Colonel Roosevelt

I'm hip-deep in Edmund Morris's Colonel Roosevelt (2010), the third and final volume in his biographical portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, which began all the way back in 1980 with The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. The first volume is absolutely stunning, with scene after scene that had me gasping aloud at Roosevelt's audacity, vivacity, and strangeness, while the second volume flagged a bit; the presidential years simply can't compare to Roosevelt's racketing about the Wild West and clawing for power back in Albany. But this volume--despite its being the third I've read on Roosevelt's post-presidential years (including Candice Millard's gripping tight-focus account of an Amazonian adventure, River of Doubt, and Patricia O'Toole's empathetic and detailed account of the period from 1909 on, When Trumpets Call)--has been a treat from the start.

It's full of scenes like this one, from a 1912 convention to nominate Republican delegates in Oklahoma:

The local committee chairman, Edward Perry, was a Roosevelt man who hoped to create a progressive stampede for the Colonel. A letter from Gifford Pinchot reminded him that, as yet, La Follette was Taft's only official challenger. Perry read the letter to the convention, but made plain that he still favored Roosevelt. This infuriated the rank and file supporting Taft. Pandemonium ensued, with Perry roaring "Slap Roosevelt in the face if you dare!" over contrary shrieks and howls. A posse of fake Rough Riders invaded the hall. For fifteen minutes they tried to storm the stage, but found it harder to take than the Heights of San Juan. Cigar-smoking Taft forces repelled them. One cavalryman got through on a miniature pony: the young son of Jack "Catch-'em-Alive" Abernathy, a friend of Roosevelt's famous for seizing wolves by the tongue. The boy shrilled "I want Teddy!" to the crowd, touching off further furor. But then the organization men suppressed him, and the convention endorsed Taft over La Follette by a vote of 118 to 32. Perry, locally known as "Dynamite Ed," showed his displeasure by going outside and detonating five hundred pounds of explosives.

The scene brings to mind the great moment in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence when a horseman mounts the stage at the nominating convention and proceeds to do lariat tricks, to the loud (and drunken) approbation of the assembled.

And there are countless other vividly described moments worth sharing. Like this one, in which the national nominating convention in Chicago proves that it can be just as rambunctious as Oklahoma's:

But then rhythmic cries of "Teddy, Teddy--we want Teddy!" developed in the uproar, like the drumbeat of a coming fanfare. Attention began to divert from Hadley on the floor to a pretty woman sitting in a high gallery. She wore a white dress, with a bunch of pinks at her waist. Whatever mysterious force focused fourteen thousand pairs of eyes on her, she was thespian enough to revel in it. She blew kisses at the crowd, then, leaning over the balustrade, unrolled a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. The noise became deafening. Unfazed, she began to yell, and proved to have the lungs of a Valkyrie. "Boys--give three cheers for Teddy!"

A golden bear materialized beneath her, in the shape of the mascot of the California delegation. She reached out and cuddled it as it rose on the top of a proffered totem, whereupon the poles of other Roosevelt delegations joined in and jiggled up and down in phallic rivalry. The woman in white vanished for a minute. When she reappeared on the floor, it seemed improbable that the Coliseum could contain more sound. She marched up the main aisle, flushed with excitement, followed by stampeding delegates in an unconscious parody of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. . . . [S]he was hoisted giggling onto a shelf of shoulder and carried to the rostrum. Elihu Root tolerantly let her take control of the proceedings.

Then there's this moment, which makes my ears hurt just to read about--it would almost make a person wish for vuvuzelas:

One of the strangest [sounds in the hall], accompanied by whistles and screams of "Toot, toot!" was the spine-stiffening hiss of sheets of sandpaper scraped together. It was meant to express the conviction among Roosevelt Republicans that an organization "steamroller" was under way, intent on flattening their spirit of revolt.

But I find myself partial to this moment, when Roosevelt, newly arrived in Chicago to try to manhandle the convention, greets the crowd on Michigan Avenue from his hotel balcony:

Far to his left and right, a flotsam of faces swirled. The smoky, coppery sky seemed to press down on the city, concentrating its heat and noise. Waving his hat for quiet, he yelled in his high voice, "Chicago is a mighty poor place in which to try and steal anything."

Really? I'm disappointed to learn that our reputation hadn't already been properly established by 1912.

Burke and Fox, TR and Taft

Passing references to Wordsworth and Coleridge in Richard Holmes's Shelley: The Pursuit made me want to know more about the pair's long friendship and its eventual break--which, conveniently, is the subject of the reliable Adam Sisman's 2007 book The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. I'm only a few chapters in, but thus far it seems likely to be as satisfying as Sisman's excellent book on Boswell.

The early chapters are largely devoted to the English reaction to the French Revolution, an eruption that caught the imagination of many thoughtful young Englishmen, including the two poets. I was particularly struck by a scene in which Sisman depicts the debates in Parliament over the legitimacy of France's new government, which finds longtime friends and allies Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke on opposite sides:

[W]hen an indignant Burke voiced his opposition to "all systems built on abstract rights" in the debate, Fox whispered his hope that though they disagreed, they might still remain friends. Burke spurned his appeal, declaring aloud that their friendship was at an end. Fox rose to reply, but was so hurt that he could not speak for some minutes, while tears trickled down his cheeks.

It is rare now, and--one assumes, with Trollope at least to back one up--was rare then, for political conflicts to reveal real, deep-seated emotion; carefully dissimulated reactions tend to be the order of the day. Fox's tears, however, reminded me immediately of another, more recent moment: the break between Theodore Roosevelt and his friend and successor William Howard Taft. I've written about it before as it's depicted in Patricia O'Toole's wonderful book about TR's post-presidential years, When Trumpets Call, but here's the gist:

Taft’s hurt feelings are palpable; in his laments about Roosevelt’s mistreatment of him, he frequently sounds like a jilted lover, or a kid who’s been beaten up by his long-admired older brother. In 1910 when Roosevelt first began speaking out against the work of Taft’s administration, “He is unhappy without the power he wielded as president. I have been made to feel it. His treatment of me has left scars that will never heal.” . . . Following a slashing anti-Roosevelt speech on the campaign trail, Taft was dicovered by a reporter alone, head in hands. “‘Roosevelt was my closest friend,’ he said. Then he wept.”

What's particularly remarkable about that excruciating scene is that it's hard to imagine TR even beginning to understand why Taft was upset; he seems to have been so utterly wrapped up in his own plans, so focused on his own importance, that he was almost entirely oblivious to the independent emotional existence of others. In my relatively limited, though growing, acquaintance with Burke, I get the impression that he was more open and human--but perhaps just as implacable a foe?

Veterans Day part two

From Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War, by Martha Hanna

Paul to Marie, 7 July 1917
I received your letter from the 3rd where you say that I sem to be happy. Listen my dear if I didn’t cherish in my heart the love of my wife and my child and my parents if I were all alone on this earth then yes I could count myself happy because when the weather is warm as it has been lately and I have everything that I need I cannot really say that I am unhappy especially since the Boches don’t ever fire on us. I am not happy because no one is happy in war I missm y home and those who are dear to me I also miss my freedom but in comparing my life to that of all my comrades then in comparison to them I really am happy.

From When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House (2005), by Patricia O’Toole

Archie [Roosevelt] was also struggling to comprehend the brutality of what he had seen and done. In one French raid he had rushed a burly German and fired five shots into him at close range, he told [a friend].

The German fell forward. From my aim, and from his look, and from the way he fell, I knew I had done for him. But I felt I absolutely had to stamp on him. I brought my left heel down on his face, by the mouth, as hard as I could. It went right in, and my boot was splashed with blood up to the ankle. Then I ran on.

That was an absolutely primitive action. I was a man of the Stone Age at that moment, hating my enemy and wanting to humiliate him even after he was dead. If I had had more time, I should have spat in his face. As it was, I stamped on it. . . . . It is extraordinary how savage the men have become. They are absolutely ruthless. I think the fighting and the blood drives them mad, they will kill anything in sight, without asking questions, there’s no talk of guarter. But get them back of the lines with a prisoner and they are very decent. In peacetime, we used to be upset if we saw a man ill in the street. Now, I can see a friend shot right next to me, and I don’t care at all—it seems quite natural, and it’s somebody else’s turn next. I’ll give orders for his tin hat to be taken, or his boots to be taken off, and that’s all.

From Studs Terkel’s “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (1984), E. B. Sledge, author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981), talks about his experience in the Pacific in World War II

There was nothing macho about the war at all. We were a bunch of scared kids who had to do a job. People tell me I don’t act like an ex-marine. How is an ex-marine supposed to act? They have some Hollywood stereotype in mind. No, I don’t look like John Wayne. We were in it to get it over with, so we could go back home and do what we wanted to do with our lives.

I was nineteen, a replacement in June of 1944. Eighty percent of the division in the Guadalcanal campaign was less than twenty-one years of age.
. . . .
It was raining like hell. We were knee-deep in mud. And I thought, What in the hell are we doin’ on this nasty, stinkin’ muddy ridge? What is this all about? You know what I mean? Wasted lives on a muddy slope.

People talk about Iwo Jima as the most glorious amphibious operation in history. I’ve had Iwo veterans tell me it was more similar to Peleliu than any other battle they read about. What in the hell was glorious about it?

If I believed in an afterlife, I would believe that all those who choose war as a first resort, all those who lie a nation into war, all those who put young men and women into harm’s way without first having tried all other avenues, all those who put young men and women into harm’s way without adequately supplying and supporting them or planning for their mission, all those who see war as a tool for winning political victories, all those who see war as a chance to make money off the backs of soldiers, all those who speak religion but are cavalier about the taking of human life, all those who unquestioningly support leaders who would march our soldiers to senseless death, and all those who push and push and push for war, but for themselves set “other priorities than military service”—if I believed in an afterlife, I would believe that all those people would face hard questions when they reach it, questions that they would, I am confident, not be able to answer to the satisfaction of their judges.

But I do not believe an eternal judgment will be forthcoming, no matter how high humanity piles its sins. We are their only judges. We must be the ones forcing them to answer the hard questions. We must push, and push, and push until they are discredited and disempowered. We must heap public scorn and shame on their heads. We must, where possible, put them in jail for years on end. We must blacken their names completely, stain the pages of the history books where they appear a hideous, soul-sickening black.

Only by doing such things can we ever hope to stay the hand of their successors in the years to come—successors who are sure to be far more like them than we would ever wish. We must hold them to account.

Only then could we possibly be worthy of those who have given their lives in the name of our country.

Veterans' Day

From Patricia O’Toole’s When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House (2005)

The months with Quentin [Roosevelt] nearby had been happy ones for [his mother] Edith. Her anxiety about the dangers of flying abated each night with the sound of his footsteps on the veranda, and after he sailed, she was sometimes visited by the odd sensation that she had just heard the footsteps again. Sagamore [the Roosevelt family home] ached with emptiness. Edith felt that her life had broken off sharply; “it is like becoming blind or deaf—one just lives on, only in a different way.”

From a letter written by Lieutenant Arnold Schuette to his newborn daughter, collected in War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (2001), edited by Andrew Carroll

December 21, 1943
My Dear Daughter, Anna Mary,
Some day I shall be able to tell you the conditions under which I write this letter to you.

You arrived in this world while I was several thousand miles from your mother’s side. There were many anxious moments then and since.

This message comes to you from somewhere in England. I pray God it will be given to you on or about your tenth birthday. I hope also to be present when that is done. It shalle be held in trust by your mother or someone equally concerned until that time.

Also I pray that the efforts of your daddy and his buddies will not have been in vain. That you will always be permitted to enjoy the great freedoms for which this war is being fought. It is not pleasant, but knowing that our efforts are to be for the good of our children makes it worth the hardships.

From a letter written by First Lieutenant Ed Luker to his wife, collected in War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (2001), edited by Andrew Carroll

June 18, 1918
Dearest Girlie,
Do you smell gas also? We were all subjected to several different kinds of it today [in training], with and without masks, and as usual, I cannot rid my clothes of the odor. It is sure awful stuff, honey. Deadly and usually insures a slow horrible death. There is one kind which kills quickly, Chlorine, but I do not prefer any kind or brand myself. I’ll use the gas mask if possible, with all its discomforts and smell.

I had to have a photo taken today for another “Officer’s Identification Book” which every officer must carry. It provides for a small size bust without head-gear, so when I receive same, I will send you copies. I believe they take the book when your body is found and send the photo to the War Dept to be placed on the Honor Roll. Won’t you be proud to have your Hubby’s picture on a nice magazine page, all fringed with black? Ha! There’s no danger tho. You’ll have me back soon. The war cannot last forever, you know, and even if it does, I will return to you safe and sound eventually.

Unlike the majority of other boys, I am not over here to “die” for my country. I came over to live for it, and after I have helped make it possible for others to live in peace and happiness, I’ll be back to continue living for you. Then we’ll be happier than we would have been had you not sent me over.

From a letter written by Union Army soldier Charles E. Bingham to his wife, collected in War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (2001), edited by Andrew Carroll

August 9, 1863
Same old camp six miles from Rebbys
. . . .
well i must drop this and wind up i am well and doing well and god grant that this bad mess of scribbling may find you in good health the weather has been exceedingly hot for all i thought it was getting colder please write as often as i remain your kind and affectionate husband and shall till death give all the love that you can spare to them that kneeds it only keepe what you want.

Thank you to all who have served and to all who are serving.

I think I made the right choice, or, It's hard to go wrong deciding to read about TR

TR was the right choice. In the first half of Patricia O’Toole’s splendid When Trumpets Call (2005), Roosevelt publicly breaks with his hand-picked successor, Taft, and the Republican Party to run a doomed campaign at the head of the newly formed Progressive Party. O’Toole presents a detailed picture of the rupture between Roosevelt and Taft, suffused with sadness and misunderstanding and driven in equal parts by Taft’s lack of self-assurance and Roosevelt’s lack of self-knowledge.

Taft’s hurt feelings are palpable; in his laments about Roosevelt’s mistreatment of him, he frequently sounds like a jilted lover, or a kid who’s been beaten up by his long-admired older brother. In 1910 when Roosevelt first began speaking out against the work of Taft’s administration, “He is unhappy without the power he wielded as president. I have been made to feel it. His treatment of me has left scars that will never heal.” As Roosevelt saw it, though, O’Toole explains,

After promising the country that he would “complete and perfect the machinery” built by Roosevelt, Taft had allowed it to be dismantled. Roosevelt had not foreseen the dangers of leaving his progressivism to a maintenance man. Progress requires motion, change, momentum. Taft was a creature of stasis.

Baffled by Roosevelt’s animosity, Taft said more than once in the summer of 1910 that if he knew what Roosevelt wanted, he would do it. “I am absolutely in the dark.”

Following a slashing anti-Roosevelt speech on the campaign trail, Taft was dicovered by a reporter alone, head in hands. “‘Roosevelt was my closest friend,’ he said. Then he wept.” Despite his somewhat muddled nature and his less-than-forceful personality (especially when set alongside TR), it’s extremely hard not to feel sorry for Taft throughout the whole miserable period. He did, however, get the last laugh, I suppose: he not only defeated Roosevelt for the Republican nomination, but he went on to outlive him and to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the job he had always wanted most of all.

Meanwhile, though Roosevelt's need for power was so starkly obvious that his blatant refusal to even acknowledge it must have required a supreme exercise of his vaunted will. When, with Taft out of town (Taft liked to travel in part because it got him away from his wife and her hectoring about his waistline.), he visited Washington, DC,

[Roosevelt] stopped by [the White House] to leave his card—it would have been discourteous not to—and when the servants seemed glad to see him, he lingered. He inquired about the kitchen’s cornbread, which he remembered fondly, and the staff brought him a piece. He ate it as he followed the chief usher on a tour, which included an inspection of the new tennis court and a stop in the executive office, where he sat at the president’s desk and said how natural it felt to be there.

Trying to imagine a contemporary ex-president doing such a thing boggles the mind. O’Toole’s book leaves no doubt that it would have been good for Roosevelt—as it has been, I would argue, for Bill Clinton—had the Twenty-second Amendment been in place to set an insuperable limit on both his ambitions and his sense of duty.

Adding yet another layer of political and emotional complexity to the conflict is TR’s daughter Alice’s marriage to Republican congressman Nick Longworth, who represented Taft’s home district in Cincinnati. Though Roosevelt privately urged him to support Taft, as was his duty as Taft’s home congressman, the tension within the Longworth family was almost unsupportable. Taft backers through and through, they all, aside from Nick himself, hated the Roosevelts, including (especially?) Alice, and they never hesitated to make their feelings clear. Alice, truly torn, and unable to appear to support either candidate too fervently in public, perhaps suffered more than anyone other than TR when he lost the election; her husband, possibly due to his undesired (and undesirable) association with Roosevelt, was defeated by 101 votes in 1912, meaning the couple had to leave their beloved DC and move back to what Alice dubbed “Cincinnasty.” Worse yet, they were forced to live in Nick’s mother’s house, where

“even [Alice's] nieces and nephews had been taught to despise her. One of the boys, down with the chickenpox, had been told by his mother to be sure to kiss Aunt Alice. The boy allegedly refused on the ground that she would infect him with something worse from her.”

In this, too, President Taft comes off better than most, able to retain legitimate affection for Alice despite the difficult situation.

These brief episodes alone should give you an idea of how full of fascinating detail, incident, and insight When Trumpets Call is. It’s the work of a historian who is able to fully flesh out characters, bringing tremendous empathy to bear without letting it cloud her critical judgment. If the last half of the book holds up, it will be one of the best history books I’ve ever read, right up there with the first volume of Edmund Morris’s two-volume life of Roosevelt (while making any third volume he may be considering writing utterly unnecessary).

And I haven’t even touched on the story of the assassin who shot Roosevelt in Milwaukee during the 1912 campaign. I’ll save that for a later post; for now I’ll just tell you that of course TR didn’t allow the shooting to prevent him from making his planned speech that night, and that the reason the assassin didn’t shoot him in Chicago was that “he did not want to spoil the city’s ‘decent, respectable reception.’”

Lincoln or TR?

On the eve of this splendid, historic Election Day, I faced a reading choice, one that seems to confront me every couple of years: Lincoln or TR? I find both endlessly fascinating, but it’s hard to imagine men of more different temperaments. So which president should accompany me through this election week? So far, I’ve dithered, reading bits of some books about each, unable to choose.

Reading about Roosevelt is, it seems, a lot like being with Roosevelt: fascinating and fun, but draining. He was exactly who he seemed to be, a big, boisterous, energetic, smart, willful, needy man who, in the words of his children, “longed to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” There are virtually no unplumbed depths there—as biographer Patricia O’Toole puts it, he “galloped away from introspection.” So the pleasures of reading about Roosevelt lie in a combination of the joys of reading about someone of such indomitable will and awe at the sheer number of his accomplishments, good and bad. O’Toole’s book, When Trumpets Call (2005), which is the one I have before me, promises to be of particular interest on both fronts, as it focuses on Roosevelt’s post-presidential years, when his will began to be thwarted and his own sense of accomplishment began to waver.

To read about Lincoln, on the other hand, is to yaw between shivering admiration (bordering, this life-long Illinoisan will admit, on reverence) and deeply felt sympathy for the obviously human, familiar man trying not to be crushed by the unimaginable pressures brought to bear on him in the last five years of his life. In his knowledge of himself, Lincoln seems to have been the opposite of Roosevelt. Doris Kearns Goodwin explains in her book about Lincoln and his cabinet, Team of Rivals (2005):

Lincoln possessed an uncanny understanding of his shifting moods, a profound self-awareness that enabled him to find constructive ways to alleviate sadness and stress. Indeed, when he is compared with his colleagues, it is clear that he possessed the most even-tempered disposition of them all. Time and again, he was the one who dispelled his colleagues’ anxiety and sustained their spirits with his gift for storytelling and his life-affirming sense of humor. When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country’s cause.

Yet he remains somewhat mysterious; as Richard Carwardine relates in Lincoln (2003),

Lincoln had dignity, considerable reserve, few real intimates, and a proper sense of the private; as John G. Nicolay and John Milton Hay, his White House secretaries [both quite young men, who would go on to write the first major biography of Lincoln], later remarked, in personal relations with him, “there was a line beyond which no one ever thought of passing.” But he was hardly aloof. He cultivated no airs and graces. In the words of a fellow lawyer, “in the ordinary walks of life [he] did not appear the ‘great man’ that he really was.”

Yet, like TR, Lincoln got people to do what he wanted and needed them to do—including his star-studded, fractious cabinet. And he was clearly a shrewd judge of character (a characteristic he definitely shared with General Grant, though, not, sadly, with President Grant). My interest in that aspect of Lincoln, of his deep understanding of personal relations and how to work with people, may tip the balance this week in his favor, and in favor of Team of Rivals.

But on the other hand, When Trumpets Call, because it treats TR’s post-presidential years, necessarily delves into the many failures of President Taft and the vexed relationship between Roosevelt and his hand-picked successor:

[Taft biographers] have wondered in exasperation how Roosevelt ever could have considered him fit for the presidency. Taft was indolent, irresolute, dependent, and undone by opposition and criticism—a dooming combination. But the Taft that Roosevelt knew had distinguished himself as governor-general of the Philippines, problem-solver in Cuba and Panama, and secretary of war. Under Roosevelt’s energetic leadership, Taft kept his lassitude in check, and his other shortcomings easily could have manifested themselves as virtues. A dependent man makes an excellent lieutenant, for he is happiest when carrying out the orders of others. And a man who shies away from conflict can be an exceptionally agreeable colleague. TR thought his friend Will had “the most loveable personality” of anyone he had ever known.

If that’s not a recipe for a fascinating book, what is?

So TR or Lincoln? Taft and TR or Lincoln and his cabinet? How to choose?

Maybe I should change the name of this blog to too many books, too little time?

On the River of Doubt

One of the many areas of agreement between me and my co-worker Jim is that there can never be too much written about Theodore Roosevelt. But whereas, with Abraham Lincoln, about whom I feel the same, the inextinguishable possibilities of history and biography lie more in the complexity of his psyche, Roosevelt’s richness as a subject is directly tied to his physical inexhaustibility. He crammed so much incident and interest into one life that Edmund Morris’s biography required two volumes just to get through the presidential years.

Nonetheless, I was surprised to find that I wasn't the only person who hadn't heard of the South American river journey that is the subject of Candice Millard’s River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. Another co-worker who’s a TR fan checked the H. W. Brands biography; the journey down the River of Doubt receives a scant four pages. Candice Millard spreads the story out over 400 pages, and it's worth it.

Roosevelt began the trip as a way to cope with his landslide loss to Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election, wherein Roosevelt had broken with the Republicans and run as the candidate of the Progressive Party. Crushed by the defeat, Roosevelt was quick to sign on to an idea proposed by an old friend, Father Zahm of Notre Dame, that he spend a few months traveling the Amazon River. Roosevelt put Zahm in charge of the planning. Zahm, for whom Millard doesn't attempt to hide her contempt, was no fan of hard work, and he delegated the organizational responsibilities to a man whose only credential was leadership of a disastrously failed Arctic exploration. The planning, thus, was poor: deep in the jungle, the members of the expedition were exceedingly displeased to find tins of luxury mustards where they expected to find basic foodstuffs.

The journey was to be fairly unadventurous, compared to some of Roosevelt’s travels as a young man. But once in Brazil—already chafing at the thought of breaking no new ground with his trip—he was quickly convinced to attempt something more daring: a descent of the River of Doubt, an Amazon tributary never before navigated by non-natives. The Brazilian government gave him its full support, in the form of a large number of camaradas, or laborers, and Brazil’s greatest explorer, Colonel Candido Mariana da Silva Rondon, who would be co-leader of the expedition.

From the start of the trip, things went poorly, as even the long overland journey, through territory familiar to Colonel Rondon from earlier exploration, was slower and more difficult than expected. Pack animals dropped dead, food supplies ran low, and malaria began its relentless attack on the group. Father Zahm quickly wore out his welcome through laziness and racism, which irked both Rondon and Roosevelt. The final straw came when he suggested that he be borne in a litter by four camaradas, because, “The Indian is made to carry priests.” Roosevelt asked Father Zahm to step into his tent; when they emerged, the Father was on his way back to Sao Paulo. (A private browbeating by TR is something better imagined than experienced. Even thinking about it makes me want to do whatever he thinks I should do. Quickly.)

The picture Millard paints of Roosevelt is the one we’re accustomed to: strong in body and stronger in will, brave to the point of foolhardiness, indefatigable, and a bit bull-headed. But alongside him she places fully-realized portraits of his son, Kermit, and of Colonel Rondon, who to this day remains a hero in Brazil for his work on behalf of the Amazon’s native population. You don’t need to know much about Roosevelt to realize that he would have trouble with the rule Rondon drummed into his exploration corps: in contact with Indians, “die if you must, but never kill.” Roosevelt was a man who cherished the idea of selling one’s life dear. Yet the element of willpower in Rondon’s adherence to his philosophy of life was so clear—the life hewing so closely to the ideals—that Roosevelt respected Rondon even as the River of Doubt tested the men and their new friendship.

As the expedition makes its way down the river, beset by difficulties at every turn. Millard describes the life of the jungle and explains how centuries of adaptive pressures had fitted animals and plants into ever-tighter evolutionary niches. With the verve of a student of natural history, she tells of the dreaded candiru (which I knew of from Peter Fleming’s excellent Brazilian Adventure), the monkey fish, which can leap high enough out of the water to snag monkeys from low branches, and the more familiar—but no less scary—piranha and caiman.

The men suffered from disease, hunger, and deadly rapids. The jungle itself, in its monotony as much as its dangers, preyed on their minds. Millard quotes from my favorite Brazilian travel book, H. R. Tomlinson’s 1912 The Sea and the Jungle

The forest of the Amazons is not merely trees and shrubs. It is not land. It is another element. Its inhabitants are arborean; they have been fashioned for life in that medium as fishes to the seas and birds to the air. Its green apparition is persistent, as the sky is and the ocean. In months of travel it is the horizon which the traveler cannot reach.

Millard conveys that tedium, and the danger, hunger, and weariness of the expedition, as well as the best travel writers—everyone from Apsley Cherry-Garrard to Bill Bryson—to the point where I found myself admiring the men just for getting up from their bedrolls in the morning.

Well into the journey, Roosevelt develops a fever and wastes away before our eyes, from the hale man who just the year before delivered a speech in Milwaukee with five bullets in his chest from a would-be assassin, to skin-and-bones shell, unable to walk. At that point, it doesn't matter that we know he died in his bed years later. There are thirty days ahead on the River of Doubt, and we see no escape. Getting out was Roosevelt's last great adventure, and thanks to Candice Millard, we now know all about it.

Conversations and anecdotes

From River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard (2005)

He was, [Colonel] Rondon wrote, “the life of the party.” In contrast to the reserved, taciturn Brazilian colonel, Roosevelt must have seemed peculiarly fun and lighthearted. Rondon himself was stunned by his loquacious co-commander. “And talk!” he wrote, “I never saw a man who talked so much. He would talk all of the time he was in swimming, all of the time during meals, traveling in the canoe and at night around the camp fire. He talked endlessly and on all conceivable subjects.”

From Tolstoy: A Biography, by A. N. Wilson (1988)

In society, shyness still tormented [the young Tolstoy] unless he was drunk. It is hard to think that the rules which he formulated for social behaviour necessarily made him the most charming of companions. “Rules for society. Choose difficult situations, always try to control a conversation, speak loudly, calmly and distinctly, try to being and end a conversation yourself. Seek the company of people higher in the world than yourself.”

From “The Evils of Spain,” by V. S. Pritchett , collected in Essential Stories (2005)

Caesar did not speak much. He gave his silent weight to the dinner, letting his head drop like someone falling asleep, and listening. To the noise we made his silence was a balance and he nodded all the time slowly, making everything true. Sometimes someone told some story about him and he listened to that, nodding and not disputing it.

From a review by Anthony Powell in the Daily Telegraph of John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England, by Maurice Pollett (1971). Collected in Some Poets, Artists, and ‘A Reference for Mellors’(2005).

Admitting that [John Skelton (c.1400-1529) had] a contemporary reputation for wit and eccentricity, we find also a mild anecdote about Skelton included during his own lifetime in one of those collections of jokes popular at the time, A Hundred Merry Tales. Shakespeare took some of his funny stories from this particular anthology.

So far so good, but hardly was Skelton in his coffin before further stories began to pour out about him, in which he was confused with a friend of Chaucer’s called Scoggin—also, as it happened, a poet and royal tutor—who had lived about a hundred years earlier.

That was bad enough, but worse was to come. Scoggin, as has been said, was an earlier personality, but one who, from his career, might be judged to possess a somewhat similar line of wit to Skelton’s. Unfortunately, on this already muddled situation descended an avalanche of chestnuts, many of a bawdy sort, told about another Scoggin, who almost certainly never existed, but was said to have been court fool to Henry VII.

Simply as regards confusion of identity, it was rather as if a story told about Evelyn Waugh was then said to refer to P. G. Wodehouse, and, as a result, not only were Waugh and Wodehouse anecdotes impossible to sort out, but they also could not be distinguished from those about Bertie Wooster, believed by many to be a real man.

Presidents and dissent

From Candice Millard's River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey:

When [Roosevelt's] train pulled into Chile's capital, Santiago, in late November [1913], he was greeted by a crowd that at first seemed to mirror the friendly masses that had welcomed him to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. But the moment he leapt from his Pullman to the train-station floor, with the triumphal strains of the American and Chilean national anthems echoing around him, his welcoming party suddenly transformed into an angry protest rally. "The human multitude, showing marked hostility, shouted with all their might vivas!--to Mexico and Colombia, and Down with the Yankee Imperialism!" a journalist for Lima's West Coast Leader excitedly reported.

The Chilean government went to great lengths to shield Roosevelt from the demonstrations, even buying and destroying newspapers that covered anti-Roosevelt rallies, but their guest had no desire to hide from any assult on himself or his country. On the contrary, he took every opportunity to face down his attackers, ready to explain in no uncertain terms why he was right and they were wrong. At a state reception welcoming him to Chile, he vigorously debated Marchial Martinez, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, about the continuted relevance of the Monroe Doctrine. Days later, in an electrifiying speech, he gave an impassioned, utterly unapologetic defense of the Panama Canal.

And that was when Roosevelt was a private citizen, no longer president. Not quite the same as George Bush's scripted press conferences and talks before hand-picked, pre-screened audiences.

This passage also reminds us that not much has changed: an American president could today go to South America and hear that same chant, and he'd still deserve it.