Edmund Morris on Theodore Roosevelt

good afternoon I'm Tom Putnam director of the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on behalf of atomic knot executive director of the Kennedy Library Foundation and all of my library and foundation colleagues I thank you for joining us today let me begin by acknowledging the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library forums including lead sponsor Bank of America Boston capital the Lowell Institute Raytheon the Boston foundation and our media partners the Boston Globe WBUR and NECN there are a number of reasons why it is fitting for us to host this presentation as a Presidential Library we are honored to commemorate and pay tribute to the life of our 26 president yet as we know by reading edmund morris theodore roosevelt was so much more than just our nation's highest office holder Roosevelt's life as an author Safari hunter Cuban Rough Rider also parallels and curious ways another man we honor in this institution Ernest Hemingway whose papers are among this library's treasures a few years ago at a forum on a moveable feast The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik commented on what he perceived as quote an odd symmetry between John F Kennedy and Hemingway in the sense that they were both men a very very complicated accomplishment both men about whom it's possible to have ambivalent feelings who nonetheless mr. garvik included continued to radiate perhaps because of some essential gallantry in their lives and our of heroism that seems undiminished fifty years on the same could be said for Theodore Roosevelt though over a hundred years have passed since the time period that we will hear discussed today another type of pairing that is apropos to today's gathering is that a biographer and subject the type of marriage if you will between the likes of David McCullough and John Adams Arthur Schlesinger and Andrew Jackson Doris Kearns Goodwin and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Robert Caro and Lyndon Johnson all of whom I note won the Pulitzer Prize as did Edmund Morris and his larger-than-life subject and tacit partner in this endeavor Theodore Roosevelt who once remarked not so tacitly I have enjoyed life as much as any nine men to chronicle the nine lives of Teddy Roosevelt has been the task of Edmund Morris these past 30 years culminating in three mesmerizing books containing over 1 million words in 2500 pages the first the rise of Theodore Roosevelt not only earned him a Pulitzer but also the National Book Award the second Theodore Rex won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and the final volume Cornel Roosevelt tells the story of TRS extraordinary post presidency Jimmy Carter is not the only President to excel in that art Woodrow Wilson whose only life whose life was great also a greatly affected by TRS post presidency once noted you can't resist the man he's a great big boy there is a sweetness about him that is very compelling this is the character that we meet and are charmed by and mr. Morris's book and whose despair especially at the end of his life we feel as our own our moderator this afternoon is Mark Feeny also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his featured writing in the Boston Globe where he has worked since 1979 and a variety of roles from arts writer to book review editor mr. Feeny is an author himself of Nixon at the movies a book about belief there is as I have alluded great sadness at the end of this volume mr. Morris speculates that in more ways than one it could be said that Teddy Roosevelt died of a broken heart and for those of us who have been transfixed by these three volumes we to experience a sense of loss as we reach the end of the road in this masterful literary journey please join me in welcoming back to the Kennedy Library mark Feeney and Edmund thank you thank you very much Edmund and I will be talking for about an hour and then for about half an hour will be time for questions from those of you in the audience you'll notice that there's a microphone there this event is being recorded and microphone there as well so if you do have a question in about an hour just please come to the microphone and you'll be recognized and you can ask your question but in the meantime I'm her surrogate as I'm sure everyone here knows the youngest man ever to serve as president was Theodore Roosevelt and the youngest man ever elected as president is John F Kennedy and we are here at the Kennedy Library Mike you talked about TR and JFK a relationship between them one's view the other we don't know TR thought of JFK an affinity between Tom mentioned infinitive Hemingway and TR what about TR and JFK well while I tried to think of the notes to that I just welcome you all here all you football haters of Washington of Boston and it's nice to to see so many Republicans who couldn't manage to get tickets on the plane to Los Angeles for centennial celebration today let that be a lesson for you to get your tickets early if you want to go to the unveiling on Mount Rushmore JFK and TR well apart from youth they had this indefinable quality of personal luster in JFK's case I don't really have to go on about it so much but he discharged a luster which famously made Nixon in debate look pallid and awkward Kennedy had any foal gence about in which I as a nightclub photographer in Durban South Africa in 1963 6263 could feel when I came home from a gig one night and the beach clubs of Durban and I turned on South African turned on south african radio is playing this dirge like classical music couldn't understand why they playing Beethoven at one o'clock in the morning and after half an hour of the solemn music a voice said we are mourning the dick today of President Robert President John Fitzgerald Kennedy whose life was tragically short and at that remote part of the world I felt completely devastated I felt something vital had been expunged so Kennedy's luster which is the only word I can think of I was felt around the world and Tio's electricity to use a word which is more frequently used about him over and over again in descriptions of TR you hear this word electricity radioactivity if sometimes use compared to a steam engine it was this discharge of force so they both had that and this this quality of motivating people of warming them with your luster of energizing them with your steam power in your electricity is something which is bred in the burn and is born and which can translate into real political power they were both supernaturally smart which is self-evident and they both had humor delicious humor and just these three qualities are listed I'm sure they are or more are enough to make any man a pretty formidable candidate for political office another way in which Kennedy and Roosevelt differed was that Kennedy never faced the challenge of a post presidency and that of course Tiaras post presidency is what Colonel Roosevelt is about that idea of probably never even used that term back then but of course we're much more now with places such as there's presidential libraries and so forth much you care to talk a little bit about the idea of a post presidency and seeing it to the lens of TRS unique and quite turbulent experience as a post president who want to be president again well the youth was still there of course he was only 50 when he left the White House and still full of vigor and still palpably enjoying power he gave up power in 1908 when it was a third term was handed to him on a silver platter by the Republican Party but he he turned down that opportunity because I think for genuinely noble reasons he felt that if he had another term enjoying power as much as he did and just and executing the officers vigorously he did I think in his moral heart he sensed that he might become overweening ly authoritarian self-righteous and veer toward corruption so he he he pushed away the silver platter he went off to Africa for a year to give President Taft his hand-picked successor a chance to build a presidential profile for himself and it's really only when he came back from Africa after every year away in the spring of 1910 that he realized what a an enormous demand there was in the United States particularly among Republican progressives for him to come back and assume leadership of their movement so with all this youth always some desire for power which but had returned already he really didn't want to be President again he founded moral a more or less impossible to resist the invitations of the progressives to run in 1912 and the story of his defeat is a story we can go to if we want but he made of his post-presidency a series of adventures that make the for my point of view made the third volume more interesting to write than the other two because not only did he run again for the presidency he became an explorer went to South America and and explored a river wronged longer than the Ryan completely unknown River he wrote many books he became president the American Historical Association then he became the great evangelist for American participation of World War one and lived on a magnificent final decade well you called magnificent but it was for disappointments at the same time wasn't it welder is magnificent tragedy if you like tragedy has to be magnificent otherwise it's just pay Falls he was brought down by his greatest faults and his death was tragically magnificent from the narrative point of view you could say that over the whole arc of his life there was it happy the shape of a Greek tragedy of a great of a man who made himself great who reached enormous power the great climax of the presidency then having left the presidency committed the act of hubris by running again in 1912 at the climax of that campaign he gets smacked in the chest by a bullet the story I could very briefly give you to show you what high drama it was a story by the way which was is uncannily similar to the story of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in March of 1981 here was tr coming out of his hotel room on October the 14th 1912 stepping into the limousine that was waiting for him to take him to his speaking engagement that night 8 o'clock in the evening and crowd connected around the limousine to welcome him as he climbed into the car just like Reagan as he approached his limo the crowd cheered he waved his Reagan had and in both cases a short blond doll eyed man step forward and shot TR point-blank in the chest the bullet went through his overcoat his jacket his waistcoat into his waistcoat pocket smacked into his steel-rimmed spectacles and then went through his 50-page speech which was our double folded so it's a hundred pages of thick paper then on through his shirt and hitted room on a trajectory which if it had continued would have gone right into his heart and he would have been dead before he sat down and T are being TR the consummate showman insisted on being taken to the Milwaukee auditorium to deliver his speech even though he felt blood spreading across his shirt and when you got there one of his guys went out on the stage and said ladies and gentlemen Colonel Roosevelt has been shot but he does want to address you tonight which got their attention and up TR came and said it takes more than that to kill a bull moose is a photograph in my book of the perforated speech which is now in the theatre as well birthplace of course he he survived and went on to these other great things but I just cite their particular example as the moment when everything began to go wrong the act of hubris had occurred the decision to run again the catastrophe happened and from that moment even though he went on to great things his life was a pretty steady inexorable decline to his death at age sixty in 1919 and if I read you right you would argue that had he not run in 1912 and waited till 1916 he would have easily been Wilson is that correct I don't mean Wilson maintained I think roosevelt had drove not a run in 1912 mmm-hmm and then in 91 in 1916 instead rather than Charles Evans Hughes he would have beaten world yes I think that's a pretty safe speculation because as you know Charles Evans Hughes was the nominee of that year and Wilson defeated him by such a narrow margin that at first it was a Truman versus some who was the guy doing Dewey true the truly versa doing situation Charles Evans Hughes victory was in fact announced by the New York Times till they suddenly decided that California contributed enough votes and Wilson in fact had been re-elected so it sounds to reason that if TR had been campaign campaigning that year on the GOP ticket instead of the lackluster Charles Evans Hughes he would have won it's also beyond question that if he had survived through 1919 and being renamed innate 'add in 1920 which unquestioned he was going to be he was going to be the Republican nominee in 1920 he would have won in 1920 because there was such a Republican landslide that year that even Warren Harding was a you mentioned earlier comparing the assassination attempt on Reagan with the assassination attempt on Roosevelt as Reagan's official biographer you had extraordinary access to him into the White House this was after you had published your first volume but before you wrote for second and third Roosevelt volumes how did that access change and inform your view of the presidency do you think it added something to your writing about Roosevelt as it obviously did to your writing about Reagan yes it added a lot because I began Theodore Rex almost immediately after finishing my first book I began it in fact the REA of the year Reagan was elected president and I was having a lot of difficulty understanding the way the White House worked simply because I am NOT by nature a political scientist and I really didn't know too much about hard operational Washington politics so I was having making heavy weather of that book and then Reagan was elected and I had this opportunity to become his biographer which at first I resisted because some PR seemed to me in 1981-82 even in 1983 TR seemed to me so much more fascinating and important than Reagan that it was just no contest between the two but by 1983 Reagan's presidency was achieving the gravitas it had received critical mass that year was the great confrontation of the Soviet Union of the evil empire and the SDI and the Korean airliner was shot down and we were in placing missiles in Europe and was the climax of the economic crisis which Reagan transcended so I began to realize that this president is a substantial president and his presidency is also extremely dramatic and maybe I was an idiot not to take the opportunity to write about him so I did I became his biographer and in the process began to learn by being there in the white house how the white house worked the elements of the presidency do not change year by year and century by century the elements are always the same even so sitting in the White House at meetings which sometimes became very boring I found myself still hankering to go back to TR enough of dureth Rex was written that I was still in my head thinking of paragraphs and in one meeting I had doodled a few paragraphs in a yellow legal pad which I forgot about in the end of the meeting it was in the Roosevelt Room ironically and at the end of meeting I was walking down the corridor to the to the Oval Office I think I had an interview scheduled with the president and one of the White House secretaries came running after me saying mr. Morris mr. Morris you forgot your notes I said I thank you she said sir you ought to be more careful about national security I said why she said well it says here the president's plotting a revolution in Panama [Laughter] so I realized then that no biographer can serve two masters and I put tea outside but when I went back to Fyodor X after publishing Dutch I understood much better how the white house worked what's the single biggest misconception about Theodore Roosevelt he has such a strong image in the public mind but what does the public not get about him oh I think the single biggest misconception was that he was a car boy a rough rider on a brag a bragging bully an unsubtle person TR was a son subtle as a Siamese cat he was a man of extreme intellectual sophistication he was erudite he read as is famously known on average a book a day he read in French and German and Italian as well as an inning in English he was a burn of Friday intellectual whose 40 books cover military history biography memoir wild life writing political analysis all sorts of subjects he had a range of acquaintances around the world unmatched by any other American president I can think of he had Japanese friends French aristocrats Brazilian army officers English tofs royalty he knew everybody he correspondent with everybody so and this gave him an an extremely deep and rich appreciation of foreign cultures to give you just one example of how this mental fertilization affected his behavior when he got to Cairo to Cairo in the spring of 1910 having spent that year in Africa as ex-president he wants to go to the al-azhar mosque in Cairo which is the oldest university in the world and when he arrived there the mullahs were sitting around teaching Madras to the students sitting cross-legged on the floor TR asked to be shown a copy a scroll of the medieval travels of even Battuta the great arabian Arabah traveler and you can imagine the delight of the mullahs to be asked a question of the sky they rushed off to their library to get this medieval scroll while TR explained to the other mullahs that of course he'd not read it in Arabic he said but I didn't really read it in French many years ago I remember it very well began to recite chunks from it so when he left that University with these dazzled mullahs salami as he left he carried under his arm a copy of the Quran now what other American president could carry off a a feat of such intellectual grace and sensitivity as that the question answers itself you mentioned his 40 books was is it easier or harder writing about the fellow writer well honestly for me it made it easier because I'm by nature literary and which is to say I'm much more literary than I am political most books about presidents are written by politically interested individuals whose primary interest is politics but prefeer DeRosa throughout his life I've identified with his literary side as much as if not more so than his political side and for that reason it's made it possible for me to deal with periods of his life which were densely political such as 1912 which was nothing but politics from beginning to end the knowledge that he was going to go on from that to more books and more letters and more essays made it easier for me to keep the narrative going if someone in the audience wanted to acquaint themselves with Roosevelt as a writer is there one book or essay that you would recommend as a place to start well as a little book published in the 1950s by Harvard University Press called cowboys and kings and what it is is simply an off print on four of three of TRS greatest longest letters and these letters are are so hilariously funny are so rich in personal reminiscence and detail are so fascinating to read and discharge such personality that anybody reading the slim book it's only about 150 pages long cannot but feel at full force this power of personality that I described the first letter is a huge letter describing his famous cross-country trip in the year 1903 as president the United States when he crossed to the Pacific Coast for the first time it's a series of anecdotes about all these little towns that he stopped at and how he was welcomed by the locals and it is so delicious that you can understand how it came about that he wrote this letter because when he got back to Washington in the spring of 1903 he went to have dinner with John Hay Secretary of State and he began to tell all these stories about his famous trip across America and John Hay who by the way used to be Lincoln's private secretary was then TR Secretary of State begged TR please mr. president will you write down these reminiscences of yours they are priceless will you write them down for me and TR eventually did produce this enormous letter which he gave to John Hay and that's the letter reproduced in this book cowboys and kings the other two letters are equally enormous letters describing his grand tour of Europe in 1910 all the kings in embassy stayed with climaxing with the funeral of King Edward the seven it's a delicious little book and I hope it's going to be reprinted at some point but it's obviously available in libraries so yeah you can track it down you have a wonderful phrase in Colonel Roosevelt for his personality explosive effervescence I would imagine spending something the vicinity of thirty five years in the company of such explosive effervescence might get a little tiring did you ever find yourself tiring of him did he ever wear you out people did say that that he was so explosively energetic that they just felt innovated by being posed to him I never felt that myself but I did feel at the end of each of these big books that his personality was so overwhelming that I needed to get away from him I didn't want to fall into the other links syndrome of becoming mr. Woodrow Wilson ah office spent his entire life writing about Woodrow Wilson producing these I think 60 volumes of Wilson's presidential papers to the extent he began to look like wardrobe was so I got away from TR by writing about Reagan which took me 15 years when I went back to him it was such a luxury of reacquaintance that had made writing theodoric's a delight but then after finishing Theodore Rex I needed another break and I wrote about Beethoven and that year writing about Beethoven enabled me to go back to him a third time and complete this book well I have to ask that most annoying question that to pose to someone who's completed a mighty task like this and that is what's next I really don't know it some frankly I haven't decided but it's going to be something very different I don't want to write about any more presidents I wouldn't mind writing about another musician but some composers don't sell all that well Beethoven did okay but anyway it'll be something non-presidential and non Republican and non-political reading Cornel Roosevelt I found myself wondering about the children do they make them so thick become so vivid in the book and I wondered do you ever meet Alice Roosevelt I did actually I didn't interview her so much as my wife who wrote a book about Eve Kermit Roosevelt Tiaras wife and her long life which went on to 1948 and Edith of course was much closer to Alice than well Alice at least could talk about Edith in much more detail than any of the other children being a woman so I sort of sat in the corner while Sylvia was interviewing her and she is then very old and what I did get was the sense of her how can I put it her humorous malevolence she found she found suffering and awkward situations very funny while Silvia was introducing was in interviewing her Archie Roosevelt our good friend Archibald Roosevelt jr. was taking a shuttle down from New York to Washington while the interview was proceeding and somehow Ellis got a message during course the interview that Archie was having heart trouble on the plane and Alice actually cackle she loved people in distress I also interviewed Archie Roosevelt and fo Derby and found neither than political participation interviewing children because the element of worship does tend to come in the most rewarding interview and the most rewarding acquaintance in fact was with Archie Board Roosevelt jr. because he didn't realize how much like TR he was there's such an amazing cast of characters over the course of the three books do you have any favorites among them favorite characters I've always been very fond of Elihu root is a forgotten name now but he was one of the few strong men about tea by the way a Nobel Peace Prize winner a great Secretary of State he was one of the few men around TR who was not overawed by him and he knew exactly how to treat TR with just the right amount of humorous patronizing dispatch for example when TR turned 43 in the White House Elihu wrote him a note saying all your friends are delighted to hear that you've turned 43 and we have great hopes for you when you grow up and on another occasion somebody said to no tiara apparently said to root and to Henry Cabot Lodge I was just at the White House talking to Woodrow Wilson and he wouldn't send me to Europe because to fight in World War in the war because he knew I'd be killed in the war and Elihu root said Theodore if you had managed to convince him of that I'm sure he would have thank you you mention Wilson you're not much of a fan of Woodrow Wilson I would hazard to say hmm I admire Wilson simply because he was such a solitary manipulator of political Washington one can't help admire him the same way one admires general to go as an extremely cerebral frosty megalomaniac but I found him very narrow and crimped and Presbyterian and humorless although apparently everybody who knew was sin in his domestic environment found him a delightful man but to compare him in 1912 with TR Wilson had no foreign experience no sensitivity to foreign cultures all he was interested in was congressional politics he was a cerebral rather dry academic with a beautiful prose style I grant him that but a man of no charm no sweetness let's turn the inner to a bit to you from TR for some of the biographies you think or writers who shaped your own writing style to the most influenced you Charles Dickens Mark Twain one of the reasons I live in America was I fell in love with Tom Sawyer at the age of 10 and identified with him so much I wanted to come and live in America and it was of course through Mark Twain's and style that I got to love the American vernacular and Dickens for for humor and for narrative pace and for characterization in my later years even in war who my opinion is the greatest prose stylists of the 20th century I did I delight an evening Wars combination of extreme lucidity and extreme cruelty his humor is blended ly cool and the American equivalent was SJ Perelman he was another superb stylist whose whose virtuosity in language just makes one just give it one goosebumps Limoge juste in every sentence the exact placement of the right word at the right point P G Wodehouse I should have mentioned too because he of all stylist is the one who knows how to distribute words most powerfully Jeeves uncovered the fragrant eggs in B and I pronged a moody folk for o the word folk Philippian the sentence unbeatable you can all but taste the eggs right what about biographers so this biomaterials admirer who you whom would you like to write your biography I'll evade that question and say that it's a Boswell to begin with and to end with the first and the greatest of all biographies Boswell's life of Johnson and to go from some of the famous to some be extremely obscure there was an American writer biographer called Thomas beer B EE R who flourished in the 20s and 30s read a lot of talk of the town type pieces for Saturday Evening Post but he wrote three books in the 1920s one was called the Merve decade which made him famous about the 1890s the other was a biography of Mark Hanna the Republican senator and the other was about view of Stephen Crane Thomas be a pioneer the biographical style that is very much like impressionistic painting point holistic coloration extraordinary use of dialogue he's a magnificent stylist he made biography into an art a literary art he's completely forgotten now but I admire him profoundly do you think this is a good period for biography is it valued and practiced as as well as it might be I think it is I think the biography is because taking the place of the novel in the sense that biography good biography tends to be about extraordinary compelling personalities passing through adventures and coming to some sort of resolution at the end which is the recipe for all great novels in the past but is no longer a recipe for good fiction you were born in Nairobi and the book begins with TR and safari in Africa did you feel a personal resonance there we did it's so vivid the writing even by your standards in that section of the book did you feel that well all writers have capital they'd like to spend and I always was aware that I had this African capital that I needed to spend at some point since I grew up in that country and accumulated a lot of atmospheric stuff so to write about TRS year in that part of the world where I lived was some compared to be easy because I knew all the landscapes that he trekked through in fact I've recently discovered that the house that he stayed in when he was in Nairobi in 1910 he would come in from the safari regularly stay in this large gray stone house in Nairobi was right across the river from the house I grew up in now when I was a small boy going for my Tom Sawyer phase I was aware of the fact that this famous American former president had come to Nairobi and had gone on a safari and taken care of about three-quarters of the wildlife the East African colonies but I didn't realize that he had been the guest of Lord and Lady Macmillan whose houseless was with him I did know that lady macmillan the South Widow was still living there when I was a kid and I used to sometimes sneak across the river and and worm my way through the bamboo palms and look at her on her terrorists having teen being waited on by servants in white Kansas and it goes to me now that that's the veranda the TR sat on writing his African game trails and if I'd know about when I was ten years old and had known that years later I'd be writing his biography I could have gone up to the old lady and say please tell me about the other Roosevelt mrs. Macmillan so there was that sort of childhood identity with him I saw a picture of him when I was 10 years old and I liked the look of him you can remember seeing that picture yeah in the in a civic history of Nairobi there's a photograph of him in a pith helmet with his teeth showing all those teeth and his moustache well he just looked like fun yeah did you travel much for your research did you try to follow his own paths and journeys not really this time around I did because I knew all of the the Europe that I described and I thought he knew the Africa and to Maya grant I never got to the river of doubt as tweed Roosevelt did he he led an expedition there and if I'd had the time and the money in the energy I would have liked have done that but I didn't what I did do though as far as the river of doubt expedition was concern was go to all the Portuguese sources the Brazilian sources and with the aid of a Portuguese dictionary managed to get a lot of information about that expedition that's not available in English and after Colonel Roosevelt himself I think the single most remarkable character in the book is Colonel Ron dolls at how it's pronounced Colonel Candido da Silva Ron Dunn yes could you talk a little bit about him for the for those in the audience who haven't read the book yet yeah he's one of Brazil's great national heroes nominated I believe twice for the Nobel Prize Peace Prize in 1920 for his work in behalf of the Brazilian Indian he was practically almost 100 percent Indian himself but when Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Rio Janeiro 1910 what happened was he was there just he thought to do an expedition for the American Museum of Natural History an American expedition up the Tapajos River the Pappagallo River I think it was but a Brazilian foreign minister said to him Colonel Roosevelt would you consider a double expedition with one of our own Colonels colonel mariano Silva Candido Rondon and if you would like he's our greatest Explorer he's explored the Brazilian Outback he's laid down telegraph lines he knows the country as no other Brazilian does if you would join with him to explore a river that he is discovered called the Rio de deux Vida the river doubt it's cold out because nobody knows where it goes we think it's a tributary of the Amazon if you will do this and if you will write a book about it we will finance the expedition so that's how it occurred that TR took this irresistible opportunity as he said to become a boy again to go in search of this unknown River so the two Colonels led a bi-national expedition the Brazilian half of the expedition was highly professional all trained Brazilian army officers photographers seismic refers telegraph engineers and TR zone compliment who are much more toward the natural history side in the course of this long and extremely arduous and nearly fatal expedition the two Colonels bonded they spoke French that was there any common language they had exactly co-equal status they were both intellectually drawn colonel Rondon was a positivist and a lover of of classical literature to look at the books that they packed on their canoes going down the river is to be embarrassed as how unsophisticated we are these days all these men were packing Homer few cities collage Jane Austen and God knows what else Colonel Ron Don and TR achieved such synthesis that at the end of the expedition they said farewell to each other on the ship that was bringing the seriously ill theater as well back home TR said to Ron Don in French I hope you will come and visit me in my country and Ron Don said I will when you next become president of the United States another president knighted States return wrong Dragan did he ever talk with you about Theodore Roosevelt that his name ever come up did Reagan ever talk to me about TR what else when I went in for my first interview as I walked toward his desk he said I'm not going to write up San Juan Hill for you is there anybody on the political landscape today that you would see however distantly as a political descendent of Theodore Roosevelt nope is that a good thing or a bad thing well guys like that come along once well I wouldn't say once in a century or once in the generations they come along irregularly but it seems to me that in American presidential history the times always precipitate the man Lincoln was precipitated by the Civil War he was the only person who could become president at that time he embodied in his own divided nature the divisions of the Civil War FDR was precipitated by the banking about the banking crisis the depression and the class struggle of the American the 1930s he was the only president who could have done what he did at the time Nixon that fatally flawed president was precipitated by the crisis of the Vietnam years America was self-doubting and tormented and they produced a self-doubting and tormented president the America of the 1980s wanted to be reborn to recover its national spirit after the malaise of the Carter years and it precipitated Ronald Reagan and overnight the country became positive and began to recover it it's its self-respect Bill Clinton was precipitated by the cyber special 1990s a period when the internet was beginning to take over all human discourse when international borders dissolved away and people began to float freely in cyberspace and we had this free-floating president who floated in whatever direction he could register the most hits and he'd precisely expect expressed our national ethos at the time and I could go on so I think when the time requires it another theater Roosevelt will be precipitated well that's a cheering thought well TR was once described as quote the most interesting American who ever lived two-part question was he and is he still well he's certainly the most interesting American I've ever studied and it's pretty universally accepted I think in most of the reviews of books about him not just my own book that he was compulsively interesting there are certain characters in history who are in exhaustively interesting vogner Lincoln shall go t are men of this quality are can have books written about them forever and all the books will be different because they are polychromatic and polygonal is just more and more and more to find out about them I'm wondering would you mind reading a little bit from your book before we take questions from the audience it just so happens we have a copy and I should add by the way and I hope I'll remember to add at the end of the question answer session that Emin will be signing books when we're done what would you mind ok I'm sorry we couldn't talk about andrew darlington robinson well we will we'll do that and then most questions but the last three paragraphs acting curve Transnet well you can choose something else that would be my closet to here for you just these use gel it begins three decades later or Frenette refers to the present okay this is the end of the epilogue the epilogue tells the story of TRS post humors reputation is the rise and fall of his reputation and all the major books that had been written about him since he died so brings us up to the President and I say three decades later the shifting sands of historiography seemed to have allowed the monolith of Theodore Roosevelt to settle sand being sand nothing of his future reputation can be predicted he is still buffeted by revisionist storms some emanating from a khadeem and obsessing on the latest heed a fix in that quarter of masculinity but the prevailing breeze of popular opinion is favorable a c-span survey in 2009 in 2009 rating the leadership of American presidents placed t Roosevelt at number four after Washington Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt substantial books on him continue to appear in a eagerly read three recent examples by Kathleen Dalton Kandi's Millard and Patricia row to demonstrate that for all the Rough Riders machismo fair-minded women feel no need to consent condescend to him Douglas Brinkley study of the Roosevelt Ian conservation record the wilderness warrior became a national bestseller last year even though it was only over 900 pages long the emplacement of Theodore Roosevelt bridge across the Potomac River in Washington gives many commute compute commuters the impression that it and not the forested Island beneath is the 26th president's official memorial some are among those trees however he stands 18 feet tall one bronze fist up raised eternally lecturing the doves and mocking birds solemn words are carved on granite tablets nearby but they and all the millions of other words that have been published about him come no closer to the truth than those of a small boy in Cove School Oyster Bay on June 16th 1922 as part of a class exercise paying tribute to the late Colonel Thomas Meyer wrote he was a FULFILLER of good intentions and one of the great intentions he fulfilled was the poetry Edward Arlington Robinson I knew you'd get under that and Edward Arlington Robinson provides the epigraph for each chapter in your book can you talk a little bit about TR and Edward Arlington Robinson well very briefly I'm Edward Edwin Arlington Robinson who won three Pulitzer Prizes for poetry almost completely forgotten today was a poet that Theodore Roosevelt fished out of hell by the hair of his head and that's Arlington Robinson's language he wrote to Kermit Roosevelt your father fished me out of hell by the hair of my head in the year 1905 when he was starving and working as a subway ticket term Stamper in New York City TR read a short volume of self-published poems by Edward Arlington Robinson called the children of the night and he admired the poem so much that he not only reviewed book a book in scribblers magazine but he wrote Arlington Robinson a letter saying dear mr. Robinson in so many words dear mr. Robinson I have heard that you are in some financial difficulty I've read your poems and admire them very much would you be interested in a federal position on strict condition that if you accept it you will not do any federal whatsoever we'll continue to write poetry and Robinson accepted this irresistible offer became an officer in the Customs House in New York City and proceeded to write poetry on the federal Nicol for the rest of TRS presidency and after tea I left the White House Arlington Robinson went on from strength to strength gradually winning recognition in the teens as the most original poetic voice in America outside of that of Robert Frost his some somewhat jealous rival went on to great Fame and enormous success in the 20s and 30s until his dying day never ceased to praise Theodore Roosevelt for saving him so in testimonial to to that and also to the quality of his poetry I have used as epigraphs to all my chapters sections from the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson so not only do we have a president who read poetry while in office he reviewed poetry while in office and I guess you could say that he was the the founder of the National Endowment for the Humanities through finding this job for Edwin Oliver Robinson Aneta pursue which never occurred to me well you're welcome to it for the paperback if anyone in the audience would care to ask questions there are microphones there and there please step up to them and while we're waiting for people to come forward I will ask if I may a Reagan question this is the centennial day wrote about it today what are your feelings on one Reagan 100 I admired him profoundly as president it was impossible to fall in love with him as many of his acolytes do I found him so cool and so remote that I never disliked him or liked him I felt completely objective about him as a man as a person in private I found him extraordinarily uninteresting he had no interest in himself and that was the reason so to ask Reagan questions was to get nothing in return he'd never thought about himself he had no ego he had a tremendous sense of it he knew exactly who he was and what he wanted formidable I did but no vanity that was perplexing to a biographer his charm was delicious but it was public charm TRS charm could be felt privately was most powerfully felt privately Reagan's was discharged publicly in private none of his magic was was apparent he was by nature thespian he was an actor when he went out through the door he became extraordinary in private there was nothing there what that is not to disparage him I have to try and try and explain them the the mystery of the theatrical personality they live they are born they exist to operate in the public sphere well isn't and I apologize to listen to Mike I just won't ask this one last question you could say though the TR was an actor too but he was as much of a stage actor and had he been around 100 years later the camera would have been horrified by yeah so vigorous whereas Regan had that genius of letting the camera come to him you're right you're right once with Regan I watched his last speech to American people it was very telling I went down to the Oval Office to watch him deliver it he came in and he seemed oddly ill at ease there's like five minutes to go before 9 o'clock carrying a glass of hot lemon water in his hair wrapped her onto the white napkin which he always drank before he spoke and made his voice silky and he sat down but he seemed strangely in at ease and he kept looking at this dead monitor in the corner of the ROM and the monitor flicked on it about a minute before the address with his picture on it and Reagan said ah there he is and he became Ronald Reagan first question from over here thank you so much for this informative and lively book review um I just need the snake of the garden party but I want to take him down a peg and I'd like you to respond to this when he examples when he took the trip down the river of doubt it was ill planned he certainly risked his son life as son's life who became a lifelong victim of malaria he risks many other people's lives without consideration without thought about what he was doing he risked his own life which he did repeatedly he seems not to care about that so much when he World War one was in the offing he urged urged urge made fun of Woodrow Wilson for not going into the war Woodrow Wilson finally went into the war he urged his sons who joined this valorous soldier Clinton was killed almost as soon as he entered the war that was 1918 Roosevelt was heartbroken died in 1919 isn't it can we include this frivolous idea toward life and death even among his own people as part of his legacy thank you yeah I'm glad your oldest Christian man because we have been rather - dude Welling rather too much I think on on tears positive aspects we actually did talk about Quentin a lot at a private meeting upstairs just now but the points you raised are valid ones there was something sick about his desire to fight in battle in the sense that his desire to to go and fight and when he was denied the opportunity to lead a division of American volunteers at the age of 58 to Europe to fight aside the Free French when he was denied that opportunity by Woodrow Wilson quite rightly denied the opportunity the sickness was his desire that his four sons should go and fight in his stead and he made it quite plain that since he himself have been deprived of the privilege of being possibly killed in action maybe one of his sons could to do him that favor which Quentin did Quentin I should say that all four sons went to war willingly they were brought up to be hawks as TR would say not to be sparrows or was that Edith that was Edith's lion wasn't it Edith said I would like my son's to be hawks not sparrow so it was in the mother's influence as well but it was quite plain from what Tia wrote that he rather hoped that one of his boys would be or more would be wounded and perhaps killed in battle and so bring honor to the family name when Quentin was killed in July of 1918 he was absolutely devastated realizing how ugly war was what death indeed was realizing what had been stamped out in the death of this promising boy who's the least bellicose of the four by the way and he never quite recovered from that and I'm quite sure that his grief for Quentin which was extreme contributed to his own early death just five months later over here Mr Morrison what do you talk about the dialectic nature of mr. mr. Roosevelt a Nobel Peace Prize winner of war monger a great great progressive and - turned out a pretty rabid anti-semite and racist would you please address these contrary nature's of of the president well you're quite wrong about a rabid anti-semite absolutely wrong TR had no Semitic anti prejudice that I'm aware of his racial policies I will discuss but before I get into that important subject let me just say that men of his dimensions embody in themselves contradictions all of the men I've cited earlier on Wagner Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon and to go contained profound contradictions within themselves so everything as I've often said about TR everything you say about him is true except I will I will argue about the anti-semitic allegation as you probably know he's he pointed the first Jewish cabinet officer in our history Oscar Strauss he used to say when he went campaigning to great pride in his mix of mixed ancestry he once said campaigning in the lower Eastside I wish I had a little Jew in me his favorite policeman was author Raphael thus Jewish policemen that when TR was police commissioner of New York City TR took a particularly shine to the sky and when TRS police commissioner had to guarantee security to an anti-semitic German public orator was coming to New York City to deliver a lot of anti-semitic lectures T all solved the problem of giving the skies security by giving him a bodyguard entirely of Jewish policemen I just think that goes to the top of the country nature because his rhetoric during the ramp-up and World War one Torche Jewish bankers and the Jewish establishment has been well documented so again I think that just points out further and I you know I admire the president so but it just I it just always never failed to take me back when I look at the country nature of how the president I just wanted the thing was not the president's father someone who was involved during the civil war and the war buying or buying himself out of the service and I wonder if that had anything to do with later on his own need for glory and self aggrandizement now that theory is trotted out enlargen there is absolutely no evidence for it whatsoever he was proud of his father and admired him margin profoundly I would like though to raise the question of race which you brought out regard Latin American blacks this is important because tiara here exhibited these contradictions when he became president in 1901 the first person he called upon to advise him was dr. Booker T Washington who was then the most eminent black leader in America brought him to the White House to advise him and he famously gave him dinner in October of 1901 in the White House the first time any president entertained a black man on famy as it happened creating a firestorm of racial outrage in the in the white South and after this magnificent beginning and several very courageous appointments of black officeholders during his first term he severely blotted his copybook by his behavior during the Brownsville incident of 1906 when he as commander-in-chief discharged a whole regiment of black soldiers in Brownsville Texas for an alleged race riot on no evidence whatsoever and although he realized he'd made a mistake he would never go back on decision and he lost overnight the support of all the black Americans who serve strongly identified with him in 1912 he voluntarily and summarily decided not to allow blacks to participate in the Progressive Party in the deep south he gave his rationale for that it's complex and I don't want to go into it nog he'll take too long it's in my book but his race his record as as an Apsara and a friend of American blacks was very much damaged by his behavior at the time of Brownsville and not surprisingly what Booker T Washington came out for Wilson in 1912 yes sir after 2500 pages he decided to injure study with the words of a small boy what brought you to that decision words the small boy and sir Thomas Marr oh yes what about him well he had you said sorry yes I early on when I was writing my first book I went through a bunch of old papers in the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace and I came across a packet of essays written by these schoolchildren in 1922 obviously this class had been given an assignment by their teacher to write something about the dead kernel and flicking through these childish essays I came across this one essay by this one little boy with his one sentence that seemed so perfectly epigrammatic summing up everything he was he was the fulfilling of good intentions when I saw it I knew that was going to be the last sentence of the last book you made my day because Thomas More is my father ha ha so extraordinary well it's not a to meet you sir thank you for coming if you give me your address afterwards I'll send you a copy of this this essay yes ma'am okay [Laughter] I was just wondering since the book is about his later life whether or not you can comment on his relationship with an influence on his niece Eleanor who I feel is a kaleidoscope of personality traits as well um I don't know too much about his relationship with Eleanor shoes his brother's daughter and he married her off as president to Franklin the two Roosevelts for those of you who confuse the two branches of the Roosevelt family the Hyde Park Roosevelt's are mainly Democrats and the Oyster Bay Roosevelt's tend to be Republicans and one of the Hyde Park Roosevelt's once explained the difference even more succinctly he said we're the good-looking ones but I don't know too much about Tia's relationship with Eleanor otherwise she was the the wife of Franklin whom he rather avuncular Lee liked and admired but their relationship the relationship between Eleanor and the Oyster Bay Roosevelt's deteriorated seriously in the 1920s well I know when some children's books I've read she spent a lot of summers with him Yoshi was one of the only cousins I was wondering how if he had any influence on her greatness and how she was interested in so many things I really don't know you don't do too darling yes my wife is reminding me that FDR always used to say that uncle that cousin Ted was the greatest man I ever knew but that doesn't tell us much about Eleanor ah my wife who knows much more about the eraser than I do it reminds me that Edith Roosevelt once said that the ugly duckling is likely to turn out to be a swan one day so who's next yes sir mr. Morris again thank you for being here two quick comments and then a question the first comment is that Sylvia Morris wrote a wonderful book as you mentioned earlier on Edith Roosevelt and for those of you folks here everyone I suppose interested in this topic highly recommend reading that book it presents a wonderful kind of softer side of the relationship of the President and eat it and those of you that enjoy mr. morsi's books be sure the only way to read them for me is to have two bookmarks one in the narrative text and one in the endnotes so if you're not inclined to read endnotes because it's not in your nature I strongly recommend that you use 2 bookmarks and read them because there is what is wonderful as the narrative text often times and I'm not from Random House or any just just offering that as a fan you're a footnote fetishist yeah actually tweet accused me of that I don't know if food is still here my question is about a TR and his faith is faith life and as I as I've read it I don't know if to say often is the right term but he would at some level used religious language oftentimes in speeches and other contexts I think II perhaps when he's in Oyster Bay he would regularly go to church and I'm just wondering was his faith life was it do you think based on what you studied of him consider to be a genuinely devout faith or was it more commensurate with with men of that era in was his language sometimes just based on political advantage like all American politicians he liked to thump the Bible John Hay once said to him is one thing I admire about you he adores your original discovery of the Ten Commandments and he was capable of conventional piety as for that matter Ronald Reagan was but I've never did divined any spiritual aspirations and TR he was uncomfortable with questions of spiritual dimension of metaphysics very shy about talking about his own personal religious faith if indeed he had one he used to go to the Dutch Reformed Church moral is de rigueur and as president he would go to the Episcopal Church st. John's in Washington with his wife who was devout but he himself never struck me as particularly pious in fact he was the one who tried to get the phrase in god we trust' taken off our national coinage on the interesting premise that it debased God to be have his name plastered all over filthy lucre but I began to notice researching the third book were in which I've gone much more deeply into his writings than in previous books serious interest in his part in questions of theology versus science for example he retinas tarnishing essay in 1911 the single most impressive intellectual production of all his literary career called the search for truth in a spirit of reverence and it's about the conflict between evolutionary biology and Orthodox religion a topic which has become resurgent in recent years and the breadth of theological and scientific knowledge that he displays in this piece this long essay based on readings in many languages is truly amazing and it comes closer than anything else he ever wrote to expressing his own personal attitude toward religion but it was basically that of a stand of cerebral theologian rather than somebody full of natural piety well I well if we get into that matter here but I think we ought to cover questions that these people are answered you can if you like the luminosity take your turn she humiliated me once when I was lecturing early on about Cheon sun's glare ladies stood up said Mr Morris what did he die of I didn't know I hadn't gotten that far so I stood there like an idiot and Sylvia shouts our pulmonary embolism yes sir actually two quick questions you said that his being shot and then the death of his son was sort of a steady decline which he never really fully recovered from I was interested for your opinion um he once called his father the greatest man he had a knew what affected his life more his father or the tragedy with his first wife dying Alice Lee and his mother in 1884 which do you think inspired him the most or was it a combination of those two things that went on to propel him and secondly great presidents like Lincoln transcended the Radical Republicans Theodore himself took on the establishment in the Republican Party I guess where would a whiskey me where would Theodore fit in with the Republican Party today while the three great bereavements of his early life beyond the death of his father when he was a student at Harvard and the double death of his wife Alice Lee his first life and his mother in the same house on the same night in 1884 it did affect him to a certain extent in the sense that they just made him tougher he already was phenomenally tough his attitude to the death of Alice Lee which for a while seemed to unhinge him for several days TR went around like a complete zombie and they worried that he might be losing his reason but what he was doing was concentrating his faculties erasing from his memory the very name of Alice Lee he never spoke about her again not even to their daughter Alice Longworth and these are almost almost masochistic seeming suppressions form the the lever of which he was made later on in life is the indestructible person I largely I think due to the cauterizing effect appease his tragedies the other question is to where he would stand the Republican Party now we must remember that back in 1910 100 years ago the Republican Party and Democratic Party were very different from what they are now in fact the Republican Party of Sarah Palin and the tea party members is more as indistinguishable from the Democratic Party of 1910 lily-white small-government reactionary anti anti privilege whereas the Republican Party of those days was the party of the black man of racial liberals and the party of big centralized government TR was a big centralized government man of democratic instincts and so much so to such a federal extent that I think if he was alive now he would be a big government Democrat yes sir I was what if you just comment on the fact that he might have had a photographic memory well it's not a little it's idiot is a fact yes it's a fact his memory was photographic sometimes he would he would see a face that was vaguely familiar to him and he would do this over his face and then he would say I remember you he was standing by a train of steam all around you twelve years ago there are countless karpas anecdotes to show how photographic his memory was how he could disgorge whole paragraphs of prose that he'd read fifteen or twenty or thirty years before and more than just anecdotes I came across a concrete example when I was researching this book a letter from Kermit his son writing to his father from Brazil in what was in 1913 dad do you by any chance remember a poem by Edith Thomas called far from Castile and tal wrote back in longhand yes you asked about Edith Thomas yes it's called far from Castillo and goes like this he wrote out too long stanzas and sent it off so I thought I'll check out this poem I looked to ice I googled either farmers and a founder was indeed a part of that name who published in the 1890s and I found this poem far from Castile in an issue of the Atlantic Monthly published I think in 1890 92 so where other and going through the magazine in order to read it I checked its text against TRS handwritten text of 17 years later and it wasn't quite word-for-word in about three instances he wrote Lydian Lydian chord and stood a Gordian knot and sometimes a line was alighted but apart from these two or three minut differences it was word-to-word what he had read in 1890 and i know he read it in 1890 because in that same issue atlantic month he was an article by himself yes ma'am I just want to say I was delighted with your assessment of evil of war with her favorite office yup Jane Austen did brave greed I won't deal with your cervix wit and your love of language have you ever written a novel no I've never never written a novel I did write a biography of Ronald Reagan [Laughter] that was not supposed to be funny which was a non fiction nonfiction biography told by an imaginary person but that's the nearest I've ever gotten to it if I may ask what about progressive our politics what what is your take on the effect of this of dynasties is American politics the effect of dynasties American products I am not qualified to answer that I really don't think I can say anything intelligent on that subject okay thank you very much thank you good answer I have a quick comment and then a question and my comment is is that it was through your books that I really became a TR fan and a history student itself thank you for that my question is could you talk about his I would say controversial position in 1910 where a judicial decision could be overturned by by a vote of the people and did that have anything to do with the leadership in the Republican Party turning against him in 1912 because that was the sense I got through reading your book I was just wondering if you could talk about that just tell me if I'm right or wrong well in 1910 when TR came back from from Africa and from his grand tour of Europe the first famous man in the world at that point to this enormous welcome in New York City where a million New Yorkers turned out to welcome him home he was at the cusp of his life and wanted to spend the rest of his life writing books but he was almost immediately prevailed upon here in Boston by Charles Evans Hughes at Harvard commencement who persuaded TR to support a progressive measure that governor Hughes was trying to put through the New York state legislature TR made the fatal commitment under the Elms of Harvard to aid governor Hughes and thus got sucked back into active politics finding himself during the course of the Year becoming the the the spokesman for the uprising political movement could be a political progressive movement candidates who are trying to achieve an election in the congressional elections of 1910 Republican progresses and he campaign for for all of those who struck his fancy but came on too strong too fast and too hard putting all his gigantic prestige in behind a radical political message articulated in his famous new nationalism speech in Osawatomie Kansas at the end of August 1910 and that speech was so radical espousing for example the superior superiority of Labor of the Capitol and the right of the people he hoped to withdraw judicial decisions that were contrary to the popular interest that it completely destroyed his good will in the Republican Party and made the scenes of his disc of his um dismissal from the party or hesitantly his um his denial on the part of Orthodox Republicans in 1912 so as a matter of fact the the election of 1910 was a disaster for Theodore Roosevelt personally most of the candidates he is fast were defeated and he's political prestige evaporated so rapidly that by the end of the year this man who at the beginning of the year being the most famous man in the world had become a political nonentity and it's one of the most remarkable things about his biography that somehow within the next two years he recovered all his gravitas and led that extraordinary campaign which to this day is the most powerful third party campaign in our history thank you yes good afternoon first of all I'd like to say thank you for helping history to come alive today and making it so vivid I went to heard James McGregor Byrnes give a talk after he had written the book about the three Roosevelt's Teddy Franklin and Eleanor and if I remember this if I remember correctly he said that he felt the greatest of the three was Eleanor and I'm just wondering what your opinion is who among the three what you feel was the greatest Roosevelt well FDR was the greater president he dealt with greater issues he served much longer and he achieved greater things Theodore Roosevelt was the greater personality FDR won one goes to his house one gets the feeling that there was nothing there except his political interests apart from that and yachting it wasn't there was no nothing there of any interest except to students of political animals he was a superbly talented an extraordinary effective executive politician all the other things that Theodore Rose Wahb was Tianna of FDR never approached TR was a man in the round FDR was an executive as for Eleanor I absolutely must share with you and Eleanor Roosevelt joke which I came across in the papers of James Gould cousins the great American novelist - I'm rather interested in he worked in the Pentagon in World War two wrote a letter to his mother that I came across saying mom I wonder if you'd like to hear the latest Ellen a joke this is 1943 and he said Helen Oh walked into the Oval Office she just come back from a transatlantic trip to Britain and she said Franklin do you notice something difficult that different about me and FD I was busy with affairs of state said new hairstyle said Franklin I've been wearing my hair like this since 1929 don't you notice something different about me he said well yeah a new dress you bought that in London Franklin I've been wearing this dress since our honeymoon he said Ellen I don't know I'm busy I can see what's different about you she said Franklin I'm wearing a gas mask and a reminder that Edmond will be signing copies of his book and let us thank you very much for [Applause]

Channel: JFK Library

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Keywords: John, F., Kennedy, Presidential, Library, and, Musuem, edmund, morris, theodore, roosevelt, american, history, politics

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Length: 90min 12sec (5412 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 06 2018