T.R.: The Last Romantic.

• Author: Kesler, Charles R.

H.W. Brands (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 897 pp., $35.

It is difficult to write a bad book about Theodore Roosevelt, but even more difficult to write a really good one. H.W. Brands, a professor of history at Texas A&M, deserves congratulation on his new one-volume biography, an honest, enjoyable, sympathetic portrait of our twenty-sixth president. Aside from a melodramatic prologue and some unfortunate bows to modern psychology, Brands provides a straightforward narrative of Roosevelt's life, letting T.R. speak for himself and allowing his contemporaries to provide commentary. The result is a vivid character study, stronger on his life than on his times, but engrossing throughout. The book appears in a season of renewed interest in the Republican Roosevelt, not least because of the conservative debate over "national greatness" sparked by David Brooks and William Kristol, in which Roosevelt figures prominently as a patron saint of American nationalism and energetic government.

T.R. was a phenomenon, "a force of nature", as countless friends as well as enemies called him. His character, at once exasperating and endearing, helped to make politics interesting again for Americans who still lived in the shadow of the Civil War, sheltered but dominated by the great men and achievements of the mid-nineteenth century. William Jennings Bryan, the other galvanizing politician of Roosevelt's era, was a much less interesting figure in his own right, and his platform of debt relief through rampant monetary inflation could hardly be called high-minded. So in an age when public attention focused more on industrialists and financiers like Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan than on politicians, and when politicians themselves were often cogs in political machines run by better known or more notorious bosses, Roosevelt stood out. His ranching, hunting, birdwatching, book writing, politicking, bullying, flag waving, soldiering, and canal-building reminded Americans that life was about more than getting and spending, and that happiness and duty were not mutually exclusive. T.R. was living proof that politics at its best was something higher both more fun and more serious - than economics.

Part of the fun (and the seriousness) was Roosevelt's talent for invective. He was not a great writer, but he could turn a phrase, particularly if it were acerbic: he was a virtuoso of vituperation. Brands provides many examples: the opponents of the Panama Canal treaty were "a small body of shrill eunuchs"; the British ambassador, Roosevelt confided, "seems to have a brain of about eight guinea-pig power"; Bryan was "the cheapest faker we have ever had proposed for President"; journalist Joseph Pulitzer was "one of those creatures of the gutter of such unspeakable degradation that to him even eminence on a dunghill seems enviable." And surveying Woodrow Wilson's neutrality policy, T.R. commented, "We are passing through a thick streak of yellow in our national life."

Roosevelt was certainly "judgmental", as we would say today, which is one reason why reading him (and about him) is such a tonic. But the principles behind his judgments were not always reliable. Of these underlying moral and intellectual doctrines, Brands says very little - characteristically, he provides us with T.R.'s grades at Harvard, but not the contents of his courses. What Brands does vouchsafe about Roosevelt's principles is entirely conventional, bound up as it is in the tired account of Progressivism as a more or less natural outgrowth of American social and economic conditions. For decades, this lazy man's Marxism (there are several varieties of it, depending on whether the Progressives were reforming democratic capitalism in order to preserve it or...