HEROES: The Turning Point

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Red Whiskers & Fair Play. In the fall of 1876 T.R. went to Harvard. Rarely had a young man and an old university seemed less compatible. T.R., reddish-whiskered and rampaging, was contemptuous, for example, of Harvard's "fair play" political consciousness. Wrote he: "I have not the slightest sympathy with debating contests in which each side is arbitrarily assigned a given proposition and told to maintain it . . . There is no effort to instill sincerity and intensity of conviction." As he moved out of Harvard, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, becoming a college boxer, courting and later marrying a Chestnut Hill belle named Alice Lee, he suffered all the torments of power hunger and high ideals that had no place of power to go. One night at an Alpha Delta Phi committee meeting, T.R. told his fraternity brothers: "I am going to try to help the cause of better government . . . But I don't know exactly how."

The Years of Growth. Through the next 17 years T.R. groped toward power along what one friend called "an eccentric orbit." Shrugging off the wealthy, wellborn friends who warned him that politics was "low," he joined Manhattan's 21st District Republican Club, got elected and re-elected to three rambunctious years in the lower house of the .New York State legislature. In the winter of 1884 T.R.'s wife Alice died in childbirth, and he headed west to the solace of the silent spaces of the North Dakota Territory. "Black care," he said, "rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough." There T.R. ran the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn cattle ranches (see color pages), rode the range beneath springtime stars and winter snow-dust, got sworn in as a deputy sheriff by Sheriff "Hell-Roaring Bill" Jones, and generally gathered in the feel of what he called "the masterful, overbearing spirit of the West ... the possession of which is certainly a most healthy sign of the virile strength of a young community."

Revitalized, T.R. headed back to the power centers of the East. He was nominated as G.O.P. reform candidate for mayor of New York City—and lost. He went to London and married a childhood playmate named Edith Kermit Carow. He settled down in Washington for six years (1889-95) as Civil Service Commissioner (under Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland), then put in two years as police board chairman of New York City (1895-97), booting out corrupt cops, promoting the worthy and rewarding the brave, making headlines by prowling the slums with his reform-minded friend Jacob (How the Other Half Lives') Riis. Wrote T.R.: "I am dealing with the most important, and yet most elementary, problems of our municipal life . . . There is nothing of the purple in it; it is grimy."

Fire When Ready! In April 1897 T.R. was appointed by G.O.P. President William McKinley as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Spanish reinforcements were pouring across the Atlantic to wipe out freedom fighters in Cuba. More ominously, Germany and Japan were building fleets to challenge Pax Britannica and tilt the world balance of power. T.R. argued for war with Spain to kick the Spaniards % out of Cuba and to get the U.S. into world posture, a course also advocated by T.R.'s mentor and friend, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, as the only way to