Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [484]
I willing to die for my country, god has called me, to be his instrument. So help me god.
Innocent Guilty
Eine Fester Burg ist unser Gott.
A mighty fortress is our God. This is my body, this is my blood. The mock-religious aura that had glowed around Roosevelt since he first stood at Armageddon had reached its grotesque climax. News of the drama on the Auditorium stage flashed outward along telephone and telegraph wires, jolting every night editor in the country and penetrating even into the Casino Theatre in New York, where Edith Roosevelt sat watching Johann Strauss’s The Merry Countess. She emerged from a side entrance weeping. “Take me to where I can talk to him or hear from him at once.” A police escort whisked her to the Progressive National Headquarters in the Manhattan Hotel, which had an open line to Milwaukee. There, just before midnight, she heard that her husband’s wound had been X-rayed and dressed. He was being transferred to Chicago’s Mercy Hospital, where a team of thoracic specialists would consider whether the bullet in his chest could be safely removed.
It lay embedded against the fourth right rib, four inches from the sternum. In its upward and inward trajectory, straight toward the heart, it had had to pass through Roosevelt’s dense overcoat into his suit jacket pocket, then through a hundred glazed pages of his bifolded speech into his vest pocket, which contained a steel-reinforced spectacle case three layers thick, and on through two webs of suspender belt, shirt fabric, and undershirt flannel, before eventually finding skin and bone. Even so, its final force had been enough to crack the rib.
“THE DULL-EYED, UNMISTAKABLE EXPRESSIONLESSNESS OF INSANITY”. John Schrank under arrest after attempting to kill Roosevelt, 14 October 1912. (photo credit backmatter.2)
Marveling at the freak coordination of all these impediments, a witness to the shooting noted that had Schrank’s slug penetrated the pleura, the Colonel would have bled to death internally in a matter of minutes. “There was no other place on his body so thoroughly armored as the spot where the bullet struck.”
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
From the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
backmatter.1 TR’s perforated speech manuscript, 14 October 1914.
backmatter.2 John Schrank under arrest after attempting to kill TR.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
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Daniel J. Boorstin
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A. S. Byatt
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Caleb Carr
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Christopher Cerf
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Ron Chernow
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Shelby Foote
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Charles Frazier
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Vartan Gregorian
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Richard Howard
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Charles Johnson
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Jon Krakauer
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Edmund Morris
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Joyce Carol Oates
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Elaine Pagels
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John Richardson
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Salman Rushdie
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Oliver Sacks
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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
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Carolyn See
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William Styron
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Gore Vidal