![]() ![]() ![]() Unlike today, when Dick Cheney and Joe Biden have exercised greater responsibility and power than any Vice President in memory, the Office of the Vice President at the turn of the 19th century wasn’t “worth a bucket of spit,” at least to Roosevelt. To Roosevelt, a man who above all was in perpetual motion, becoming Vice-President would doom him to irrelevance and uselessness. ![]() His name bandied around as a candidate for Vice President, Roosevelt was flattered, but convinced that he would be useless, bored, and stagnate. With “Theodore Rex,” though, we see a man who is thrust into the Presidency without the opportunity to prepare mentally, as others had through the fire and course of a national campaign.Īnd yet, after a first term as Governor of New York, it became clear that those who controlled New York’s political machine would not allow Roosevelt another reform minded term. Individuals from his German tutor while he studied abroad to those who came into contact with him while he fought policy corruption in New York City, not to mention the men who served with him in the Spanish-American War. To read the first in Edmund Morris’ biographical series on Theodore Roosevelt (see my review here: “ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt“), one might be left with the feeling that it was inevitable that Teddy someday become President. ![]()
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