Vice President Roosevelt was returning from a summer trip to Europe when on the morning of September 18, 1901, as the ship passed the Nantucket Shoals, a man came out of the lightship and bellowed through a megaphone that President McKinley had died the previous Saturday. Franklin, now a Harvard sophomore, wrote in a letter home, “Terrible shock to all,” with no mention of what the tragedy meant for the Roosevelt family’s political fortunes. TR’s daughter, Alice, made no bones about her reaction to the news: “My brother Ted and I danced a little war dance. Shameful! Then we put on long faces.”
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