Lion in the White House:

A Life of Theodore Roosevelt

By Aida D. Donald
288 pp. Perseus, 2007 $26

Reviewed by Mark Blaine

How do you frame Theodore Roosevelt? He asserted the United States as a world power, flexing its military muscle, while winning the Nobel Peace Prize. He was a Republican unlike any who would take that title for the rest of a century. He was a protector of public lands and confidant of seminal environmentalists who also had an unquenchable, disquieting hunger to shoot game animals. He was a Dakota cowboy and a purple-waistcoat-wearing dandy with a gold topped cane. He led the charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, killed one man with his own hands and shot another with his revolver. Three years later he was president. He was a spindly kid with asthma who grew up to be the American alpha male, a barrel-chested boxer with big teeth, little eyeglasses and a squeaky voice. He didn’t like being called Teddy.

Roosevelt led America’s charge into the 20th century, and Aida Donald’s new biography of him, Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt, addresses her subject at full gallop. As a boy, Roosevelt watched Lincoln’s funeral procession pass his grandfather’s mansion. Half a century later, his youngest son Quentin, a World War I fighter pilot, died over Germany and was buried by the Kaiser. These deaths bracket the book—and Roosevelt’s dense, hectic life at the center of the action in America. His death a year later (a page flip in Donald’s story) seems almost an afterthought, a need by the author to have her player leave the stage after the action ends. 

Roosevelt’s life has been well documented. He wrote 20 books, including an autobiography and accounts of his exploits in Cuba and elsewhere. His life has been sifted and tweezed in dozens of books. One biography won the Pulitzer Prize. Donald was the editor-in-chief of Harvard University Press and she holds a Ph.D. in American history. Lion in the White House puts aside dense documentation of the man’s life in an effort to describe his relationship to his power. The effect is a disciplined and engaging march forward with occasional glimpses at the fascinating.