The River of Doubt Read Free Page B

wealthy and respected man. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he had been a member of the exclusive and unapologetically elitist Porcellian Club. During the Spanish-American War, he had been glorified as a courageous colonel of his own regiment—Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. And as president of the United States for nearly eight years, he had been at the apex of power and prestige. Now, for the first time in his life, he was a pariah, and he was painfully aware of it.
    Holed up at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt, who was famous for his almost overbearing optimism and confidence, suffered from what his family delicately referred to as a “bruised spirit.” “Of course I am having a pretty hard time, in a way,” he admitted to his son Kermit in early December. “The defeated are always held accountable in every way.” Roosevelt’s family was so concerned about his state of mind that they discreetly asked Dr. Alexander Lambert, Roosevelt’s physician and a former friend of his father’s, to come for a visit. Lambert immediately packed his bags for Oyster Bay. “You cannot imagine how glad I am to see you!” Roosevelt confessed to Lambert. “I have been unspeakably lonely. You don’t know how lonely it is for a man to be rejected by his own kind.”
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    I F REJECTION was new to Roosevelt, loss and disappointment were not. Although he was only fifty-four years old, he had already lived anextraordinarily full life. Perhaps even more striking than the peaks and valleys of Roosevelt’s life was the clear relationship between those extremes—the ex-president’s habit of seeking solace from heartbreak and frustration by striking out on even more difficult and unfamiliar terrain, and finding redemption by pushing himself to his outermost limits. When confronted with sadness or setbacks that were beyond his power to overcome, Roosevelt instinctively sought out still greater tests, losing himself in punishing physical hardship and danger—experiences that came to shape his personality and inform his most impressive achievements.
    The impulse to defy hardship became a fundamental part of Roosevelt’s character, honed from earliest childhood. Frail and sickly as a child, and plagued by life-threatening asthma, Roosevelt forced himself into a regimen of harsh physical exercise in an effort to conquer his weakness. His sister Corinne remembered her brother as a “fragile, patient sufferer . . . struggling with the effort to breathe” in their nursery on East Twentieth Street in New York City. But before Theodore had reached adolescence, he had already resolved to free himself from invalidism and frailty. Through what Corinne described as “regular, monotonous motion”—swinging from horizontal bars, struggling with heavy, awkward barbells—Teedie, as his family called him, slowly broadened his chest, strengthened his arms, and transformed himself into a young man whose body was as strong and sure as his mind.
    Although it was Theodore’s own iron discipline that brought about this transformation, it was his father’s encouragement that sparked his resolve. Theodore Senior loomed large in the lives of all of his children, but for his older son he was idol, hero, and savior. “One of my memories,” Roosevelt wrote later in life, “is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me.” Desperate for their child to breathe, Theodore and Martha Roosevelt tried anything, making Teedie drink strong black coffee, forcing him to vomit by coaxing syrup of ipecacdown his throat, or hovering over him while he miserably smoked a cigar. Finally, Theodore Sr. sat his son down and told him that he had the power to change his fate, but he would have to work hard to do it. “Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body,” he said, “and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as