TO RESCUE THE AMERICAN SPIRIT

Roosevelt’s forceful life is portrayed as the embodiment of America “as it was meant to be.”

Baier, chief political anchor for Fox News, is a prolific biographer whose volume on Theodore Roosevelt joins his works on George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. The author’s portrait of the 26th president draws on Roosevelt’s writings, diaries, letters, speeches, and other biographies. Baier sketches Roosevelt’s transformations to politician, president, soldier, writer, and naturalist. Propelled into the presidency following President McKinley’s assassination, Roosevelt himself later survived an assassination attempt in 1912. The book touches on intriguing, contradictory aspects of his trajectory. Though devoted to his large family, Roosevelt left his wife, Edith, during a difficult pregnancy to fight in the 1898 Spanish-American War. Emerging as a national hero—leading to the vice presidency—Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. A staunch Republican, Roosevelt battled his party’s corrupt power brokers and powerful corporate trusts controlling railroads and coal mines. His love of western wilderness led to the 1905 establishment of the Forest Service and national forests. After helping William Howard Taft succeed him, Roosevelt was so dissatisfied with Taft’s policies he ran against him as Progressive Party candidate, handing Democrat Woodrow Wilson the victory. Roosevelt railed against Wilson’s inaction in confronting World War I, proposing to recruit his own volunteer army. Henry Cabot Lodge captured Roosevelt’s imprint on the national imagination, observing: “He never by any chance bored the American people.” A fascinating figure, Roosevelt merits a deeper examination and additional social and political context. Though this account touches the bases, readers seeking a fuller picture can choose from numerous other acclaimed biographies.

This portrait of an iron-willed president digs only so deep.