Opinion: McCain’s Theodore Rex Redux

His was the most important prsidency since Lincoln’s. He invented the modern presidency by liberally interpreting the constitutional authority of the office to redress the imbalance of power between the executive and legislative branches that had tilted decisively toward Congress in the half century since the Civil War. [...] In 1899, he lectured the members of Chicago’s Hamilton Club on the integration of individual and natinoal morals. He had come to preach ‘not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.’ He urged his audience to a ‘life of toil and effort, of labor and strife,’ a life of courage and duty and risk, in pursuit not only of personal glory, but of national greatness. ‘A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life’ for individuals or for nations. It corrupts governments as insidiously as it corrupts man and ‘ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.’ It was his personal code of conduct and his governing philosophy. The code that had driven a frail, asthamatic child to physically transform himself into the vigorous, athletic outdoorsman who exulted in physical hardship as a welcome trial of character and body was the same code that aroused his abhorrence of materialism that consumed all of a society’s dynamism. Base materialism, Roosevelt believed, tempted people to indolence and greed and tempted nations to ‘shrink like cowards’ from the duty of playing ‘a great part in the world’ and seek shelter in ‘the cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues of a nation, as it saps them in the individual.’ [...] Roosevelt’s extraordinary zest for combat, both the physical and rhetorical varieties, remains the source of much of his appeal to me. But fortunately, I have had enough experience with fighting to have learned that having the will to fight is no great virtue if its object is simply self-conceit. Roosevelt believed fighting was essential to a happy life. I know what he meant. But what we fight for matters more than how well we fight, and Roosevelt understood this, too. He was certainly capable of letting the satisfaction his ego dervied from facing danger and hardship cloud his judgment. He could sentimentalize combat to an absurd extent. He once declared that ‘no triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.’ But for all his natural belligerence, and his aggressive statesmanship, its excesses and its worthwhile accomplishments, he was always intent on the well-being and elevation of his country. He threatened war with Germany over the kaiser’s designs on Venezuela and issued a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that reserved to the United States the right to intervene militarily in Latin American countries where disorder might attract the unwelcome attention of other great powers. He helped foment insurrection in Panama, then a part of Colombia, so that he could acquire the route for his isthmian canal. But his purpose was not to seek war and conquest for personal or even national glory. He sought to preserve peace and order by confronting potential adversaries with America’s resolve and readiness to fight if necessary to protect its interests. [...] He wasn’t a zealot who disdained the compromises and concessions essential to lawmaking in a democracy. That, in his view, was no better than muckraking. He wanted to get things done. He wasn’t an ideologue, except in this respect: ‘that we are a nation and must act nationally.’ Whatever strengthened the unity and values of the nation was worth championing, and whatever threatened them had to be fought.