All Steady on Teddy

With most biographies, it's only the specialist reader who bothers to flip back to the footnotes. Not so with Theodore Rex (Random House; 772 pages; $35). The second volume of Edmund Morris' projected three-volume set on the life of Teddy Roosevelt is likely to have just about everybody taking a peek back there once or twice. People are going to want to reassure themselves that the gifted but infamous Morris has not made up some of his nicely observed details, and not just because so much of this book has the hurtling pace and alert eye of good fiction. So did Morris' Pulitzer prizewinning first volume, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. That account was as robust and vivid as Teddy himself--probably the last President to have knifed a cougar.

But between that volume and this one came Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, one of the damnedest books of all time. Tapped by Reagan's inner circle to be the President's authorized biographer, Morris had unprecedented access to Reagan, who turned out to be the man who was not there: amiable, detached and mentally adrift. Exasperated by the weightlessness of his central figure, Morris introduced himself into Dutch as a semifictional character who moves in and out of Reagan's life, along with an entirely fictional son who becomes a student radical. Even the footnotes, with their citations from the fictional diaries of the semifictional "Edmund Morris" (got that?), were like a shower of false clues in a puzzle piece by Borges.

Dutch was a postmodern stunt that dumbfounded most critics. It also left a radioactive glow around the edges of Morris' reputation. Two years later, Theodore Rex offers Morris the chance to redeem himself by returning to the field of his first triumph. And let the record show that at no point in this book does Morris introduce himself into a subplot of the action. On the mid-September day in 1901 when Vice President Roosevelt gets word that President William McKinley has succumbed to an assassin's bullet, Morris isn't the messenger who brings the telegram. When Teddy plots to uncouple Panama from Colombia--so that the U.S. could have a freer hand to build its great canal across the isthmus--Morris is not bending to the presidential lunch table to serve the soup and listen in. When T.R. holds forth at some White House reception, Morris doesn't flutter past in a bustle and bonnet, taking surreptitious notes.

Theodore Rex lets Morris be Morris (not "Morris"), which is to say one of the most adroit biographers around. And every visit to the footnotes shows that those cinematic details--the wind that ruffles Teddy's hair on one page, the sunset that darkens windows on another--are all accounted for in some real person's memoirs or letters or in some old newspaper account.

Morris also has in Roosevelt, as he did not have in Reagan, a first-rate central character, whose style and substance foreshadowed the presidencies that would follow. His athletic vigor prefigured John F. Kennedy's. If anything, Roosevelt's White House jujitsu lessons make J.F.K.'s touch football look borderline effete. ("Muscular Christianity without the Christianity" is how somebody once described Teddy's manner.) His use of federal power against the massive industrial monopolies of his day opened the way to the decisive expansion of Washington under his younger relative, F.D.R. Though he came from old money, his inexhaustible democratic appetites--for books, people, food--to say nothing of his gift for moist-eyed public appearances and tireless politicking, make him seem at times like Bill Clinton with better breeding.

Peerless at setting scenes, Morris is not nearly as interested in laying out the issues that Teddy subjected to his rough-and-tumble handling. Morris is surprisingly stingy with background. The General Post Office controversy, the Cuban reciprocity treaty: What things of consequence were at risk there? Don't ask Morris. He's good with the sizzle, not so good with the stakes. When he tells the story of Roosevelt's intervention in the Pennsylvania coal miners' strike of 1902, he deftly sketches in the players--George F. Baer, the imperious representative of the mine owners; John Mitchell, the charismatic union chief--but barely reports the conclusions of the fact-finding commission that Roosevelt forced upon them.

Indifference to the big picture was a shortcoming of Morris' first volume too. Roosevelt was one of the most complicated figures in American history. What should we make of the unblushing imperialist who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Or the economic conservative who attempted to make the Republican Party a friend to the workingman? When this book ends, with Roosevelt turning over the White House to his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, you can laugh and marvel at what Teddy has done, but Morris has made it hard to evaluate him.

Saturnine Henry Adams, who never much cared for the sunny, tireless Teddy, concluded that Roosevelt "showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter--the quality that medieval theology assigned to God--he was pure act." Morris seems to think so too. But even if he doesn't quite have Teddy's act together, you put down this middle volume looking forward to Act III.