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and more permanent plane of well-being, and asked if any reader, nine years later, heard in them the authentic note of the Colonel’s voice. He then quoted the sentences immediately following: But woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it. And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses his fighting edge. Time and again thereafter, and compulsively during the war years, Roosevelt had indulged this rhetorical tic: always, first, the salute to men of benign instinct, then the harsh warning that if they did not fight and breed, they were doomed. In doing so, the former straight talker had become “the greatest concocter of ‘weasel’ paragraphs on record.” His misfortune was that when Americans found out that he was less interested in fighting for social justice than fighting for fighting’s sake, they had shown themselves unwilling to be either patronized or cajoled.

Summarizing, Sherman felt that Roosevelt had been more of an autocrat than a democrat, a warrior, not a peacemaker, a man of action who scoffed at philosophical scruples. His end had been tragic, Yet there was something undeniably epic about him:

Mr. Roosevelt has attained satisfactions which he thought should console fallen empires: he has left heirs and a glorious memory. How much more glorious it might have been if in his great personality there had been planted a spark of magnanimity. If, after he had drunk of personal glory like a Scandinavian giant, he had lent his giant strength to a cause of the plain people not of his contriving nor under his leadership. If in addition to helping win the war he had identified himself with the attainment of its one grand popular object. From performing this supreme service he was prevented by defects of temper which he condemned in Cromwell, a hero who he admired and in some respects strikingly resembled.

THESE EXCHANGES BETWEEN the wholeheartedly adoring and the ambivalently disparaging set the tone for seventy years of retrospective controversy. But for the postwar decade and beyond, it was Roosevelt the hero, “Theodore Rex” the masterful president, “Teddy” the lovable who loomed in popular perception. A powerful stimulant to nostalgia for him was the publication in late 1919 of Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children, the book of all his books he had most wanted to see in print. An instant bestseller, it revealed the Colonel to have been, behind his often grim public face, the most delightful of private correspondents, able to express adult feelings in language (and hilarious pictograms) that enchanted the young.

By the end of that year, as Roosevelt’s historical stock surged, that of Woodrow Wilson—outmaneuvered by Clemenceau and Lloyd George at the Paris Peace Conference, thwarted by Henry Cabot Lodge and other senatorial opponents of his cherished League of Nations treaty—fell precipitously. He collapsed of a stroke and became a peevish recluse for the rest of his presidency. Scholars wondered whether any head of state since Napoleon had ever suffered such a loss of power. The concurrent rise of Warren Gamaliel Harding as the Republican Party’s challenge to everything Wilson had ever stood for led to a rout of Democratic candidates in the presidential election of 1920. Most of the sixteen million men and women who voted for Harding, in a landslide victory, did so to honor the memory of the candidate they would unquestionably have preferred, had Roosevelt lived to run again.

Joseph Bucklin Bishop’s official life of the Colonel came out that fall: two dignified volumes entitled Theodore Roosevelt and His Time: Shown in His Own Letters. There were the requisite iconic frontispieces, protected with flaps of tissue paper. The scholarship was dogged, the coverage ample (if selective), and the index beyond reproach. But the overall tone was so reverential that only the occasional “scoop” document, such as Roosevelt’s mammoth 1911 letter describing his European tour, infused the dryasdust pages with the breath of life.

Even more monumental,