Teddy Roosevelt’s epilogue of vanities

Like old generals, most presidents, when they leave office, slowly fade away. Such men as Washington and Jefferson retired to their estates and departed from the public scene. There were a few exceptions -- John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren served in Congress after they were evicted from the White House -- but on the whole, the presidency was the apex and the end of a long career.

But Theodore Roosevelt was not like most presidents. He was atypically young when he took the oath of office, and when he left after nearly eight years, he had served not quite two terms. Much to his later regret, he had promised not to seek a third. As a result, in 1908, this vigorous, hyperactive and still immensely ambitious man found himself, at 50, out of a job and out of the limelight. He took an almost immediate dislike to this new state of affairs. Not prepared to live out his life basking in his former glory, he reinserted himself into the political fray, with fury and passion, and decidedly mixed results.

As president, Teddy Roosevelt set the tone for the new century, combining two utterly contradictory elements: a fervent belief that the government had a responsibility to protect those who could not protect themselves and a Darwinian conviction that the strong should rule the weak. “Nature,” he declared, “gave humankind a stark choice: conquer or be conquered.” With the noblesse oblige that comes from a life of privilege and a familiarity with power, he managed to do justice to both of those inclinations, supporting the use of military power in Latin America and the use of government power to protect not only the great untouched wilderness of the American West but also to provide American workers with basic guarantees.

As Patricia O’Toole reminds us in “When Trumpets Call,” Roosevelt was a man who shunned introspection. His was an external life, and he only felt alive when engaged with the world. The more engaged he was, the more alive he felt, and so the post-presidency was a major letdown. How such a man deals with such a change is the stuff of great drama. It is also one reason why O’Toole, who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her work on Henry Adams, was drawn to the subject. Roosevelt is not just intriguing as a powerful man who had to adjust to a life out of power. Roosevelt’s post-presidency was highly political, both because of his role in the 1912 election and because he remained the most dynamic figure in the Republican Party until his death.

His presidency was marked by great changes, in law and in world affairs. But under his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, there was a lull. Taft had a miserable time, and the only saving grace was that nothing happened demanding that he rise to the office. O’Toole captures the pathos and poignancy of Taft, a decent man who simply could not emerge from Roosevelt’s shadow. And Roosevelt, who had no sympathy for human weakness, detested him for it. He campaigned against Taft, called him a “puzzlewit” and a “fathead,” and he exploded with glee at the thought of his defeat.

O’Toole casts Roosevelt’s decision to contest the presidency in 1912 as the result not of principle but of personal pique: “Roosevelt, whose self-knowledge was spotty, had a sheaf of high-minded rationales for entering the fight but not a single credible insight into his motives. The border between self-restraint and self-gratification is porous, and Roosevelt easily slipped across.” While this analysis of Roosevelt’s motives is not new, O’Toole goes further than many in showing just how personal the political was for him. In her retelling, the 1912 election was shaped not by Roosevelt’s determination to revive the Progressive agenda that Taft and mainstream Republicans had rejected but by his limitless pride. She captures Roosevelt almost perfectly when she writes that he “mistook the sirens of personal ambition for the trumpets of public duty.” Angered that his successor had failed, he reacted by trying to erase the mistake, and what better way than to reclaim the presidency and finish what he had started.

Roosevelt narrowly lost the election to Woodrow Wilson, but he handed Taft one of the worst losses a sitting president has ever suffered. He also had the satisfaction of knowing that the Progressive agenda, including more protections for labor and further steps to contain monopolies, was vigorously championed by Wilson. Even on the vital question of national security, Wilson ended up guiding the United States into war with Germany in 1917, much to the dismay of many Democrats but to the grudging satisfaction of giddy advocates such as Roosevelt, who believed in the use of force and had despaired when America seemed to skirt its duty to fight.

O’Toole is a deft writer, with an eye for vignettes and an ear for language and its rhythms. But the ground she covers here is not as virgin as she suggests, and the picture she paints does not add appreciably to the already vast literature on Theodore Roosevelt. We are left with wonderful stories but no compelling sense of why these stories need retelling.

Entertainment is perhaps reason enough. Yet O’Toole seems compelled by more than that, as her protagonist would certainly have demanded. He would have insisted that the stories about his life have meaning and that their retelling be in the service of some larger point or greater goal. He would have demanded a thesis, probably one that exaggerated his significance and his place in setting the nation on its proper course even in his decade out of the White House. Before he became president and after, even his entertainment, whether it was hunting in Africa, exploring the Amazon or running for office, was justified because it was supposed to contribute in some way to the destiny of the country and the good of its citizens. Many of those sentiments may have been his vanity talking, but it is hard not to be impressed by the audacity of his spirit and ambition. O’Toole, notwithstanding her undeniable skill as a writer, could have used a dose of Rooseveltian purpose in crafting her narrative. Vanity is often a vice, but modesty is not always a virtue. *

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From When Trumpets Call

Before the federal government could serve the needs of all the people, the special interests had to be driven out of politics, Roosevelt said, and to that end he recommended disclosure of campaign contributions and a ban on the use of corporate money for political purposes. He also wanted managers and directors held personally responsible when their companies broke the law. A man in charge of a corporation means to do well, he said, “but I want ... enough supervision to help him realize that desire to do well.”