He was "a steam engine in trousers," this Harvard-educated patrician cowboy from Manhattan who galloped into the Dakota Badlands wearing spurs and a pearl-handle revolver from Tiffany's, and charged up San Juan Hill in a uniform from Brooks Brothers. He was the first president born in a big city, and the first known to the nation as an intimate - by his initials. The toothy grin that crinkled his entire face masked an unassuageable grief that he kept at bay only by action, by living life as "one long campaign." Author of 36 books and 100,000 letters, the first intellectual president since John Quincy Adams, he sometimes read two books a day - some in Italian, Portuguese, Latin, Greek or other languages he knew - and could recite the "Song of Roland." And just as he transformed himself from a frail asthmatic child, too starved for breath to blow out his bedside candle, he transformed the presidency.
Tune into public television tonight and Monday evening (Oct. 6-7) for a four-hour profile of Theodore Roosevelt that is - to use words he favored - splendid, delightful, bully. It will leave you both inspirited and melancholy - inspirited by the possibilities of human grandeur illuminated by this blast-furnace personality; melancholy about the fact that the modern presidency he pioneered - he set out to improve everything from freight rates to college football - presupposes big people but usually is occupied, certainly not filled, by little ones.He worshiped his father, a noble reformer in whose arms the infant Theodore was cradled during long nocturnal carriage rides that eased Theodore's asthmatic suffocation, akin to drowning on dry land. His father died suddenly of stomach cancer at 46.
A theme of the television biography, elegantly written by David Grubin and Geoffrey Ward, is that grief was the spur to TR's hyperkinetic life that gave the nation a decidedly mixed blessing - a hankering for heroic presidencies.
The century has been what John Milton Cooper, University of Wisconsin historian, calls "an era of great presidential expectations." And therefore also of chronic disappointment.
Such expectations have resisted banishment. Harding's promise of "normalcy," and the rhetorical minimalism of his successor, Coolidge, ran counter to the drift toward the omnipresent presidency, which was intensified first by newsreel cameras, then radio, then television. After Coolidge came Hoover, an engineer cultivating the aura of dynamic modernity. Next came TR's distant cousin, master of national media at a moment when the Depression nationalized a sense of dependence on the national government's actions.
Cooper, writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, notes that the emergence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's full-blown heroic leadership under wartime conditions was presaged by the prewar revival of interest in the Civil War, exemplified by the book and movie "Gone with the Wind," and interest in Lincoln, as exemplified by Carl Sandburg's immensely popular biography-cum-fairy tale, and the Broadway play "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" by Robert E. Sherwood, who in 1940 became an FDR speech-writer.
What began under TR as a serious attempt to make the presidency as large as the problems posed by industrialism and urbanism, reached both an apotheosis and a distinct silliness in the national swooning about JFK's manufactured glamour and patina of high culture. Richard Reeves, a Kennedy biographer, says "watching the Kennedys was self-improvement" for Americans, teaching them "how to act and spend all the new money coming their way, giving the newly prosperous some polish."
Cooper correctly believes that overreliance on the presidency, and longings for heroism, denote "political immaturity among Americans." Furthermore, by inflating the public's sense of political possibilities, and encouraging childish faith that complex problems will yield to charismatic executive "leadership," the heroic presidency encourages passivity in the citizenry at local levels and has the anti-constitutional effect of subverting limited government.
Today's president, unrestrained by any sense of the ridiculous, and promising to feel our pain and raise our children, may make one lasting contribution to the nation's health by rendering the idea of the heroic presidency laughable.