Colonel Roosevelt

From Barnes & Noble

This magisterial 768-page biography the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex tracks the extraordinarily eventful post-presidential (1909-1919) career of Teddy Roosevelt, including his vigorous, valiant "Bull Moose" fight for the White House in 1912. Author Edmund Morris contends that had T.R. won that hard-fought campaign, World War I might have been averted. (Hand-selling tip: Make no mistake: Colonel Roosevelt is a major biography, certain to be reviewed prominently.)

Geoffrey C. Ward

Morris is a stylish storyteller with an irresistible subject. The seismic personality that one White House visitor said had to be wrung from one's clothes when leaving Roosevelt's presence infuses every one of his trilogy's nearly 2,500 pages…Morris has lost none of his narrative skill over the last 31 years. His new book is filled with vivid set pieces, from the train ride across the sunburned plains of East Africa with which it opens to the snowy graveside ceremony at Oyster Bay with which his story ends.
—The New York Times Book Review

Fred Kaplan

Colonel Roosevelt is compelling reading, and Morris a brilliant biographer who practices his art at the highest level. Minor flaws, yes. But he has the reader's interests at heart…the writing is vivid in its restraint, powerful in its precision and shapely in its structure and vision. Morris has a way of making aspects of Roosevelt's life and values relevant in both dark and bright ways.
—The Washington Post

Janet Maslin

Theodore Roosevelt lived for 60 hale, hearty, prodigiously adventurous years. Edmund Morris has devoted more than half that time to writing a magisterial three-volume Roosevelt biography…Now with Colonel Roosevelt, the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt's life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life's work, he has reason to be immensely proud.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Having followed his 1979 classic, Pulitzer-winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, with a fine account of his presidency, Theodore Rex, in 2001, historian Morris returns to top form in this enthralling story of Roosevelt's life after leaving office in 1909. As Morris says, TR's presidency was an impossible act to follow. The outgoing chief executive (1858–1919) welcomed his successor, William Howard Taft, and left the country for a year, but on his return plunged back into politics, angry at Taft's backsliding on reform. The rank-and file adored Roosevelt, but Republican leaders didn't, so he abandoned the party for the historic three-way 1912 campaign, during which two progressives, Roosevelt and Wilson, battled it out, and Taft came in third. Despite losing, only death interrupted Roosevelt's outpouring of political maneuvering, journalism, scholarship, exploration, and profuse, generally unwelcome advice to President Wilson. Like Robert Caro with Lyndon Johnson, Morris has devoted a career to one man with equally impressive results. This is a witty, insightful biography combined with a vivid political history of America from 1910 to 1919, centered on a relentlessly energetic ex-president. It is a joy to read. 64 illus.; 2 maps. (Nov.)

Library Journal

This is the final volume in Morris's biographical trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt (TR), after The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex. Though he breaks no new ground, he covers the major aspects of TR's postpresidential life, including an African safari, his ill-fated third-party presidential bid, and a near-fatal Amazon expedition. Out of power, TR half understood that his fate was sealed by previous political missteps and his own mortality, as well as by his ideology. A Social Darwinist, he was driven to prove that natural selection was on his side, although this was tempered by the noblesse oblige instilled in him by his father. At his peak TR was the right man for the time, guiding an isolationist adolescent nation to world power just as he had transformed himself. Yet this final volume captures the sadness that inevitably caught up with him. Morris clearly identifies with his hero while at the same time pointing out TR's flaws as well as the limitations of those who opposed him, especially Woodrow Wilson. VERDICT Morris skillfully holds readers' attention throughout the book, which is as filled with adventure as Volume 1, even as TR's life inevitably moved downhill. In completion of the most objective and worthwhile TR biography, this is an essential purchase.—William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport

Kirkus Reviews

With appropriate crescendo and coda, the concluding volume of the author's sweeping biography of Theodore Roosevelt, followingThe Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) andTheodore Rex (2001).

Morris opens this account of the last decade of Roosevelt's life in 1909, when, just out of office, TR was somewhat at a loss about to what to do. He had, after all, been a model for the "strenuous life" he recommended, commanding soldiers and sending imperial fleets off to impress American power on the world. He had written books and countless articles, some, uncomfortably, equating birth control with "race suicide"—one reason, suggests the author, that the New Left of the 1960s considered him "a bully, warmonger, and 'overt racist.' " He had served two terms as president but decided not to go after a third, even though, in those days, he could have served forever. With no particular place to go, TR headed out on safari to Africa, shooting nearly everything he saw. Then he traveled the world, returning to America just in time to fall into often-bitter feuding with his successor, William Howard Taft. As Morris writes, TR transformed into a reforming leftist, "with enough administrative and legislative proposals to keep the federal government busy for two decades," while Taft and Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson occupied places to the right. When Wilson took office, TR became one of his sternest critics, likening him in one renowned speech to Pontius Pilate. Yet, writes Morris, even his admirers found reason to think the one-time master of the bully pulpit a mere bully. The Colonel—for so he insisted on being called—did not end his days well. Presciently, he foresaw his decline almost exactly when it occurred, a sad disintegration into a melancholic and inactive ill health. However, as the author notes at the end of his fluent narrative, for all the criticism of TR in his day and after, he has risen to the top tier of presidents, and is increasingly seen as a friend deemed him: "a fulfiller of good intentions."

Roosevelt never fails to fascinate, and Morris provides a highly readable, strong finish to his decades-long marathon.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt (and the author of a critically panned biography of Ronald Reagan), has returned with the third and final volume of his Roosevelt biography. Colonel Roosevelt, with its descriptive and narrative power, its thorough exploitation of sources, and its interplay of man and nation, may be the best biography ever written about the life of an American president. It fascinates, in much the same way that Roosevelt's editor at Metropolitan Magazine described the impression "TR" made on people: "all showing some signs of having passed through a tidal moment in their lives."

Readers of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt were engrossed by Morris' narrative of Roosevelt recovering from the death of his young wife and his mother by spending a year in the western badlands, converting himself from an East Coast Harvard dude into a man of action, able to connect with Americans from all walks of life. Morris, who grew up in Kenya and South Africa and has a feel for the wilderness, once again provides spellbinding accounts. The first, which opens the book, sets Roosevelt in Kenya, hunting big game and collecting specimens of plants and animals for the Smithsonian Institution. The second, which comes nearer to the end, describes a harrowing trip TR took in the Amazon basin, to chart a wilderness river for the Brazilian government -- the river gets renamed Rio Roosevelt -- and of course to hunt, fish, and collect specimens.

To brilliant effect Morris uses each trip as a device to structure meaning in TR's life. At the end of his carefree African adventure TR sails down the Nile, closer and closer to a return to Western civilization, and he receives news about American politics that presages his coming break with President Taft. It is Heart of Darkness in reverse. As TR portages and paddles downriver in the Amazon, the dangers increase (unfriendly locals, a mutineer among the crew, ravenous insects, difficult terrain). Morris describes a low point in a diarist's staccato:

"Clearing skies and baking heat. Rapids, rapids, rapids. Portages too numerous to count. Occasional fish dinners, but still no meat. Evasive tapirs. Grilled parrots and toucans. Monkey stew. Palm cabbage. Wild pineapples. Fatty Brazil nuts. Disappearance of fifteen food tins. Only three weeks of rations left."

TR and the others gradually unburden themselves, Lear-like (in torrential rain no less) of their possessions and much of their cultural assumptions. TR's son Kermit gets one of the crew killed through an impetuous decision on the river and almost dies himself, but in the process becomes, in his father's lights, a real Roosevelt. TR barely makes it out of the Amazon alive.

When Morris deals with domestic politics and international crises, he makes a strong case for TR's continued relevance. Going against a tendency of some biographers to see TR in retirement as a blustering blowhard, unable to get off the stage, Morris shows the ex-President in all his complexity, at the center of progressive thought and Progressive party politics. Morris makes a strong case that TR's criticism of Wilson's policies in the first three years of the war were correct, and that the nation would have been better off if it had heeded his calls for preparedness and a defense buildup. It is a serious rethinking of the pre-war years.

The Roosevelt family comes alive in Morris's telling. Wife Edith remains as private as ever, but always loving and supportive. All TR's sons go off to war, and Quentin, the dashing pilot, dies in combat with a German ace. TR's grief at his sons' injuries and Quentin's death remains a private matter, but Morris lifts the curtain for us.

Colonel Roosevelt settles some scores with academic historians who pummeled Morris for his unorthodox narrative approach to his Reagan biography, in a set piece in which TR lectures at the American Historical Association:

"The imaginative power demanded for a great historian is different from that demanded for a great poet; but it is no less marked. Such imaginative power is in no sense incompatible with minute accuracy. On the contrary, very accurate, very real, very vivid, presentation of the past can come only from one in whom the imaginative gift is strong."

With this book, Morris rests his case.

--Richard Pious