All language subtitles for S01E01 Get Action (1858-1901) IMDB 8.3

Tonight, from director Ken Burns...

You can't expect people like
that to happen all the time.

The monumental saga

of an exceptional American family whose
impact is still felt across the nation.

It's an extraordinary story.

The drama of it is
unmatched in our history.

Theodore, the once-sickly boy
who stormed into Washington

as if he was charging into battle.

He didn't dare slow down.
There were demons.

Franklin.

Struck down by illness,
he would pull himself back up

while lifting the country
out of depression and war.

The only thing we have
to fear is fear itself!

You just had a sense this guy can do it.

Eleanor.

She would go where her
husband could not,

redefining the role of First
Lady and inspiring millions.

Eleanor Roosevelt is a sort of
miracle of the human spirit.

There are so many times in her life

when you would think she
would have given up.

And for the first time,

peer into the private lives
of the most public of people.

I can't even imagine what
it must have been like

for Eleanor to absorb
the terrible betrayal.

Theodore,

Eleanor,

Franklin.

"The Roosevelts: An Intimate
History, " next on PBS.

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.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored

to present the president
of the United States.

This is the second dedication

and there will be others
by other presidents...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the story of the Roosevelts.

No other American family has
ever touched so many lives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

His father would always be his hero.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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."

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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
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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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.

"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."

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.

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'."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.