Theodore Roosevelt was without doubt the most energetic of all our Presidents. And the most ebullient. And the most athletic. He was, Henry Adams decided, "pure act." After visiting the White House, John Morley, British essayist and biographer, concluded that Roosevelt was "an interesting combination of St. Vitus and St. Paul." To Joseph Bishop, one of Roosevelt's newspaper friends, he exclaimed: "My dear fellow, do you know the two most extraordinary things I have seen in your country? Niagara Falls and the President of the United States-both great wonders of nature!"

TR seemed to possess limitless vitality, indomitable courage, and indestructible will; and he was a passionate devotee of the strenuous life. "Get action," he advised; "do things; be sane; don't fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action." Roosevelt wanted his fellow countrymen to "hit the line and hit it hard," and set an astonishing example of line-hitting himself. Reported Rudyard Kipling, after spending some time with the President: "I curled up in the seat opposite, and listened and wondered, until the universe seemed to be spinning around and Theodore was the spinner. But French ambassador Jean-Jules Jusserand had a tougher time with TR. He joined the President for two sets of tennis one day; then TR suggested a bit of jogging; and after they had jogged on the White House lawn a while, they had a workout with the medicine ball. After that, TR turned to his guest and asked, "What would you like to do now?" "If it's just the same with you, Mr. President," sighed Jusserand, "I'd like to lie down and die."

The child, in TR's case, was not father to the man. As a boy, Teedie, as he was called, was weak and sickly, with a puny body, poor eyes, and an asthmatic cough. When he was ten, his father took him aside and told him: "Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body... You must make your body." A humiliating encounter with four boys on a stagecoach reinforced the point: when the boys began teasing him, he found he couldn't take on even one of them alone. "I'll make my body, " he resolved. He began working out in a gym which his father installed for him on the second floor of their home in New York City and continued working out for the rest of his life. He took boxing lessons, studied judo, learned to ride and shoot, played tennis, took long hikes, climbed the Matterhorn, hunted big game in Africa, explored Brazil, and fought in the Spanish-American War. He also became a cowboy.

In September 1883, Roosevelt visited the Dakota Badlands, fell in love with the cattle business, acquired two ranches, and became a gentleman cowhand. The cowboys chuckled over "Four Eyes" at first. Amused by his mild expletives-"By Godfrey!"-they were in stitches when they heard him say, the first time he took part in a roundup, "Hasten forward quickly there!" The phrase was, for a time, a byword in the Badlands. But the cowboys soon learned to take TR seriously. He spent almost forty hours in the saddle with them without complaint; he gradually acquired the professional skills of a good cowboy; and he handled a barroom tough just the way he should be handled. When he dropped in at a hotel in Mingusville one night after spending the day looking for lost horses, a shabby character with a cocked pistol in each hand accosted him in the lobby (which was also the barroom) and cried: "Four Eyes is going to treat!" TR sat down by the stove and tried to ignore him, but the pistol-packing bully persisted. "Maybe you didn't hear me," he yelled. "I said Four Eyes is gonna treat!" At this point Roosevelt got up, as if to comply, and then, as he later told it, "struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right." The man fell, and on his way down hit his head against the bar and was knocked unconscious. He was dragged outdoors and deposited in a shed; the next day, when he came to, he hurriedly left town. "That four-eyed maverick," said one old cowhand of Roosevelt, "has sand in his craw a-plenty." Years later, when TR was recruiting men to fight with him in Cuba, he had no trouble finding volunteers in the Wild West.

TR loved war as well as sports; he regarded the two as moral equivalents. He was, in fact, just about the only President we have ever had who (at least in his younger days) looked upon war as a good thing in itself. "No triumph of peace," he insisted, "is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war." He admired soldierly virtues and wanted to restore "the fighting edge" to the American spirit. "Every man," he once wrote, "who has in him any real power of joy in battle knows that he feels it when the wolf begins to rise in his heart; he does not then shrink from blood or sweat or deem that they mar the fight; he revels in them, in the toil, the pain, and the danger, as but setting off the triumphal. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, TR hankered for a war. Whenever there was a crisis in U.S. relations with other countries, he diligently beat the drums for war and hoped for a flare-up. But he not only wanted the United States to go to war; he also wanted to get into the war himself. The two always went together for Roosevelt. He was steadfastly true to what may be called the "TR principle": one volunteers for action in the wars one advocates, regardless of profession, social standing, health, age, or political position. After all, what fun is there-especially if one is an important person-in arranging vicarious valor? "My power for good," Roosevelt pointed out, "would be gone if I didn't try to live up to the doctrines I have tried to preach."

But TR had to wait a long time for his war. In 1886 he hoped for a fight with Mexico over a border incident and offered to organize his "harum-scarum" ranch hands into a cavalry battalion; but the war never came. In 1892, a quarrel with Chile fired his hopes again. Roosevelt, a friend reported, "goes about hissing through his clenched teeth... For two nickels he would declare war himself ... and wage it sole." "Do you remember," Mrs. Roosevelt asked a friend amusedly some years later, "how we used to call Theodore the Chilean Volunteer and tease him about his dream of leading a cavalry charge?" But the Chilean crisis, too, passed. Friction with Great Britain in 1895 roused TR's belligerency once more. "This country needs a war," he told his friend Henry Cabot Lodge; and he pointed out that a war with Britain might well result in the acquisition of Canada. 18 But the fighting, not the acquiring, was what really roused his spirit. Unfortunately, the United States and England settled their differences peacefully so TR was cheated once more out of combat.

In 1897, TR became Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the McKinley administration and fell in love with his work at once. "The Secretary is away," he wrote a friend one day, "and I am having immense fun running the navy." But he was more than ever eager for the United States (and TR) to get into a shooting war. This time things looked promising. The United States had been wrangling with Spain ever since 1895, when the Cubans had revolted against Spanish rule; when TR entered the Navy Department, relations between the two nations were extremely strained. TR, who had favored American intervention in Cuba almost from the beginning, was impatient with President McKinley for his lack of truculence. McKinley, he complained, had "the backbone of a chocolate eclair." But he did not despair. "We will have this war for the freedom of Cuba," he insisted in an after-dinner speech in Washington, "in spite of the timidity of the commercial interests." As he spoke he looked right at Senator Mark Hanna, the Cleveland industrialist, who opposed war; and someone next to Hanna whispered wryly: "Now, Senator, may we please have that war?"

In April 1898, TR finally got his war. When the United States declared war on Spain, he ran excitedly around the Navy Department for a week or two like a little boy on roller skates; then he resigned his post, volunteered for action, was commissioned a lieutenant colonel, and helped organize a cavalry unit of cowboys and college men to fight in Cuba. The press had a good time thinking up nicknames for the regiment-"Teddy's Terrors," "Teddy's Texas Tarantulas," "Roosevelt's Rough 'Uns"--and finally settled on "Roosevelt's Rough Riders."

In Cuba, at long last, TR saw the action he had dreamed of for years and acquitted himself bravely, even heroically, on the battlefield. "Gentlemen," he cried, during the attack at Kettle Hill (which he called the "San Juan charge"), "the Almighty God and the just cause are with you. Gentlemen, charge!" To some reluctant troopers, he exclaimed: "Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?" As he told it later: "I waved my hat and we went up the hill with a rush....I killed a Spaniard with my own hand"; he added, "like a jackrabbit." And when the operation was over, he cried: "Look at those damned Spanish dead." "The charge itself was great fun," he said afterward. "Oh, but we have had a bully fight!" Roosevelt's combat experience amounted to one week's campaign in Cuba and one hard day of fighting, but it was enough to make him a national hero. When the war was over he published a book about his experiences entitled The Rough Riders. The story that the publisher had to order a special supply of the letter "I" from the type foundry is apocryphal. But the comment Irish humorist Finley Peter Dunne put into the mouth of his character Mr. Dooley was not. TR, said Mr. Dooley in his Irish accent, should have called his book Alone in Cubia. For TR, of course, the Cuban campaign was no matter for mirth. "San Juan," he said two decades later, "was the great day of my life."

San Juan made TR a popular hero. After the war, when he was stumping New York State as candidate for Governor, he took seven Rough Riders with him and had a bugler sound the cavalry charge before each speech. "You have heard the trumpet that sounded to bring you here," he told voters in one town. "I have heard it tear the tropic dawn when it summoned us to fight at Santiago." After winning the election and taking office in 1899, he alienated Republican leaders by sponsoring a civil-service law and a tax on corporation franchises. Speaking of his relations with the Republican state machine, he once explained: "I have always been fond of the West African proverb: 'Speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far."' Anxious to get rid of the independent young Governor, party leaders began talking of kicking him upstairs into the Vice-Presidency. When he heard about it, TR at once announced: under no circumstances could I or would I accept the nomination for the Vice-Presidency." But when he made a speech for McKinley's re-nomination at the Republican convention in June 1900, the delegates went wild, and enthusiastically picked him as McKinley's running mate. TR accepted the nomination; but Republican National Chairman Mark Hanna was glum. "Don't any of you realize," he cried, "that there's only one life between this madman and the White House?" He was horrified when "that damned cowboy," as he called TR, became President upon McKinley's death in September 1901, but he gradually came to like him.

Soon after TR became President, one worried citizen beseeched him not to let his fighting spirit plunge the United States into war: "What!" cried Roosevelt earnestly, "a war, and I cooped up here in the White House? Never!" Roosevelt did not exactly remain cooped up in the White House; but his seven and a half years in office were devoid of armed conflict. He did throw his weight around on the international scene: mediated in a war between Japan and Russia; sent the U.S. Navy on a cruise around the world; and supported a revolution in Panama to further his plans for building an interoceanic canal there. But there were no wars or even serious rumors of war during his Presidency. There was plenty of excitement nonetheless. "No President has ever enjoyed himself as much as I have enjoyed myself," admitted Roosevelt when it was all over, "and for the matter of that I do not know of any man of my age who has had as good a time ..." He invited the distinguished black educator Booker T. Washington to dinner in the White House and was castigated by southern Democrats. He tried to have the inscription "In God We Trust" removed from U.S. coins (where it had been put in 1864) as both unconstitutional and sacrilegious and was blasted as impious. He got into a big fight with people he called "nature fakers"-that is, people who wrote sentimentally about wildlife-and was charged with cruelty to animals. He sent his annual message to Congress in 1906 in simplified spelling and produced outrage in that august body. ("Nuthing escapes Mr. Rucevelt," wrote the Louisville Courier-Journal. "No subject is tu hi fr him to takl, nor to lo for him to notis.") He sprang a surprise antitrust suit on J. P. Morgan's Northern Securities Company in 1902, producing astonishment and indignation in that high and mighty captain of finance. "If we have done anything wrong," Morgan loftily told TR, "send your man to my man and they can fix it up." "That can't be done," TR told him, and went on with the action. Afterward he said that Morgan seemed to view the President of the United States as a "big rival operator" rather than as the elected representative of the American people and that it was time he learned differently. (Morgan was a reluctant learner; when TR headed for big game in Africa after leaving office in 1909, the banking tycoon is said to have cried: "Health to the lions!")

TR was one of America's most assertive Presidents. Not only did he believe that the U.S. Constitution empowered the federal government to act vigorously in the general welfare; he also believed in the centrality of the executive branch in the American system. When he ran for a third term in 1912 on the Progressive Party (Bull Moose) ticket, he called for a "New Nationalism"-that is, a national government which exercised broad powers to govern the country in the interest of the people as a whole. In October 1912 while campaigning in the West, he was shot by a crazy man in Milwaukee. "He pinked me," TR exclaimed; but he insisted on riding to the city auditorium to give his speech anyway. "I have a message to deliver," he told his associates, "and I will deliver it as long as there is life in my body." He gave his speech with a bullet hole in his chest undressed and bleeding, and then was rushed to the hospital.

TR lost his bid for a third term in 1912, went on an exploring expedition in Brazil, and returned to harass the administration of Woodrow Wilson. When the Great War broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, he clamored for action again and offered to raise a volunteer division to fight with the Allies in Europe. Though thousands of young men volunteered to serve in a TR unit, President Wilson stubbornly refused to approve the idea, arguing that the ex-President was too old and too much of a show-off to be of any use in the European conflict. Marshal Joffre, hero of the battle of the Marne, urged Wilson to commission Roosevelt; French Premier Georges Clemenceau also strongly backed TR's request. "There is in France," he wrote Wilson, "one name which sums up the beauty of American intervention. You must know, Mr. President, that more than one of our poilus has asked, 'But where is Roosevelt?' Send them Roosevelt. It will gladden their hearts." But Wilson remained adamant, while Roosevelt (who called the President a "Byzantine logothete") dreamed of being shut up in the same room with Wilson and boxing with him. "I am the only one he has kept out of war," he said bitterly.

On July 4, 1917, when the first American troops arrived in Paris and paraded through the streets, the French people on hand cheered enthusiastically: "Vive les Teddies!" Though Roosevelt was not with them, he took enormous satisfaction in knowing that all four of his sons were in the service. But when his son Quentin, a pilot in the air force, was shot down and killed behind enemy lines in 1918, the heart seemed to go out of TR. His health declined rapidly thereafter, and he was reduced to invalidism. He died suddenly on January 5, 1919, shortly after composing an article for a newspaper, and his son Archie, home on sick leave, cabled his brothers in France the incredible news: "THE LION IS DEAD."

Source: Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 194-98.