Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [336]
THE FOLLOWING NOVEMBER, Roosevelt’s self-proclaimed “fifth cousin by blood and nephew by law” was elected President of the United States. For most of Franklin’s life, he had had to contend with the fact that his surname famously denoted someone else. Now the reverse began to apply.
Franklin was generous enough, and sincere, in insisting that Cousin Theodore was “the greatest man I ever knew.” He had managed, despite the crippling misfortune of polio, to get where he was by emulating the Colonel’s career path: from Harvard via the New York legislature to the Navy Department, and then on to Albany as governor of New York. He had even run unsuccessfully for vice president. But it was clear from the moment of his inauguration in 1933 that the new “Roosevelt” would henceforth make his own imperious way.
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., had less luck in trying to emulate the late Colonel. Retiring from the army with a chestful of decorations—the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, and the Croix de Guerre—he entered politics and successively became a New York State assemblyman, assistant secretary of the navy, and Republican nominee for the governorship of New York in 1924. But innocent involvement in the Harding administration’s “Teapot Dome” oil-field-leasing scandal compromised his campaign against the incumbent governor, Al Smith. Ted’s diminutive stature, face-dividing grin, and harsh cries of “Bully” did not evoke enough memories of his father to beguile the electorate, and Cousin Eleanor made things worse by barnstorming the state in an automobile reconfigured as a teapot. He was badly defeated, in a presidential election year that otherwise went well for the GOP.
President Hoover appointed Ted governor of Puerto Rico, and then of the Philippines. He was a popular and able administrator, but Franklin’s election ended his political career, and he became an executive of the publishing house of Doubleday, Doran & Co. In further imitation of his father, he built a mansion on the grounds of Sagamore Hill, and became notoriously bookish, given to loud recitations of Kipling and Omar Khayyám. It was a question whether Ted or Alice—the sibling he felt closest to—was the more vituperative in criticizing the New Deal as a perversion of the Square.
Brother and sister were both “American Firsters” in the early days of World War II. But Ted’s Plattsburg conscience soon prompted him to switch from isolationism to principled support of the administration’s preparedness program. A week after Pearl Harbor, he was appointed a brigadier general on active duty, and from June 1942 through 1943 fought with wild courage in North Africa and Italy. Although he was fifty-six on the countdown to D-Day, and wizened and lame with arthritis, he persuaded General Omar Bradley that his presence in Normandy would be inspirational to the assaulting forces. On 6 June 1944, Ted hobbled ashore from the first boat to hit Utah beach, and at once took command of a landing operation that threatened to degenerate into bloody chaos. His all-day heroism under constant fire won him the Medal of Honor. General Roosevelt was chosen to lead the Ninetieth Division into further battle, but on the eve of his appointment on 12 July, he died of a heart attack. He was buried in Normandy two days later, on the twenty-sixth anniversary of Quentin’s death. General George Patton, an honorary pallbearer at the funeral, described Ted as “one of the bravest men I have ever known.”
Kermit Roosevelt never recovered from the sensation, on hearing of the death of his father, that he had nothing left to stand on. A proficient but not a natural soldier, he wrote a book about his service in Mesopotamia, War in the Garden of Eden, and spent the immediate postwar years building up a mercantile business, the Roosevelt Steamship Company.