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T.R.: "Our nation is that one among all the nations of the earth which holds in its hands the fate of the coming years. We enjoy exceptional advantages, and are menaced by exceptional dangers; and all signs indicate that we shall either fail greatly or succeed greatly . . .
"Here is the task, and I have got to do it."
Power & Hope. That Republican Roosevelt did not fail greatly and did succeed greatly at century's turning point is the great but little recognized fact behind the U.S.'s social health and world strength today. In every sense T.R., whose looth birthday anniversary the U.S. celebrates this year, was a man for today. "My ambition," he once wrote a friend, "is that, in however small a way, the work I do shall be along the Washington and Lincoln lines." Said T.R.: "The only true conservative is the man who resolutely sets his face toward the future."
Theodore Roosevelt set the U.S. on course for the new? century by deploying the steel of power to safeguard the warm glow of hope. At home he introduced a new kind of peacetime power—the power of the U.S. Government—to slap down robber barons and labor agitators in order to conserve the freedoms of U.S. business and U.S. labor as U.S. institutions. "A democracy can be such in fact," he wrote, "only if ... we are all of about the same size." Abroad he introduced another new kind of power—deterrence, as symbolized by the U.S. armed forces—to promote the U.S. self-interest in world peace and world order. Said T.R.. one of the most successful peacekeepers of U.S. history: "I have always been fond of the West African proverb: 'Speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far.' " At home and abroad T.R. tempered his steel in his confidence that national character and national leadership would beget responsible national conduct.
"Americanism," wrote Theodore Roosevelt, "means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life."
The Vital Quality. T.R. was the youngest President the U.S. ever had—in office at 42. out of office at 50. He was also—despite a succession of afflictions that included asthma, puny arm muscles, nearsightedness and near blindness, near deafness, abscesses on thighs and legs, tropical fevers—the most vigorous President the U.S. ever had. "I do not like to see young Christians with shoulders that slope like a champagne bottle," said T.R.. and he turned the White House years into a bully spectacle of romps and pillowfights with his sons, presidential judo battles with imported Japanese wrestlers, boxing matches with his aides, mass scrambles across Washington's Rock Creek with Cabinet members. Army officers and foreign diplomats—"being the right sort, to a man."
T.R. was also a wide-ranging intellectual. He read Ronsard's verses while exploring the River of Doubt in Brazil; he wrote a biography of Missouri's Senator Thomas Hart Benton while running a couple of cattle ranches in North Dakota Territory; he identified 64 different bird calls in