A Bully Father
Kerr, Joan Paterson
0 n the morning of his resignation, during a farewell to White House staffers now routinely described as rambling and mawkish and signifying instability, Richard Nixon quoted the young Theodore...
...By any measure it indicated the bedrock mental health that allows a man to survive...
...In the 25-year-old Roosevelt, he had a case study in spectacular personal renewal, a man whose painfully renewed pursuit of happiness turned into a gaudy shower of familial joy...
...without bespattering the company with the sauce...
...He succeeded by making people adapt to his manner, instead of the other way around...
...Don't get cast down...
...He enjoys the job ("I like to do the work and have my hand on the lever"), but appears to work no harder at it than Ronald Reagan: We almost always take our breakfast on the south portico now, Mother looking very pretty and dainty in her summer dresses...
...Probably no one who's held the job before or since has left behind a more spontaneous bundle of correspondence—with the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, who for months on end would neglect his job to type besotted love notes to the widow Galt across town...
...71 The American Spectator December 1995 73...
...Roosevelt calls his offspring "bunnies," and plays "bear" to them with such terrifying gusto that his wife demands that the activity no longer be conducted after supper...
...But once it really gets going, nothing rivals Teddy Roosevelt's story for Thomas Mallon's books include the novel Henry and Clara and A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries...
...Roosevelt seems to have viewed the presidency as an opportunity for personal development, a chance to mix it up with Japanese wrestlers and contemporary poets...
...Throughout these letters he is either pampering animals ("I am acting as nurse to two wee guinea pigs," he assures an anti-vivisectionist) or slaughtering them ("P.S.—I have just killed a bear...
...Modern theorists of "parenting" would applaud the way in which the roughhousing paternal grizzly could so easily metamorphose into something distinctly feminine...
...There are those famous, awful letters from the Earl of Chesterfield to his son, excruciating in their self-regard and sheer obviA BULLY FATHER: THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S LETTERS TO HIS CHILDREN Biographical essay and notes by Joan Paterson Kerr Random House / 260 pages 1$25 reviewed by THOMAS MALLON speed...
...Perhaps it's just too remote...
...Sometimes in life, both at school and afterwards, fortune will go against any one, but if he just keeps pegging away and doesn't lose his courage things always take a turn for the better in the end...
...His human preoccupations almost certainly made him a better President...
...Nixon used the quotation as evidence of things being never as dark as they seem...
...Kerr points out the observation of Cecil Spring Rice, a British diplomat: "You must always remember that the President is about six...
...The whole TR story—asthmatic childhood, gym regimen, widowing, flight to the Dakota, big second family and Sagamore Hill, all of this before Rough-Riding and trust-busting—used to be better known to children than it is now...
...To Kermit: "I have just had to descend with severity upon Quentin because he put the unfortunate Tom [a kitten] into the bathtub and then turned on the water...
...In the space of three years he went from San Juan Hill (highlight of a military career that makes Colin Powell's look like, well, Eisenhower's) to the White House, with time enough to be governor of New York and Vice President of the United States in between...
...They'd stuck spitballs on some White House portraits...
...Roosevelt died at age 60 after writing 150,000 others...
...I know you are studying hard...
...He may not haveliked the "kodak creatures" of the press, but he took pleasure in the White House (its usher had the prescient name Ike Hoover), and he enjoyed Washington itself...
...in fact, any line between the human species and the rest of them is barely detectable...
...Their father likes a good game of "tickley," and adopts the title "vice-mother" when the First Lady is away...
...Then I work until between four and five, usually having some official people to lunch—now a couple of Senators, now a couple of Ambassadors, now a literary man, now a capitalist or a labor leader, or a scientist, or a big-game hunter...
...Then we stroll about the garden for fifteen or twenty minutes, looking at the flowers and the fountain and admiring the trees...
...Both men lived in the last hours of a civilization that used letter-writing not just to record the private life, but to conduct it...
...Since it is for you only and there are so many points, won't you read it twice...
...In her long and admiring introduction to this new edition of the paterfamilias's correspondence, Joan Paterson 72 The American Spectator December 1995 ousness: "Do you use yourself to carve ADROITLY and genteelly, without hacking half an hour across a bone...
...The children's pets—terriers, macaws, flying squirrels, kangaroo rats—seem to have outnumbered the live humans and mounted taxidermy around them, and their father proves a sharp and entertaining observer of the creatures' ways...
...The sea bores him, the past is overrated, and discouragement is the enemy: "Don't worry about the lessons, old boy...
...He can worry over "attack and misrepresentation," and seek comfort in Lincoln's letters, but by and large there is no awesome burden, no malaise, no funk...
...and without overturning the glasses into your neighbor's pockets...
...His fatherly letter-writing was made possible by the boys' absences at school and Roosevelt's presidential travels...
...Character must trump intellect and athletics...
...To Archie: "I have just had to give [Quentin] and three of his associates a dressing down—one of the three being Charlie Taft...
...For all his dismissal of the traveling routine ("I had the usual experience in such cases, made the usual speech, held the usual reception, went to the usual lunch, etc., etc...
...This portion of Nixon's remarks is regarded as particularly dissociative—equating the loss of a wife with the end of a mere presidency...
...Kerr quotes Roosevelt's daughter Alice: "Father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening...
...He didn't really mean harm...
...There are 126 letters in this new edition...
...There are pillow fights and "scrambles," all part of a need to be treated "as a friend and playmate...
...In the surprisingly unpleasant stack from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter, the novelist claims to dislike playing the heavy, but clearly feels it's big of him to be saying anything at all: "At the Saturday Evening Post rate this letter is worth $4000...
...Roosevelt's limited enthusiasm for school sports is a frequent theme, though one has to remember that an apostle of the strenuous life is bound to have an exceptional notion of what not overdoing it means...
...A guinea pig (another one, not the two above) is "squirming and kicking and looking exactly like Admiral Dewey," and the situation of a new dog is solemnly reported to Quentin: "The kitchen cat and he have strained relations but have not yet come to open hostility...
...or maybe polio and PT boats make for better legends...
...0 n the morning of his resignation, during a farewell to White House staffers now routinely described as rambling and mawkish and signifying instability, Richard Nixon quoted the young Theodore Roosevelt's grief-shattered reflection upon the death of his first wife: "And when my heart's dearest died, the light went out from my life forever...
...He raises the children with the same cheerful definiteness he used in steering those "turbulent little half-caste civilizations...
...There was no reason he couldn't meet with legislators while watching the boys in their sandbox, nor any the Speaker couldn't deal with the leg-grabbing of a kitten: "Mr...
...Actually, the comparison had the sort of raw sincerity that Nixon-haters had always judged the man incapable of demonstrating...
...Quentin is "Quenty-Quee," and Archibald, in the year he turned ten, "Blessed Archiekins...
...H e was also the most popular attraction in a self-assembled zoo...
...On occasion he seems more like auntie: "Doctor Riley is along, and is a perfect dear, as always...
...Robert Frost saidhe was "our kind...
...Parental instruction of the epistolary kind is often a starchy, backfiring affair...
...To Ted at Groton: "To have you play football as well as you do, and make a good name in boxing and wrestling, and be cox of your second crew, and stand second or third in your class in the studies, is all right...
...Cunning" is a favorite word for pets and children alike...
...Mrs...
...it doesn't seem that he resisted it much...
...When he moved his own six children into the Executive Mansion (he would be the President to make the term "White House" official), they ranged in age from four to seventeen...
...If Mother wants to ride, we then spend a couple of hours on horseback...
...He was already plotting his comeback, a psychological one this time, and his model was only incidentally a politician...
...Cannon . . . eyed him with iron calm and not one particle of surprise...
...R oosevelt proceeds by gentle indirection, telling one of the boys how he's had to discipline another...
...The "vigor" of the Kennedy White House was derivative of TR's in more ways than one...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
