Books: All Steady On Teddy

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With most biographies, it's only the specialist reader who bothers to flip back to the footnotes. Not so with Theodore Rex (Random House; 772 pages; $35). The second volume of Edmund Morris' projected three-volume set on the life of Teddy Roosevelt is likely to have just about everybody taking a peek back there once or twice. People are going to want to reassure themselves that the gifted but infamous Morris has not made up some of his nicely observed details, and not just because so much of this book has the hurtling pace and alert eye of good fiction. So did Morris' Pulitzer prizewinning first volume, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. That account was as robust and vivid as Teddy himself--probably the last President to have knifed a cougar.

But between that volume and this one came Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, one of the damnedest books of all time. Tapped by Reagan's inner circle to be the President's authorized biographer, Morris had unprecedented access to Reagan, who turned out to be the man who was not there: amiable, detached and mentally adrift. Exasperated by the weightlessness of his central figure, Morris introduced himself into Dutch as a semifictional character who moves in and out of Reagan's life, along with an entirely fictional son who becomes a student radical. Even the footnotes, with their citations from the fictional diaries of the semifictional "Edmund Morris" (got that?), were like a shower of false clues in a puzzle piece by Borges.

Dutch was a postmodern stunt that dumbfounded most critics. It also left a radioactive glow around the edges of Morris' reputation. Two years later, Theodore Rex offers Morris the chance to redeem himself by returning to the field of his first triumph. And let the record show that at no point in this book does Morris introduce himself into a subplot of the action. On the mid-September day in 1901 when Vice President Roosevelt gets word that President William McKinley has succumbed to an assassin's bullet, Morris isn't the messenger who brings the telegram. When Teddy plots to uncouple Panama from Colombia--so that the U.S. could have a freer hand to build its great canal across the isthmus--Morris is not bending to the presidential lunch table to serve the soup and listen in. When T.R. holds forth at some White House reception, Morris doesn't flutter past in a bustle and bonnet, taking surreptitious notes.

Theodore Rex lets Morris be Morris (not "Morris"), which is to say one of the most adroit biographers around. And every visit to the footnotes shows that those cinematic details--the wind that ruffles Teddy's hair on one page, the sunset that darkens windows on another--are all accounted for in some real person's memoirs or letters or in some old newspaper account.