What drained the glory of war from T R was when his son, Kermit, was killed in WWI. Since POTOS Wilson would not allow T R to fight he encouraged his son to go find glory and lived vicariously through him. T R was never the same after having to tell his wife of the death of their son and deal with the remorse he felt for having encouraged him to go to war.
12
Media image making and remaking was old hat by 1900; Lincoln's re-imaging from railroad lawyer to railsplitter was just another political tool. Roosevelt took it new heights, doing it for and by himself.
Not for nothing did Finley Peter Dunne's Mr Dooley describe TR's war memoir thusly: “Tis Th’ Biography iv a Hero be Wan who Knows. Tis Th’Darin’ Exploits iv a Brave Man be an Actual Eye Witness,” Mr. Dooley observes. “If I was him, I’d call th’ book, ‘Alone in Cubia.”
Roosevelt's image-making is covered well in "Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan: The Making of a President" by Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03612759.1998.10528243#
So well that various Amazon reviewers are outraged by it.
3
and what of the black men
who were cut out of the photograph
out of the history
the roughest riders of all
who dug teddy's big ditch
the american century indeed
6
Let's look at what really happened. The American press was aching to make a hero out of Roosevelt. When he went to Cuba, a hassle of photographers went with him decided to record every day of his stay. At San Juan Hill, his Rough Riders were decimated and it was the Buffalo Regiment, made up of Blacks, who took the hill. Roosevelt himself arrived after the hill had been taken.But the movement to create a hero was on and the legend was born.
Roosevelt initially gave credit to the Buffalo Regiment, but as time went by, he diminished their role until he ended up saying that if it wasn't for the encouragement and leadership of the white officials, they would not have surged ahead. As always, to the victors go the spoils.
13
We are still all paying for his, and the other Roosevelt's, conniving and arrogance.
Roosevelt seems to have been born with an innate lust for violence and killing. Widely known and thanked for his role in establishing national parks, he was, by his own estimate a blood-thirsty hunter of birds and animals. He and his son slaughtered 512 animals -- not including birds -- on one African safari. The Safari' total was estimated at 11,000 victims. He is said to have killed nearly 100,000 animals in his various hunts and potshots. Left to his own devices, TR was a killing machine.
11
One of the few characteristics about our current commander-in-chief that I'm grateful for is his reticence towards war, in spite of John Bolton.
Don't get me wrong, I think Trump is a dangerous leader in many other ways, but my point is that I don't think TR should be idolized for bellicosity. Churchill at least very badly needed to be at war in his time.
6
Based on this review, the book sounds very interesting and I have purchased an electronic version of the book to read.
2
This looks like an excellent book to read. I'm a big fan of Theodore Roosevelt on many levels. It is very interesting the similar internal dynamics shared between Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Both wanted "to get action", from a young age, all through their youth, early manhood and onward.
8
Teddy Roosevelt certainly loved to fight, loved war. Not an endearing quality.
9
@Mark Siegel In fact this was Roosevelt's only war, and just a decade later he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in mediating the Russo-Japan war. If I remember Edmund Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt correctly, the battle of San Juan Hill was the first and last time he killed a man. Morris gave me the impression that the act of killing fundamentally altered him.
7
Though not exactly the same path, I can't help but see a parallel between Teddy's rise to the leadership of his country and that of Sir Winston Churchill, and his rise to the leadership of Great Britain. Where are such men today? The need for them has never been greater.
14
Like Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill loved war too much. His record as a military leader was spotty. He wanted to launch D-Day before the Allies were remotely ready. It took FDR’s cunning and strategic genius to keep him at bay. Churchill did a brilliant job keeping up the spirits of the British people during the low points of the war, and he was an exceedingly gifted writer. In sum, I don’t share the consensus view that he was a great man.
5
@Michael
They have bone spurs in their feet. But for that, they'd be honored to serve...
5
While not necessarily disagreeing regarding Churchill's character, I believe it was the Americans who wanted to rush DDay, pushing for a 1943 cross-Channel invasion, and the British who insisted on waiting.
5