A Constructive Radical

THE LETTERS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT, VOLS. VII and VIII (1,621 pp.)--Edited by Elting E. Morison--Harvard ($20).

Theodore Roosevelt became a myth ahead of his time. This was partly due to a heroic combination of energy and diverse talents. The U.S. has had few public officials who could get equal enjoyment from shooting a charging rhino or writing an essay on Dante, from outwitting Manhattan's Tammany politicians or swapping opinions on Roman history with British scholar friends. It was also true that later generations, notably those raised under the administration of Teddy's cousin, Franklin Delano, could see Teddy, politically speaking, only in the perspective of successors like Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. This was to see him very dimly indeed.

With Volumes VII and VIII, covering the years 1909 to 1919, Editor Morison and a 21-man research staff have finished their work of sorting and mounting Roosevelt's many-sided correspondence, a work which should provide future Roosevelt biographers with a fine photographic likeness to go by. Oyster Bay's leading Republican, who wrote some 25 books during his lifetime, was quite possibly the most literate tenant the White House ever had,* but he never let his erudition interfere with a good reporter's knack for saying what he had to say quickly and directly. This makes his letters one of the most readable sets of correspondence around, as well as one of the most instructive.

The Noblest Game. In March 1909, Republican Theodore Roosevelt obeyed his earlier campaign pledge not .to seek a third term, and turned the presidency over to his "lieutenant," William Howard Taft, governor of the Philippines and later Secretary of War under T.R. He went to Africa for a ten-month hunting holiday, on trail of "the noblest game in all the world." Before he got back to civilization at Khartoum, however, he had found time, in the midst of hunting, to reread his favorite author, Historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, to acquire a late-in-life appreciation of Shakespeare, and to pass a disapproving critical judgment on Harvard President Eliot's new five-foot shelf of classics ("As the list, it strikes me as slightly absurd").*

He spent the next three months on a front-door tour of Europe, in a triumphal progress of cheering crowds and hospitable crowned heads. Roosevelt surprised Europeans with his encyclopedic familiarity with their history and customs, although some local peculiarities startled him. In Rome, at a royal Italian dinner party, he found that his hat was not taken until after he had escorted the Queen to the table. In Vienna, at the end of a similar affair, T.R. wrote: "The Emperor and all the others proceeded to rinse their mouths, and then empty them into the finger bowls." (Groping for precedents, Roosevelt recalled that the 18th century Austrian Diplomat Wenzel von Kaunitz had been in the habit of using his toothbrush at the same stage.)

Slacker Malgre Lui. Once back home, the ex-President's holiday mood slipped off, as he watched the Republicans, under Taft, grow more cautious and passively conservative. "I was able to hold the Republican Party in power," he wrote, "only because I insisted on a steady advance, and dragged them along with me. Now the advance has been stopped."

Taking a leaf from Lincoln's book, Roosevelt had hoped to make the Republicans "the party of sane, constructive radicalism." His well-planned reforms, like the regulation of big business and the natural resources conservation program, made him and his party immensely popular, as did his brilliant diplomacy, sometimes a singlehanded operation. ("I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.") By 1908. "reactionary"' Democrats were getting the same abuse that Cousin Franklin's young men of a latter day were to heap on the Republicans. Roosevelt was furious that a "floppy souled creature" like Taft threatened to undo his plans for the party: hence his hopeless attempt to win the nomination again in 1912, his "Bull Moose" split with the G.O.P., and the easy victory of Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats.

Roosevelt had a poor opinion of Wilson ("a scholarly, acrid pacifist of much ability and few scruples") and a poorer one of the Democratic Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan ("an amiable, windy creature who knows almost nothing"). When World War I began. Roosevelt was an interventionist. He saw the invasion of Belgium as a desperate threat to the fabric of international law. and denounced Wilson's "spiritless neutrality" in the face of it. ("I should have backed the protest by force.") Repeatedly he offered to furnish and equip a volunteer cavalry division for emergency war service. ("I and my four sons" were to be among its officers.) He was consistently turned down. He sat the war out, a "slacker malgre lui,'' ljut his sons went overseas with the Army as fast as he could get them there. One of them, 21-year-old Quentin, was shot down in his pursuit plane and killed.*

"Put Out the Light." To the end of the war, T.R. kept up a yeasty life on the sidelines, writing books and articles, and keeping up a brisk correspondence with, among others. Allied leaders like Britain's Lloyd George and France's Clemenceau. "Oh, Lord," he once wrote to Clemenceau, "how I wish you were President of the United States."

Roosevelt's wartime interventionism made him more popular than ever in the U.S., and there was already some cautious speculation about his getting the Republican nomination in 1920. The chance never came. On a January night in 1919 he went early to bed, told his valet, "Put out the light." They were his last words; by morning the 60-year-old ex-President was dead of coronary thrombosis.

With him, for a time, died his rare gift of realizing that the conservative and the radical need not be two people at each other's throats, but can be a single man who realizes that a country must often change itself to preserve itself, but must keep its national identity strong, to give the changes any meaning.

*Other contenders: Political Philosopher Thomas Jefferson, Essayist James Madison, Diplomat John Quincy Adams, Historian Woodrow Wilson.

*Along Eliot's five feet of authors: Milton, Emerson, Virgil, Robert Burns, Goethe, Adam Smith, William Penn, Dante, Darwin, Homer. Among the omissions T.R. protested: Aristotle, Thucydides, Chaucer, Moliere.

*His remaining sons also fought with credit in World War II. The eldest, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, onetime governor general of the Philippines, died of combat exhaustion in Normandy, where he served as assistant commander of the 4th Division. Businessman and Author Kermit Roosevelt, after serving with both the British and U.S. armies in both world wars, died in 1943 on active service in Alaska as a major. Archibald Roosevelt, 59, the only surviving son, was an infantry battalion commander in World War II, now runs a bond business in Manhattan.

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