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Steps Going Down. From that point his life was of steps going down, of huge energy pounding at fate for an outlet, of rage and idealism that was frustrated by the lack of the mechanisms of power. T.R. was angered and then maddened by what he deemed to be Taft's surrender of the Republican Party to the Old Guard. He challenged Taft at the 1912 Republican convention, and because it was Taft who now controlled the G.O.P. organization. T.R. took a humiliating defeat. T.R. then launched his epic Bull Moose campaign—"We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord"—and thereby 1) split the G.O.P. vote. 2) handed the White House to Woodrow Wilson.
T.R. went off again to explore a fabled River of Doubt in Brazil—"because it was my last chance to be a boy"—but he was stricken with jungle fever, lying in a canoe, saturated by blinding, drenching downpours. He returned to Sagamore Hill pallid, hollow-cheeked, 55 Ibs. lighter. Once more he attempted to retire, even trying to get the phone cut off—"We could send notes by a boy on a pony"—but his nature would not permit it. He began to rage at Woodrow Wilson. Once Wilson had defined T.R.: "I am told that he no sooner thinks than talks, which is a miracle not wholly in accord with the educational theory of forming an opinion." T.R. feared that Wilson's idealistic foreign policy in war-mad Europe would beget world war. After world war did break out. after the Lusitania had been sunk, Wilson said that the U.S. was "too proud to fight." T.R. had criticized Wilson for "hopeless weakness" and "magniloquent vagueness." Soon T.R. was sneering at Wilson as "yellow."
"Put Out the Light." When World War I came at last to the U.S., T.R. put on one last desperate struggle to serve his countrymen. He asked Woodrow Wilson for permission to raise a division of volunteers and rush it over to help the hard-pressed Allies on the Western Front. Two-hundred-fifty thousand Americans, still drawn by T.R.'s magic, volunteered. Wilson declined.
So T.R., "never more beset by a sense of inadequacy." had to watch his four sons, Theodore Jr., Kermit, Archibald and Quentin, head off to war in his stead. One day T.R. wrote Quentin sadly: "I putter around like the other old frumps, trying to help with the Liberty Loan and Red Cross and such like." Another day word came back to Sagamore Hill that Quentin, a pilot, aged 21, had been shot down over the trenches and killed. The father, grievously afflicted, wrote this tribute to his son: "Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joys of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are part of the same Great Adventure."
Fiercely, never leaning back, the great man moved toward the close of his own Great Adventure. Around him at Sagamore Hill, faraway distances and memories kept crowding in—winter on the range in North Dakota Territory, the great plains an