I've already read two Roosevelt Biographies, but I may need to read a third. NR has a review this month of Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex, and I'm captivated. From his first speech to congress as president (on foreign terrorists):

The wind is sowed by the men who preach such doctrines, and they cannot escape their responsibility for the whirlwind that is reaped. . . . They and those like them should be kept out of this country; and if found here they should be promptly deported to the country whence they came; and far-reaching provision should be made for the punishment of those who stay.

Can you name me a past president you would rather have in office today??


I suppose my favorite quality of TR's was his astonishing breadth of learning. Someone wote to him in 1903 asking what he head read in the first two years of his administration. His answer, in part:

Parts of Herodotus; the first and seventh books of Thucydides; all of Polybius; a little of Plutarch; Aeschylus' Orestean Trilogy; Sophocles' Seven Against Thebes; Euripides' Hippolytus and Bacchae; and Aristophanes' Frogs. . . . [biographies, in French, of Prince Eugene, Adm. de Ruyter, Turenne, and Sobieski]. . . Macbeth; Twelfth Night; Henry the Fouth; Henry the Fifth; Richard the Second . . . Church's Beowulf; Morris' translation of the Heimskringla . . . Sienkiewicz's Fire and Sword . . . Rob Roy; Waverly . . . Pickwick Papers; Nicholas Nickleby; Vanity Fair.