the expectation that Taft, his good friend and chosen successor, would continue on the progressive course set by the Roosevelt Administration. Instead, Taft had filled his Cabinet with corporate lawyers, bungled a chance to overhaul an antiquated tariff that enriched manufacturers at consumers' expense and undermined Roosevelt's farsighted environmentalism. Taft means well, Roosevelt would say, "but he means well feebly."

Then came the midterm elections of 1910. The G.O.P. lost control of the House, and Roosevelt began criticizing Taft's policies in print. The final rupture occurred a year later when Taft's Attorney General filed an antitrust suit against the U.S. Steel Corp. because of a 1907 acquisition that Roosevelt had personally approved. T.R. was outraged. The decision to challenge Taft soon followed. T.R.'s campaign would not succeed, but the ideals that he and his Bull Moose Party enunciated in 1912 would resonate in American political life for decades. They still do. They shaped much of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and influenced domestic policy until the 1980s, when the Reagan Revolution began dismantling social programs. Even now, echoes of that campaign can be heard in debates on what government should do for citizens and how to make it more accountable.

Roosevelt's odds of unhorsing an incumbent President were long, but not as long as they would have been in previous election years, when nominees were chosen by a handful of bosses and rubber-stamped at state party caucuses. In 1912 a dozen states were letting voters do the choosing in primaries, a political innovation just beginning to catch on. If T.R. could win big in the primaries, he could present himself as the people's choice and Taft as the creature of the bosses.

Collectively, the primaries gave T.R. a shot at 362 votes, and he stunned the party by walking off with 278 of them. Taft finished a distant second, with 48. But in the 36 states without primaries, Roosevelt was outflanked by the bosses. In June, as delegates headed to Chicago for the national convention, Taft's men boasted that their candidate had 557 votes--17 more than he needed for the nomination. T.R. could see that his primary delegates plus delegates from renegade factions elsewhere had left him about 70 votes short. His aides noisily challenged the legitimacy of scores of Taft supporters, but when it became clear that he could not win, T.R. executed one of the gutsiest maneuvers in the annals of American presidential campaigns: he denounced the Republicans as thieves and bolted the convention. A bolt spared Roosevelt the humiliation of losing to Taft. It also kept his candidacy alive on a brand-new ticket of his own creation, the National Progressive Party, better known as the Bull Moose Party, a nickname that came from the answer T.R. had given when someone in a crowd yelled out to ask how he felt. "Like a bull moose," he yelled back.

The Bull Moose Party got off to a thundering start. Within seven weeks, the Progressives had established the party in nearly every state and were back in Chicago for their first national convention. But who were the Progressives? Although Republicans of the day cast the Progressives as radicals, in truth they were teachers and lawyers, farmers and small-town folk, urban reformers of every ilk, crusaders for peace and women's suffrage, champions of the little guy. They were less a movement than a catch basin for civic-minded men and women impatient with politics as usual but a bit frightened of Eugene V. Debs and his Socialist Party. While many Progressives could not see past their pet causes, T.R. managed to bring them together in a big tent held aloft by the idea that the government, which ought to serve the people, had been hijacked by special interests. "To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day," the Progressive platform declared.

A brief for a strong Federal Government, the Progressive platform was so far ahead of its time on many points (Social Security and the minimum wage, for example) that it would take a generation and another Roosevelt, T.R.'s fifth cousin Franklin, to bring them into being. In hopes of protecting the investing public from swindlers, the Progressives called for federal regulation of stock offerings and fuller disclosure of corporate financial transactions, ideas that found their way into the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.

During his presidency, a time when corporations were growing ever larger, Roosevelt operated on the principle that the Federal Government was the only institution strong enough to combat their Darwinian tendency to crush competitors and maximize profits by keeping wages low and prices high. In 1912 he was even more adamant.

T.R. welcomed African Americans into his new party, but the whites organizing the Progressives of the Deep South insisted that if any black were permitted to hold a party office or serve as a delegate, Southern whites would refuse to join. Left to choose between acquiescence and no presence in the South, Roosevelt acquiesced and was roundly criticized. W.E.B. DuBois and other black leaders saw Roosevelt as a hypocrite and threw their support to the Democratic nominee, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. They would regret it. Southern Democrats were frankly committed to white supremacy. Wilson's Cabinet, dominated by Southerners, soon resegregated the civil service, erasing most of the gains made during the Roosevelt and Taft presidencies.

As the Progressives at the convention moved toward the moment of anointing Roosevelt as their first presidential candidate, his lieutenants were scrambling to line up a Vice President. T.R. yearned for Hiram Johnson, the Progressive Governor of California, but Johnson yearned not to run. He was sure that the Bull Moose Party would lose and that his career would be over. Johnson did not surrender until the last minute, after Roosevelt's men insisted that if the great T.R. did not shrink from defeat in a noble cause, no one else should either.

Whatever Johnson's sentiments, just about everyone else at the convention found it an exhilarating combination of barn raising and revival meeting. They hammered together their platform, belted out hymns and interrupted Roosevelt's acceptance speech 145 times to holler and applaud. When he closed with the best line from his first speech after the bolt--"We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord"--they burst into what may still be history's loudest rendition of Onward, Christian Soldiers.

The battle would be short. Election Day, Nov. 5, was only two months off when the Progressives went forth to proselytize. Taft had already dropped from sight, telling the newspapers that he planned to take a long vacation and would stand on his record. It was said that the ideological difference between Roosevelt and Wilson was the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but on one fundamental they sharply disagreed. Wilson was a states'-rights man who contended that the history of liberty was a history of limiting the power of the national government. Roosevelt was a confirmed nationalist, convinced that the history of social progress proved that only a strong central government could level the playing field.

The urgent questions of the day were economic: how best to regulate the economy and what to do about a tariff policy that kept consumer prices artificially high by protecting American companies from foreign competition. The tariff had been created decades earlier to raise revenue (income tax being a thing of the future) and to nurture a stripling American manufacturing establishment. As the manufacturers prospered, they convinced their captives in Congress that ever thicker blankets of protection were needed to preserve American jobs. Wilson, calling the tariff "stiff and stupid," promised an immediate revision. Roosevelt, arguing that a speedy change would disrupt the economy, proposed a permanent nonpartisan commission of experts able to make impartial recommendations for more gradual reform.

T.R. also campaigned forcefully for a commission to regulate corporations. Its members--accomplished, public-spirited business leaders--would study a company's affairs, require change when there were signs of monopoly and stamp a company "approved" when all was in order. Once approved, the company could operate without fear of prosecution under the country's confusing antitrust law. To Wilson, the corporations commission was a dangerous merger of business and government, sure to enable Big Business to regulate the regulators. Even Taft roused himself to condemn it as "the most monstrous monopoly of power in the history of the world."

While Taft vacationed and Wilson gave as few speeches as possible, Roosevelt raced up the East Coast and down, across the South and into the Midwest. In Milwaukee, Wis., on Oct. 14, as he stood in an open car to salute a cheering crowd, a man a few feet away drew a revolver and fired, hitting Roosevelt in the chest and knocking him back into the car seat.

Three Presidents had been assassinated in T.R.'s lifetime, and he had long ago prepared himself for such a moment. He put his fingers to his lips, saw that he was not bleeding from the mouth and concluded that the bullet had not perforated a lung. The bullet, slowed by the contents of his breast pocket--a steel eyeglass case and a copy of the speech he was about to give--had lodged in a rib. He insisted on proceeding to an auditorium where a crowd of 10,000 was waiting for him. In full command of his political instincts, he showed the audience his bloodstained shirt and said, "I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose." Roosevelt spoke for 90 minutes, then consented to go to a hospital.

From first to last, no candidate in 1912 fought harder than Roosevelt, but in the end, the country chose Wilson. The results resembled those of 1992, when Ross Perot's third-party run deprived Bill Clinton of a popular majority but gave him a victory, with 43% of the vote. Wilson's plurality was 42%. Roosevelt finished with 27% and Taft with 23%. Debs drew 6%, twice the share he had won in 1908. Monday-morning quarterbacks have claimed that if T.R. had sat out 1912, his votes would have gone to Taft. Not so. As the numbers show, 77% of the electorate wanted anyone but Taft.

Roosevelt lost, and in a political culture set in its two-party ways, the Bull Moose Party was destined for a short life. But T.R.'s 1912 campaign still quickens the pulse, in part because his foresight on social policy proved to be 20/20 but even more because he was that rare person able to see past the corruption and mediocrity of his time. Theodore Roosevelt understood what a government devoted to its citizens might achieve, and he got the country talking as seriously as it ever has about what it wanted to be.

•O'Toole is author of When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House (Simon & Schuster)

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207791,00.html Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 The Police Commish By Richard Zacks

In the 1890s, New York City was unrepentantly wide open. Day or night, a man with a thirst or a letch or the urge to gamble could satisfy his cravings with ease. Long past midnight, small bands played in dozens of Manhattan concert saloons while prostitutes in floor-length dresses trawled the tables. Streetwalkers divvied up the various corners in the Tenderloin, and touts handed out cards for $1-a-date Bowery brothels. Bettors wanting action could wander into Frank Farrell's crystal-chandeliered casino on West 33rd Street. Tourists could smoke opium in no-frills dens in Chinatown.

And where were the cops? Quite a few were busy taking bribes. It was no secret that crooked officers shared their illegal profits with an equally corrupt Democratic political club, Tammany Hall. But on May 6, 1895, Republican mayor William Strong appointed to the city's four-man board of police commissioners the Manhattan native and former state legislator Theodore Roosevelt. Selected at once as board president, Roosevelt eagerly embraced the mayor's mandate for reform, calling it "a man's work." Quite simply, the author of The Winning of the West aimed to clean up Dodge, even if it had 2 million people. Although he never entirely succeeded--who could?--T.R.'s time on the police beat gave the Knickerbocker aristocrat a glimpse of life among the urban poor that shaped the Progressive he became.

Roosevelt set ambitious goals: to make merit replace bribery in the system of job assignments (sergeants sometimes paid $15,000 for lucrative captaincies) and, crazy as it sounds, to compel officers to actually enforce all the laws. He scored a few successes initially, weeding out corrupt veterans. To see whether patrolmen were walking their beats, he began making the same rounds late at night and incognito--though at times in the company of a newspaper reporter. Once, Roosevelt found three bluecoats loitering outside a saloon at 2:30 a.m. "What are you men doing here?" he asked abruptly. "What the %$*&# is that your business?" snapped one of them, in vintage New Yorkese. Roosevelt, spectacles glinting, then introduced himself and lectured them on performing their duty. "These midnight rambles are great fun," he later confided to his sister Anna. "I get a glimpse of the real life of the swarming millions." On some of those nights, Roosevelt's companion was the photographer and social critic Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), who guided him through the circles of hell suffered by the city's struggling immigrants.

Roosevelt was settling in at 300 Mulberry Street, the police headquarters, when he embarked on what would be the costliest struggle of his tenure. He decided to enforce the moribund blue law against Sunday drinking. In a New York minute, he went from lauded to loathed. Fearlessly, he vowed not to back down. "Dry Sundays" led Manhattanites to flee to Coney Island for a beer; 540,000 mugs were sold one Sunday. German Americans, missing their beer gardens, held an anti-Roosevelt parade. Two mail bombs arrived and were defused. "I would rather see this administration turned out for enforcing laws than see it succeed for violating them," Roosevelt proclaimed. Privately, though, he agonized. "I have now run up against an ugly snag, the Sunday Excise Law," he wrote to Anna. "It is altogether too strict, but I have no honorable alternative save to enforce it and I am enforcing it, to the furious rage of the saloon keepers, and of many good people too; for which I am sorry."

The situation turned even bleaker for Commissioner Roosevelt when his fellow Republicans passed an ill-conceived law to crack down on what little legal Sunday drinking remained, mainly at hotels. The Raines Law decreed that only hotels with 10 or more rooms could serve alcohol with a meal on Sundays. Within weeks, almost every saloon, beer dive and dance hall in the city transformed itself into a "Raines Law hotel." Tavern owners thumbed their nose at Teddy. "Ten beers and one hard-boiled egg scarcely constitute a meal," groused Roosevelt, but wink-wink Tammany judges disagreed, one even stating that 17 beers and a pretzel were sufficiently nourishing to qualify.

Even more infuriating to Roosevelt, prostitutes and unmarried couples began renting--by the hour--those 10 hastily constructed rooms over the bar. Meanwhile, Roosevelt fell into an ongoing feud with a scheming fellow commissioner, Andrew Parker, which stalemated the board. "I cannot shoot him or engage in a rough-and-tumble with him," Roosevelt lamented. The would-be reformer was bogging down, spending his time giving out awards for stopping runaway carriages.

By August 1896, a scant 15 months into the job, Roosevelt was seeking to escape. As William McKinley's presidential campaign began gearing up, he mentioned to an influential McKinley backer, Maria Storer, that his dream job was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt began passionately campaigning for McKinley, electrifying crowds from Massachusetts to North Dakota.

McKinley was elected, but Roosevelt was dour on his own prospects."This is the last office I shall ever hold," he told a friend. "I have offended so many powerful interests and so many powerful politicians." The President-elect was indeed wary. "I am told your friend Theodore is always getting into rows with everybody," he informed Mrs. Storer. "I am afraid he is too pugnacious." But at the last moment, McKinley relented.

His legacy as police commissioner? He helped introduce a bicycle squad and pistol-shooting practice. Vice triumphed, but Roosevelt survived with his honor intact and with an enlarged sympathy for the struggles of the poor. "He is a fighter, a man of indomitable pluck and energy," wrote the Washington Post. "A field of immeasurable usefulness awaits him. Will he find it?"

Zacks, author of The Pirate Hunter, is at work on a book about police commissioner Roosevelt

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207793,00.html Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 The Self-Made Man By Kathleen Dalton

The young Theodore Roosevelt did not strike most people as promising enough to become one of the nation's greatest Presidents. His august Knickerbocker family had grown rich from generations of shrewd investments in real estate, banking, glass importing and even hardware. But in his youth--and for that matter in his adulthood--T.R. showed very little interest in adding to the family fortune. When Roosevelt was a toddler, his asthma began to overshadow everything he did. As he grew, Theodore was too "delicate" for school--until Harvard he was educated at home--and too weak to stand up to other boys. On doctor's orders his father Theodore Sr.--called Thee by everyone in the family--and his mother Martha, called Mittie, rushed him to seashore resorts one day and mountain cabins the next in search of air to help him breathe. The sickly boy seemed unlikely to survive into manhood or amount to much if he did.

But Roosevelt's childhood weakness would turn out to be the provocation for the ferociously robust man he became. At about the time Theodore reached the end of boyhood, Thee, whom young T.R. adored, set off a crisis in their relationship. He insisted on making his favorite child into a strong man by directing him to embrace a life of vigorous exercise. He told him with characteristic sternness to throw off his invalidism by force of will. He ordered the boy to "make your own body." According to Theodore's sister, Theodore "resolved to make himself strong," to turn his back on his "nervous and timid" childhood and embrace manhood. The cure would come by way of sports and outdoor activity, mountains to be climbed and harsh weather to be endured.

From that day forward, T.R. became a fierce champion of what he called the "strenuous life," a self-imposed struggle to live with vigor and determination. He boxed and pulled at weight machines, and his chest expanded along with his capacity to breathe. To conquer his fragility he began, wrote a friend, "constantly forcing himself to do the difficult and even dangerous thing." Years later, T.R. wrote in his autobiography that his life changed forever because he set fearlessness before him "as an ideal" that by dogged practice he achieved. Advised that he had a bad heart and shouldn't climb stairs, the 22-year-old T.R. ascended the Matterhorn.

His self-making had costs. Throughout his life he repeatedly injured himself, even sustaining a boxing injury when he was 45 that on top of a cataract cost him the sight in his left eye. Obsessively seeking strength through exercise and adventure, he developed an equally overdone hatred for sissies, "cripples and consumptives," for anyone who could not measure up physically or who reminded him of his childhood shortcomings. He even told his sons he'd rather see them dead than have them grow up to be weaklings. He could never admit to frailty in himself. That was one reason his charge up Kettle Hill in the Battle of San Juan Heights with the , the volunteer cavalry unit he organized to fight in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, was so important to him. It proved to the world--and himself--that Roosevelt, a man who could talk very admiringly about war, had the strength and courage to fight in one. Although all his life, even when he was President, he continued to suffer on occasion from asthma he did not want the public to know of his illnesses. It didn't fit his self-image.

There was another dimension of the young Roosevelt's determined embrace of vigor: his wholehearted encounter with nature, sometimes as a naturalist, sometimes as a hunter. It shaped his life and his enduring image. Nature provided the setting for his struggle to make himself strong, and it opened up a world of scientific discovery at the same time. Roosevelt always remembered the day during his boyhood when he was walking up Broadway and spotted a dead seal on display in a market. Fascinated by the animal, he went back to see it again and again and eventually took its skull home to study. It was the first of countless natural-history projects.

Roosevelt began to collect animal specimens, including fireflies and squirrels. He filled his notebooks with drawings and life histories of animals and insects, such as the common black ant, and then read Darwin and Huxley, who helped him ponder how Homo sapiens coexisted with the so-called lesser creatures. When the American Museum of Natural History unpacked 2,200 mounted creatures from the collection of the Verreaux brothers, French naturalists, the unabashed young Theodore donated his own mounted menagerie--a bat and 12 mice.

Delighted to see that his son loved nature, Thee took him camping and encouraged his interest in biology and dissection. Mittie was not so enthusiastic. Dead-animal stink and the reeking chemicals used to preserve hides upset the decorum of her parlor. But nature and the science of nature were the solace of Roosevelt's invalid childhood, a refuge where he could achieve intellectual mastery at a young age. Under his father's loving tutelage, T.R. fashioned himself into a naturalist whose specimens can be viewed in museums today; scientists later welcomed him as an equal into their debates about how to classify species.

When Thee died of cancer at age 46, Theodore, then 19, was overcome by grief, but within a year he fell in love with a Brahmin beauty named Alice Lee, who found his stories of hunting in the Maine woods charming. Just before they wed in the fall of 1880, he went West to hunt with his brother Elliott. He hoped life in a saddle and breathing the open air all day would build up his strength once more. On the trail, he fell in love again, this time with the American West.

By the time he graduated from Harvard, T.R. had made himself the most experienced outdoorsman in a class filled with the sons of wealth and comfort. And his fierce determination to make his life count for something larger than his own interests sent him into writing and politics and the study of history. Indeed, even as he settled into married life with Alice and attended Columbia Law School, T.R. turned back to nature. He eventually bought two ranches in the Dakota Territory, where he could raise cattle to sell to the Eastern markets and at the same time retreat for health-giving hunts when his life in the East permitted.

Thus began the pattern of his adulthood, to work fiercely in the East for the causes he cared about, writing and politicking, until he was so weary that he headed West to regain his health. Nature replenished him when he was depleted. When Alice died in February 1884, shortly after giving birth to a daughter who would share her name, T.R. headed to the Dakotas to find solace for his grief. When Roosevelt became President in 1901, he took his love of nature with him to the White House. When the strain of the job weighed on him, he stepped outside to watch the spring birds migrating. He identified the blackpoll warblers perched in the elms outside the Oval Office. And he kept a list of his sightings. Anytime he yearned for the strenuous life outside the White House, Roosevelt cheerfully dragged ambassadors and small boys to climb rock faces and ford streams in Rock Creek Park. Few could keep up with him.

In a way, President Roosevelt regarded the nation's trees and open land and animal inhabitants as prime constituencies whose interests he must serve. His dear friend forester Gifford Pinchot joined him in warning the public that the natural resources of the U.S. were not inexhaustible, that a timber famine was imminent and that coal, iron, oil and gas would run out someday. Congressional leaders didn't want to hear about game or tree protection or the resource needs of future generations. Roosevelt took advantage of what he called the "" of the presidency to educate voters and legislators about the need for laws to protect natural resources.

In the spring of 1903, Roosevelt used a trip out West to dramatize his commitment to preserving wild places. With the nature writer John Burroughs he followed birdsongs in Yellowstone Park, then rode mules into Yosemite with John Muir, the great preservationist and founder of the Sierra Club. Roosevelt and Muir slept under the stars and were covered overnight by a blanket of snow. T.R.'s journey from asthmatic ornithologist to hearty rancher turned President proved that a silver-spoon birth does not have to prevent a man from developing, over time, a broad vision and a rare kind of political gumption. All he required was a chance to make himself a new man by embracing nature and its creatures with his whole heart.

Dalton is the author of Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207796,00.html Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 The River of Doubt By Candice Millard

Theodore Roosevelt had carried the lethal dose of morphine with him for years. He had taken it to the American West, to the African savanna and, finally, down the River of Doubt--a twisting tributary deep in the Amazon rain forest. The glass vial was small enough to tuck into a leather satchel or slip into his luggage, nearly invisible beside his books, his socks and his eight extra pairs of eyeglasses. Easily overlooked, it was perhaps the most private possession of one of the world's most public men.

In December 1913, Roosevelt, then 55, and a small group of men embarked on a journey to explore and map Brazil's River of Doubt. Almost from the start, the expedition went disastrously wrong. Just three months later, as Roosevelt lay on a rusting cot inside his expedition's last remaining tent listening to the roar of the river, he clutched the vial that he had carried for so long. Shivering violently, his body wracked with fever, he concluded that the time had come to take his own life.

In the span of a few days, Roosevelt, once America's youngest President and among its most vigorous, had become a feverish, at times delirious, invalid. He was suffering from malaria and had developed a potentially deadly bacterial infection after slicing his leg on a boulder. In the sweltering rain forest, the cut had quickly become infected, causing his leg to redden and swell and sending his temperature soaring to 105°F. At the same time, the expedition had reached a set of seemingly impassable rapids. Roosevelt's Brazilian co-commander, Colonel Cândido Rondon, had announced that they would have to abandon their canoes and strike out into the jungle--every man for himself. "To all of us," one of them wrote, "his report was practically a sentence of death." For Roosevelt, who could barely sit up, much less fight his way through the rain forest, the plan was simply an impossibility.

He made his decision that night. Before the first rays of sunlight seeped through the thin tent walls, he summoned his remaining strength and called out to George Cherrie, a naturalist who, along with Roosevelt's son Kermit, had been keeping a vigil over the feverish ex-President. Turning to his friend and his son, Roosevelt said, "Boys, I realize that some of us are not going to finish this journey. Cherrie, I want you and Kermit to go on. You can get out. I will stop here."

Roosevelt had set sail for South America in the fall of 1913, not quite a year after his failed attempt to regain the presidency. As a third-party candidate vying for a third term, he had split the Republican vote, putting a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, in the White House for the first time in 16 years. After the election, Roosevelt found himself a pariah, ridiculed by his enemies and hated by many of his old Republican friends and backers. Hunkered down at Sagamore Hill, his secluded home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., he fought to stave off depression and despair.

Escape came in the form of an invitation to speak in South America. It was a chance to leave New York; to see Kermit, who was working in Brazil; and to take a quiet collecting trip into the Amazon. When Roosevelt reached Brazil, the country's Foreign Minister abruptly offered him a rare opportunity: a chance to explore an unmapped river in the heart of the rain forest. So mysterious was this tributary that even the man who had discovered its headwaters five years earlier had no idea where it went and so had named it Rio da Dúvida--the River of Doubt.

For Roosevelt, the opportunity was irresistible. Not only did it appeal to him as a naturalist and would-be explorer, but it was also precisely the difficult adventure he was longing for. Throughout his life, he had battled depression and loss by seeking out dangerous physical challenges and pushing himself to the limit of his endurance. This expedition was a chance to prove his strength and reclaim his sense of purpose. It was a chance for redemption.

Just to reach the banks of the River of Doubt, however, Roosevelt and his men had to endure a grueling monthlong journey across the Brazilian Highlands. They lost dozens of pack mules and oxen to starvation and exhaustion and were forced to abandon crates filled with provisions. At the river's edge, Roosevelt had taken stock of what was left and realized that he and his men would have to cut their provisions in half before they launched a single boat.

Once on the water, the men were quickly confronted by their worst fears. The seven battered and leaking dugout canoes that they had bought from local tribesmen sat just inches above the water and proved lethally difficult to maneuver. Below them swam 15-ft.-long black caimans and razor-toothed piranhas. Each time the men were forced to portage their massive dugouts or hack a campsite out of the thick vegetation on the riverbanks, they were attacked by stinging, biting, disease-carrying insects. Nearly all the men, including Kermit and Roosevelt, fell prey to the suffocating fevers and bone-grinding chills of malaria. The jungle was also home to poisonous snakes. One night a coral snake slithered from under a fallen tree and sank its fangs into Roosevelt's foot. But for his thick leather boots, he would have died an agonizing death.

Also hidden in the rain forest was a group of indigenous tribesmen later known as the Cinta Larga, or Wide Belts. Sophisticated hunters and fierce warriors, they shadowed Roosevelt and his men yet never allowed themselves to be seen. They attacked Colonel Rondon when he was hunting alone and killed his dog. Rondon, who had spent nearly half his life exploring the Amazon and making contact with its most isolated tribes, responded to the attack by leaving the Indians gifts, signs of friendship and respect. As commander of his own regiment, he had ordered his troops when dealing with indigenous tribes, "Die if you must, but never kill." His kindness toward the Cinta Larga had probably averted a massacre.

Even with Rondon's help, the expedition had already lost one man, and the others were at constant risk. Kermit's paddler had drowned in one of the many deadly rapids that studded the river. Kermit, 24, had nearly died in the same accident, and Roosevelt lived in constant fear that he would lose not his own life on this expedition but his son's. Time and again, the men also lost canoes and precious provisions to the rapids. Game and fish eluded them, and they were reduced to searching, often in vain, for Brazil nuts, hearts of palm and the sweet, white sap of milk trees. One of the porters, roundly despised for his laziness and violent temper, had begun to steal food. Out of desperation and rage, he eventually murdered another man on the expedition. By the time the expedition reached what appeared to be an impassable set of rapids--a series of six waterfalls, the last of which was more than 30 ft. high--Roosevelt was gravely ill, and his men were beaten down by exhaustion, hunger and fear. The only man among them who believed that they could get their dugouts through the rapids was Kermit. Having spent much of the past year building bridges, he was extremely skilled with ropes, a talent that had already saved the expedition countless times as it encountered series after series of rapids.

With Cherrie at his side, Kermit went to Rondon and argued that he could use ropes to lower the dugouts over the falls. Rondon considered it a hopeless effort, but because the other men supported Kermit, he agreed to let him try. That was all Kermit needed to stay his father's hand. Roosevelt understood that the best way to ensure Kermit's survival was not to spare him the burden of carrying his father but to give him the chance to do just that. To save his son, Roosevelt realized, he would have to let his son save him. In the end, Roosevelt, Kermit and all but three men would survive to place the river--renamed the Rio Roosevelt--on the map of South America. Roosevelt never fully recovered his health, but he refused any regret. "I am always willing to pay the piper," he once wrote, "when I have had a good dance."

•Millard's account of this journey, The River of Doubt, was published by Doubleday last year

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Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 Charging Into Fame

Theodore Roosevelt wanted to fight. By the mid-1890s, inflamed by press reports of Spanish atrocities against Cubans fighting for independence, he strongly favored forcing Spain to give up Cuba or face war. On Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine exploded under mysterious circumstances in Havana harbor, killing 266 sailors. Congress declared war against Spain in April and called for volunteers. Among the first was Roosevelt, who said a man "should pay with his body" for his beliefs.He helped raise a cavalry regiment largely from the Southwest and became its lieutenant colonel. The press dubbed them the Rough Riders. Roosevelt got his fight and stormed into politics upon his return. [This article contains complex diagrams and maps. Please see hardcopy or pdf.] THE CUBAN CAMPAIGN Spain's only Atlantic fleet was bottled up in the harbor of Santiago de Cuba. As the Navy lurked offshore, the U.S. landed troops to capture the city and the fleet 1. Marines invade, JUNE 6-10 2. Army lands, JUNE 22 3. Inland skirmish, JUNE 24 4. San Juan Heights, JULY 1 5. Navy destroys Spanish fleet, JULY 3

CUBA CARIBBEAN SEA Santiago de Cuba Las Guásimas El Caney El Pozo Siboney Daiquirí Guantánamo Bay Caimanera Fort Toro Fisherman's Point CUBA Havana Map area

15 miles 15 km

THE BATTLE OF SAN JUAN HEIGHTS The Spanish defenses on the low hills were the key to controlling Santiago de Cuba. Once the Spanish lost the high ground, they could not defend the city. They surrendered on July 17 Santiago de Cuba The Spanish kept thousands of soldiers in reserve near the city, but they never joined the battle Spanish positions The Spanish were outnumbered more than 10 to 1, but they held the high ground and inflicted heavy damage during the disorganized American approach San Juan Hill U.S. troops were pinned down at first, but withering fire from their three Gatling guns sent the Spanish troops scrambling in less than 10 minutes

Kettle Hill Under fire, Roosevelt led the charge, killing one soldier just below the summit. He then led a second charge, joining the fight for San Juan Hill

U.S. positions Units became hopelessly entangled on the narrow road through the jungle. Casualties were heaviest at the exposed river crossing

Trail Sharpshooter skirmish lines El Pozo Hill Aguadores River San Juan River To El Caney Gatling guns Trail Road Observation balloon Factory Blockhouse Barbed wire U.S. artillery Cavalry units Spanish retreat 1,000 ft. 300 m

AFTERMATH: A U.S. EMPIRE In one of his last acts as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt dispatched Commodore George Dewey and the U.S. Pacific Fleet to the Philippines. On May 1, 1898, Dewey destroyed the Spanish squadron at Manila Bay without a single U.S. casualty. A peace agreement was signed on Aug. 12, and with a formal treaty in December, Spain ceded Puerto Rico and Guam, sold the Philippines to the U.S. for $20 million and granted independence to Cuba PHILIPPINES Manila Guam

Sources: The Rough Riders and An Autobiography, by Theodore Roosevelt; The War with Spain in 1898, by David F. Trask; San Juan Hill 1898, by Angus Konstam; The Spanish-American War, An American Epic, 1898, by G.J.A. O'Toole; The Spanish-American War, by Edward F. Dolan

TIME Graphic by Joe Lertola and Jackson Dykman

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207801,00.html Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 Birth Of A Superpower By Paul Kennedy

The facts were blindingly obvious, claimed the precocious Harvard graduate in his book , or the History of the Navy During the Last War with Great Britain. First, in the eternal Darwinian struggle that took place between calculating, egoistic nation-states, it was essential for one country--in this case, the U.S. at the close of the 19th century--to avoid "a miserly economy in preparation for war." And for a state as dependent on sea power as America, it was unthinkable that the nation "rely for defence [sic] upon a navy composed partly of antiquated hulks, and partly of new vessels rather more worthless than the old." The U.S. was rising to world-power status, but it could do so only on the back of a powerful and efficient Navy.

Phew! Who was saying this? The writer in question was none other than Theodore Roosevelt, then a mere 24 years old. He was just a short time out of college when his book was first published, in 1882, but already making waves. Here is one of the few examples in recent history--Churchill is another--of a young, highly ambitious man who could foresee his own impact on the future international order. From early on, Churchill seemed to have possessed a premonition that he would lead his nation and empire in an age of great peril. In much the same way, T.R. appeared destined--and felt destined--to preside over, and manage, the U.S.'s emergence as one of the global great powers. He believed also that his leadership would be decisive because he had understood, before many of his contemporary political rivals and friends, the importance of naval power in buttressing the international position of the U.S.

Roosevelt was, for an American, unusually familiar with naval history. Two of his uncles, brothers of his Southern-born mother, had been involved in the Confederate navy in the Civil War. (One of them, James D. Bulloch, was a Confederate naval agent who commissioned the C.S.S. Alabama, the famous commerce raider on which his younger brother Irvine served.) The young Theodore had grown up with stories about earlier naval battles and eagerly read works on the history of war. Yet it would be fair to say that his notions about sea power--build bigger warships, concentrate the fleet--were primitive until the late 1880s, when he was introduced to one of the greatest luminaries of naval thought, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. At the time of their first meeting, Mahan, then in his late 40s, was giving lectures at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., lectures that would culminate in the 1890 publication of his international best seller, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1783.

Mahan's book, which Roosevelt devoured in one reading, is at first sight a detailed account of the many battles fought by the British Royal Navy as it rose to become sovereign of the seas. But it is much more than that, for Mahan claimed to have detected the principles that underlay the workings of sea power, and had determined the rise and fall of nations. With great skill, the author showed the intimate relationships among productive industry, flourishing seaborne commerce, strong national finances and enlightened national purpose. Great navies did not arise out of thin air; they had to be built up over time with the most modern warships, well-trained crews and decisive admirals. Ultimately, though, it was the man or the men at the top--those steering the nation through war and peace--who had to understand the great influence that navies could exert on international politics. Sea power, if properly applied by such leaders, was the vital tool for any country aspiring to play on the world stage.

Here was a road map for the rest of T.R.'s life, or at least the part of it that would be focused on foreign affairs. In Roosevelt's future naval policies we see the embodiment of Mahan's larger principles. Moreover, this conjuncture of Mahan the theoretician and Roosevelt the man of action arrived at just the right time in the history of the U.S. Its industries were booming, its commerce thriving and its merchants fighting to gain markets overseas in the face of tough foreign competition. All of that pointed to the need for a strong Navy. And, to be sure, the nation was getting one. The fleet was no longer the dilapidated collection of small warships it had been when Roosevelt wrote his book about the War of 1812. By the late 1890s, it could be reckoned among the top four or five in the world.

But it was Roosevelt, more than anyone else, who turned U.S. sea power into the manifestation of the nation's outward thrust. His first demonstration of that counts among his most famous decisions. By 1897 he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position in which he could act out his ambitions, especially since the Secretary, John D. Long, was a rather sick man and President William McKinley had no great interest in naval matters. On Feb. 15, 1898, when news arrived of the sinking in Havana harbor of the U.S.S. Maine--the event that effectively set off the Spanish-American War--Roosevelt had his opportunity.

Roosevelt had previously confided in Mahan his belief that the U.S. should push Spain out of not only Cuba but also the Philippines, though at the time acquiring the Philippines was by no means a goal of the McKinley Administration. Ten days after the Maine went down, on a late Friday afternoon when Long was temporarily out of the office, his dynamic assistant cabled instructions to Admiral William T. Sampson in the Caribbean and Commodore George Dewey in Hong Kong to prepare for decisive action. Long, though by his own account somewhat bemused, did nothing later to counter those orders. So when Congress declared war on Spain on April 25, the U.S. squadrons in both theaters had been heavily reinforced. The results--the destruction of the Spanish fleets in Manila Bay and, two months later, off Santiago, Cuba--were decisive. Spain had been reduced to the rank of a minor power, and the deeply troubled lands of Cuba and the Philippines came under U.S. sway.

The naval war of 1898 provided the nation with a complete justification of Mahan's theories. The firepower of the American battleships had clearly been overwhelming--a great relief to Roosevelt, who had feared voices in Congress calling instead for lots of small, coastal-defense vessels. Most impressive of all was the performance of the new battleship U.S.S. Oregon, which had steamed from San Francisco to Cuba to partake in the final battle. In fact, so enthusiastic was Congress about the importance of the Navy that it authorized the construction of many more battleships and heavy cruisers.

But the lesson that most impressed itself on Roosevelt was that it had taken the Oregon, steaming at high speed, a full 67 days to complete the 14,700-mile journey around Cape Horn. American navalists and expansionists--and Roosevelt was both--began clamoring for the construction of a canal across Central America, one that, given the turbulent nature of international politics, must be completely under U.S. control. Facing large potential threats in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the U.S. had no choice but to shorten the route between the East and West coasts.

The matter was urgent because Roosevelt and his circle were not the only people who had discovered the influence of sea power on world affairs. Mahan's lessons from history had had an almost universal resonance. Under Kaiser Wilhelm II and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Germany was building a battle fleet as large as the U.S. one and equally fast. France and Russia, now in alliance, were also pouring resources into new construction, as were Italy and Austria-Hungary in the Mediterranean. The most amazing growth, from virtually nowhere, was that of the Japanese navy in the Far East. And all these growing fleets caused the British to spend unprecedented amounts on the Royal Navy in an effort to maintain its centuries-old naval supremacy. The U.S. could not afford to slacken its pace.

The U.S. navalists need not have worried. Within a short while, in March 1901, Roosevelt was elected Vice President under McKinley; six months later, following McKinley's assassination, he was catapulted into the highest office. As early as 1902 he demonstrated the growing clout of the U.S. Navy during the so-called Venezuelan crisis. Venezuela's feckless financial policies and its refusal to pay international debts had led to a blockade of its coastline by various European navies, notably Germany's. Urged on by the nationalist wing of the U.S. press, Roosevelt had instructed Dewey, now an admiral, to patrol with a large force in waters nearby, ostensibly on seasonal fleet maneuvers but with an intent that was clear to all.

It was a tactic that seemed to fit perfectly with the President's motto, "Speak softly, but carry a big stick." Whether it was fully true, as Roosevelt later claimed, that it was U.S. sea power that compelled the Germans to back down, is open to some doubt. But with a compromise debt settlement reached at the Hague, it was becoming clear that the era of European interventions in the western hemisphere had come to an end. Long an empty declaration, the Monroe Doctrine, which had warned Europeans not to interfere in the Americas, was now a reality as a result of American sea power.

But so, too, as the Latin American states discovered to their dismay, was the to that doctrine, which the President proclaimed in 1904. If we do not want third powers to take action against wrongdoing regimes in our hemisphere, the President stated, "then sooner or later we must keep order ourselves." What that meant was that the U.S. was claiming for itself the right to intervene in the affairs of hemispheric nations when those nations aroused the displeasure of Washington.

It was not just the misbehavior of Central and South American governments that concerned Roosevelt in this volatile region. He was also eager to prevent any foreigners from gaining a concession to build the canal that he wanted the U.S. to build. When the Colombian government turned down a proposed deal for a 100-year lease of territory in its province of Panama, the President threw his weight--and the weight of a naval landing party--in favor of one of the perennial Panamanian uprisings aimed at gaining independence from Colombia. Twelve days after Washington recognized the new nation of Panama, in November 1903, it signed with deep satisfaction a canal treaty with Panama that was identical to the one rejected by Colombia.

While the U.S. was secure now in its Atlantic realms, it was being forced to increase its attention to China and the Pacific. The U.S. had long possessed trading and missionary interests in East Asia and now of course occupied the Philippines, so it naturally had cruisers and gunboats in those waters. But it was not the biggest player in the region. Russia, France and Britain had significant battleship squadrons in the Far East. The fastest-growing naval force of all belonged to Japan, which was increasingly suspicious of Russia's creeping territorial controls in Manchuria. In February 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet anchored at Port Arthur on the coast of China. The 20th century struggle for dominance of East Asia had begun in earnest.

The Russo-Japanese War was another gift from the gods to Roosevelt. He had long worried about czarist ambitions in Asia, as he worried about German ambitions in the Atlantic. He was full of admiration for the Japanese armed services as they steadily vanquished the larger Russian armies on land and smashed the Russian fleet in the epic battle of Tsushima in May 1905. But the President did not want complete Japanese domination of the Far East either, and so he actively lobbied both sides to turn to the peace table. Since Britain was diplomatically allied to Japan, and France to Russia, neither was an acceptable arbitrator. And the Kaiser's Germany was trusted by no one. By default the U.S. became the natural mediator. Roosevelt persuaded the two nations to send representatives to the U.S. for negotiations to be conducted in Portsmouth, N.H., where he took the deepest interest in cajoling, often bullying, the two belligerents into ending the war. For his role, T.R. was awarded the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize.

All the same, the world remained a dangerous place. There were the German threat to France, the Anglo-German rivalry in the North Sea, the Balkan tinderbox and the unanswered question of Japan's ultimate ambitions. Roosevelt decided a bold move was required to send a message that the U.S. was a global player. In December 1907 he dispatched from Hampton Roads, Va., the "," consisting of all 16 of the U.S. Navy's modern battleships. They were embarked on what would be a 46,000-mile, 14-month cruise around the world. Here was showing the flag, indeed. Almost a century later, that voyage is still regarded as the apotheosis of Roosevelt's belief in naval power as an instrument of national policy. The stately procession across the Pacific and then through the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal and Mediterranean before returning to the Atlantic seaboard was an impressive logistical feat, even if it confirmed to the U.S. Navy the limited endurance of the older battleships and produced a remarkable number of desertions in Australian ports. But the world public was not to know of that. A million people had assembled in San Francisco harbor to watch the fleet depart; half a million Australians greeted it in Sydney. Even the anxiously prepared visit to Tokyo Bay had gone well.

A short while after the Great White Fleet's return, Roosevelt relinquished the presidency. To his successor, William Howard Taft, he had one message: Do not divide the fleet. The Mahanian principle of concentrating the main battle fleet in one theater remained in place. It would still be there in 1914 when the Panama Canal, instigated by T.R., finally opened. Only during the Second World War, when the U.S. Navy became the largest in the world, would the U.S. possess a two-ocean fleet.

But the foundations of its maritime supremacy had been laid, and firmly, by this most energetic of U.S. Presidents. It is true that after 1909, the U.S. took a bit of a breather in world affairs, retreating to the side of the stage as the European crisis unfolded. But it never stopped building warships. And the country would be summoned back to the center of international politics in 1917. Despite the isolationist pressures of the interwar years, the U.S. would never be able, or willing, to abandon its pivotal role. The country's later trajectory would have made T.R. feel justified, and proud. He had always been convinced that it was impossible for the U.S. to avoid becoming the greatest world power of the 20th century; the only choice was whether it would do so well or poorly. And the trick was to turn the theory of Mahan's principles about sea power into effective practice, for the furtherance of American interests and values. No U.S. President did that better.

Kennedy is director of International Security Studies at Yale. His latest book is The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations (Random House)

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207803,00.html Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 How To Shrink The World

1 - CREATE A COUNTRY

Panama was a province of Colombia when Theodore Roosevelt took up the idea of building a canal after a failed attempt by France. When the Colombian government rejected a new treaty allowing the U.S. to build a canal, Roosevelt became enraged. Soon after, a group of Panamanian separatist leaders declared a revolution. That same day, U.S. gunboats appeared off the coast to keep Colombia from reclaiming its territory. Roosevelt vigorously denied that the U.S. had fomented the revolution but defended his actions in characteristic terms: "To have acted otherwise ... would have been betrayal of the interests of the United States."

2 - GET THE BUGS OUT

The rain forests and squalid towns of Panama were rife with diseases like malaria and yellow fever. As many as 20,000 people died during the French effort to build a canal in the late 1800s. But as a result of his work in Cuba after the Spanish-American War, a tireless American doctor named William Gorgas came to believe strongly in the new discovery that a specific mosquito spread yellow fever. Overcoming doubters, he began a widespread campaign of mosquito eradication and sanitation improvements. The death rate among canal workers plummeted

3 - CONSOLIDATE POWER

Initially, Congress created a seven-person commission to oversee construction. After the first chief engineer broke down under the stress of the job, Roosevelt sidestepped the panel and gave total power to one man, Army Colonel George Goethals. As absolute ruler of the Canal Zone, Goethals oversaw every detail, from digging and building to resolving personal disputes among workers.

4 - MAKE THE DIRT FLY

At first, the Americans pursued the failed French dream: a sea-level passage through the mountains and jungles. In 1906 that plan was overruled in favor of damming the Chagres River to create a vast inland lake that could be entered through flights of locks at either end. That still meant cutting an eight-mile trench through the mountains. Every rainy season, mudslides wiped out months of work in a single moment. 5 - RALLY THE TROOPS

In 1906 Roosevelt wanted to see the colossal project for himself. His trip marked the first time a U.S. President left the country while in office. To see conditions at their worst, he went at the height of the rainy season. While touring, he delighted workers by leaping aboard a 95-ton Bucyrus steam shovel and grilling the operator about how it worked. The operator seized the moment to ask for overtime pay.

6 - LOCK AND LOAD

At 1,000 ft. long and 110 ft. wide, the locks were built to handle the largest ships then planned. Even though many modern ships are too big (the Titanic would have fit; today's Queen Mary 2 doesn't), the canal handled more than 14,000 transits in 2005, accounting for about 5% of world trade. How a lock works:

•Ship enters first lock from ocean --Culvert --Lock 1 --Lock 2 --Miraflores Lake •Water from Miraflores Lake enters first lock through culvert system, elevating ship to level of second lock •Ship pulls into second lock; gates close behind it •Water from MirafloresLake enters second lock, elevating ship to lake level •Ship moves into Miraflores Lake, proceeds through canal to next locks

Sources: The Path Between the Seas, by David McCullough; The Panama Canal, by Lesley A. Dutemple; An Autobiography, by Theodore Roosevelt; Letters and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt; Destiny by Design, by Jeremy Sherman Snapp

[The following text appears as part of a complex diagram]

THE SCALE OF THE WORK The lock-and-lake plan made much of the French digging superfluous. Still, U.S. excavations accounted for 75% of the total removed

•Excavated by FRANCE, 1881-1903 •Excavated by the U.S., 1904-1914 •Land not needing excavation

Caribbean Sea Gatun Locks Gatun Lake Culebra Cut (Now called Gaillard Cut) Pedro Miguel Locks Miraflores Locks Miraflores Lake Pacific Ocean CANAL ZONE Gatun Lake loses 26 million gal. of water each time a large ship passes through the locks •Colon •Gatun Locks •Gatun Dam •Gatun Lake •Railroad The Panama Railroad, opened in 1855, was the spine along which men, equipment and dirt moved during construction •Pedro Miguel Locks •Miraflores Locks •Panama City

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207805,00.html Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 The Strenuous Life By ANDREA DORFMAN

THE EARLY YEARS

1858-83

Born in New York City on Oct. 27, 1858, Theodore Roosevelt is the second of four children of Theodore and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt. At age 6, T.R., his brother Elliott and friend Edith Carow (who would one day be his second wife) watch Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession from the home of T.R.'s grandfather on Manhattan's Union Square. He graduates magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1880 and marries Alice Lee a few months later, on his 22nd birthday. The next year, he becomes the youngest man ever elected to the New York state assembly. A Republican, Roosevelt serves three one-year terms, one as minority leader. During that time, he publishes his first book, on the War of 1812, which becomes required reading at the U.S. Naval Academy. He also buys a stake in the Maltese Cross, a cattle ranch near what is now Medora, N.D.

TRAGEDY

1884-85

On Valentine's Day 1884, less than four years after Roosevelt's wedding, his mother and wife die within hours of each other, in the same house. His first child, Alice, is just two days old. That summer he flees to Dakota to mourn, staying for two years (and acquiring a second ranch, Elkhorn), while his sister Bamie rears Alice. During this time, work is completed on Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt's spacious home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., which will serve as the summer White House from 1902 to 1908.

A NEW BEGINNING

1886-97

In November 1886, Roosevelt, just 28, loses the race for mayor of New York City. A month later, he marries his childhood friend Edith Carow. They will have five children: Theodore Jr., Kermit, Ethel, Archie and Quentin. Once settled, he becomes increasingly involved in national politics, serving as a U.S. Civil Service commissioner in Washington and president of New York City's board of police commissioners before President William McKinley appoints him Assistant Secretary of the Navy on April 6, 1897. THE ROUGH RIDER

1898

In May 1898, less than a month after the start of the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt resigns from the Navy Department to become lieutenant colonel of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment--the "Rough Riders"--and fight in Cuba. Soon promoted to colonel, he leads two charges in the Battle of San Juan Heights, which he calls his "crowded hour." Roosevelt is later nominated for, but denied, the Congressional Medal of Honor. He finally receives it in 2001.

RISE TO POWER

1898-1901

Not long after being discharged from the Rough Riders, Roosevelt is elected Governor of New York. During his two years in office, he signs nearly 1,000 bills into law, including one desegregating state schools. After being nominated as McKinley's vice-presidential running mate in 1900, he and McKinley defeat William Jennings Bryan and Adlai Stevenson by fewer than 900,000 votes. On Sept. 6, 1901, six months after taking office, President McKinley is shot while touring the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y. McKinley dies eight days later, and Roosevelt is sworn in as the 26th President. Just 42, he is the youngest man ever to hold the office.

THE PRESIDENCY BEGINS

1901-04

Five months into his first term, T.R. launches his trust-busting campaign by suing the Northern Securities Co. He also establishes himself as a conservationist, creating Crater Lake National Park in Oregon (the first of five such parks he designates) and proclaiming Pelican Island, Fla., the first federal bird reservation. (He will set up 50 more.) Other highlights include his July 4, 1903, "Square Deal" speech in Springfield, Ill., and the treaty with Panama to build the Panama Canal.

SECOND TERM

1904-09

On Nov. 8, 1904, Roosevelt wins the election, saying, "I am glad to be elected President in my own right." His Dec. 6 message to Congress includes the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which justifies U.S. intervention in Latin America. In 1905 he establishes the Forest Service; gives away his niece at her March 17 wedding to distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt; brokers the --signed on Sept. 5 in New Hampshire--ending the Russo-Japanese War; and persuades colleges to make football games less dangerous. The next year, T.R. mediates a dispute between France and Germany over Morocco and signs the Antiquities or National Monuments Act--which enables the President to protect sites like California's Muir Woods, New Mexico's Gila cliff dwellings and the Grand Canyon--as well as the Pure Food and Drug Act and a meat-inspection law. On Feb. 17, T.R.'s daughter Alice marries Ohio

Congressman Nicholas Longworth, and in November he and

Edith inspect the partly built Panama Canal--the first time a President has left the U.S. while in office. On Dec. 10, T.R. wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War; he is the first American Nobel laureate. Finally, on Dec. 16, 1907, T.R. dispatches the "Great White Fleet" on a round-the-world voyage that he believes is "the most important service that I rendered to peace."

T.R.'S LEGACY

1909-19

Soon after the Inauguration of his successor, William Howard Taft, on March 4, 1909, Roosevelt and his son Kermit sail to Africa, where they spend nearly a year shooting animals for the Smithsonian. In early 1912, T.R. announces his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, but the party renominates Taft--even though Roosevelt won all but one primary and caucus. The new Progressive (Bull Moose) Party promptly adopts T.R. as its candidate. That October he is shot while campaigning in Milwaukee, Wis., but gives a 90-min. speech before seeing a doctor. Democrat Woodrow Wilson is elected on Nov. 5, 1912; T.R., the runner-up, garners the largest percentage of votes ever by a third-party candidate. In the fall of 1913, T.R. travels to South America, where he gives lectures and explores Brazil's "River of Doubt." He nearly dies, but later says, "I had to go. It was my last chance to be a boy." After he returns to the U.S., war breaks out in Europe, and the Panama Canal opens to traffic. The U.S. enters World War I in April 1917; 15 months later, T.R.'s son Quentin, 20, is killed in France. Devastated, Roosevelt declines to run (again) for Governor of New York. On Jan. 6, 1919, T.R. dies in his sleep at Sagamore Hill of a coronary embolism. He is only 60.

With reporting by Deirdre van Dyk

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207806,00.html Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 Fighting the Fat Cats By Richard Lacayo

We know Theodore Roosevelt well from photographs--that round, fully fleshed face, that swelling neck, those teeth. How many people know that we have a record of his voice as well? During his 1912 presidential campaign, Roosevelt was recorded several times on Thomas Edison's wax-cylinder technology. His voice, it turns out, is not quite what you would expect from his pugnacious appearance. The tone is patrician, cultivated, almost professorial. It has accents not so different from the ones you hear in the voice of that other Roosevelt, Franklin. Old money courses through every syllable.

Roosevelt's voice is a reminder that he was a descendant of a wealthy old New York family. In an age of robber barons and their heaped-up millions, Roosevelt's net worth was modest compared with theirs, and as a young man, he lost considerable money in his disastrous attempt to become a cattle rancher in the Dakota Badlands. But all his life he moved easily in a world that dressed for dinner. When he led the Rough Riders, it was in a uniform from Brooks Brothers.

All the same--and with good reason--America's business élite was wary of Roosevelt from the start. He turned out to be the first President to aggressively use the powers of government to set rules for the headlong U.S. economy and the men he called "malefactors of great wealth." When President William McKinley chose T.R. as his running mate in 1900, Ohio Senator Mark Hanna, the business-friendly G.O.P. power broker who had engineered McKinley's rise, was horrified. "Don't any of you realize," Hanna raged at fellow Republicans, "there's only one life between this madman and the presidency?" As Governor of New York, the job he occupied before joining McKinley's ticket, Roosevelt had pushed legislation to clean up sweatshops, strengthen state inspection of factories and cap the workday at eight hours. He was by no means a radical, as every radical would tell you, but he was convinced that if the legitimate grievances of laborers and the poor were not addressed, they would rise up to take matters into their own hands.

By comparison, McKinley had been everything a robber baron could hope for in a President. He consulted with Wall Street on economic policy, kept tariffs high--they protected American industry but meant higher prices for consumers--and never moved to curb the growth of trusts, the huge enterprises that gathered together smaller companies to form near monopolies. Oil, steel, rubber, copper--one after another, the major sectors of the U.S. economy were becoming dominated by behemoths like John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which marketed 84% of all the petroleum products in the U.S. As large companies gobbled up smaller ones, McKinley did nothing to spoil the feeding frenzy, though it often meant higher prices and lower wages. The Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890, was a feeble weapon to begin with--the Supreme Court had restricted how it could be used--but McKinley didn't even take the trouble to use it. All of that was fine to men like Rockefeller. "The day of combination is here to stay," he once said. "Individualism is gone. Never to return." He hadn't reckoned on Roosevelt. Five months into his presidency, T.R. took Wall Street by surprise. He launched an antitrust suit that demanded the breakup of Northern Securities, a holding company organized to consolidate three railroads in the Pacific Northwest. By targeting that company, Roosevelt had also chosen to move against the man who epitomized the empire of money, New York financier J. Pierpont Morgan.

Beefy, saturnine and phenomenally wealthy, with a plump red nose caused by the skin disease rhinophyma, Morgan held immense power over the U.S. economy. In a day when there was no Federal Reserve to control the money supply or tweak interest rates, he operated at times as the nation's one-man central bank. By withdrawing his approval from a shaky deal, he could cause a panic. By pouring millions into tottering banks, he could end one. He did more than assemble capital for new ventures. He took over mismanaged companies, installed his own men and supervised operations. As he exercised his godly powers, he could not abide interference. Jean Strouse, one of his most thorough biographers, has cast doubt on whether he actually spoke the words that have been endlessly attributed to him: "I owe the public nothing." But if he didn't say them, he should have. As a summary of his lifelong outlook, they could hardly be bettered.

Like Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, Morgan believed in free enterprise but had seen enough of unbridled competition. For much of his career, he had assembled financing for the railways whose stupendous growth had revolutionized the U.S. after the Civil War. Boom and bust, duplicated routes, desperate price cutting and collapsed enterprises--the bumpy realities of the railroad business left Morgan with a horror of economic disorder. Profits required stability. Stability required concentration. Concentration meant trusts.

As it happens, Roosevelt's outlook was not entirely different. He didn't dispute the benefits of large-scale capitalism, and he thought of huge enterprises as an inevitable development of the industrial age. He understood the idea of economies of scale. Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette and William Jennings Bryan, the perennial standard bearer for the common man, might have wanted to dismantle everything bigger than a hardware store. What Roosevelt wanted was simply to regulate the big outfits. For starters, he wanted to compel them to open their books. Quarterly reporting in the corporate world was still a novelty and always voluntary. He wanted the government to see into companies' workings so it could judge which combinations were tolerable and which were illegal restraints of trade. "We draw the line against misconduct," he said. "Not against wealth."

In his business affairs, Morgan was a man accustomed to handling things personally. One of his biggest objections to the way Roosevelt had sprung the Northern Securities suit was that the President had not quietly tipped him in advance. Large sums of borrowed money were at stake, and the abrupt attack by the Justice Department had rattled the markets. In Morgan style, he went personally to Washington to meet with Roosevelt and Attorney General Philander Knox.

Roosevelt left a recollection of the meeting, which remains a classic moment in the history of dealings between business and government. In that account, Morgan asks Roosevelt why he had not quietly allowed Morgan to take care of the problem without resorting to the courts.

Morgan: "If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up." Roosevelt: "That can't be done."

Knox: "We don't want to fix it up, we want to stop it."

There in brief was the divide between the new President who had a whip in his hand and the veteran financier who could barely imagine that whips could be wielded by anyone in Washington. After Morgan departed, Roosevelt confided to Knox his bemusement at the financier's manner. Morgan, T.R. said, had acted as though the President of the U.S. was just "a big rival operator."

Roosevelt directed Knox to continue to pursue his suit. All the same, Roosevelt remained open to more cooperative dealings with Morgan. For all his tough talk, Roosevelt really was willing to cut deals. But he wanted the business world on notice that the days of freewheeling combination were over. And Morgan had reason to play ball with Roosevelt. Northern Securities was only one of the many trusts he had assembled. General Electric, Western Union, International Harvester, Aetna Insurance--he controlled them all. Just a year earlier, he had put together what was then the world's largest corporation, U.S. Steel, whose $1.4 billion in assets was equal to 7% of the nation's gross national product. Roosevelt recorded that in their meeting Morgan had asked him bluntly, "Are you going to attack my other interests, the Steel Trust and others?" Roosevelt's answer couldn't have been entirely reassuring: "Certainly not--unless we find out that in any case they have done something wrong."

Though Roosevelt's Justice Department went on to bring 44 more antitrust suits in the course of his presidency, he never attacked any other of Morgan's interests. He even used Morgan as a mediator to help settle a Pennsylvania miners' strike that threatened to create a winter scarcity of coal for heating. And when he ran for President in 1904, Roosevelt was not above accepting campaign contributions from the very businesses he was pressuring, though he was so careful not to show them any favor in his second term that Henry C. Frick, one of Rockefeller's lieutenants, was left to grumble, "We bought the son of a bitch, but he wouldn't stay bought."

The suit against Northern Securities eventually landed at the Supreme Court, and Roosevelt won a narrow but crucial victory that opened the way for more aggressive use of the Sherman Antitrust Act in other cases. He also established a Department of Commerce and Labor, which included a Bureau of Corporations to monitor the budding monopolies. Roosevelt endlessly reassured Big Business that he intended merely to keep an eye on its conduct. But he let it be known that he meant business too. Only "the corporation that shrinks from the light" would have anything to fear from government, he once said. Then he added, "About the welfare of such corporations we need not be oversensitive."

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207811,00.html Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006 Lessons from a Larger-than-Life President By Karl Rove

Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most remarkable figures in America's story. Adventurous, brave, opinionated, a larger-than-life personality, he was a man of action, energy and motion. T.R. loved what he called "the literature of history"--and wanted to be a key actor in America's great drama.

Roosevelt was not perfect by any means--but he was an extraordinary man by any reasonable measure. He was among our most consequential Presidents, changing America in deep and lasting ways. A century after he served as President, he still has many things to teach us. Among them:

1. It is every American's responsibility to be active in our civic life. "The first duty of an American citizen, then," Roosevelt said, "is that he shall work in politics." T.R. took the title of citizen seriously. He believed freedom could not be preserved without Americans "striving and suffering for it" by defending the nation and participating in the practical work of democracy.

2. Politics should be animated by large, important ideas. For a man who said "I like big things," politics was about precisely that. T.R. was not interested so much in management or budgeting matters; he wanted to grapple with big issues like America's role in the world, social justice and fairness in competition. Whether it was waging war or waging peace--T.R. was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize--he shaped the future of the nation and the course of human events. In doing so, he helped invent the modern American presidency.

3. The United States, while not flawless, is a profound force for good in the world. Theodore Roosevelt led a reluctant nation, largely indifferent to world affairs, onto the global stage. On his watch, America became a great world power. "There comes a time in the life of a nation, as in the life of an individual, when it must face great responsibilities, whether it will or no," he said in 1898. "We have now reached that time. We cannot avoid facing the fact that we occupy a new place among the people of the world ... Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny."

4. Leadership matters. Confident in his own powers of judgment and persuasion, Roosevelt believed in "immediate and rigorous executive action" in times of crisis. And whether they agreed with him or not, Americans knew where this human dynamo stood on the great issues of his time. Driven by a fervent belief in the Declaration of Independence, he drew strength from his faith that all Americans "stand on the same footing," as human beings worthy of respect. And like all great leaders, he inspired those he led, turning his convictions into theirs.

5. A spirited clash of ideas is not only inevitable in politics, but helpful. T.R. didn't just love ideas, he loved to debate them as long as it was fair and straight. The "healthy combativeness" of politics clarified differences and choices. The rough-and-tumble of the political arena didn't bother him. "If a man has a very decided character, has a strongly accentuated career," Roosevelt said, "it is normally the case of course that he makes ardent friends and bitter enemies." T.R. had both. So did F.D.R. So did Lincoln. So did Reagan. So do all consequential leaders.

6. There can be great joy in politics. At the age of 28 and on the verge of losing the New York City mayor's race, he still wrote a friend, "I have had first class fun ..." He relished the thrust and parry of politics, its give and take, the highs and lows. And he knew politics was a noble profession. "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords," he famously said. No man loved being President more than T.R.--or missed being President as much.

7. Character matters. Roosevelt was a man of extraordinary self-will. Encouraged by his father, he turned himself from a sickly child to a powerful, hardy young man. He overcame common human fears and became a man of great courage. He chose "the strenuous life" over comfort and ease. He was a loyal friend and faithful husband--and reveled in the company of his children. He encountered heartbreaking losses-- the sudden passing of his beloved first wife and his mother on the same day in the same house and, later, the death in combat of his son Quentin--yet his life was characterized by passion and zest and a drive to achieve great things.

Roosevelt's fellow citizens loved him, in large measure because they knew how deeply he loved his country. At the start of "a new century big with the fate of many nations," he said America was the "young giant of the West." He strived with all his considerable power to conserve, strengthen, direct and ennoble it. He did all that and more, which is why Theodore Roosevelt holds a special place in the American imagination. •

•Karl Rove, a history buff, is assistant to the President, deputy chief of staff and senior adviser

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207825,00.html Monday, Jul. 03, 2006 An American Princess By Rebecca Winters Keegan

Long before before Jenna Bush flashed a fake ID or Amy Carter staged a sit-in, another rebellious First Daughter was grabbing the nation's attention by lounging atop the White House roof smoking cigarettes, placing bets with a bookie and toting a pet garter snake named Emily Spinach in her pocketbook. "I can be President of the United States or I can attend to Alice," Theodore Roosevelt once said when asked to discipline his headstrong eldest child. "I cannot possibly do both."

Whip smart and witty, eccentric and strikingly beautiful, had she been born in another age, Alice Roosevelt Longworth might have ended up a scientist, a writer or a particularly brutal judge on American Idol. Instead, she is remembered as one of the capital's most successful hostesses, a gifted gossip whose decades of sharing filet of beef and sly one-liners with statesmen and their wives led her to call herself "an ambulatory Washington monument."

Probably the defining moment in Alice's life came when her mother, Alice Lee Roosevelt, died two days after giving birth to her in 1884. Later that same day, in the same house, T.R.'s mother died. A devastated Teddy retreated to the Dakota Territory to grieve. During her first three years, Alice was cared for by Teddy's sister Bamie on Long Island. After T.R. remarried, this time to his childhood sweetheart Edith Carow, Alice went to live with the couple and was eventually joined by five siblings. Teddy never mentioned Alice's deceased mother, a behavior Alice grew to describe as "dreadfully Victorian and mixed-up."

Young Alice, a rambunctious tomboy, considered herself "the outsider in the nursery" and often clashed with her prim stepmother and competed with the rest of the children for her father's attention. "T.R. loved his daughter when he noticed she was there," says Stacy Cordery, a historian at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Ill., who is writing a biography of Alice with the cooperation of Alice's granddaughter Joanna Sturm.

In 1901, while the nation mourned the assassinated President William McKinley, Alice, 17, was "filled with an extreme rapture," she later said. Her father's rise to the presidency brought the attention-hungry teen instant celebrity and fashion-icon status. "Princess Alice," as she was dubbed, embarked on a diplomatic mission to Japan with then Secretary of War William Howard Taft, diving into the ship's pool fully clothed, attending sumo wrestling matches and enchanting the press.

In 1906, in a lavish East Room wedding, Alice married Nicholas Longworth, an Ohio Congressman who shared little with her besides an interest in Republican politics. A drinker and a playboy, Longworth quickly earned his wife's "complete contempt," says Sturm. Alice also grew to resent her do-gooder cousins Franklin and Eleanor, often mocking Eleanor's bucktoothed smile at dinner parties. "Grammy couldn't stand earnestness," Sturm says.

At age 41, Alice gave birth to her only child, Paulina, Sturm's mother. Though officially fathered by Alice's husband, Paulina was in fact the product of Alice's lengthy affair with Idaho Senator William Borah, a long-gossiped-about fact that will be confirmed by letters in Cordery's biography. "Alice had no idea how to be a mother," says Cordery. When her husband died in 1931, Alice was asked if she would run for his seat. But "Alice couldn't slap backs and kiss babies," Cordery says. Instead, she commented from the sidelines, observing that Wendell Wilkie, the Republican hope to defeat F.D.R. in 1940, enjoyed support from "the grass roots of 10,000 country clubs."

Though she may not have intended malice, Alice's sharp tongue did leave wounds, reducing Eleanor to tears. In 1957, Alice's quiet daughter Paulina died of an overdose of sleeping pills. A softened Alice adopted Sturm and reconciled with Eleanor, who sent her an affecting condolence note. "She was a lively grandmother," Sturm says of Alice, who spent two more decades entertaining Nixons and Kennedys in her home, which was covered with old animal skins, books and peeling paint. Alice would stay up late, teaching herself Greek and reading about science, propped beside a throw pillow embroidered with if you can't say something nice, then sit next to me. Until Alice died at 96 in 1980, Washington's elite were more than happy to take her up on that offer.

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207827,00.html Monday, Jul. 03, 2006 A Step Back For Blacks By Anita Hamilton

Theodore Roosevelt once lamented, "there is not any more puzzling problem in this country than the problem of color." More puzzling to us now are his conflicted views on race. On the one hand, he could write that "the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man." But as was common among whites at the time, his opinion of blacks as a group was rather dim. "As a race, and in the mass," he wrote in a letter in 1906, "they are altogether inferior to the whites."

Two key incidents of Roosevelt's presidency represent his disappointing legacy on race. The first was his invitation to black educator Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House—an act of political courage at the time. Washington, a former slave and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, was, in Roosevelt's view, "the most useful, as well as the most distinguished, member of his race in the world." On the first day of his presidency, Roosevelt sent a note to Washington inviting him to the White House to discuss suitable candidates for patronage appointments in the South. On Oct. 16, 1901, Washington dined with the President, Roosevelt's wife Edith and a family friend, then left town on a midnight train. No sooner did news of the meal became public than the firestorm began. Accused of promoting "social equality," which some feared would encourage intermarriage of white women and black men, Roosevelt was widely villainized. In particular, the thought of race mixing at the highest levels made white Southerners apoplectic. Newspaper headlines roared Roosevelt Dines A Darkey and Our Coon-Flavored President. South Carolina Senator Ben Tillman said, "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again."

As Roosevelt privately expressed his "melancholy" over the South's "violent chronic hysteria," blacks looked upon Roosevelt as a savior and anointed Washington as their hero. The President vowed to invite Washington to dine "just as often as I please." But although Roosevelt consulted Washington throughout his presidency, neither the Tuskegee chief, nor any other black person, ever supped at the White House with Roosevelt again.

Five years later, Roosevelt was involved in another racially charged incident, and in this one his behavior offered less to admire. On Aug. 13, 1906, a dozen or so gunmen went on a 10-minute shooting spree in the small town of Brownsville, Texas. They left a saloon bartender dead and a police officer seriously injured. Townspeople reported that the attackers were soldiers from the all-black 25th Infantry Regiment, who had been stationed just a few weeks earlier at nearby Fort Brown. Tensions between the soldiers and the white citizenry had been brewing since the day the troops arrived. An Army investigation eventually concluded that the soldiers were guilty. Townspeople produced shell casings, which they claimed to have found on the street, of the same kind used in the soldiers' new Springfield rifles. A number of eyewitnesses also claimed to have seen black soldiers in uniform on the streets during the shooting. But no evidence could link anyone to the incident, and subsequent investigations revealed the eyewitnesses to be unreliable—a nearly blind man claimed to have seen soldiers 150 ft. away on the moonless night—and heavily biased. "Citizens of Brownsville entertain race hatred to an extreme degree," said Major General F.C. Ainsworth, the Army commander in Texas at the time.

Even the investigators charged with looking into the matter were openly biased. When asked under oath, "Do you believe colored people, generally, are truthful?" Army Inspector General Ernest Garlington replied, "I do not." When no soldiers confessed, he called it a "conspiracy of silence." The President agreed, and with no trial ordered on Nov. 5 that 167 of the soldiers be discharged without honor, pension or benefits. "Some of those men were bloody butchers," he later remarked. "They ought to be hung."

Criticized as an "executive lynching," and a "despotic usurpation of power," the decision was widely unpopular among blacks and Northern whites. Even Roosevelt's ally Washington, who as a rule never spoke publicly against the president, opposed him. "Brownsville was an unforgettable shock. It erased any illusions about Roosevelt's benevolence created by the dinner at the White House," noted historian Louis Harlan in his 1983 biography of Washington. Roosevelt chafed at accusations that he dismissed the men because they were black and insisted that his decision was based solely on his "convictions." The Richmond Planet, a black newspaper, observed: "President Roosevelt may like Colored folks, but he has a devilish mean way of showing it."

The soldiers found a white ally in Ohio Senator Joseph Foraker, who managed to gather enough evidence of a flawed investigation to reopen the case in 1908, when he famously told the Senate, "They ask no favors because they are Negroes, but only for justice because they are men." The troops' white commander, Major Charles Penrose, testified before the Senate Military Affairs Committee that, "my men had nothing whatever to do with it." But despite ample evidence of paid witnesses and biased investigators, a court of inquiry, consisting of five generals, concluded on April 6, 1910 that the soldiers were indeed guilty.

Forgotten for decades, the Brownsville affair got a fresh airing in 1972 with the publication of The Brownsville Raid by John Weaver, which revealed how even the telltale shell casings were probably planted on the streets as part of a frame-up. On Sept. 28, 1972, the Army announced that the soldiers would finally be granted an honorable discharge. Only one was still alive by then. Dorsie Willis, a former private, had spent some 60 years shining shoes in a Minneapolis bank building. When the arthritic 88-year-old received $25,000 in back pay in 1974, he told reporters, "You can't pay for a lifetime."

So which was the real Roosevelt: the man who sat down to dinner with Washington or the one who ordered the hasty discharge of the soldiers? Historians would say both. The boisterous, cocksure President was a man of strong convictions on many things. But on questions of race, he spent a lifetime feeling his way.

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207828,00.html Thursday, Jun. 29, 2006 The Roosevelt Legacy Bush Shouldn't Carry On By ANDREW FERGUSON

How to explain the Bush administration? Or more precisely, how to explain the defining characteristic of George W. Bush's presidency — this fondness for rhetorical extravagance, this straining after greatness, this implausible invocation of only the loftiest goals and purposes?

I used to think it was a boomer thing. After all, the only other baby boomer president, Bill Clinton, had it too. In the 1990s, when no one really wanted much from the federal government except favorable tax treatment for our 401(k)s, Clinton would stand before Congress and the TV cameras, he would work his jaw and narrow his eyes, and he would tell the nation with a vigorous thrust of the thumb that the nation faces a "challenge as great as any in our peacetime history". Then, rising to the challenge, he would announce a new initiative to expand family leave.

Gilding the lily — casting the everyday and unexceptional in the most grandiose terms — has always been a weakness of boomers, who in their youth would sometimes compare Captain Marvel comic books to the Sistine Chapel or call Yoko Ono an artist. Overstatement has been George W. Bush's prime rhetorical technique. When he drew our attention to a handful of troublesome regimes, he couldn't just call them troublesome regimes; instead they ballooned into an "axis of evil." His hope of stabilizing the Middle East by fostering self-government was not just a geostrategic Hail Mary — it would lead, he said in the stunning capper to his second Inaugural, to "the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." Born into happiness and prosperity and languor, American boomers have long compensated by goosing their language, and their self-image along with it.

But I no longer think Bush's technique is just a boomer thing. I think it's a Roosevelt thing — and I don't mean the Democrats' Roosevelt, the one who used a cigarette holder and wore a cape, I mean the Republicans' Roosevelt, the one who wore buckskin and shot bears.

TR looms over every modern president, not just Republicans, as a goad or a reprimand, a taunt or an inspiration. Historian, hunter, soldier, essayist, cowboy, megalomaniac — he was bigger than life, in the way that all politicians hope to be. Richard Nixon, a president whose insecurities and intimations of unworthiness reached pathological levels, invoked TR throughout his presidency, right up to the mawkish speech he gave as he left the White House two steps ahead of the sheriff. For politicians of the soft and pampered boomer generation — "well-meaning little men," as TR once called the type, "with receding chins and small feet" — TR is a perfect reproof, and they respond by embracing him. Clinton placed a bust of the Rough Rider on his desk. Bush moved TR's portrait to a prominent spot in the Cabinet room, and to many an Oval Office visitor he proudly points to his desk as the same one Roosevelt used. "I call him Ted," the President has said.

Yet TR's influence on Bush reaches beyond rhetoric and interior decorating. Early on Bush declared himself a different kind of conservative, different from the government-libeling libertarians who seized Congress in the Republican Revolution of 1994. Like TR, he would be a "big government conservative," a believer in "limited but vigorous" federal power. Indeed, Bush conservativism has proved to be so unorthodox as to be not really conservative at all.

Where Bush's agenda most resembles TR's is in its limitless ambition — its incessant busy-ness, its desperate need to appear to be addressing everything all at once. Even as he seeks the "end of tyranny in our world," Bush would also remake the government's entitlement system, rewrite the nation's tax code, reform its legal system, revolutionize worker training and health care; he would amend the constitution to define marriage and insert Washington into the nation's local schools as never before. In May, the administration celebrated one of its most trivial, and typical, programs — the Department of Transportation's "Click It or Ticket," which mobilizes the federal government to make sure that every driver in the country...is wearing his seatbelt.

"We stand at Armageddon," TR once told his followers, "and we battle for the Lord." Bush has never gone quite that far, but the world-saving impulse that is TR's most unappealing legacy inspires him even so. "Small-government" conservatives — which is to say, conservatives — wish he'd find another 20th century Republican hero. He might want to investigate Calvin Coolidge, whose own conservatism was more modest, more peaceable, and — by the way — more popular. If the president insists, he can even call him Cal.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1209221,00.html Thursday, Jun. 29, 2006 Why we should study Theodore Roosevelt By NEWT GINGRICH

One hundred years ago America had its most popular President since George Washington. TR, as Theodore Roosevelt was popularly known, captured, to an extraordinary degree, the imagination of the American people. At the same time, he also captured the respect of much of the world, culminating with his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping negotiate peace between Russia and Japan.

There is much Washington could learn from studying Theodore Roosevelt. Paying little regard to either the Republican or Democratic bosses, he was a natural maverick who did what he thought was right. A passionate believer in technology, TR, in 1902, became the first President to ride in an automobile — something for which at the time, he was praised by the newspapers as an act of courage and foresight.

TR was also a deep believer in the moral power of reform. He was a reform police commissioner in New York City, a reform leader of the Civil Service Commission and a reform Governor of New York. He knew that modern society required honesty, transparency and accountability. His commitment to reform was so great that the New York Republican bosses promoted him for the Vice Presidency simply to get him out of Albany. Little did they know what a reformer they were about to foist on the nation.

After less than a year as Vice President, TR found himself the youngest President in American history, after President William McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. As Mark Hanna, the leading Republican politician of the era lamented, "Now look — that damn cowboy is president."

One area of reform that Republicans and Democrats alike could learn from was TR's approach to the environment. He understood that conservative and conservation have the same root and he was passionately committed to conserving America's natural resources for future generations. Most Republicans would do well to study his commitment to national parks, national forests, and the management of the natural world. On the other hand, Democrats would do just as well to note that Theodore Roosevelt saw man as part of nature and not as its opponent. As a rancher, big game hunter, fisherman and perhaps the most outdoor President in American history, TR believed that conservation included land use and not merely its preservation. I believe he would have resoundingly advocated a multiple use approach to Federal lands.

TR was President during a period of enormous stress over immigration and the meaning of being an American. He was unequivocally for control of immigration and for encouraging immigrants who wanted to be American while opposing those who would radically change America. As TR put it, "In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American. . . . There can be no divided allegiance here."

TR was also a leader in America's emergence as a world power. As a young political leader he supported the Navy League which advocated a big ship Navy capable of projecting American power across the world. As the Assistant Secretary of the Navy — at that time the second highest job in the Navy — he advocated war with Spain over Cuba and did all he could prepare Commodore Dewey's fleet so it could take the Philippines. When war came he resigned from his Washington desk job and formed a volunteer group of polo players and Western cowboys, including Native Americans, who became known as TR's "Rough Riders". Their great moment in the sun came in the Battle of San Juan Heights. (It wasn't actually San Juan Hill they charged up.) In typical TR fashion, he brought with him two men toting a tripod and camera, who filmed the invasion. And other journalists reported the heroic exploits of the Rough Riders who helped drive the Spanish off the heights.

As President, TR believed in a policy, as he put it, to "Speak softly and carry a big stick." He used American power carefully but effectively to dramatically increase the role of America in World Affairs. Finally, combining his sense of American patriotism and morality with his awareness of the power of technology and a growing national economy TR understood that government had to be dramatically modernized. He helped launch the , and reforms like the Pure Food and Drug Act dramatically improved America's ability to provide a better life within a regulated market which had to meet minimum standards of public health and safety.

Faced with today's challenges TR would undoubtedly be advocating a new generation of reform and a new commitment to aggressively winning the future by modernizing our systems, reforming the failures, and boldly fighting for an American definition of a better 21st century.

There is a lot we could all learn from his life.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich holds a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Tulane University. His latest book, Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America, will be released in paperback in July.

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