Live from the TRPL #1: Doris Kearns Goodwin on Finding Hope in History

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN:

A president's most important job, Roosevelt said again and again, is to set an example. And the example he set was to fight for what he believed to be right with every ounce of energy he had. When he died in his sleep at the age of 60, his son famously said, "Death had to take him sleeping or there would have been a fight."

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Welcome to Live from the TRPL on Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library officially opened its doors on July 4th, 2026. And in the days leading up to it, the brand new auditorium hosted some really special talks, interviews, and panel discussions. These featured a striking lineup of voices, including historians, conservationists, architects, and political leaders. I wanted to give our podcast listeners a chance to hear some of these great speakers. So we've put together a short series, six episodes over six weeks. We start the series with presidential historian Doris Kerns-Goodwin. She takes the stage to introduce Theodore Roosevelt, not as a monument, but as someone who has had to build himself piece by piece into a leader. Doris has spent decades inside the lives of American presidents, the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Johnson, Lincoln, and she jokes that after 10 years writing about TR, she came to think of him as one of her boyfriends.

She tells this story almost like she's talking about an old complicated friend, the sickly child who willed himself into the strenuous life, the privileged young legislator everyone dismissively nicknamed the dude. The almost unthinkable day he lost his wife and mother and the way he rebuilt himself afterwards out in the bad lands of North Dakota. Along the way, Doris makes the case that studying stories like this and looking to history broadly gives her hope about what we're all able to overcome. Of course, she brings plenty of warmth and humor into her talk, including the story of a French ambassador decidedly unprepared for one of TR's famous hikes. So settle in for this one. It's part biography, part pep talk, and a genuinely moving case for why leadership like his still matters.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN:

How glad am I to be here with all of you and what a splendid opening this is going to be. It's a joy for me to be here when finally Theodore Roosevelt gets his presidential library after a wait of 150 years, 107 years. And how lucky that we waited this long the more you think about it, because with the help of technology unavailable in those earlier years, the TR Library provides an interactive experience unlike any you've ever seen. I can't wait till you go through it all. Indeed, with the AI representation of TR, which is trained on 150,000 historical documents that had been scattered in 18 different institutions, TR can answer our questions in real time. How I wish I'd had him by my side when I was writing my books. I spent 10 years with him, one of the four presidents that I studied over 60 years, including Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Lyndon Johnson.

Each book took so long, longer than World War II to write Franklin and Eleanor, twice as long as the Civil War to finish Abraham Lincoln. But I did begin to think, as Ted said, of them as my guys, even my boyfriends. And during the decade I spent with TR, what fun it was to live with him. I often found myself talking aloud to him, asking him questions, but somehow he never answered then. I never got mad at him. I simply imagined what he might say in a dialogue in which I played both sides. But now in this splendid library, I finally will have my chance. And now this morning, I have the chance to share with you what it was about TR that drew me to want to live with him for all those years, to wake up with him in the morning thinking about him, go to sleep at night thinking about him.

And now here at the Presidential Library, you will have the rare opportunity to step inside that story yourselves, experience his leadership, his character, his curiosity and his conversations. But first, let me tell you why I love history so much and why the study of history is more important today than ever. I'm often stopped on the street or even in the airport sometime by people asking me, "What gives you confidence that we can emerge from this really difficult time?" And I often tell them it's history that gives me confidence. For as tough as this time is, history shows that we've been through really, really tough times before and in each situation we emerged with greater strength. Just imagine what it was like for Abraham Lincoln on the eve of his inaugural. Seven states had already seceded from the union. A civil war that would kill more than 600,000 was about to begin.

He later said if he'd ever imagined what it would've been like in the first three months of his presidency, he could not have thought he could have lived through it. And then imagine FDR at his inaugural, the country at rock bottom with the depression, one out of four people out of work, starving people wandering the streets, no safety net in those days. The banking system had collapsed. Somebody said to him as he was about to go to speak, "You know if your program works, you'll be one of the great presidents. If it fails, you'll be one of the worst." "No," he said ominously, "I'll be the last American president." That's how fragile democracy was at that time. And then imagine the early days of World War II when Hitler in the spring of 1940 sped all across Europe, tens of thousands of people killed by his bombs in his tanks, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg surrendering, and eventually France.

If he had continued, not only would democracy have been an issue, but Western civilization would've been lost. And the thing is that we know how each one of those crises ended. We know that the civil war ended with the union restored and emancipation secured. We know the New Deal provided a safety net and public jobs before the mobilization for the war brought the depression to an end. We know the allies won World War II, but our ancestors, they did not know how their stories would end. They lived with the same anxiety we're living with today. So in this beleaguered time, history is critical. It provides us with perspective, it provides us with lessons, and it provides us most importantly with hope. I truly, truly believe that. So now come with me to another time when democracy was in peril, to 1901, when a 42-year-old Theodore Roosevelt took office after the assassination of William McKinley.

It's a time reminiscent of our own. The industrial revolution had shaken up the economy, much like the tech revolution and AI today. Gigantic companies were swallowing up smaller companies. There was a massive gulf between the rich and the poor. People in the rural areas were suspicious of people in the cities. Western farmers were suspicious of Eastern manufacturers. New inventions were speeding up the pace of life. It was a period of vast immigration, nationwide strikes, anarchist bombings, and TR warned that democracy was in peril because people in different classes and sections were beginning to see each other as the other rather than as common American citizens. So what leadership traits did he possess that enabled him to knit this country together under a doctrine of fair play and a square deal for all, the rich and the poor, the capitalist and the laborer? How did he restore the fellow feeling that made our countrymen feel once again that they were fellow citizens in America?

It was not clear that he was fitted for this leadership role when he first emerged in public life at 23 running for the legislature. "Who's the dude?" people asked. They had first sight of him. His hair was parted in the center. He had short whiskers on his cheek. He had a monocle over one eye held in place by a gold chain over his ear and his waistcoat and trousers were so tight as the tailor could make them. He looked like the privileged dude he was, the grandson of one of the five wealthiest men in New York City. But unbeknownst to those who characterized him at that time, he had already experienced hardship and revealed a number of leadership qualities. His childhood was shaped by terrifying attacks of bronchial asthma. He remembered hearing his parents worry that he might die. Unable to engage in sports, however, he became a ferocious reader, transporting himself into the lives of adventurous heroes that he admired, explorers, soldiers, frontiersmen.

One summer he actually devoured 15 novels. Later, a lifelong reader, he said that leaders in every field need to know more than anything human nature and to know the needs of the human soul and those needs as set forth are nowhere else in the great books of poetry and prose. Books are the greatest companions. All his life he set aside time for reading while waiting for meals between visitors lying in bed at night. But then when he was 10, his father feared that his son was becoming an invalid, spending too many days in bed. He told his boy he had the mind, but not the body and without the body, the mind could not go as far as it should. "I will make my body" young TR promised. And in the months and years that followed, working out in the home gym that his father built for him, he showed the perseverance, the pursuit of goals despite discouragement that would mark his leadership in later years.

Every day he lifted weights, hoisted himself up on horizontal bonds, slowly, ever so slowly remaking his body until he became known as the exemplar of the strenuous life. It took hard sustained work day after day, a quality he brought with him for the rest of his life. He argued that there were two kinds of success in the world. The first to a man who has such natural powers that he can do things that no one else, no matter how hard they try, can ever do, such as a Shakespeare or later an Einstein. But the more common success, his success, he said, depended on a man's ability to develop ordinary qualities to an extraordinary degree through hard sustained work. He was not a good swimmer, but he became a strong one, not a good shot, but became a big game hunter. His eyesight was poor, but he became a world-class birder.

He wasn't a brilliant writer, but he slaved over everything he wrote and ended up publishing 40 distinguished books. And when given any assignment when he was homeschooled at home with a young tutor, he would never procrastinate, never wait till the last moment, he would say. He regarded procrastination as a sin, preparing ahead freedom from anxiety, a habit of mind that would mark his leadership style and set an example for all of his teams in the years ahead. I often think of him when I'm about to put something off and I think, no, I'll just get anxious if I put it off. I'll do it now because of TR. And the most difficult to replicate leadership trait from childhood that that dude in whiskers didn't seem to show at the moment was his great curiosity. When he walked in the woods that surrounded their summer home to clear his lungs, he began to observe birds, to listen to their songs, to discern their shapes and their colors.

He collected bugs and insects curious to learn their anatomy, mounting hundreds of specimens in his bedroom, driving his brother Elliot to beg for a separate room. And as you walk through this new library, you'll follow that curiosity right alongside him from the bugs and the birds that filled his childhood bedroom to the ideas that shaped a presidency. It's a reminder that great leaders aren't born all at once. They start by asking questions. These were some of the qualities that caused the local Republican boss, Joe Murray, to take a paternal interest in young TR when he first arrived at Republican headquarters with the idea that he might run for the state legislature. Murray saw that young TR listened when he talked with working class Irish and German immigrants. He was interested in their stories and he told them stories of his own. He watched him interact with strangers.

He witnessed his manic energy soaking up what he needed to know about the district. And with Murray's backing, TR easily won the seat, becoming the youngest member of the legislature. And once there, he rose like a rocket. He made such fiery speeches against his democratic opponents whom he called rotten and corrupt that he garnered headlines across the country and no rookie had ever secured such headlines, but he became a jack in the box. He would constantly jump up and down, interrupting his colleagues. He loved being the center of attention, so much so that his daughter, as we all know, famously said, he wanted to be the baby at the baptism, the bride at the wedding and the corpse at the funeral. But the rocket soon crashed to the ground. He found he couldn't get anything done. He was so irritating even to his Republican colleagues.

It was then that he revealed what would become his signature leadership trait, the ability to acknowledge errors and learn from his mistakes to grow. In other words, he recognized, he said that he had developed a swelled head and that cooperation and compromise were essential to get anything done. He moderated his rhetoric, he reached across the aisle and he became a productive legislator. "The man who has never made a mistake," he later said, "has never made anything." By acknowledging error and learning from his mistakes, he continued to grow. Young Roosevelt further revealed his capacity for growth when a union sponsored bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses owned by absentee landlords was referred to one of his committees. He had been brought up believing in laissez-faire, a bias against governmental schemes to regulate the economy. He believed the tenement owners were also, the cigar manufacturers had a right to do whatever they wanted with their private property.

But when the union leader, Samuel Gompers, asked him, "Just come with me to one of these tenements, I just want you to see the conditions under which they are living and working." And there he did. He went, he saw five adults and several children enclosed in a single room making cigars with tobacco crammed in every corner next to the bedding mixed in with the food. His developing sense of empathy was aroused. He not only agreed to vote for the bill, but he became his champion. Empathy, the ability to understand and share in other people's feelings by seeing or imagining their points of view, surely one of the most critical traits in a leader. So then by his third term in the state legislature working with Democrats that he'd previously labeled as rotten, he brought the two parties together to pass a host of important bills that benefited New York.

He had overcome the self-centered aspect of his leadership and become a true leader. At 25, happily married to Alice Lee, the case of love, he said at first sight, and awaiting the birth of their first child, he felt he had the reins in his own hands, but then adversity struck. "Everyone is broken by life," Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "But afterwards, some are strong in the broken places." While some people lose their bearings, their life forever stunted from adversity, others simply resume their normal behavior, still others through reflection and resilience are able to transcend their ordeal armed with a greater resolve and purpose. So it was with Theodore Roosevelt, whose resilience carried him through an almost unimaginable tragedy. When Alice was about to give birth, TR's 49-year-old mother came to New York City to be with her while Teddy was in Albany. A joyous telegram announced the birth of the baby girls, cigars and celebrations all around.

And then a second telegram came telling him to come home at once. There was a crisis in his house. He reached the house in time to be with his dying mother who had contracted a fast moving case of typhoid fever. And then 12 hours later, his 22-year-old wife, Alice, died from a kidney disease undiagnosed during her pregnancy. "The light has gone out of my life," he wrote in his diary underneath a big X marking the tragic day. "For joy or sorrow," he continued, "My life has now been lived out." Feeling the need to escape from this catastrophe, he headed for the Badlands where he had purchased a ranch the previous year. It was here in the landscape that surrounds us today that his grief solely gave way, slowly gave way to renewal. Rather than escaping tragedy, he found a healing that would fundamentally alter his life.

In the beginning, constant activity, riding his horse 15 hours a day and performing the daily work of life on the ranch prevented overthought and he was finally able to sleep at night. Meanwhile, the haunting beauty of the landscape seeped into his very soul, producing a lifelong love of open spaces that would eventually lead to the great conservation measures and the national parks that would be permanently associated with his name. And as you'll discover here, the Badlands didn't simply shelter DR in his darkest hours, they shaped the leader he would become, for it was here in the Badlands that his depression gradually subsided and in time he fell deeply in love again, sustaining a lifelong joyous marriage with his childhood friend, Edith Carroll. But this resilient ability to bounce back after tremendous sorrow gave him perspective in later life when he faced triumph and defeat in various elections.

"I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen," he said, "to allow me to be either cast down or elated for more than a very brief time over success or defeat." While other men might have been destroyed by the experiences Roosevelt endured, he emerged stronger, more focused, more complex, more interesting with greater powers of self-knowledge. His two-year soldier on the Western frontier became what he called the most important educational asset of his entire life. When asked two decades later which chapter of his life he would choose to remember, including the presidency, he said, "I would take the memory of my life on the ranch with his experiences close to nature and among the men who live nearest to her." Standing here, it's easy to understand why this is the place where Theodore Roosevelt believed he had become the man he was meant to be.

He had gained 30 pounds of muscle and grit and his falsetto voice was now strong enough to drive oxen. But most importantly, when he returned east, he was able to cast himself as a new kind of American man, a hybrid of the cultivated easterner and the hard bitten westerner. For the rest of his life, countless countrymen regarded him as a man of the west, a romantic figure far removed from his upper class background, no longer a dude or a dandy. Simply put, as Roosevelt later said, "I would not have become president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota." His Badland experiences also shaped his ambition and his philosophy of leadership. Before going west, he saw his ambition as climbing a ladder from one title position to the next, from the state legislature to the Congress, to the Senate, and then perhaps governor and even president.

But now he realized that by moving up a ladder and focusing too much on the future, a person becomes too cautious, too careful in word and deed. But now knowing that fate could interrupt long-term planning at any moment, he determined, "I'm just going to choose a job that I think I can make a difference in, even if it means I'm moving sideways rather than upwards." It is one of the reasons his story speaks to us so today and one of the questions this library constantly asks, quietly asks of each of us, "Not how high will you climb, but how can you make the greatest difference?" And he would leave everything on the field, keeping nothing in reserve for some future that might be cut short. So he served as civil service commissioner for six years, believing deeply in the merit system, whereas he said the farmer's lad and the mechanic's son would have the same chance to compete as the son of wealth or privilege, an early illustration of his insistence on fairness that would prove his signature leadership style in his years ahead.

He became police commissioner of New York, most corrupt department. Why do you want to do it? That's why I want to do it. And he resolved while he was there to get out of the office as often as he could and learn firsthand the nature of the policeman's work by taking what he called these midnight rambles through the city. He would disguise his identity with an oversized coat and a floppy hat, finding where the police were on their beat or where supposedly on duty they were enjoying a beer in a saloon. Cartoonists had a field day, caricatures of startled policemen covering at the site of cowering at the site of an enormous set of teeth, a metal rimmed glasses and a mustache entertained the country and ushered Roosevelt into national prominence. And from then on, Roosevelt made a point of getting out of the office in as often as he could to see in his own eyes what was happening on the ground.

A style of leadership famously dubbed management by wandering around. Well, then after stomping for McKinley in 1896, he secured a vaunted position as assistant secretary of the Navy, but no sooner had Congress declared war on Spain in 1898, then he proclaimed that he would resign his Navy post and volunteer for the army. Not a single one of his close friends agreed with what seemed to them an impulsive decision. "I really think he's going mad," one friend said. The president asked him twice as a personal favor to stay. He had much more power there than he would have as a soldier, but he wanted to be on the ground where the action was. Again, a leadership trait we will see again and again. He created a most colorful volunteer regimen composed of frontiersman from the west, cowboys, hunters and miners alongside Ivy League football stars from the east, polo players, members of the Somerset Club, and policemen from their beats in New York City.

To stimulate the fellow feeling that he believed was essential to the success of the mission, he deliberately arranged the tents at the training ground in San Antonio in such a manner that the Cowboys and the Wranglers slept side by side with the scions of financiers. He assigned the Knickerbocker Club members to wash dishes for a New Mexico company, and he brought Easterners and Westerners together in the daily chores of washing, laundry, digging, and filling in latrines. Eventually, a common denominator emerged throughout the entire regiment, a leveling of money, social status, and education under the aegis of teamwork. Roosevelt had discovered that great leadership doesn't erase differences, it just gives people a purpose larger than themselves. And then on the day that ended with his regimen's triumphant charge up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill, TR exhibited the leadership trait he valued the most, courage. And as you'll see in the Battle of San Juan Hill Gallery here, this moment of uncertainty is going to be replicated for you.

You'll see as his men were advancing hesitantly up the hill, under a hail of bullets from the Spanish situated at the top, Colonel Roosevelt, the only mounted man, was in his leadership's customary position at the rear of the columns, but he suddenly decided to charge up the hill to rally the men. They had to go faster to follow. "Follow me, follow me," he yelled, pushing them forward at a faster pace. "No one who saw Roosevelt take that ride expected that he would finish it alive," one witness said. No one who saw him with why he's wearing a blue polka dot bandana floating straight out behind his head, the most conspicuous object in the range of rifle pits, but inspired by their leader, up, up, up went the troops in the face of death, acting like veterans until they reached the summit and the Spanish surrendered.

And it's one thing to read and learn about that charge, another to experience the sights and sounds of the battle right here in the library where you can begin to appreciate just how exposed and improbable that ride up Kettle Hill really was. So Roosevelt's courageous ride then captured the imagination of the country, leading him to write a memoir of his experiences called the Rough Riders. When a copy came across the desk of a celebrated humorist who wrote weekly columns for the Chicago Times Herald, he wrote a mocking review calling Roosevelt's propensity for placing himself in the center of every action. He said, "It's a biography of a hero by the hero. He should have called the book Alone in Cuba." So it was here that Roosevelt displayed a leadership trait that was sustain him throughout all his days, a sense of humor and an ability to laugh at himself.

He wrote to the journalist, "I regret to tell you that my family and my intimate friends are delighted with your review of my book. Now I think you owe me one and I shall exact that. When you next come east, you pay me a visit. I have long wanted the chance of making your acquaintance." And then later, Roosevelt loved to tell the story of meeting a charming young woman at a reception. "Oh," she said, "I've read everything you ever wrote." "Really?" He said smiling. "What book did you like best? Why that one, you know, alone in Cuba?" But of course, it was his courage and battle that led to his victory in the race for governor where he displayed a different act and a different aspect of courage in defying the powerful Republican bosses by calling for reform in a bitter struggle over a franchise tax system that would require companies who had been given exclusive state franchises to operate electric street railways, telephone and telegraph lines, making tens of million dollars a year to pay, as what he said, decency to pay their fair share.

But so angry did Roosevelt's action make the political bosses who were in leave with the corporations and the franchise operators that they threatened to withhold all contributions from the Republican Party if Theodore Roosevelt was put up for a second term. So they essentially exiled him from the governorship to the vice presidency, a position he found so useless that he told a friend he was not doing any work that mattered and he would now decide to attend law school. More and more it seems to him, he said that the best thing in life is to have a piece of work wealth worth doing and then to do it well, and I have none. But then on September 6th, 1901, an assassin's bullet brought McKinley's life to an end and Roosevelt was shot into the presidency, the youngest man to occupy the White House in the country.

But young, though he may have been, his winding path to the presidency had provided him with an unusually wide set of experiences. He'd worked in state government as both a legislator and governor. He'd worked in city government as police commissioner, in the federal government as civil service commissioner, assistant secretary of the Navy and vice president. He'd lived a life of privilege in the east and a life with cowboys and ranchers in the west. He had trained as rough riders in the south, and most importantly, he had developed the number of qualities that serve as the foundation for leadership. They were already there. Humility, the willingness to acknowledge errors and learn from mistakes, empathy, resilience, courage, humor, the ability to laugh at oneself, and finally an ambition that had become larger than for self, the desire to make a difference in other people's lives. So as Roosevelt settled himself and his family into the White House, a single question buzzed in the citadels of finance in the newspapers and conversations around the country, "Would Roosevelt continue unbroken McKinley's laissez-faire anti-regulatory philosophy toward business?"

The chair of the Republican Party, Mark Hanna, feared that Roosevelt might be impetuous, a knight in shining armor, spoiling for battle. When McKinley had chosen him as vice president, Hannah had threatened to resign his post as national chair. Don't any of you realize there's only one life between that madman and the presidency? But Hannah would soon learn that Roosevelt was much more sophisticated than the cartoon image of him as a dragon slayer suggested. During his weeks of preparation for his first big address before Congress, when everyone was imagining, we're going to find out what kind of president he's going to be. Will he be with the corporations? Will he be against them? With careful diplomacy, he gave the corporate representatives and all the conservative members of Congress a hand in sharing and shaping his speech. He needed to learn from them, he told them. He slowly figured out how to handle the big corporations he needed them.

It made a very pretty scene report as observed that this young president earnestly was placing his thoughts before his older counselors and asking them to criticize him when they thought he was wrong. And in the end, he came to a very balanced view about the big corporations. He recognized that the captains of industry who had driven the railway systems across the country, built up our commerce, developed our manufacturers to the point we were leaders of the world, had on the whole done great good to our people. He had no patience with the Democrats who wanted to break up the big corporations simply because they were big, who resorted to hatred and fear in denouncing the big corporations. He was concerned only if they used unfair means to quash competition or if they used their powerful position to raise prices and diminish wages. He distinguished between good trusts and bad trusts, and he fought for regulations that would require corporations to make reports to the government that would allow the president as steward of the people, as he called himself, to determine whether there were abuses and to find remedies.

But when the conservatives in Congress prevented even his moderate reforms from going through, he took his case to the American people. He spent more time on the road than any previous president. He would travel weeks, even months at a time by a train from one city to the next, talking with people, meeting with local newspaper editors, listening to complaints. Year after year, he would stop his train at village stations all along the way. This was his way of bringing the presidency to the people, meeting Americans where they lived. Listening as much as speaking and building trust one town at a time. He would be jostled by frantic crowds at every station. He never betrayed impatience or irritation. He recognized that these extended tours represented his first real chance to gain the people's trust. So he raided night radiated nothing but delight as he accepted an array of bizarre gifts that would always come to the stations, including an infant badger, a lizard, a horn toad, a copper vase, an Indian basket, two bears, a horse, and a gold inlaid saddle.

And then as the train pulled away, he would remain by the window for hours so he could wave to groups of people standing at the small road crossings along the way. At one point, he found himself frantically raving in a group and surprisingly wasn't getting much, but an indifferent cold reception until he was told little wonder he was waving at a herd of cows. But it was here that his communication skills proved critical. He developed a bond with the people. They came to trust in his leadership, an essential bond of the leaders to be successful. When he talked to them, he talked informally to farmers and laborers. He was always sure of reaching them, he said, with a simple language that his Harvard friends might judge homely or commonplace. Newspapermen began to compile the aphorisms that they termed Roosevelt gems. Pithy statements about citizenship, character, ordinary virtues that he repeated time and again to the pleasure of his audiences.

Farmers in Aberdeen sought South Dakota whistled approval when he declared no law can ever be framed to make a fool wise or a weakling strong or a coward brave. They cheered when he compared the qualities desired and the best kind of public servant to the qualities displayed by a good neighbor, somebody who makes a promise that he constantly will keep if he gives his word. And they cheered again and again, the familiar Roosevelt adage, speak softly and carry a big stiff. It was even said that he gave Maxwell House the slogan, good to the very last drop. And when he took after someone, he minced no words. One politician, he said, had no more backbone than his chocolate A Claire. So it was during one of these Western tours that Roosevelt began to test the phrase, a square deal for every man, capitalist or laborer, rich or poor, great or small, the slogan that would characterize his entire program.

He refused to attack the wealthy simply because they were wealthy, only if they used unfair means to accumulate their wealth. He refused to attack the poor simply because they were poor. The rock of class hatred, he believed, was the greatest and most dangerous rock in the course of any republic. The square deal was never about taking sides. He understood he told people that they might prefer the old conditions of life under which the average community was more self-dependent when there was less glaring inequality that we see now in our great cities, but we cannot go backward. The industrial revolution has brought great progress. Our task, he said, is to grant regulatory power to deal with these abuses. On one of these tours, he visited 24 states and delivered more than 250 speeches ranging from a brief platform address to major addresses. His energy was legendary, fostered in part, I believe, by the joy he found in life.

That irrepressible zest became one of his greatest leadership strengths, inspiring confidence in others even during difficult times. Indeed, a British visitor to the United States said he had encountered two forces of nature in the United States, Niagara Falls and President Roosevelt. His charisma was such that while he was in the neighborhood, one critic reluctantly acknowledged the public can no more look the other way than the small boy can turn his head away from a circus parade with a steam glyopee. But he understood as all good leaders did, that he had to find time to relax and replenish himself. Even boundless vitality needed to be renewed. So throughout his presidency, late afternoon was a time for exercise, a horseback ride, a boxing match, a raucous game of tennis, or his favorite, a strenuous hike along the cliffs in Rock Creek Park. He would drag visitors and friends along through the wooded sections of the park with one simple rule.

He had to move forward point to point. You could not go around any obstacle. If a creek got in the way, you had to ford it. If there was a river, you had to swim it. If there was a rock, you had to scale it. And if you came to a press up issue, you had to left yourself down over it. Journalists delighted in descriptions of these crazy afternoon rambles as his fellow walkers desperately waited for them to end. Stories multiplied of this general or this ambassador or cabinet officer dropping out and falling by the way. But the best story was told by the French ambassador, Jules Juiceron. He left a celebrated account of his first walk with the president. He arrived at the White House he recalled in his top hat in his afternoon dress as if they would be walking in the. He soon found himself in the woods following Roosevelt at breakneck speed through the fields and over rocks.

At last, they came to a wide stream. He assumed we'll rest a moment and we'll go back. Judge of my horror when I saw the president unbutton his clothes and heard him say, "Well, we'd better strip so as not to wet our things in the creek." Then I too, for the honor of France, removed my apparel, except I left on my lavender kid gloves. Why? Because to be without gloves would be most embarrassing if we should meet ladies on the other side. So I just had this picture of the naked two of them through the entire time I was writing the book. And there's actually a plaque at Rock Creek Park to Jules Jouser on. For Roosevelt, obstacles were never detours. They were invitations. He also found replenishment in books. He was always, always learning. During the biggest domestic crisis he faced, an extended strike of a union of coal miners against a powerful cartel of railroad presidents and minors, he read all 10 volumes of Nicolay and Hay's Life of Lincoln.

Lincoln was his hero. And then when he finished, he wrote to the librarian of Congress, "Can I have some books on the early Mediterranean race and the history of Poland?" When the library delivered the books he requested, Roosevelt wrote a letter of thanks. "I owe you so much. It's been such a delight to drop everything useful, everything for instance, relating to the coal strike and to read about the relations between Assyria and Egypt, which could not possibly do me any good, but in which I reveled accordingly." So when Roosevelt left the presidency after seven and a half years, he could take great pride in knowing, as one writer said, that he had given himself to the duties that he had without stint or limit. Through his square deal legislation, he had softened some of the worst aspects of industrialism, protecting women and children from exploitation, enforcing rules for workman's compensation, ending discriminatory railroad rates, opening corporate books to public expension.

He had secured federal legislation requiring proper labels on food and drugs, preventing adulterated drugs, adulterated food products and bogus medicines that were flooding the market. His antitrust activities had broken up monopolies that were not playing by the rules of the game. He had forced meat packing plans to clean up their act and had passed a law preventing corporations from contributing to political campaigns. He was the guiding spirit behind the conservation movement, saving millions of forest lands, national parks, bird reservations, and wildlife preserves as part of our common heritage. His insistence on military preparedness had played a role in keeping America out of war while his successful negotiations to bring an end to the Japanese Russo war had brought a Nobel Peace Prize. But in the end, he became a great president as was said in the introduction, not simply because of what he did, but who he was.

"A president's most important job," Roosevelt said again and again, "is to set an example." And the example he set was to fight for what he believed to be right with every ounce of energy he had. When he died in his sleep at the age of 60, his son famously said, "Death had to take him sleeping or there would have been a fight." So this extraordinary man we honor today with a spectacular new library, it's not simply meant to be a monument to him, but as an invitation, an inspiration to learn from his example. He's alive in every room. Let us learn from him how to become better leaders, better citizens and better stewards of one another and of this remarkable land. And above all, let us learn from his character. Let our children see what it means to lead a life of service. The challenges this prevents, the joy it provides by knowing you have made a difference in the lives of many.

May Theodore Roosevelt live on, not only in our memory, but in our example for generations to come. Yay for Theodore Roosevelt. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Listeners, so glad to have you along for the Live from TRPL, our special six-part series from the library's grand opening. You can find more interviews and talks like these online at trlilibrary.com/video, where you'll also see the library's opening ceremony, drone shows, news stories, historical footage, and more. Check it out and thanks for listening.