Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt became president at forty-two because someone shot his predecessor, and spent seven years using the office in ways it had not been used before. Born in 1858 into an old and wealthy New York family, he was an asthmatic child who was told to build his body and did so obsessively, boxing at Harvard and keeping it up until a blow detached a retina and blinded him in one eye — which he concealed. His wife and his mother died in the same house on the same day in 1884, and he went to the Dakota badlands and ran cattle for two years. He came back into politics as a civil service commissioner, then police commissioner of New York, walking the beats at night to catch officers asleep, then assistant secretary of the navy, from which he resigned in 1898 to raise a volunteer cavalry regiment and charge up Kettle Hill in Cuba. That made him governor of New York, and the party bosses put him in the vice-presidency to get rid of him. McKinley was shot in September 1901. His presidency invented much of what the office now does: antitrust suits against Northern Securities and Standard Oil, the Pure Food and Drug Act after Sinclair's novel, federal mediation in the coal strike on the miners' behalf, 230 million acres put into public protection, and the Panama Canal, obtained by recognising a Panamanian revolt against Colombia within hours. He mediated the Russo-Japanese War and won a Nobel Prize. He split the Republicans in 1912, was shot campaigning and finished the speech, and died in 1919. His conservation record and his imperial record are the same record. The man who created the national forests also took Panama, ran the Philippines war to its end, and stated the corollary under which the United States would police the Caribbean, and he saw no tension in it.

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