The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt, #1)

by Edmund Morris

“THEODORE,” THE BIG MAN SAID, eschewing boyish nicknames, “you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should.

You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.”

Only a month ago Bill Sewall had convinced him that “the nobles of the earth” were “men of toil”—and probably would convince him again, as he intended to return to Island Falls one day.

A throbbing hangover confirmed his lifelong resolve never to get drunk again, and the evidence is he never did.

he remained “perfectly pure” throughout his bachelor years.

five foot seven, only two inches shorter than he—yet

“We little suspected,” wrote Professor J. Laurence Laughlin many years later, “that we were being addressed by a future President of the United States and his Secretary of State.”

Politics, on the other hand, was beginning to appeal to him so strongly that he asked Professor Laughlin if he should not perhaps make that his career instead.

Bill Sewall

“You may laugh, but I have a presentiment that some time I may be President.”

he had begun what was to become a lifelong habit, that of simply not recording what was ominous, unresolved, or disgraceful.

As usual he passed every spare minute in the open air, rowing, swimming, sailing, shooting (mostly at inanimate targets, out of deference to Alice), and constantly challenging Elliott to physical contests.

“I have enjoyed it greatly, yet the more I see the better satisfied I am that I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.”

I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.

he was more concerned with personal honor.

“here,” he confessed many years later, “the romance of my life began.”

While its first edict, promising “to hang, burn, or drown any man that will ask for public improvements at the expense of the County,” could

“It is difficult for me to discuss seriously the proposition that a man when questioned as to something which has just happened will lie to his own hurt, and six months afterward tell the truth to his own benefit.”

“Well, my boy,” said Tracy, “you have been a thorn in our side during four years. I earnestly hope that you will remain to be a thorn in the side of the next Administration.”