Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [467]
Biographical Note: Drs. Marks and Marks comment further, in a review of the medical narrative provided them by the author, as follows: “One can speculate that in the 1870s, when [TR] was ‘advised by Harvard doctors on graduation to lead sedentary scholarly life because of heart weakness,’ that the examining physician may have heard a heart murmur. The heart murmur could have been secondary to early childhood rheumatic heart disease or a congenital heart valve abnormality.” However, “his rigorous [subsequent] life suggests that if he did have a heart murmur it did not significantly impair cardiac function.” TR’s recurrent attacks of “Cuban fever” after 1898 were consistent with malaria. “The parasite can reside in the liver for years—with bouts of septicemia recurring and causing these symptoms.” His frequent “acute joint pains” probably were attacks of gout. Given his increasing weight, after his 50th birthday, joint symptoms could also reflect degenerative osteoarthritis, particularly of the hip, knee, and ankle joints.” Returning to the question of TR’s coronary vulnerability, the doctors concede some likelihood of endocarditis. “But if he had endocarditis, possibly related to his leg infection seeding a damaged heart, his terminal course would have been marked by high fevers and evidence of infectious, embolic showers which would have been noticed by his physicians, i.e. hemorrhages, speech or motor deficiencies etc.… Further, embolism is unlikely since Faller recorded [six hours before TR’s death] ‘normal heart and pulse’—and this is very unlikely associated with a pulmonary embolus.” Allowing that the undisclosed amount of morphine administered to the patient four hours before his death may have caused the respiratory depression noticed by James Amos, the doctors nevertheless conclude that TR’s “recurrent chest pain/discomfort, obesity, and high blood pressure all make coronary artery disease likely,” leading to their speculative diagnosis of “myocardial infarction” as the prime cause of death.
For a conflicting opinion, stating that TR’s final illness was “most compatible with polyarticular gout,” but also with “reactive arthritis [and/or] rheumatic fever,” see Robert S. Pinals, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Inflammatory Rheumatism” Journal of Clinical Rheumatology, 14.1 (Feb. 2008).
The author has deposited a copy of his narrative of TR’s recorded medical problems in TRC.
7 it spread around the world Arthur Krock of The New York Times told Henry Pringle that he had watched President Wilson receiving cabled news of TR’s death en route to Modena, Italy. According to Krock, who was looking through a window of the presidential car, WW’s face registered “transcendent triumph.” Pringle treated this anecdote, which Krock retailed to him eleven years later, seriously in his 1931 biography of TR (602). It is true that WW received the news while traveling, but his reaction (so far as Krock could discern it through plate glass) can only be guessed at.
8 headed again for the presidency “Among party leaders today it was conceded that if Colonel Roosevelt had lived, he undoubtedly would have had the nomination for the presidency.” The New York Times, 7 Jan. 1919.
9 took refuge in metaphor Henry A. Beers, Four Americans: Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman (New Haven, Conn., 1919), 8; “Theodore Roosevelt in Memoriam,” Natural History, Jan. 1919; William Dudley Foulke, A Hoosier Autobiography (New York, 1922), 221; New York Evening Post, 6 Jan. 1919; Slayden, Washington Wife, 354; Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries, 214; Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 435.
10 Archibald Roosevelt announced The New York Times, 7, 8 Jan. 1919.
11 “It was my father’s” Ibid.
12 In a further Ibid.
13 ROOSEVELT DEAD A large fragile scrapbook album in TRC contains a collection of these headlines.
14 Even so, he Undated news clip in “Theodore Roosevelt” scrapbook, Pratt Collection (TRB).
15 “Mother, the adamantine” TR, Letters, 8.1266.
16 “Gone … gone” George Syran to Mr.