The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014) s01e01 Episode Script

Narrator: One drowsy summer afternoon in 1908, in the fifth floor offices of the law firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn at 54 Wall Street in Manhattan, the junior clerks were idly talking about their dreams for the future.
Most hoped just to become partners one day.
But one had far bigger dreams.
He didn't plan to practice law for long, he said.
He intended to go into politics and eventually become president of the United States.
The speaker was just 25 years old.
He had been an undistinguished student and he was an indifferent lawyer.
But no one laughed.
His name, after all, was Franklin Roosevelt.
His fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was already president, the youngest and perhaps the most popular president in American history.
And his rise to that office had once appeared just as unlikely as their fellow clerk's chances now seemed.
Newsreel announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to present the president of the United States.
[Cheering and applause.]
Franklin Roosevelt: This is the second dedication and there will be others by other presidents [Cheering and applause.]
And I think that we can perhaps meditate a little on those Americans 10,000 years from now.
I think we can wonder whether our descendants because I think they'll still be here what they will think about us.
And let us hope that at least they will give us the benefit of the doubt, that they will believe that we have honestly striven in our day and generation to preserve for our descendants a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under.
[Applause.]
Narrator: Between them, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt would occupy the White House for 19 of the first 45 years of the 20th century, years during which much of the modern world and the modern state was created.
Man: Jefferson's view of government was that government can only do that which is explicitly enumerated in the constitution of the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt coming one century later, precisely one century later, says, "no.
Government can do anything that is not specifically prohibited in the Constitution.
" And he believed that the government of the United States had to be much more central, energetic, and assertive than the constitution had envisioned it or we could not go on as a nation.
I think both presidents regarded the constitution as a nuisance, that is something that was all right in the late 18th century but just wou didn't fit a, their country and, more important, them.
They had bigger dreams, and they thought that, ah, the Constitution was elastic enough to accommodate their ambitions.
Narrator: They belonged to different parties.
They overcame different obstacles.
They had different temperaments and styles of leadership.
But it was the similarities and not the differences between the two that meant the most to history.
Both were children of privilege who came to see themselves as champions of the workingman and earned the undying enmity of many of those among whom they'd grown to manhood.
They shared a sense of stewardship of the American land; an unfeigned love for people and politics; and a firm belief that the United States had an important role to play in the wider world.
Both were hugely ambitious, impatient with the drab notion that the mere making of money should be enough to satisfy any man or nation; and each took unabashed delight in the great power of his office to do good.
Each displayed unbounded optimism and self-confidence, each refused to surrender to physical limitations that might have destroyed them, and each had an uncanny ability to rally men and women to his cause.
Man: And you can't expect people like that to happen all the time.
The exceptional presidents are the exception.
And these two Roosevelts were exceptional with a capital "E" underscored.
Narrator: The two Roosevelts belonged to two branches of an old New York family whose members sometimes viewed one another with suspicion.
The living link between them was Theodore Roosevelt's best-loved niece and Franklin's wife Eleanor.
She had learned to face fear and master it long before her husband declared that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself.
Her own character and energy and devotion to principle would make her the most consequential First Lady and one of the most consequential women in American history.
Man: It's Shakespeare to have a single family in which human flaws and virtues are on such vivid display.
And the constant struggle between those vices and those virtues to try to do good and to fulfill one's duty.
Man: I think all of the Roosevelts were wounded people.
They had things, things had happened to them that they had to overcome.
And somehow all of them learned from that, that people could overcome things and that it was worthwhile trying to help people overcome things.
Woman: And what's so extraordinary is to realize that they're connected by this web of ties.
The fact that Franklin Roosevelt idolizes Theodore Roosevelt when he's a young man and tries to follow his path through Assistant Secretary of the Navy, through the governor, through the presidency.
The fact that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt who are related to one another get married and become this couple and this extraordinary president and first lady.
And the fact that Franklin Roosevelt finally is able to put into place the very goals that Theodore Roosevelt had expressed in the Bull Moose platform in 1912 that he was never able to realize, that Franklin Roosevelt brought to fruition.
It's an extraordinary story.
The drama of it is unmatched probably in our history.
Narrator: This is the story of the Roosevelts.
No other American family has ever touched so many lives.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: About 1644, our common very common ancestor, Klaes Van Roosevelt, came to New Amsterdam from Holland as a "settler" the euphemistic name for an immigrant who came over in the steerage of a sailing ship in the 17th century instead of the steerage of a steamer in the 19th century.
From that time, for the next 7 generations, from father to son, every one of us was born on Manhattan Island.
Theodore Roosevelt.
Ward: Americans don't like to think of themselves as divided by class.
But the Roosevelts are patricians.
They were born and raised to believe that they really were better than other people.
They could all have been perfectly comfortable and happy.
And instead they decided to get into public life and see what they could do about making the lives of other Americans better.
Narrator: The Roosevelts eventually became one of New York's most prominent families, their substantial fortune built on Manhattan real estate and banking, west Indian sugar, and imported window glass.
They were known for their dignity and decorum.
People like the Roosevelts, one old New Yorker remembered, were "the only nobility we had.
Men could not stand straight in their presence.
" All the Roosevelts worked and lived in the city, but two branches of the family would become known for the places where they had their summer homes north of Manhattan, at Hyde Park on the Hudson River, and to the east, on the north shore of Long Island at Oyster Bay.
On October 27, 1858, Theodore Roosevelt was born at his family's Manhattan townhouse on 20th Street, the second of what would be 4 children.
His grandmother pronounced him "as sweet and pretty a young baby as I have ever seen," but within 3 years, his parents were fearing for his life.
He suffered frequent colds, fevers, headaches, cramps, and he often gasped for breath.
McCullough: This little boy was ill virtually from the time he was aware he even existed.
And he was very ill with asthma.
It's as close to feeling that you're being strangled to death as is possible.
And with an acute asthmatic it is, you are being strangled to death.
And with a child, of course, it is utterly terrifying.
He heard his parents say, when they didn't think he could hear, that he wasn't expected to live very long.
He also was a spare, spindly little fellow and full of fear.
He was afraid to go out of the house without his younger brother Elliot accompanying him.
And he's constantly trying to cope with fear, cope with his inner terror.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: I was a sickly, delicate boy, suffered much from asthma, and frequently had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe.
One of my memories is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person.
Narrator: His father would always be his hero.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: My father combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness.
No one whom I have ever met approached his combination of enjoyment of life and performance of duty.
Narrator: Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.
's inherited fortune permitted him to indulge his whims ensuring he had a yellow saffronia rose for his buttonhole each morning, driving one of New York's fastest four-in-hands through Central Park, leading family excursions to Europe and the Middle East.
But he also had what he called a "troublesome conscience," and used his income to become something new in New York a serious philanthropist who gave half his time each week to one or another of a dozen charitable organizations, including the Children's Aid Society and the Newsboy's Lodging House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the brand-new American Museum of Natural History.
His children called him "great heart" without a hint of irony.
"My mother, Martha Bulloch," Theodore recalled, "was a sweet, gracious, beautiful southern woman, entirely 'unreconstructed' to the day of her death.
" Her family called her Mittie.
McCullough: She was reputedly the most beautiful woman in New York of her day.
Now, the assumption, alas, by too many people then and since has been that because she was beautiful and southern she wasn't very bright.
Mittie was very bright and very funny and very charming, well read, mercurial in personality.
Her son Theodore was much more like her than he was his father, the one he idolized and wanted to be like.
Narrator: His mother had grown up on a Georgia plantation surrounded by slaves, and she filled her delicate son's imagination with family tales of duels and chivalry and derring-do.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: It was from the heroes of my favorite stories, from hearing of the feats performed by Southern forefathers and from kinsfolk, and from knowing my father that I felt great admiration for men who were fearless, and I had a great desire to be like them.
Narrator: Mittie Roosevelt was so devoted to her southern family that when the civil war began, she begged her 29-year-old husband not to join the Union Army because she could not bear to have him take up arms against her homeland and he reluctantly gave in.
McCullough: The father decided to pay for a substitute in the civil war, which was a very common thing to have done among people who could afford it.
Poor people were being drafted, rich people could buy their way out.
The father bought his way out and the father regretted it all of his life.
It was the wrong thing to have done.
And Theodore felt it was the only time, the only action that his father ever took, that was not heroic.
Narrator: Instead of serving in uniform, Theodore Sr.
Helped persuade President Abraham Lincoln to establish the allotment commission and then spent the better part of two years moving from army camp to army camp, talking soldiers into sending at least a portion of their pay home to their families.
While he was gone, his wife, sister-in-law, and mother-in-law in Manhattan secretly made up bundles of scarce goods to be smuggled through Union lines to their Confederate kin.
Her brothers Irvine and James Bulloch helped build or sail warships that sank more than 60 Union vessels and helped foster in their young nephew a life-long fascination with the Navy.
On April 25, 1865, 16 days after the end of the civil war, as Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession moved uptown, 6-year-old Theodore and his 5-year-old brother Elliot watched from the window of their grandfather's mansion at Broadway and 14th Street.
The end of the civil war ended the division within the Roosevelt household.
But its memory would leave Theodore with a question he could never quite resolve: How could his father, the father he would always remember as "the best man I ever knew," have failed to fight for the Union? It was a failure his son would feel compelled to compensate for again and again.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: My triumphs consisted in such things as bringing home and raising by the aid of milk and a syringe a family of very young gray squirrels, in fruitlessly endeavoring to tame an excessively unnameable woodchuck, and in making friends with a gentle, pretty, trustful white-footed mouse which reared her family in an empty flower pot.
Narrator: Theodore loved reading books of history and science and adventure, and he ran what he grandly called the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History," a constantly expanding collection of "curiosities and living things.
" He kept live mice in his shirt drawer and dead ones in the icebox, tied turtles to the laundry tubs, and took lessons in taxidermy, a hobby that made family maids reluctant to enter his bedroom.
Unable to win through size and strength his rightful place in his loving but fiercely competitive family, he learned the power of words and charm and book learning to call attention to himself.
He told incessantly, his thoughts sometimes tumbling so far ahead of his words that some thought he suffered from an impediment.
There was nothing wrong with Theodore's mind, his father told him, but sickness, his father said, was "always a shame and often a sin.
" To overcome his asthma, he told his fragile son, "you must make your body.
" Theodore did his best to comply, spending hour after hour on rings and parallel bars set up on the third-floor piazza of the family home.
He took boxing lessons from an ex-prizefighter, too, so that his younger brother Elliot wouldn't have to shield him from bullies anymore.
When he was 14, his father presented him with a gun and when he couldn't manage to hit anything with it, bought him spectacles that opened up the world still further.
He began to think of pursuing a career in science.
When the Roosevelts went to Africa in 1873 and spent several months sailing on the Nile, while work was finished on a new family house on West 57th Street, Theodore was fit enough to spend day after day in the saddle, shooting some 200 birds for his collection.
He would never fully conquer asthma but his struggle against it reinforced his belief that life itself was an ongoing battle.
Woman as Corinne Roosevelt: The summer of 1874 proved to be the forerunner of the happiest summers of our lives, as my father decided to join the colony which had been started by his family at Oyster Bay, and we rented a country place which, much to the amusement of our friends, was named "Tranquility.
" Anything less tranquil could hardly be imagined.
Corinne Roosevelt.
Narrator: In the summer of 1874, the United States was in the second year of a depression.
Factories were shuttered.
Banks had failed.
Hundreds of thousands of workers had lost their jobs and those who continued to work saw their wages cut by a quarter.
Workers began to talk more and more of fighting back, of organizing.
But none of it affected Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.
His fortune shielded his 4 children from all of it.
Anna, known as "Bamie," was 19 but she was old beyond her years.
She suffered from a deformation of the spine, and was an adviser rather than a playmate to her younger siblings, who always saw her as one of "the big people.
" Elliot was 14 handsome, athletic, and charming, thought by many the most likely to succeed.
At 12, Corinne was the baby of the family, witty, sensitive, and worshipful of her older brothers.
But the focus of everyone's attention was 15-year-old Theodore.
He seemed infatuated with everything so long as it provided him with the opportunity to excel.
He was in almost perpetual motion: Riding, swimming, shooting, competing in the long jump and 100-yard dash against his brother and his cousins.
He rarely won, but he always tried.
And in between, he devoured books and liked to recite poetry by the hour to his New York neighbor and sometime sweetheart Edith Carow.
"His energy seems so superabundant," his father wrote, "that I feel it may get the better of him in one way or another.
" Woman: I think if he were a little boy today, he might be given ritalin and grow up to be a salesman of some sort and we would never have heard from him again.
You look at photographs of him whenever he's seated; if he has a hand on a desk or a hand on his knee, it's always in a fist.
There's all that coiled energy.
It's not, it's not anger, it's just energy coiled waiting to be let loose.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: Get action.
Do things.
Be sane.
Don't fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; Get action.
Man as Samuel Scott: If you asked me to define in one word the "temper" of the Harvard I knew, I should say it was patrician, strange as that word may sound to American ears.
Samuel Scott.
Narrator: In the fall of 1876, Theodore Roosevelt descended on Harvard.
His sister Bamie had picked out and furnished his Cambridge rooms where he kept live salamanders and continued to stuff birds just as he had at home.
A manservant blacked his boots and kept things tidy.
He chose his friends exclusively from classmates he called "The gentleman sort," deplored the dry kind of science being taught, and spoke up so often in one class that the professor snapped, "see here, Roosevelt, let me talk.
" "When it was not considered good form to move at more than a walk," a classmate remembered, "Roosevelt was always running.
" Man: "The New York times.
" October 13, 1877.
Mr.
Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.
is a gentleman of the very highest character, and would bring to the duties of collector of the port of New York executive abilities of no common order.
McCullough: That family was not inclined to public life nor were people of that gilded age, gilded world, blue bloods of New York, inclined to public life.
In fact, they looked upon it as something one did not do, where you'd be mixing with the coarser side of life.
Narrator: Corruption had been a central issue in the presidential election of 1876.
Republicans abandoned the struggle over the status of freedmen in the south in the interests of a more lucrative ongoing battle with the democrats over the spoils of office.
Everything seemed to be for sale.
And bosses in both parties were determined that it stay that way.
In 1877, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.
, allowed the new republican President Rutherford B.
Hayes to nominate him as collector of customs as a symbol of his commit to civil service reform.
But in the end, the old, corrupt machine crushed his nomination.
He said he was relieved.
"To purify our customhouse would have been a terrible undertaking," he told his son.
But he did feel "sorry for the country "as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests.
We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.
" Two days after his appointment fell through, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.
, collapsed.
On February 9, 1878, he died of cancer of the bowel.
His eldest son arrived from Harvard too late to say good-bye.
Theodore was shattered.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: Sometimes when I realize my loss, I feel as if I should go wild.
He was everything to me.
I have lost the only human being to whom I told everything.
With the help of my God I will try to lead such a life as he would have wished.
Narrator: Still grieving at Oyster Bay that summer, Theodore suffered a second blow.
He and his childhood friend Edith Carow had always been close and may have had an understanding that they would marry.
But in the summerhouse one afternoon, they quarreled and ended their relationship.
Neither ever told anyone what had come between them.
Theodore only admitted, "we both of us had tempers that were far from the best.
" Afterwards, he tried to outpace his anger and his grief rowing furiously back and forth across Long Island sound, galloping so hard he injured his horse, shooting a neighbor's dog when it dared bark at him.
Finally, he fled to the Maine Woods to hike and hunt.
He found there what he would always find in wildness a world in which to restore himself.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: Dear motherling: Funnily enough, I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity since I came back to Harvard.
Please send my silk hat at once.
Why has it not come before? Narrator: Theodore Roosevelt now had a sizable inheritance, so large, he remembered, it allowed him to live "like a prince" in Cambridge.
Everything seemed to go his way.
"I stand 19th in the class, which began with 230 fellows," he boasted to his sister Bamie, and "only one gentleman stands ahead of me.
" Jenkinson: Roosevelt had been a scrawny, sickly, gangly, and awkward child with extremely poor sight.
He should not have been able to overcome that.
Even when he was graduating from Harvard, magna cum laude, his personal physician said, "you have a weak constitution and a poor heart.
You should not expect to live a very long life.
In the short time you have ahead of you, I urge you to be as sedentary as possible.
" And Roosevelt said, "I'm not doing that!" He said, "I'm going to bound up every flight of stairs I ever come to!" Narrator: He fought for the lightweight boxing championship at Harvard, edited a newspaper, won election to Phi Beta Kappa, and was asked to join 3 of the university's most prestigious clubs the Dickie, Hasty Pudding, and Porcelain.
And somehow he found the time as an undergraduate to begin writing a 498-page history, "The Naval War of 1812," that would eventually influence a generation of naval planners.
He also fell in love.
Alice Lee was 17 when he first met her at a classmate's home.
She was tall, blonde, full of life.
"See that girl?" Theodore said that evening.
"I am going to marry her.
She won't have me, but I am going to have her!" It took him a year to win her.
She was his "sunny-faced queen," his "bright bewitching darling.
" "So pure and holy," he wrote, "that it almost seems profanation to touch her.
" She called him "Teddy" and "Teddykins.
" They were married in Brooklyn, Massachusetts on October 27, 1880.
"Alice looked perfectly lovely," a guest remembered, "and Theodore was so happy, and responded in the most determined Theodore-like tones.
" His old childhood sweetheart, Edith Carow, was among the guests and made a point of out-dancing everyone else.
"Our intense happiness," Theodore noted in his diary a few days later, "is too sacred to be written about.
" Together, they began planning a big hilltop house of their own at Oyster Bay a 14-bedroom cottage to be called "Leeholm" in her honor.
Man as James Roosevelt: I often wonder why men are satisfied to live all their lives between brick walls and thinking of nothing but money and the so-called recreations of so-called society when there is so much enjoyment in the country.
James Roosevelt.
Narrator: That same fall of 1880, there was another marriage in the extended Roosevelt clan.
56-year-old James Roosevelt belonged to the Hudson River branch.
His summer home was "Springwood" a 900-acre estate high above the river's eastern shore near the village of Hyde Park.
Ward: Springwood is an absolutely beautiful place.
It overlooks the river acres and acres of woods and fields with a ramshackle old house, very comfortable.
They were not showy people, the Roosevelts, so it's a very comfortable place.
Narrator: There James Roosevelt lived the life of an English country gentleman, his money made in railroads and investments.
His servants and tenant farmers all called him "Mr.
James.
" He was an episcopalian and a conservative, reform-minded democrat who took both his religious and civic duties seriously.
But he had been a widower for 4 years.
His late wife, a distant cousin, had died of heart disease.
Their only child, a son nicknamed Rosy, had married an heiress to the Astor fortune and moved away.
In his loneliness, Mr.
James had once suggested marriage to Theodore Roosevelt's sister Bamie.
She gently turned him away, then invited him to dinner to meet a friend of hers Miss Sara Delano.
"He talked to her the whole time," Theodore's mother said.
"He never took his eyes off her.
" Sara Delano was 25, less than half of James' age, tall and regal, a member of a French Huguenot clan that had flourished in America even longer than the Roosevelts had.
Her father, Warren Delano, who had made himself a millionaire in the China trade, had "the true patriarchal spirit," Sara remembered, and supervised every detail of family life within the big-walled estate he'd built at New Burgh, 25 miles downriver from Hyde Park.
No democrat could ever work for him, Warren Delano once explained, because, while not all democrats were horse thieves, it had been his experience that all horse thieves were democrats.
His 5 daughters attracted what he called an "avalanche of suitors" and he was startled when Mr.
James asked for Sara's hand.
He was a business associate and his rough contemporary, after all, and he was a democrat.
Before he gave his approval, Mr.
Delano had to be convinced that Sara was, as he said, "earnestly, seriously, entirely" in love.
She was.
James Roosevelt and Sara Delano were married on October 7, 1880, just 6 months after they met.
A guest remembered that several women wept at the thought that "such a very girl should marry an old man.
" On January 30, 1882, at Springwood, they had a son.
Sara and her baby very nearly did not make it.
Labor had stretched on for more than 24 hours.
Sara was given too much chloroform.
The doctor had to breathe life into her boy.
7 weeks later, at St.
James' Episcopal Chapel in Hyde Park, the baby was christened.
Theodore Roosevelt's mother mittie came to visit and said that the child was, "such a fair, sweet, cunning, little bright, darling baby.
Sara looks so very lovely with him, like a Madonna and infant.
" He was named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Man as John Walsh: Suddenly our eyes became glued on a young man who was coming in through the door.
His hair was parted in the center, and he had sideburns.
He wore a single eye-glass.
He carried a gold-headed cane in one hand, a silk hat in the other, and he walked in the bent-over fashion that was the style with the young men of the day.
"Who's the dude?" I asked another member.
"That's Theodore Roosevelt of New York.
" Assemblyman John Walsh.
Narrator: 6 days before James and Sara's baby Franklin was born, Theodore Roosevelt made his first headlines as the brand-new republican assemblyman from Manhattan's 21st dist and the youngest man ever elected to the assembly.
He was just 23 years old, and Albany had never seen anyone quite like him.
He had dropped plans to become a scientist while still at Harvard, then dropped out of Columbia law school, refused to go into the family business, and finally surprised everyone by deciding to try his hand at republican politics and run for the assembly some of his friends had advised him against it.
Politics in either party was no place for a gentleman, they told him.
It was a "low" business, run by "saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors and the like.
" "That merely means that the people I know do not belong to the governing class," he answered, "and I intend to be one of the governing class.
" Man as Theodore Roosevelt: I mean to act up here in Albany on all questions as nearly as possible as I think father would have done.
I thoroughly believe in the republican party when it acts up to its principles but if I can prevent it I shall never let party zeal obscure my sense of right and decency.
Narrator: He took to the floor again and again, pushing for municipal reform bills sometimes even when they were opposed by his own party's leaders, forcing an investigation of a State Supreme Court Justice for accepting bribes, and denouncing Jay Gould, the powerful Wall Street manipulator, for offering them.
When the courts overturned his bill meant to relieve the terrible conditions under which tenement-dwellers were forced to manufacture cigars, he angrily denounced the judiciary.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: It was this case which first waked me to a dim and partial understanding of the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions.
They knew legalism, but not life.
Narrator: Always, he would seek a middle course between change and stability: He had a deep fear of what he called "the mob.
" He saw everything in terms of right and wrong.
Those who opposed him were by definition self-interested, dishonest.
"The average Democratic catholic Irishman as represented in this assembly," he confided to his diary, "is a low, venal, corrupt, and unintelligent brute.
" They didn't like him, either.
When a hulking assemblyman known as "the McManus," a representative of the Democratic Tammany machine, was overheard planning to toss the newcomer in a blanket, Roosevelt tracked him down.
"By God!" He told him, "if you try anything like that, I'll kick you, I'll bite you.
I'll kick you in the balls.
I'll do anything to you you'd better leave me alone.
" The McManus backed off.
Democratic newspapers lampooned him as "His lordship" and "Jane-dandy.
" Republican papers praised his courage and independence.
But all the newspapers loved him for the colorful copy he provided.
He was re-elected twice, served a term as minority leader, and made himself the best-known republican in New York state all before he was 26.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: Albany, February 6, 1884.
Darling wife, how I did hate to leave my bright sunny little love yesterday afternoon! I love you and long for you all the time, and oh, so tenderly; doubly tenderly now, my sweetest little wife.
I just long for Friday evening when I shall be with you again.
Good-bye, sweetheart.
Narrator: Alice Roosevelt was 9 months pregnant and under the care of her mother-in-law in New York.
Theodore was in Albany, battling for a measure to reform the New York City charter and delighted that the newspapers were calling it the "Roosevelt Bill.
" He was in the chamber on the morning of February 13 when he was handed a telegram.
His wife had given birth to a healthy girl the night before.
She would be named for her mother Alice.
His fellow assemblymen crowded around to offer congratulations.
He was "full of life and happiness," one remembered.
Then a second telegram arrived.
He rushed for the railroad station.
Fog shrouded the tracks.
It took more than 5 endless hours to reach New York.
He did not get to 6 West 57th Street until midnight.
His brother Elliot opened the door.
He was weeping.
"There is a curse on this house," he said.
"Mother is dying, and Alice is dying, too.
" Mittie Roosevelt had typhoid fever.
Alice was barely conscious, weakened by childbirth, and suffering from bright's disease kidney failure.
Helpless, Theodore went back and forth between their bedsides.
His mother died at 3:00 in the morning of February 14.
His wife Alice died at 2:00 that afternoon.
Only the baby survived.
It's almost impossible to talk about this because it's so, it's so sad and it's so central to Roosevelt.
Roosevelt had a two-by-3-inch pocket diary.
Uh, he wrote "the light has gone out of my life.
" And he meant it.
He soldiered on.
Roosevelt was no one to wallow in self-pity.
But that was a blow so enormous that it's amazing that he was able to climb out of it.
Ward: He was in the darkest kind of despair.
Theodore Roosevelt was, among the many other things he was, a depressive.
And this ceaseless, relentless action just endlessly, he said, "get action, be sane," and he meant it literally.
If he didn't get action, he was not sane.
Narrator: He was back at work within 3 days of the funeral.
He gave his favorite photograph of Alice to his aunt; put the house in which his wife and mother had died up for sale; handed his newborn daughter off to his sister Bamie to raise as if she were her own; and hurried back to Albany.
Man: From that time on there was a sadness about his face that he never had before.
You could not talk to him about it.
He did not want anybody to sympathize with him.
It was a grief that he had in his soul.
Narrator: There is no record that Theodore Roosevelt ever spoke of his wife Alice again, not even to the troubled daughter who would grow up bearing her name.
Man: There was something about that death that really unhinged Roosevelt.
And he had to stay as far away from it as he could.
It was as though his wife had never existed.
But it was devastating for his daughter Alice, who felt that somehow she was responsible for the death of her mother.
Narrator: He hurled himself back into committee work, reporting out as many as 21 bills on a single day.
If he weren't working so hard, he admitted to a friend, "I think I should go mad.
" But he refused the nomination for a fourth assembly term.
He needed to get away, he said.
He still needed to escape the grief that continued to crowd in on him.
He headed west.
[Train whistle blowing.]
McCullough: And then he goes west to the Badlands, about as bleak and depressing a place, particularly in any time of the year other than the summertime.
He once said, as only he could have said, "the Badlands look like Poe sounds.
" Man as Theodore Roosevelt: Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him.
Nowhere else does one seem so far off from all mankind.
Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.
Jenkinson: You can't understand Roosevelt without understanding that.
"Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.
" He's an advocate and an exemplar of the strenuous life.
He rushed through life.
He was like a, a 6-year-old child on steroids, just like a Tasmanian devil in the course of his life.
And he did it partly because this was the persona that he crafted.
But he did it in part, too, I think, because he didn't re slow down.
There were demons.
Narrator: In the summer of 1884, the Badlands became a refuge, a place to rebuild his broken spirits.
He didn't go west to be a cowboy.
He went west to be a ranchman.
There's an elite upper-crust aspect to this.
Narrator: He had begun hunting buffalo and ranching on the little Missouri River in North Dakota a year before.
It had been an investment, and he would eventually sink half his fortune in it.
Ranching, he believed, was "the pleasantest and healthiest and most exciting phase of American existence.
" Roosevelt was not alone.
Hundreds of easterners were flocking to the plains that summer, eager to cash in on what everyone was calling the "Beef Bonanza.
" "I now look like a regular cowboy dandy," he wrote Bamie, "with all my equipment finished in the most expensive style.
" He designed his own fringed buckskin costume.
Tiffany's supplied his silver-mounted bowie knife.
He was an exotic presence at first, once overheard urging his cowboys to "hasten forward quickly there!" "Hasten forward quickly there!" And of course these guys just about fell out of the saddle it was so hilarious.
Ah, but then after a while, when he rode a bucking horse or when he confronted a gun fighter, which he did, they realized old Theodore's all right.
He proved himself to them.
Narrator: Cowboys called him "Old four-eyes" behind his back, but when one drunk dared say it to his face, and pulled a gun, Roosevelt knocked him senseless.
He eventually won everyone's respect, helping to build a new ranch house called Elkhorn with his own hands, enduring a month-long roundup that covered almost 1,000 miles, hunting down 3 thieves who had stolen his boat and marching them 45 miles to the nearest sheriff's office after carefully staging the capture again for his own box camera.
And he spent weeks on the hunting trail shooting 170 birds and animals on one camping trip through the big horns, including a grizzly bear killed at 20 paces, Roosevelt reported, with a bullet placed so "exactly between his eyes "as if I had measured the distance with a carpenter's rule.
" Man as Theodore Roosevelt: Dearest Bamie: I had grand sport with the elk But after I had begun bear killing, other sport seemed tame.
I have had enough excitement and fatigue to prevent overmuch thought; and moreover I have been at last able to sleep well at night.
Narrator: Roosevelt's ranching adventure would end in financial disaster.
In 1887, the snowiest winter in the history of the west blanketed the plains.
Hundreds of thousands of cattle froze to death including most of Theodore's herd.
"The losses are crippling," he admitted to Bamie.
Still, the months he spent off-and-on in the Dakotas between 1883 and 1887 changed him.
Everyone could see it.
He had demonstrated to himself that action enabled him to conquer the grief that had threatened to destroy him.
He had also proved that he could hold his own among men of every class.
His voice grew deeper, less shrill.
"He now weighed 150 pounds," a friend remembered, "and was clear bone, muscle, and grit.
" Jenkinson: He had more adventures than you can possibly imagine some of them extraordinarily dangerous.
And he believed it transformed his body, no longer a 98-pound weakling, now a Bull Moose.
He believed that it transformed his spirit not a grieving husband whose mother and wife died on the same day but a man who's ready to rebound into the public arena of the United States.
He believed that it gave an understanding of the common people of this country their strengths, their weaknesses, their needs.
I think this time in the west made him as a man, made his political career possible, because it gave him an antidote, as it were, to his eastern trappings and made him palatable, made him lovable for the American population not just in a way that worked, but was all new.
Narrator: Roosevelt liked to say that he had become as much a westerner as he was an easterner.
It was there, he remembered many years later, that "the romance of my life began.
" "If it had not been for my years in North Dakota," he went on, "I never would have become president of the United States.
" Man as Theodore Roosevelt: There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at firs.
.
But by acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid.
Most men can have the same experience if they choose.
Man as Franklin Roosevelt: In thinking back to my earliest days, I am impressed by the peacefulness and regularity of things.
Up to the age of 7, Hyde Park was the center of the world.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Ward: Franklin Roosevelt was the sun around which everything there revolved.
Every moment of the day was devoted to people admiring him.
His mother, who simply adored everything about him; his father, who was, who loved him very deeply; servants; Tenant farmers who doffed their caps to him and called him "Mister Franklin;" a legion of tutors who came to take care of him.
And all of it was for his benefit.
I think FDR saw his rightful position was to be the center of the world.
Narrator: Some children are loved; Franklin Roosevelt was adored.
His mother kept him in dresses and long curls until he was nearly 6, and then dressed him in kilts and miniature sailor suits.
She gave him his daily bath till he was almost 9.
His infrequent playmates were Roosevelt cousins and the children of other country gentlemen up and down the Hudson.
Ward: I think Sara Delano Roosevelt was the most important person in her son's life.
She only had one child and could not have more.
So she poured her enormous affection and intelligence on this boy.
If a mother's success is to be measured by whether she teaches her child that he or she can do whatever they put their minds to, she is a triumphant mother.
Goodwin: You have to give Sara Roosevelt credit for having instilled in this child this enormous self-confidence that allowed him to get through all the travails in his life, that allowed him to help his country through all the difficulties of our lives.
So, to some extent that complexity in him which made people say that as close as you got to him you never fully understood him, had to do maybe with his need to distance himself from this mother, who loved him perhaps too much.
But nonetheless that love is the core of the self-confidence and the assurance that we all saw as a leader.
Narrator: His father taught his son to shoot and sled, to sail an ice-boat on the frozen Hudson and steer the family yacht through the cold Canadian waters around their summer home on Campobello Island.
And he passed on intact to his son his unfailing good humor.
Franklin called him "Popsy.
" A reporter would one day ask Sara if she had always wanted her son to become president.
"Never, oh, never!" She answered.
"The highest ideal I could hold up before our boy was to grow up to be like his father, straight and honorable, just and kind, an upstanding American.
" Then, in 1890, when Franklin was 8, Mr.
James suffered a heart attack.
He recovered but his doctors warned that his survival depended on being shielded from all unnecessary worry.
That warning brought Sara and her son still closer together in a loving conspiracy to keep Mr.
James alive.
From birth, Franklin had been what his grandfather Delano called "a very nice child, always bright and happy.
" Now his impulse toward unwavering cheer intensified.
Unpleasantness was not to be acknowledged.
The Roosevelts spent 4 summers at a German health spa, where Mr.
James took the waters and Franklin did his best to entertain himself while pretending not to notice his father's fellow patients "half-crippled sufferers," one remembered, "limping to the Springs on crutches, and looking as if their next step will be into their graves.
" Back at Springwood, his parents encouraged him to fill his time with hobbies photography, collecting coins and stamps, and books about the Navy.
Like his increasingly celebrated cousin, he shot and classified birds but then had someone else professionally preserve them.
His mother dusted his exhibits once a week.
"I dare not trust it to anyone else," she said.
And mother and son both scorned Franklin's far-older half-brother Rosy, the product of Mr.
James' first marriage.
He was idle, showy, self-indulgent everything his parents did not want their young son to become.
Groton School which Franklin entered at 14, in the third form was meant to drive that lesson home.
"In these times of exceeding comfort," said the school's founder and headmaster, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, "the boys need hardness and, it may be, suffering.
" Nothing in Franklin's upbringing had prepared him for life among other boys away from home.
Quarters were spartan and claustrophobic.
Each day began with an icy shower.
Bells sent the boys scurrying from class to class.
Peabody encouraged his students to inflict rough and often brutal justice on schoolmates they simply didn't like.
FDR was a lonely, little boy who was raised by grownups to be with grownups.
He was always popular with people older than himself.
But when he got to Groton and later when he got to Harvard, people didn't like him.
He seemed too well-mannered, too fussy, ah, he read too much, um, his humor was different, and he was too eager to please.
He was a sort of like an airedale.
Narrator: He could neither excel nor fully fit in.
Other students outperformed him in the classroom.
He was too slight and inexperienced at playing on a team to do well at sports; he ended up managing the baseball team, not playing on it.
He called it "a thankless task.
" For a boy who had been the object of almost universal admiration, life at Groton was bewildering, disheartening.
"I always felt entirely out of things," he would admit many years later; something had gone "sadly wrong" for him at school.
But his letters to his parents carefully kept those feelings hidden.
Over and over again, he would assure them "I am getting along very well with the fellows.
" People of Roosevelt's class were taught to control their emotions.
But, but Franklin Roosevelt was an extreme case.
And I think he was taught early on that one mustn't worry anyone else, one must keep any bad thoughts to yourself.
You're supposed to have a good time all the time or seem to be having a good time all the time.
Woman: August 29, 1886.
Society topics.
The engagement was announced during the week of ex-assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt and Miss Edith Carow of New York.
Mr.
Roosevelt is a widower, his first wife, formerly Miss Lee of Boston, died two years ago.
Narrator: When Bamie Roosevelt read of her brother's engagement, she forced "The New York Times" to print an immediate retraction.
It was unthinkable that her brother who had so recently lost his wife would be planning to remarry and still more unthinkable that he could have become engaged to one of his closest childhood friends without her knowledge.
She was wrong.
He and Edith had been secretly engaged for a year.
He planned to marry her in London before Christmas.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: Dearest Bamie, you could not reproach me one-half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness as I reproach myself.
Were I sure there were a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth.
Narrator: Theodore had believed so deeply that a second marriage would represent a betrayal of the departed that he had deliberately avoided coming in contact with Edith Carow for months after Alice's death.
But they had encountered one another by accident and began to see one another in secret, Theodore confining his diary entries to the single letter "E" to keep their courtship from prying eyes.
Edith was refined, self-assured, and disciplined "born mature," as her friends liked to say and she had been devoted to Theodore since childhood.
[Bell chiming.]
On December 2, 1886, a day when all of London was festooned with fog, they were quietly married at St.
George's Church on Hanover Square.
After they returned to the united states the following spring, they moved into the newly-completed house at Oyster Bay that Theodore and Alice Lee had planned together.
He had already given it a new name; it was no longer Leeholm, it was now Sagamore Hill.
"Sagamore" was the algonquin word for "chieftain.
" Edith asked to be allowed to raise Theodore's daughter Alice as if she were her own.
"It almost broke my heart to give her up," Bamie remembered, but she did.
At Sagamore in September of 1887, Edith gave birth to a child of her own Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
4 more children would follow over the next decade: Kermit, Ethel, Archie, and Quentin.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: At Sagamore Hill, we love a great many beautiful things birds and trees and books, and horses and rifles and children and hard work and the joy of life.
We have great fireplaces and in them the logs roar and crackle during the long winter evenings.
The big piazza is for the hot-still afternoons of summer.
There could be no healthier and pleasanter place in which to bring up children than in that nook of old-time America around Sagamore Hill.
McCullough: It was his trophy room.
It was his huge trophy room and his family are part of his trophy collection.
Uh, he's probably more proud of them, is more proud of them than anybody.
And it gave him a place to have his books, a place to have his hunting trophies, a place to hang the portrait of his father which was always hung right at his desk.
He always wanted to be able to look up and see his father.
Narrator: For the next 30 years no matter what official role Theodore Roosevelt was called upon to play, no matter where his duties took him his real home and headquarters would always be Sagamore Hill.
After he'd lost half his fortune in the cattle business, Roosevelt had turned to writing to supplement what remained of his inheritance.
In 1888 he was hard at work on the first of what would become a best-selling 4-volume history, "The Winning of the West.
" "I'm a literary feller, not a politician these days," Roosevelt told a friend.
But he didn't mean it.
He was still only 30, too young to abandon politics.
He campaigned hard that fall for Benjamin Harrison, the successful republican candidate for president even though he privately thought him just "a genial little runt.
" His reward was appointment as one of 3 federal civil service commissioners in Washington.
He made the most of it, battling publicly with the postmaster general who had dismissed thousands of workers merely because they were democrats.
And he conducted probes of political appointees who tried to get around the law that made it illegal to demand campaign funds from federal employees.
"I have made this commission a living force," Roosevelt boasted, "and in consequence the outcry among the spoils men has become furious.
" He would prove so even-handed that Grover Cleveland, Harrison's Democratic successor, asked him to stay on.
During his 6 years in the nation's capital, Roosevelt learned the ways of Washington and made friends who would prove useful to him later in his career.
But rooting out unqualified postmasters did not command the sustained national attention he craved.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: I used to walk past the White House, and my heart would beat a little faster as the thought came to me that possibly possibly I would some day occupy it as president.
Man: "The Chicago Tribune.
" August 17, 1891.
Elliot Roosevelt, brother of civil service commissioner and ex-assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt, is an inmate of an asylum for the insane near Paris, France.
His condition and behavior due to excesses were such that both his wife and his sister were afraid of him.
Theodore Roosevelt says that he believes that for the last two years, his brother has been of unsound mind and unfit to manage his affairs.
Narrator: Elliot had once seemed the more promising of the Roosevelt brothers.
He was more handsome, more athletic, and more charming than Theodore.
But in his teens he had begun to fall behind.
Headaches and mysterious seizures ended his schooling.
He couldn't seem to find a focus, spent his time yachting, fox-hunting, playing polo and drinking.
Theodore had hoped Elliot's marriage to the beautiful Anna Hall in 1883 would give his brother "something to work for.
" Woman as Anna Eleanor Roosevelt: I came into the world, and from all accounts I must have been a more wrinkled and less attractive baby than the average but to him I was a miracle from heaven.
All this is rather vague to me, but my father was never vague.
He dominated my life as long as he lived, and was the love of my life for many years after he died.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.
Narrator: Elliot's first child, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, had been born on October 11, 1884.
Theodore was her godfather.
Everyone would call her Eleanor.
Two other children, Elliot, Jr.
, and Hall, followed.
But her father's drinking only increased.
He took at least two mistresses, threatened his wife, vowed to kill himself, got a family maid pregnant.
To keep that scandal out of the newspapers, the Roosevelts had to pay thousands of dollars to the woman's family and had Elliot committed to the French asylum for a time.
"It is all horrible beyond belief," Theodore told Bamie.
Elliot was now "a dangerous maniac," he said, "absolutely lacking in moral sense.
" He urged Anna to leave her husband.
Things got worse.
Anna died of diphtheria.
Their son Elliot, Jr.
died of Scarlet fever.
Eleanor's father was now drinking half a dozen bottles of Brandy and champagne a day.
On August 13, 1894, suffering from delirium tremens, he tried to climb out a second-floor Manhattan window, raced hysterically up and down the stairs, collapsed with a seizure, and died the following day.
He was only 34.
When Theodore went to see his brother's body, his sister Corinne recalled, "he was more overcome than I have ever seen him cried like a little child.
" Elliot's two orphaned children, 3-year-old Hall and 9-year-old Eleanor, were placed in the care of their maternal grandmother at "Oak Terrace," her big dark house at Tivoli-on-the-Hudson, 25 miles north of Hyde Park.
Eleanor would spend the next 6 lonely summers there, dreaming of her dead father, living even more closely with him, she remembered, than she had "when he was alive.
" At 8:30 in the morning on Monday, may 6, 1895, 37-year-old Theodore Roosevelt started up the steps of New York police headquarters on mulberry street.
A knot of eager reporters rushed along behind, trying to keep up.
"Where are our offices?" He shouted.
"What do we do first?" It was a rhetorical question.
The New York Police Department was famously corrupt and the new reform mayor had appointed Roosevelt one of 4 police commissioners with orders to clean it up.
Man: Mr.
Roosevelt's voice is the policeman's hardest trial.
It is a voice that comes from he tips of the teeth and seems to say in its tones, "what do you amount to anyway?" "The New York world.
" Narrator: To draw attention to himself, he affected distinctive costumes a straw hat and cape, sometimes a pink shirt and black sash with tassels and he cultivated newspapermen, taking reporters with him as he prowled New York at night, on the lookout for policemen who dared doze or drink on duty.
What patrolmen feared most, one newspaper said, was the sight of flashing teeth.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: These midnight rambles are great fun.
My whole work brings me in contact with every class of people.
I get a glimpse of the real life among the swarming millions.
Narrator: Roosevelt forced the police superintendent and his deputy inspector to resign.
At first, he was wildly popular.
His favorite exclamations became his watchwords "Bully!" and "Dee-lighted!" But he also took it upon himself to "rigidly enforce" a Sunday law that was supposed to shutter all of Manhattan's 15,000 saloons on the sabbath.
In doing so, he alienated German workingmen who looked forward to a stein of beer on their one day off.
Jenkinson: He wasn't a puritan and he didn't believe in prohibition but he thought a law that's on the books and is routinely ignored is a bad law and it creates corruption.
And he was right.
The policemen would take bribes to allow saloons to stay open and that this led to a, a demoralization of, of law and order in the police force.
So, he decides to enforce the Sunday closing law.
Narrator: When 30,000 German workingmen held a parade to protest his action, Roosevelt made it a point to show up.
They think he won't show up because he won't be able to bear the, the, the criticism.
So, he says, "I'll be happy to come.
" And he goes and he stands on this dais and watches these people going by with placards denouncing him and, and, and saying that he's the worst police commissioner in U.
S.
history and he's watching this go by and he's grinning and his big teeth are out and he's, he's giving people bully signs.
And then one of the people out in the crowd shouts out, thinking Roosevelt was too cowardly to show up, he shouts out, "wo ist der Roosevelt?" And Roosevelt stands up and says, "ich bin here!" Narrator: Roosevelt's action led to a mass exodus of German-Americans to the democrats at the next New York election and added to the hostility of the man who controlled Roosevelt's own party.
Thomas Collier Platt was known as the "easy boss" because of his hushed, courteous manner, but behind the scenes he was cold-eyed, ruthless, and immovable.
Platt called Roosevelt "a perfect bull in a China shop," and tried to have him removed from his post.
Roosevelt's fellow commissioners also grew to resent his noisy prominence and began to vote down his proposals.
Roosevelt moved on.
When republican William McKinley of Ohio was elected president in 1896, Roosevelt lobbied him hard for a new federal post Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
He'd been interested in the sea and sea power since boyhood.
William McKinley was an amiable, cautious conservative, privately worried that Roosevelt was "too pugnacious, always getting into rows with everybody.
" He asked boss Platt for his opinion.
Platt said he'd be dee-lighted to see the young troublemaker return to Washington.
Jenkinson: The first book that Roosevelt published was called "The Naval Wwar of 1812.
" And what he concluded was that we nearly lost that war because we had not had a Navy ready and that the war was, was prolonged and made more difficult to get through because of our unpreparedness.
This was his great obsession.
And he wormed his way into becoming the Assistant Secretary of Navy in 1897 precisely to prepare the country for the 20th century.
Man: You could say that Teddy Roosevelt was slightly crazy.
But if he was crazy it was a very balanced kind of craziness.
He kept his demons in balance.
They were lurking there but he kept them in some sort of equipoise.
He was highly functional.
He was not neurotic in the sense of having to repair to his room to brood or to have terrible headaches or lie in the dark the way some other late 19th-century neurasthenics did.
Roosevelt was a high functioning neurotic.
But he, he was neurotic.
He was driven by forces that visibly bubbled through him and weaknesses that he felt he had to compensate for.
His need to show constantly himself and everybody else what a man he was.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: Cowardice is the unpardonable sin.
No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.
It may be that at some time in the dim future, the need for war will vanish; but that time is as yet ages distant.
It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness.
Jenkinson: There's no question that Roosevelt is an imperialist.
Apologists like to try to play this down.
But the fact is he's probably the most significant imperialist in American history.
He gave a speech to the naval war college which I think can be regarded as the most aggressive foreign policy speech in all of American history.
He said, "we are going to take our place in the world's arena.
The British empire is beginning to show signs of decline.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
One country and one country only will fill that vacuum, and it must be the United States, and I'm going to make sure with all of the powers inherent in me that that becomes the truth.
" Theodore Roosevelt, we should say this bluntly, liked war.
He came along when Darwinism had become social Darwinism, and he was a believer in the survival of the fittest.
He was a believer, therefore, to a certain unpleasant extent, that might makes right.
He believed that nature was red in tooth and claw and political nature was red in tooth and claw and only the sentimental flinched from that fact.
And it gave him an unpleasant dimension, which, after a century of war, which the 20th century became, should cause us to look back on Theodore Roosevelt with, ah, dry eyes.
Narrator: For nearly a decade, Roosevelt had believed no European power should be permitted to maintain even a foothold in the new world.
He'd once favored a war to seize Canada from Britain.
And when the people of Cuba rose against their Spanish rulers in 1895, he'd wanted the United States to intervene immediately on their behalf.
He was not alone.
Thomas: There was a little group in Washington that was excited about the idea of liberating Cuba.
And they would meet secretly with Cuban emigres.
Teddy's friend Henry Cabot lodge was part of that cell.
It was a group of sort of gentlemen imperialists.
They didn't like the word imperialism, they called it the "large policy.
" But they're eager to foment rebellion in Cuba and then have America come to the rescue.
[Explosion.]
Narrator: On February 15, 1898, the U.
S.
battleship "Maine" blew up in Havana Harbor.
266 Americans died.
The cause was unclear.
But Roosevelt blamed Spain and called for vengeance.
President McKinley moved cautiously: He had seen the dead piled up at Antietam, he said, and wished to see no more.
Roosevelt privately accused the former soldier of having "the backbone of a chocolate eclair.
" Just 10 days later, when his boss, the Secretary of the Navy John D.
Long, took the weekend off, Roosevelt seized the opportunity to cable squadron commanders around the world to be on high alert and directed commodore George Dewey to be ready to attack the Spanish fleet in the Philippines when the time came.
When McKinley finally called upon congress for a declaration of war in April, Dewey steamed into Manila Harbor and destroyed the entire Spanish fleet anchored there without losing a single American sailor.
But Spain still held Cuba.
Roosevelt was 39 years old and the father of 6 children when America went to war, and he held an important post in Washington.
But he was determined to get to the front nonetheless.
His own father had stayed out of the civil war; he would not give his own children any reason to question his sense of duty.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: It was my one chance to do something for my country and my one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring rod in every family.
I would have turned from my wife's deathbed to answer that call.
Narrator: Secretary long said he was acting "like a fool" out of "vain-glory.
" And Edith was seriously ill, suffering from the after effects of a difficult childbirth.
Thomas: Roosevelt's friends thought he was stark raving mad to want to go off to war when he was almost 40 years old, he had young kids, he had a sick wife what was he doing? Roosevelt, though, wrote some ac fairly thoughtful letters saying, you know, "I, I hate people who talk a big talk but don't deliver.
" "I've been out here for a long time saying that we need a war.
I have to now deliver myself.
I have to show that I can live up to my own standard of honor.
And that means that I have to go to war myself.
" Narrator: Roosevelt left the Navy department, had Brooks brothers run up a special uniform, ordered a dozen pairs of spare spectacles, and went to war as a lieutenant colonel in the 1st volunteer cavalry.
Its commander was a regular army officer and close friend, Colonel Leonard Wood.
But the outfit quickly became known as "Teddy's Terrors," "Teddy's Cowboy Contingent," finally "Roosevelt's Rough Riders.
" They had their own theme song, too: "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight.
" No one else could ever have recruited such a regiment.
1,000 eager horsemen, mostly from the west: Bronco busters and Indians and buffalo hunters; sheriffs and marshals and Texas rangers who had tamed frontier towns and the cowboys and prospectors who had shot up the same towns on Saturday nights.
And serving right alongside them, Irish cops from New York and protestant clergymen from New England; fox hunters and yachtsmen and British adventurers; the world's best polo player and the amateur tennis champion of the United States.
"You would be amused," Roosevelt wrote to a friend from the Rough Riders' training camp in Texas, "to see 3 knickerbocker club men cooking and washing dishes for one of the new Mexico companies.
" Man as Theodore Roosevelt: It is a great historical expedition, and I thrill to feel that I am part of it.
If we fail, of course we shall share the fate of all who do fail, but if we are allowed to succeed, we will have scored the first great triumph in what will be a world movement.
Narrator: Roosevelt was desperate to get into battle before the fighting ended.
When the expedition was finally ordered to sail for Cuba from Tampa, Florida, and he was told his men would have to wait for the second wave of transports, he defied orders, commandeered a ship, and ordered his men aboard.
Nothing went as planned.
Half the unit's horses had to be left behind.
The heat soared above 100 degrees.
Drinking water was foul.
Tinned beef proved inedible.
The landing at daiquiri was chaotic, even though the Spanish never fired a shot.
Horses were forced to swim ashore; one of Roosevelt's two mounts drowned.
General William Shafter, the overall commander, weighed more than 300 pounds and was so crippled by gout he could not walk.
General Joseph Wheeler, in charge of the cavalry division, was a one-time confederate who sometimes forgot he was fighting Spaniards, not Yankees, and was determined that his men, not the infantry, would get the credit for fighting the Spanish first.
The American target 19 long miles away, 7 of them through hey jungle was the port city of Santiago de Cuba, where American warships had already blockaded the harbor.
Roosevelt and the rough riders were in the lead when they were ambushed on a jungle path near the village of Las Guasimas.
[Gunshot.]
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: Yesterday we struck the Spaniards and had a brisk fight for 2 1/2 hours before we drove them out of their position.
We lost a dozen men killed or mortally wounded and 60 severely or slightly wounded.
One man was killed as he stood beside me.
Another bullet went through a tree behind which I stood and filled my eyes with bark.
The last charge I led on the left using a rifle I took from a wounded man; and I kept 3 of the empty cartridges for the children.
Thomas: Roosevelt and the Rough Riders basically marched into an ambush at Las Guasimas.
Not a brilliant military move.
But it was the moment of truth for Roosevelt.
And Roosevelt always worried that if he was in combat he would become overexcited.
This happened to him sometimes in times of danger.
But he steadied himself.
He had to.
He had to show courage and he did.
He got control of himself and his men and he stood up against withering enemy fire coming out of nowhere.
They weren't quite sure who was shooting at them from where but Roosevelt stood his ground.
He marshaled his men.
They shot back.
Finally they flushed out the Spaniards and Roosevelt led the charge that he'd always dreamed of as he chased the Spaniards through the bush.
Narrator: The Rough Riders, aided by the first cavalry and black troops of the tenth cavalry, routed the enemy.
They pushed on toward Santiago, where Spanish soldiers were dug in along the San Juan Heights and on top of a lower summit the Americans would call Kettle Hill.
Jenkinson: The great day was July 1, 1898, when he assaulted Kettle and later San Juan Hills in Cuba.
He called that "my crowded hour.
" And probably everything else pivots on that.
Narrator: On the first of July, the order was given to drive the Spanish off.
The Rough Riders were assigned to support regular troops as they stormed Kettle Hill.
The battle began with an exchange of artillery.
Spanish shrapnel bruised Roosevelt's wrist and tore the leg from a man standing next to him.
[Gunfire.]
Bullets ripped through the air, Roosevelt remembered, "making a sound like the ripping of a silk dress.
" He led his men forward.
Spanish fire poured down as the Americans splashed across the San Juan River.
[Gunfire.]
Several Rough Riders were hit.
Eventually, hundreds of men were stalled at the foot of the hill awaiting orders to attack.
When the orders did not come, Roosevelt mounted his horse "Texas" and led his Rough Riders forward through the milling men.
"Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?" He demanded of one private.
The man got to his feet and was instantly killed.
Then the Rough Riders went up the hill and they took enormous losses.
It was a reckless thing to do, probably not very responsible from the point of view of being a military commander, but he did it.
[Gunshot.]
Narrator: A bullet nicked his elbow.
His spectacles fell off and he somehow managed to replace them as he rode.
The Rough Riders followed him, cheering.
The regulars they had been supposed to support now struggled to keep up.
A wire fence forced Roosevelt to dismount.
He got through it and kept going.
The Spanish began to flee.
He shot one with a revolver: "Doubled him up," he said, "neatly as a jackrabbit.
" [Explosion.]
Narrator: The summit of Kettle Hill gave him a clear view of the ongoing battle for San Juan Heights.
He decided to join that struggle, too, and rushed toward the fighting.
But he forgot to give the order to follow.
Only 5 five men did.
3 were shot down.
He ran back, rallied his men, and joined the assault by black and white American troops that finally drove the enemy from its fortifications.
It had been "fun," Roosevelt said when it was over, and "the great day of my life.
" He wandered the battlefield, exclaiming over all the "damned Spanish dead.
" The Rough Riders lost 89 men, killed or wounded; Roosevelt was proud, he said, that it was "the heaviest loss suffered by any regiment in the cavalry division.
" "No hunting trip so far has ever equaled it in Theodore's eyes," a Rough Rider and old friend wrote Edith after the battle.
"He was just reveling in victory and gore.
" Jenkinson: He later said of his time in Cuba to a reporter that the only thing he regretted was that he didn't get a disfiguring and ghastly wound in that war.
This is really important.
There is a blood lust in Theodore Roosevelt.
He was a killer.
You can't, you can't sanitize that.
Narrator: "I do not want to be vain," he told a friend, "but I do not think that anyone else could have handled this regiment quite as I have handled it.
" And his men agreed.
"We were drawn to him," one remembered.
"We'd have gone to hell with him.
" Thomas: Roosevelt craved above all awards the medal of honor and thought he deserved it, and lobbied for it wrote incessant letters to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge and to others, looking for that medal.
The army did not like Roosevelt.
He was a volunteer.
He wasn't one of them.
He really wasn't very disciplined about following orders.
So they were damned if they were gonna give Roosevelt this medal.
Teddy Roosevelt, although he's a wonderful figure and a glamorous figure, is a dangerous figure in some ways.
This glorification of war can't be a good thing in the long run.
Most wars are prolonged and miserable and wretched with great loss of life.
And to think that war could be as neat and tidy and kind of over-so-quickly and so happily as Teddy Roosevelt's war is an illusion.
Ah, and it was an illusion that this country from time to time succumbs to.
Jenkinson: He wrote a book about it.
The book is called "The Rough Riders," published in 1899.
The, the rumor is, whether this is true or not I don't know but it's a great story, that the printer had to order more type with the letter "I" on it because Roosevelt wrote about himself so much.
And a friend of Roosevelt's, but not an uncritical one, uh, wrote to Roosevelt congratulating him on the publication of "The Rough Riders" and said, "but I would urge you to rename it 'Alone in Cuba'.
" [Men cheering.]
Narrator: Cuba had been liberated.
It had been, the Secretary of State John Hay said, "a splendid little war.
" And Theodore Roosevelt had made himself an American hero.
Even before he sailed for home, letters began to arrive, urging him to run for governor of New York.
Jenkinson: So Roosevelt realized that that moment vindicated his father, launched him into the national scene, made him a hero for the rest of his life.
It opened every subsequent door for him.
Thomas: He comes back from war and he senses that he is what America wants to be.
Out of Roosevelt's self-importance but also fed by a real adulation there emerges a kind of cult of Roosevelt.
People simply worshipped this guy in a cowboy hat, this easterner who had become a westerner and represented all the things that were vital and vibrant and strong about America.
Narrator: Reform-minded New York independents pressed him to run for governor on their ticket.
But his old antagonist boss Platt now wanted him, too; a war hero would help the republican slate in what looked to be a tough year.
Roosevelt rejected the reformers and ran as a regular republican: "Idealism," he said, must be combined with "efficiency" and that could only be done as part of a major party.
Man: Carthage, New York.
He spoke for about 10 minutes the speech was nothing, but the man's presence was everything.
It was electrical, magnetic.
I looked in the faces of hundreds and saw only pleasure and satisfaction.
When the train moved away, scores of men and women ran after it waving hats and handkerchiefs and cheering, trying to keep him in sight as long as possible.
Narrator: He barnstormed with 6 uniformed Rough Riders at his side.
Every speech was preceded by a bugle call.
"You have heard the bugle that sounded to bring you here," Roosevelt would shout.
"I have heard it tear the tropic dawn at Santiago.
" At one whistle-stop, an over-enthusiastic veteran introduced him as the man who "led us up San Juan Hill like sheep to the slaughter and so will he lead you!" Roosevelt won.
"I have played it with bull luck," he told a friend.
"First to get into the war; Then to get out of it; then to get elected.
" No one was prouder of his victory than the Hyde Park Roosevelts, who had deserted the democrats to support him.
"Hyde Park gave the colonel an 81 vote majority," Mr.
James wrote proudly to Franklin.
"Last spring, the democrats carried the town by 91, so we think we did very well by our cousin.
" Franklin was so thrilled by what the man his mother called "Your noble kinsman" had done that when he was told he needed glasses, he ordered two sets of lenses, one mounted in a gold-rimmed pince-nez precisely like the one Theodore Roosevelt wore up Kettle Hill.
He only rarely wore the other pair.
Boss Platt feared the new governor harbored what he called "altruistic ideas," and was "a little loose" on questions affecting "the right of a man to run his own business in his own way.
" He was right.
Roosevelt promised to consult Platt as he went along, but he had concluded it was neither wise nor safe for Republicans to take refuge in what he called "mere negation.
" New circumstances demanded a new kind of reform, progressive reform.
The republican party, he felt, should actually offer real solutions to real problems.
The unprecedented but reckless growth that had transformed the country since the civil war was meant to continue, but the old "natural laws" of the marketplace were no longer adequate; government, he believed, needed to step in to tame the market's excesses and maintain necessary order.
Wrongs now had to be righted through legislation as well as persuasion.
Roosevelt intended to strike a balance between what he called mob rule and improper corporate influence.
Platt controlled the legislature.
But Roosevelt held two press briefings a day to rally support for his positions and won more battles than he lost.
In less than 6 months, he secured passage of bills that taxed corporations, limited working hours for women and children, improved sweatshop conditions, created or protected forest preserves in the Catskills and Adirondacks.
Progressive reformers all across the country took notice.
Man as William Allen White: There is no man in America today, whose personality is rooted deeper in the hearts of the people than Theodore Roosevelt.
He is more than a presidential possibility in 1904, he is a presidential probability.
He is the coming American of the twentieth century.
William Allen White.
Narrator: Roosevelt seemed likely to run for a second term as governor.
Then, everything changed.
On November 21, 1899, Vice President Garret A.
Hobart died of a heart attack.
Friends urged Roosevelt to make himself available for the post when McKinley ran for re-election the following year.
He was against it at first.
It was a purely ceremonial office.
He wanted to become president one day and no vice president had gone on to be elected to that office since Martin Van Buren in 1836.
Mark Hanna of Ohio, McKinley's closest advisor, was against it, too.
He thought Roosevelt was a "damned cowboy" and an uncontrollable "madman.
" But progressive Republicans admired him, so did westerners, and boss Platt wanted him out of New York and out of his hair once a for all.
"Roosevelt might as well stand under Niagara Falls," he said, "and try to spit the water back as to stop his nomination by this convention.
" Brands: The vice presidency in those days was where political careers went to die.
People became vice president, were never heard of again.
And Platt figured that's what would happen to Theodore Roosevelt.
Narrator: The delegates nominated him on the first ballot.
The only vote against him was his own.
"The thing could not be helped," Roosevelt explained to Bamie.
"The vital thing is to re-elect President McKinley and to this I shall bend all my energies.
" He crisscrossed the country 673 speeches in 567 towns in 24 states.
McCullough: There was no ambiguity to Theodore Roosevelt.
And there was no lack of trying.
When he ran for vice-president, he traveled something like 22,000 miles.
And he was a new species a new kind of man in a new century.
And he saw the possibilities that this new century presented because he was really a man of the world.
He was a very sophisticated character beneath sort of the aggressive, noisy, outermost mannerisms and the decibel level that he lived at.
He was not inconspicuous, ever.
[Train whistle blows.]
Narrator: On election night, Roosevelt waited for the returns at Sagamore Hill.
When it was clear that McKinley and he had won, a newspaperman congratulated him.
"Please don't," Roosevelt said.
"This election tonight means my political death.
" Then, he paused and added, "of course, gentlemen, this is not for publication.
" "Your duty to the country," McKinley's closest advisor told the president, "is to live for the next 4 years.
" "I feel sorry for McKinley," another official said.
"He has a man of destiny behind him.
" Early in the morning on December 8, 1900, a little over a month after Theodore was elected vice president, the long battle that Franklin and Sara Delano Roosevelt had been waging to keep Mr.
James alive finally came to an end.
He was buried alongside his first wife in the graveyard behind St.
James' Church at Hyde Park.
Franklin did his best to comfort his mother.
She was only 46.
A long, lonely widowhood stretched ahead of her.
She would find what comfort she could with steady devotion to her son.
His successes would be hers, as well.
On the evening of September 13, 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was where he liked most to be: In the woods, miles from the nearest town, with his wife and children as companions.
Accompanied by two guides, he had climbed Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks, New York's highest peak.
In Buffalo, 7 days earlier, an anarchist had shot President McKinley.
But the president's condition had quickly stabilized and he seemed so certain to recover that Vice President Roosevelt had been encouraged to go ahead with his vacation.
Then, a messenger struggled up the slope: The president was dying of gangrene.
Man: His condition is grave.
Stop.
Oxygen is being given.
Stop.
Absolutely no hope.
Stop.
Members of the cabinet in buffalo think you should lose no time coming.
Stop.
Narrator: He wore out two teams of horses racing down the mountain by buckboard, then climbed aboard a special train for Buffalo.
It took him a total of 12 long hours to get there.
By then, McKinley was dead.
Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office in the parlor of a friend's house at half-past 3 in the afternoon on September 14, 1901.
He was the youngest president in American history, just 42 years old.
Franklin Roosevelt was at sea, returning from another voyage to Europe, when he got the news.
It was a "terrible shock to all," he noted, but it was also exciting.
Cousin Theodore's ascension to the nation's highest office had provided him with vivid evidence of how far an ambitious Roosevelt might rise.
Man as Theodore Roosevelt: It is a dreadful thing to come into the presidency this way, but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it.
Here is the task, and I have got to do it to the best of my ability, and that is all there is about it.
Theodore Roosevelt.