Taft 2012 - Jason Heller [74]
“Just take Teddy himself. Theodore Roosevelt spent years achieving relatively small feats in an escalating series of steps forward as a leader of men—as an officer in the United States Army, as a participant in the conservation movement, even as governor of New York. Finally, he possessed the ability to take the ultimate reins of leadership as president. At which point, he was able to turn around and delegate to others so many of the small acts that he would add up to a great president. I know this truth firsthand, for I was one of those doers of Teddy’s small things! I left my judicial appointment to work in the Philippines under his direction; I went to Panama to get construction under way on the canal when a calm hand was required; I took responsibility of administering the War Department when a new man was called for. Were these great tasks? Certainly not; they were simply tasks that needed doing, and I was proud to do them for a man who knew how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Indeed, I was so proud to be one of Teddy’s extra limbs, as it were, and I so admired the work he did in marshaling us all that I allowed myself to be convinced I could take his place when his term was ended.”
Taft caught his breath again. He had no idea how long he’d been standing there speaking. They were all still staring at him, rapt.
“But that was Teddy’s excellence,” he said. “I, myself, am a different beast. The small acts of my own life, as I grew into a man, were not the acts of a commander but, rather, the acts of a judge. I was a good judge! Surely I heard thousands of cases, through all of which I listened to Americans of all sorts attest to the central facts and conflicts of their lives, and I strove mightily to return their testimony with fair, careful, thoughtful decisions. That, if I may say so, is my excellence. I am an excellent judge.
“It did not,” he added slowly, articulating every word, “make me a great president.”
In his peripheral vision, just behind Rachel at the platform’s edge, he saw Susan Weschler brush her hand across her eyes.
“Teddy was a great president,” Taft said. “But here is my question. What about his daughter? Did you know that Teddy had a brilliant spitfire of a daughter, Alice? Oh, she was a force to be reckoned with, that one! All the genius and force of will that made Teddy a figure worth carving into the side of a mountain multiplied threefold and bursting from the seams of a scowling little girl! Yes, Alice spent her White House years in a constant tornado, bursting into Cabinet meetings to yell at her father, outsmarting her bodyguards on a daily basis, literally climbing the walls to spend the night on the roof doing heaven knows what. She was a Roosevelt to the very core, a hero waiting to happen, and you would think that—surely!—she would be the centerpiece of Teddy’s life, his prize possession. But do you know what he told a reporter one day when Alice flew through the office to interrupt their interview? ‘I can be the president of the United States,’ he said, ‘or I can attend to being Alice’s father, but I cannot possibly do both.’
“I … I cannot be that great a president. It is not the people, in the abstract, who most move me; it is people. Real people. People like those I met in the courtroom, who looked me in the eye and told me their troubles. People like my great-great-granddaughter, Abby, who may be an Alice Roosevelt herself someday, searching for a way to find her own excellence, and whom I will surely attend to first and foremost when that day comes! And people like my … my great-granddaughter, Rachel, whose excellence stands manifest