The asthmatic boy who willed himself into a cowboy, a war hero and the youngest president — and finished a campaign speech with an assassin's bullet in his chest.
Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858 into a wealthy New York family and spent his childhood nearly crippled by asthma, so weak he sometimes had to sleep sitting up. His father built a gym in the house and told him he had to 'make his body.' The boy took up boxing, rowing, and relentless outdoor exercise, and built a personal creed he later called 'the strenuous life' — along the way becoming an obsessive amateur naturalist who kept a boyhood 'museum' of specimens.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard and, at 23, published 'The Naval War of 1812,' a serious work of history still cited by scholars. That same year he won a seat in the New York State Assembly, where he quickly made a name attacking corruption and machine politics.
On February 14, 1884, his mother and his young wife Alice died in the same house on the same day — his mother of typhoid, his wife of kidney failure two days after giving birth. Roosevelt wrote a large X in his diary and the words 'The light has gone out of my life,' left his newborn daughter with his sister, and went west to ranch in the Dakota Badlands. The catastrophic winter of 1886–87 killed most of his cattle and much of his fortune.
Back east he became New York City Police Commissioner in 1895, prowling the streets at night to catch officers asleep or drinking on duty, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, where he pushed hard for a big modern battle fleet. When war with Spain came in 1898 he resigned to help raise the Rough Riders, and his charge at San Juan Heights made him famous enough to be elected Governor of New York that November.
Republican bosses who could not control him made him William McKinley's running mate in 1900 to bury him in the powerless vice presidency. Six months into the term McKinley was shot dead by an anarchist. 'Now look,' party boss Mark Hanna is supposed to have said, 'that damned cowboy is President of the United States.' At 42, Roosevelt remains the youngest person ever to hold the office.
As president he pushed what he called a 'Square Deal' for ordinary Americans. He revived the dormant antitrust laws to break up giant corporations, earning the label 'trust buster'; forced mine owners to the table to end the 1902 coal strike; and, after reading Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle,' signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
Conservation was his most lasting legacy. Roosevelt placed roughly 230 million acres of the United States under federal protection, creating five national parks, 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, and 18 national monuments — using the new Antiquities Act to shield the Grand Canyon when Congress would not.
Abroad he backed a revolution that split Panama from Colombia so the United States could dig the Panama Canal, sent the 'Great White Fleet' of battleships around the world as a show of power, and personally mediated the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. For that he won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, the first American ever awarded it.
Out of office and disgusted with his handpicked successor William Howard Taft, Roosevelt ran for a third term in 1912 on the new Progressive 'Bull Moose' ticket. In Milwaukee a saloonkeeper named John Schrank shot him in the chest; the bullet was slowed by a folded 50-page speech and a steel eyeglass case in his pocket. Roosevelt insisted on delivering the speech first — 'It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose' — talking for roughly 90 minutes before going to the hospital. Splitting the Republican vote handed the election to Woodrow Wilson.
In 1913–14 he nearly died exploring an uncharted Amazon tributary, the River of Doubt, weakened by fever and an infected leg wound. He never fully recovered his health. When his youngest son Quentin was killed as a pilot in 1918 it broke something in him, and he died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill on January 6, 1919, at 60. 'Death had to take him sleeping,' a friend said, 'for if Roosevelt had been awake there would have been a fight.'