Admirers of that book, which has just been released in a 'revised and updated' paperback edition, have eagerly awaited the second installment, whose appearance was delayed by Morris' unhappy detour into Reagan territory and the much-derided Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999). Volume 1, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, was published in 1979 and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. Theodore Rex is the second in a projected three-volume life. Morris' great skill lies not in putting TR's presidency in perspective but in putting us in the room with the man and giving us a sense of what it was like to be Theodore Roosevelt. It's the dazzling, multifaceted, irrepressible Rooseveltian character. But policy achievements - trust-busting legislation, for example, or digging the Panama Canal - aren't what stick in the mind as you glide through the 1,600 pages of Edmund Morris' biographical work in progress. Bush even pronounce Polybius?įor the mark he left on the country, TR deserves his place on Mount Rushmore. Can anyone imagine Bill Clinton sparring in the White House basement? Could George W. Here was a president who could converse with diplomats in serviceable French, who relaxed by reading Polybius, who permanently damaged his left eye in a boxing match. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard he became a rancher.The contrast doesn't hinge so much on TR's dervish-like energy and ebullient personality as on the sheer breadth of his interests and accomplishments. When Theodore Roosevelt came to office in 1901, he was already a legend – and only forty-three, younger than any American president before or since. Not once in the past thirty years have the two major parties offered American voters such a choice – nowadays, the field is all too often overcrowded with political dwarfs struggling for ‘name recognition’. On the right, Richard Nixon, who was to win, and three governors of major states – John Rockefeller of New York, George Romney of Michigan and Ronald Reagan of California and among the Democrats, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and three senior senators: Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.

Reading this absorbing account of his eight years in the White House, I’m reminded of the days when it was not exceptional for half a dozen qualified men to fight it out for the presidency.

Theodore rex by edmund morris