Mornings on Horseback
McCullough, David
gravest emergencies. Similarly, he would drive his men hard, when necessary, but placed particular importance on the kinds of small creature comforts and recreation that keep soldiers...
...Not until well after the war when the passion for civil service reform broke out among the well-born Mugwumps of New York and New England did the elder Theodore seek 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 (or consent to accept) public office...
...But fact can accommodate as much poetry as fiction...
...L t o the Whirlwind, the first volume of her autobiography, published in 1967, tells how she was expelled from the party and arrested...
...When she saw a man approaching her from the other direction, she was further terrified of being robbed and killed...
...From family documents, McCullough does show that young "Teedie's" worst attacks seemed to occur on Sundays...
...The American armed forces--and to a greater extent sections of the informed American public--are turning against the "managerial" officer in favor of the "warrior" type...
...But even this tentative sally into the bruising political combat of the day ended in humiliation when Sen...
...His amiable brother Elliot, the father of Eleanor Roosevelt, was an alcoholic and a fugitive from family responsibilities, not to survive the century...
...Just as naturally, he knew little of the circumstances in which more ordinary people lived...
...He overworks the point, but it is a valid one...
...When the blizzard descended, she was terrified of death in the snow...
...The patrician reformism of his father's circle came naturally--it was said by one wit that he "seems to have a pulpit concealed on his person...
...Another sister suffered from a spinal deformity...
...During the Civil War, the elder Roosevelt hired a substitute and none of his peers thought the worse of him for doing so...
...The great, rather dowdy New York town houses, the grand tours, the keen attention of servants, the warm and affectionate solicitude of a large and close-knit family--all formed a sort of cocoon insulating the young TR from hardness...
...In Eugenia Ginzburg's c.ase, though, the context establishes its validity...
...She speaks of herself as lucky, and she was...
...Box 177 Freeport, Maine 04032 I That is the essential theme of what this subtle, elegant, and humane biography has to tell us about the shaping of TR...
...is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and former editorial page editor of the Washington Star...
...A nearly dead Eugenia has been restored to health by a Woman doctor with a bad conscience...
...It's a line of work that attracts superior minds and noble spirits...
...R o o s e v e l t ' s strangeness lay, for the most part, in the elements of his heritage, awaiting transmittal...
...The book's richness in vignettes as moving as this says something about the way Gulag conditions reduce life to primordial patterns...
...A good Communist, married to a party dignitary and herself doing well in the hierarchy-she was a history professor at the University of Kazan--she got into trouble because she was not quick enough to denounce a colleague who had been nailed as a Trotskyist in the Stalin purges of 1937...
...In short, even if Monty's men did not love him--he was a remote and indeed unlovable man--they trusted him...
...There is a general catharsis to be had in the recollections of a Solzhenitsyn, an Amalrik, or a Bukovsky...
...His wife (of Bright's disease) and his mother (of typhoid) died within hours of each other while he was still a young man...
...He was arrested shortly after she was...
...She and her younger son, reunited after a dozen years apart, re-established emotional connection by reciting alternate passages from poems he had learned from her as a four-year-old...
...When the doctor telephoned to say they must postpone their reunion because of a threatened blizzard, she reacted with frenzied determination to meet him anyway...
...Few of our more uncommon Presidents, one suspects, would have survived the devices of electronic politics...
...lize the essence of experience...
...The harrowing details are the same no matter which area of the Gulag sets the stage...
...The lesson to be derived from this book is an important one...
...Rutherford B. Hayes wanted to appoint him chief customs inspector for New York, a capital plum in those days...
...And what, indeed, of Theodore Roosevelt tout court...
...It had suffered humiliating defeats and redeemed them, but it lacked a sense of direction...
...But he was far more...
...M i t t i e " Bulloch Roosevelt was a gay, articulate, enjoying woman (with a fetish for cleanliness: She took two baths at a time, one to soap and the other to rinse) whose way with words shows up in all her children--especially the future President, who was to leave many books and 150,000 letters...
...What would Miss Barbara Waiters have made of Washington's stodgy demeanor and uncomfortable false teeth...
...By TR's own admission, he never felt up to the example his father set...
...There, amid so many deprivations, she encountered true love...
...The Theodore Roosevelt of Mornings on Horseback is indeed the sum of his experiences and nurture...
...The Roosevelts' private world provided a scale of ease and luxury open to few--travel, private tutors, household museums, generous allowances...
...After a few further brushes with disaster, she has been assigned to a job as a nurse in a home for children born in labor camps...
...The individual soul defending itself against Them-society, the state, whoever wields the collective power--has been a riveting theme since Antigone...
...More to the point, perhaps, is that these Sunday bouts of asthma assured him the keen attention of his worshipped but sometimes distracted father...
...So it was by fate no less than fortune that TR was set apart from ordinary experience...
...Nothing lasts...
...T R ' s mother came of the Georgia Bullochs, a gifted family that in the Southern tradition produced warriors as readily as the old New York Dutch families produced high-minded Calvinists and doers of good civic deeds...
...The author has undoubtedly examined the claims of the "psychobiographical" techniques now fashionable, and occasionally makes unobtrusive use of their insights--but invariably without calling into play their penchant for arrogant pronouncements, a ponderous apparatus, and depreciative jargon...
...t h a t is obvious...
...Similarly, he would drive his men hard, when necessary, but placed particular importance on the kinds of small creature comforts and recreation that keep soldiers going...
...In rough order of significance they were the characters of his father and mother, his membership in one of the principal old New York families (this was the era portrayed by Edith Wharton), his precarious health, and his nurturing in an insulated world of privilege and high principle...
...She had an artist's sensitivity to the details that crystal...
...Roscoe Conkling thwarted the appointment...
...There is also the specific moral exhilaration of contact with an order of human being you don't run into every day...
...David McCullough is the first TR biographer, so far as I am aware, to dig beneath the received accounts of TR's boyhood frailties...
...Never mind that the name of the camp, Elgen, is the word for corpse in the Yakut language...
...Winter waits NOVELS by J. Inchardi $11 each Lines On The Death Of A Fisherman Three Jews In A Tub Dreamship Yurros A Paper Toy Intercurse Jehovah Mafioso Saturn Maru Order by mail from Sirius Books, P.O...
...It also says something about Eugenia Ginzburg's literary flair...
...As Within the Whirlwind, the second volume of her memoirs, begins, the luck has done its work once more...
...Soldiers will risk their lives if need be, but not for commanders they think fools or butchers...
...Theodore Roosevelt's life blended, in almost freakish opposition, the gifts that birth, money, and secure position could bestow with sudd,~n, cruel deprivations...
...McCullough writes: There were no answers save "God's will" or " f a t e , s t r a n g e and t e r r i b l e f a t e , " Theodore said...
...ID MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK David McCullough / Simon & Schuster/$19.95 Edwin M. Yoder, Jr...
...Twentiethcentury history has not diminished its relevance...
...Partly, the appeal persists because of eternal qualities in the drama Soviet dissidents describe...
...Rommel was rather like that--and Montgomery thrashed him...
...Of Jefferson's pet mockingbird...
...On the other hand, we must beware of succumbing to a puerile romanticism, an unthinking admiration of commanders who take absurd risks, who exhaust or kill their men and ruin their equipment in pursuit of visions of swift, brilliant, and conclusive victory, of out-Pattoning Patton as it were...
...His lifelong passion for natural history began at an early age...
...Again and again, some generous person or unpredictable turn of events would save her from going over the precipice...
...Company...
...considering the local alternatives, it's a good job...
...Monty's greatest asset, however, was his ability to impress his military persona--his way of doing things, and his intentions--on the Eighth Army...
...When TR as a lad suffered horribly from asthmatic attacks, the psychosomatic aspects of this terrifying disorder were dimly understood...
...Still, the moral dimensions of her sensibility left room for guilt...
...Her early prison experiences included a cross-section of the possible horrors...
...It ends with his return, many thousands of dollars the poorer, from ranching in the Dakota Badlands...
...It may be relevant that his mother ap...
...Montgomery's great ability, in the words of Brigadier John Strawson, "was that he seemed to know exactly what to do, explained it in terms which made everyone both clear as to what was required and convinced that it was right, and then went on actually to do it...
...It was he...
...It was no help when, as a sincere believer in the Soviet system, she demanded justice according to Soviet law...
...Her husband's willingness to go along with anything the party did put a permanent emotional distance between him and her...
...He also opposed a nickel-an-hour minimum wage, although he was soon to respond generously to the tutelage of Samuel Gompers...
...A l l of this, of course, formed an WALL STREET _9 t080 Dou Jorw...
...This might not have made him a pleasant dinner companion, but it did make him a very good general...
...lea" All Rig.fgs Resemmd improbable background for a late nineteenth-century American politician...
...In some measure this is a welcome development--unlike too many of our officers today, none of the great commanders of World War II that I know of had advanced degrees in business administration...
...Certainly all this holds for Eugenia Ginzburg, a magnificent woman rendered the more magnificent by her season in hell...
...She and Anton, separated by miles of Arctic emptiness, were able to see each other fairly regularly because of his privileged position as a doctor and hers as a kindergarten attendant...
...He called for the restoration of the whipping post for certain crimes...
...The sole, overwhelming lesson was the awful brevity of life . . . . An asthmatic childhood had shown that life could be stifled, cut off, unless one fought back and all Papa's admonitions to get action, to seize the moment, had the implicit message that there was not much time after all...
...The revelations of depravity and spiritual triumph repeat themselves...
...The war demanded delicacies of forbearance that could not have come easy in such a divided household...
...Is 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982...
...His ruthless willingness to purge incompetents among his officers--a prerequisite of great generalshipw must also have contributed to a sense of security among front-line troops...
...In such a context, the word "luck" might be expected to ring false...
...Nor were TR's early views at all remarkable...
...one day it was instructed to break up its divisions, the next to reunite them...
...She was not only a natural creator of literature but one whom literature nourished...
...His famous bush hat, studded with the regimental badges of all the units he had visited, was another clever psychological device...
...The rest of her ten-year sentence included returns to tree-felling as well as other hospital jobs, one of which led to her supreme good fortune...
...T R, incidentally, even at his most robust, was never to be entirely cured of asthma, nor of the other chronic illness, cholera morbus, that made him a frail and sickly child...
...Her story follows the familiar outline...
...Little wonder that when TR entered politics as a young New York state legislator he struck the hardened cases in Albany as a specimen quite as exotic as any Nile birdlife...
...on Horseback is not, however, another study of TR's colorful and combative Presidency...
...The same political insights keep turning up...
...Ironically, it was no better guarantor of safety than her unwillingness...
...The last day found her like a person who has patiently endured a year in plaster but who cannot stand five minutes more...
...That defined Anne Crutcber is a journalist based in Washington, D.C...
...Her defense against hopelessness and degradation was to recite poetry...
...Of all the notable Presidents this "accidental President" at 42 was probably the most unusual...
...Like most great generals, Monty had a sense of theater, as evidenced, for example, by his rule that there would be no coughing during his talks (although he relented from time to time by giving thirty-second coughing breaks during his longer discourses...
...WITHIN THE WHIRLWIND Eugenia Ginzburg / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / $17.50 Anne Crutcher L i k e Tolstoy's happy families, Soviet dissident memoirs are, in an important sense, all alike...
...He was, as his extensive childhood diaries show, precocious...
...The Albany days revealed little of the future progressive...
...One day it was preparing to withdraw to Cairo, the next to drive Rommel from North Africa...
...Whether the elder Roosevelt's avoidance of arms or his brutal reversal in the customs appointment fight shaped TR's own ambitions is the sort of question David McCullough refuses to answer glibly...
...Hamilton continually calls Monty a "professional" and his rivals in the British Army "amateurs"--and by this he refers not to their respective lengths of time in uniform but to their attitudes toward service...
...The man was Dr...
...Churchill had described the Eighth Army under its previous commanders as brave but bewildered...
...Her brother James Bulloch, acting as Jefferson Davis's agent, procured the building of Confederate raiders in British shipyards, which strained Anglo-American relations during and after the war...
...Yet each new testimony is as fascinating as the last...
...The kind of people who write Soviet dissident memoirs compound the fascination...
...Monty was enormously competent at his job because he practiced and studied it to the exclusion of all else...
...He was married to a Georgia lady of passionate Confederate sympathies whose brothers were active in the Rebel cause...
...There, where prisoners were routinely robbing and betraying each other for crumbs, these two found the ultimate in mutual devotion...
...By the mid-1880s, early medical experiment had established the acute responsiveness of asthmatics to family situation, but by then TR was no longer a child...
...The perfect and prominent teeth, the ribboned pince-nez, the squeaky, plummy voice and diction, the abrasively righteous views--these JOURNAL THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH I982 37 did not captivate those who viewed politics as a practical art of horsetrading or, worse, of jobbery, bribery, and pillage...
...Its subject is the atypical, one might almost say unAmerican, provenance of a really quite strange young man...
...Monty's memos, orders, and speeches are superbly clear and concise, and the copious testimony of officers who served under him confirms one's sense that he knew how to talk to soldiers...
...Like a mythic incarnation of dauntless love, she set out on foot...
...Politics was no trade for a merchant-gentleman, and neither was war...
...There is a charming picture of him during a family frip up the Nile, blasting away at bird specimens and spending long hours on the decks of the hired river boat skinning and mounting them...
...More to the point is that the younger Roosevelt idolized this kindly, earnest, upstanding father and felt his early death (of stomach cancer in his mid-40s) so sharply that he grieved for years...
...her as a "counter-re,)olutionary terrorist" and launched her on 18 years of prison and Siberian exile...
...parently was a conforming agnostic...
...They even had what might be called fun together...
...TR's father, the first Theodore Roosevelt, affectionately known to the family as "Thee," moved at a social level where public spiritedness did not readily translate into an interest in politics--and in fact bred a certain contempt for it...
...The poignance of their intimacy reaches an epic vividness in Eugenia's account of the last dayof her ten-year sentence, after which she could look forward to the comparative bliss of Siberian exile without civil rights...
...His tireless efforts to induce ordinary soldiers to lay aside a portion of their pay for wives and children suggest an attempt at compensation...
...Of Lincoln's penchant for melancholy dreams...
...David McCullough is too seasoned and sensitive an observer of human character to slip into the artless habits of post-Freudian biography, too wise and observant of complications to reduce life's mysteries to sovereign explanations...
...His father died in his 40s...
...But his situation was quite impossible...
...She managed to survive solitary confinement in a freezing cell, transportation to Siberia in a crowded boxcar, extra punishment for resisting a guard's sexual overtures, a stint of tree-felling at 49 degrees below zero and, of course, the potentially mortal illnesses that go with such treatment...
...Anton Walter, a German physician, a fellow prisoner, and a worthy partner for even such as Eugenia...
...Mornings Edwin M. Yoder, Jr...
Vol. 15 • March 1982 • No. 3
