An Imperial President

President Teddy Roosevelt liked to take his Washington friends, including the French Ambassador Jean-Jacques Jusserand, on grueling hikes around the Virginia countryside. One day they came to a deep stream, and Roosevelt led the group in stripping off to ford and swim across. The French ambassador, however kept his gloves on, "In case we should run into ladies."

Anecdotes such as this enliven Louis Auchincloss's "Theodore Roosevelt," (Times Books, 136 pages, $20) an otherwise rather pedestrian biography of the America's first President of the 20th century.

The leader who charted America's course to become a major naval and global power, Roosevelt broke out from the long and deliberate decades of isolation with the construction of the Panama Canal, and America's deep involvement in world affairs. He won the Novel Peace Prize for his work in securing a peace treaty between Japan and Czarist Russia. He might have done the same, but he deliberately kept his role quiet, using his personal relations with the German Kaiser resolve the Morocco crisis of 1906 that took France and Germany to the brink of war.

Roosevelt was far too entertaining and rambunctious a character for any book about him to be dull. His life sprawled way beyond the confines of this short (136-page) biography. Auchincloss has to gallop across Roosevelt's life as a historian, a New York police commissioner, a rancher and sheriff's deputy in the Wild West, a state governor, president and then highly active ex-president.

Roosevelt's bid to stand again as a Bull Moose candidate in 1912, after growing disgusted with the cautious Republicanism of his successor William Howard Taft, threw the election to the Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson.

Auchincloss is reduced to making one chapter try to contain the overflow, listing a dozen brief quotations from Roosevelt's letters and memoirs to convey something of his extraordinary range of interests. There is Roosevelt on the Victorian novelists and on the ancient Greek tragic dramatists; on disciplining his sons for throwing spitballs at the White House portraits to trying to cure a naval officer of alcoholism. From the need to curb litter in the national parks to his disdain for High Society, Darwin's theory of evolution to his own theory of an effective American diplomacy, Auchincloss catches something of the dynamo that was Teddy Roosevelt.

Auchincloss is also at pains to stress that Roosevelt was a serious political radical. His 1907 annual message to Congress called for the introduction of inheritance and income taxes, currency reform, the 8-hour day, control on financial contributions to political campaigns and state-fixed prices for rail travel.

Planning his quixotic 1912 campaign, Roosevelt was inspired by disgust for a political system he saw corrupted by private wealth. Auchincloss cites the memoirs of Roosevelt's old friend William Roscoe Thayer for the ex-president's striking assertion that "I can name 46 senators who secured their seats and hold them by favor of a Wall Street magnate and his associates in all parts of the country. Do you call that popular representative government?"

Thayer and another old friend, Judge Robert Grant, were so struck by Roosevelt's growing radicalism that they appealed to him to run. Roosevelt replied: "I wish to draw into one dominant stream all the intelligent and patriotic elements in order to prepare against the social upheaval which will otherwise overwhelm us."

Auchincloss skates over the obvious conclusion to this outburst, that Roosevelt was no devoted party man. Indeed, he is one of the few presidents who could happily have run for either party -- which explains his 1912 success in beating the official Republican candidate. But Roosevelt was wrong about the imminent social upheaval, at least in the United States. The first world war, overthrowing the Russian, German and Hapsburg empires and unleashing the double furies of Communism and Fascism, plunged Europe into just such desperate straits.

One of the ambitious Times Books American Presidents series, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Auchincloss brings a novelist's style and a patrician sensibility to the Teddy Roosevelt volume. And he leaves the reader with the striking thought, that Roosevelt's daughter Alice "called him the perfect leader for an imperial age -- we wonder, a bit ruefully, how he would fit into our own."