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But the quality of T.R. that added the vital plus to his program was that he had learned, during long and full years of growth and experience, joy and hardship, that compromise is no substitute for decisiveness, that inspiration is made out of specific minute-by-minute leadership. He had also absorbed out of a long career of professional politics, precincts and patronage a healthy notion about how the presidency ought to be run.
"I believe in a strong executive," said T.R. "I believe in power; but I believe that responsibility should go with power." Above all else, it was T.R.'s presidential presence—the glint behind spectacles, the mustache, the teeth, the granite jaw, the Gatling-gun voice—that rallied his dispirited countrymen behind his challenging precepts of freedom through order and venture and pride.
Dead Rebs & Asthma. He was born at 28 East aoth Street in Manhattan on Oct. 27, 1858, a calm evening that followed days of strong northeast wind and record tides. His father, Theodore Roosevelt, a merchant-banker, of a Dutch family famous for seven generations in New York philanthropy, was a "Lincoln Republican." His mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, was a Georgia-bred secessionist. One of T.R.'s first memories was about how he cheered for the Union and about how he would cheer even louder to reply to his mother's discipline. One night at family prayers Theodore fervently appealed to the Lord of Hosts to "grind the Southern troops into powder!"
The Roosevelts came through the Civil
War to raise Theodore ("Teedie"), a brother and two sisters amid days in which, sister Corinne recalled, "the hours flew on golden wings." But Theodore, as he grew older, was nonetheless a boy sorely beset. "I was a sickly, delicate boy," he wrote, "and suffered much from asthma. One of my memories is ... of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me." His arm muscles were so weak that he could not stand up to other youngsters. One day his father encouraged him: "You have the mind but not the body . . . You must make your body. It is hard drudgery, but I know you will do it." Theodore organized a gymnasium with horizontal bars and a punching bag on the second floor of the town house and set about to do just that.
Intensely he moved through years of private tutoring in the U.S. and Europe, began to develop a gleaming treasure house of ideals. He fastened onto the magazine Our Young Folks, with stories such as Cast Away in the Cold and Grandfather's Struggle for a Homestead—"good healthy stories . . . teaching manliness, decency and good conduct." He moved on to the heritage of the heroes of Valley Forge. Said Theodore: "I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world, and I had a great