Theodore Rex.

• Author: Schaffer, Howard B.
• Position: Moose Tracking

THEODORE REX by Edmund Morris Simon & Schuster, $35.00

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, TO THE consternation and dismay of the conservative leadership of his own Republican party, Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th president of the United States. It proved a turning point in American history. The youngest and, by any reckoning, one of the most dynamic and fascinating men ever to reach the White House, Roosevelt--the Theodore Rex of Edmund Morris's highly readable new biography--followed a long succession of mediocrities who had presided over the country in the 36 years after the death of Lincoln.

Like his assassinated predecessor William McKinley, these mostly forgotten men felt no need to exercise the power and influence inherent in the presidency and were largely overshadowed by the congressional leaders, industrial tycoons and Wall Street bankers who dominated the American scene in the post-Civil War years. Roosevelt rejected their legacy and made the White House a powerful force in shaping the nation's political, economic and social life. The first president to begin his term in the 20th century, he had an impact on the governing of the country that endured long after he left office in 1909 after completing his second administration.

Theodore Rex--Morris recalls that Henry James used the phrase--is a lucid, insightful and sympathetic portrait of Roosevelt's seven and a half years as president. It follows the able biographer's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) in which Morris chronicled Roosevelt's meteoric progress from his childhood in a prominent patrician family in Manhattan, through his years as a privileged Harvard preppy and tough North Dakota ranch hand, to a succession of political and military positions--among them the New York State assemblyman, New York City commissioner of police, heroic and famed leader of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, a governor of New York, and, briefly, vice president.

Theodore Rex picks up Roosevelt's story with McKinley's death, when as Senator Mark Hanna famously declared, "that damned cowboy is the president of the United States." Roosevelt was then not quite 43. What follows is an almost play-by-play account of Roosevelt's years in power that begins with his breakneck dash by horseback and special trainride from his cabin in the wilderness of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York to Buffalo, where McKinley lay dead, the victim of an anarchist's bullet. In the...