around in my lifetime. i remember seeing her in this town. what was she like? she was married to a former speaker of the house who was from ohio. >> that's right. >> so, is there any connection there? >> well, at first he traded her away to his sister to look after. the little girl, he just gave her away like a sack of salt and went west to recover from the death of alice lee. but when he came back to marry his second wife, who happened to be his childhood sweetheart, edith, she insisted on taking this child back as the first child in their own family. so alice, little alice lee roosevelt, became the first of six children, and grew up to be a complex and extremely interesting woman whose portrait i've painted in quite a lot of detail in "colonel roosevelt."

i've made a point in this book of describing all of his children. making them real characters in his story because by the time he came back from africa, they were all on the edge of adulthood and becoming more and more interesting in their own right. >> what can you tell us about the other five kids? when did he marry his second wife, edith? >> he married his second wife edith in 1886 which was only 2 years after the death of alice lee, and it was an extremely happy marriage. an extremely successful one. and she lasted as long as the administration of harry truman. and the children they produced, theodore roosevelt jr. was the first and there was kermit, then had was another girl, ethel, and then there was quinton, and i've forgotten archie, too.

they had four sons. and two daughters. >> how did each of those die? >> i tell their stories in the epilogue to "colonel roosevelt" and alice, the first to be born, was the last to die in 1918. ted turned out to be a magnificent soldier in world war i. came back in world war ii to be a general who went ashore on d-day with the third army and died of a heart attack just a few days after winning the medal of honor for the d-day invasion. one of the most highly decorated soldiers of both world wars. archie was very similar. much decorated soldier, who died of old age in the late 1970s. ethel died -- ethel was just a housewife through most of her life, but she dedicated most of her life to preserving the memory of her father and

preserving sagamore hill, his home on long island. alice became alice, the famous princess alice. and quinton, the youngest and the brightest and most promising of all his children, was very tragically killed as a fighter pilot in world war i. and i make a great deal of that tragedy at the end of my book on t.r.'s last years because i think that single tragedy destroyed theodore roosevelt himself and was the cause of his death just a few months later at the age of 60. >> the movie "the rise of theodore roosevelt" when is it coming out? >> it's been under option by the various producers for 30 years, but now very encouragingly it's been taken over by a producer who is interested, taylor hackford, the very eminent hollywood director in doing it,

and i believe they are talking to hbo. that's the latest. >> and how about the other two books? any interest in doing movies about them? >> no. >> and what about the books? i have a hardback copy of your first book reissued, what's the status, are they reissuing all your books this year? >> yes. "the rise of theodore roosevelt" is reissued in hardback. there's three of them. the complete trilogy is going to be available this season, as an irresistible gift. >> i want to go to an episode -- i find so many people don't know about, although we've talked about it on this network. but you have as much detail as i've seen on it, and that is the assassination attempt of theodore roosevelt in october of 1912 -- >> that's right. >> -- in milwaukee. and you say at the end of your

book that that may have been part of what killed him in the end, that that was still left in his system and all that. would you go back to the beginning and talk about how the assassination came about, attempt, that is. he wasn't assassinated. >> in "theodore rex" on the day t.r. became president i have a little section describing how an unemployed keeper in new york reacted to the death of mckinley and the accession of theodore roosevelt by having a vision in which the dead president, president mckinley, emerged from his coffin and pointed at a morning who was manifestly theodore roosevelt dressed as a monk and said, avenge my death, kill this man. so, i just dropped that into "theodore rex" which occurred, and that same little man, john

shrank that makes his appearance in "colonel roosevelt" in september of 1912 tracking t.r. around the country as he's campaigning for the progressive party. hoping to shoot him at some point or other. misses several opportunities to assassinate him and finally caught up with him in milwaukee in october of 1912. and in circumstances uncannily similar to those which happened when reagan was nearly killed in 1981, he shot t.r. in the chest as he was coming out of a hotel en route to a speech. and t.r. collapsed into his l o limo, not realizing at first how seriously he'd been shot. john shrank was taken off by cops and security guards. t.r. instead of allowing his escorts to take him to hospital,

insisted on going through with his scheduled speech. marched onstage in the m auditorium, threw open his jacket, exposed this great spreading mass of blood, and theodore says it makes more than that to kill a bull moose, and spoke for almost two hours. at times tottering and nearly falling off the stage. the audience is mesmerized as you can imagine. but somehow he got through the speech, and then allowed them to take him to hospital. and survived, of course. but as i know from watching reagan recover from his wound, to be hit in the chest with a bullet that stops within an inch or two of your heart clarifies the mind wonderfully and affects one's physical condition ever afterward. >> and they didn't remove the bullet ever? >> no. it was impacted on a rib in such

a way that it would have been dangerous to remove it. they left it there. for the rest of his life he walked around with a slug in his chest. >> i remember seeing down at the american history museum here the glass case, there's a picture in there and also the 51-page speech or part of it, i think, and then i remember seeing a shirt out in north dakota out near his ranch, a white shirt that had a hole in it. >> that's right. and the bloodstain. >> where are they keeping all that now? i haven't seen it. i think the shirt belongs -- have you seen it? >> no. i think the shirt and the speech, the perforated speech with the bullet holes going through it, as i illustrate, i think they belong at the theodore roosevelt birthplace in new york, at least that's where i saw them. and pretty creepy to go there and look at them. >> whatever happened to john shrank? >> he was found mentally incompetent a paranoid

schizophrenic. and he spent the rest of his life in jail, dying, i think, in the 1940s. >> you also talked about how roosevelt went over to him and grabbed him with his hands. what was that all about? >> yes. the security men around t.r. were wrestling with the little guy to the ground in a frenzy just as they wrestled john hinckley back in 1981. and the one security guard was -- really tried to break his neck. t.r. called out, don't kill him, bring him here. they brought this little man to t.r., and t.r. with an oddly gentle gesture reached and held his face, looked at him, and said why did you do it? and looking into this guy's face, which you can see very clearly in photographs taken at the time, i think i have the portrait, you can see straightaway that the expression that symptomizes insanity.

and t.r. says, oh, what's the reason, take him away. >> what happened from that period forward in the campaign, the other candidates, and who were they, and how long was he in the hospital? >> he was in hospital for i think 10 or 12 days. but it took several weeks before he began to recover. by which type the cime the camp practically over. he made one final speech in madison square garden a couple nights before the election in november of 1912. the other two candidates were president taft running for re-election, and governor woodrow wilson of new jersey. and both these men being gentlemen said that they would stop campaigning for as long as the colonel was incapacitated. >> how did the election come out?

>> the election came out as t.r. knew it would come out, with woodrow wilson winning, because the third party candidacy of t.r. and his progressives split the republican party. and elected woodrow wilson. >> i wrote down somewhere the actual totals on the vote. but my memory is he got 27% of the vote, and as you said in the beginning, got the most vote of any third party candidate. what did you learn in writing about this third party candidacy that would be of value in 2012 if there's a third party candidate? >> well, the candidacy, the party's candidacy did produce a progressive minority in the senate. which was -- had a good deal of power as a swing unit. but what i think is more relevant to today's political

situation is that when a large minority of the country believes itself to be disenfranchised, excluded from power, excluded by a combination of shared privilege between lawmakers and corporate executives and professional politicians, when the large citizenry begins to feel they are excluded, they become extremely angry, very passionate, and very unified. and the tea party movement, which in no way matches the sophistication of the progressive movement, nevertheless has got that unifying feeling. these people feel excluded from power and they want to show that they can get power back. so, the fact that the progressive party eventually dissolved away is perhaps of some encouragement to the

leaders of the two main parties right now. but at the moment a third party threat i think is quite real for the presidential election by 2012. >> what did they do wrong, then, in 1912 that prevented him from getting elected? >> if t.r. had been nominated by the republican party in the spring of 1912, he would have brought all these progressives with him. they were mostly republican, and would have meant he would have had a huge vote and he without question would have been elected president in 1912. >> i found a lot of interesting stuff in your notes back in the back. one of the things you do in this third edition, i don't know -- i haven't got theodore rex with me, but the first book you didn't do it the same way, but you have the biographical notes and the historical notes ain th

back. where did you get the idea? i'd not seen it before. >> i wrote of footnote fetishes like you, brian. >> what was the point? why were you doing that in the back? >> well, often when one is doing deep research into a character, one comes up with really interesting stuff which doesn't easily fit into the narrative. for example, i have a very long biographical footnote there about his memory which goes in great detail. it gives all sorts of examples of this phenomenal memory. if i'd done that in the course of the book, it would have held the story up. so, i felt the footnotes was the most appropriate place for it. >> when did you write all these footnotes? >> as i was writing the book. >> as you were going along, stop, write them, and put them all together on the end. >> that's the beauty of the computer. when i wrote my first book on

manuscript paper, 11x22, i would have to do the footnotes in microscopically small handwriting at the bottom of the page. and if a paragraph was in another chapter, i would have to cut off the footnotes and attach them to the latest pages. but now working on a computer, one can attach the footnotes directly to the text and they just follow, find their place like tadpoles wherever you move your text later on. >> what was your first book that you wrote on the computer? >> i began to write on the computer halfway through "dutch." >> and when you were writing "dutch" had you already done a significant amount of your second roosevelt book? >> i'd done -- yes. i'd done, oh, about seven chapters. which i completely rewrote 15 years later when i wenthanged a by then. and so "theodore rex" which followed "dutch" was more or less a new book.

>> how had you changed as a writer? >> well, i think i was just that much older and wiser. when i started "theodore rex" i was not very hip as a student of presidential politics. therefore, i found it very difficult to write a book about his presidency when i really didn't understand the white house. but having spent all those years in reagan's white house and seen the presidency in operation, i could go back to "theodore rex" and rewrite it from the point of view of somebody who had seen ow power works and gotten to presidency. >> we talked a lot about your being around ronald reagan. did you ever total up the number of days that you were in the white house during that last term of his? >> no, i didn't. met i ca freely, so it was through most of 1985, through 1989, plus all the time i spent with him after

he left the white house. >> when we visited with you in your home over here on capitol hill a lot of years ago, you showed us your card system on how you were writing "dutch." did you do the same thing with theodore roosevelt? >> yep. i've got yards and yards of cards. >> what do you do with all those old cards? >> it's a question. i suppose one day i'll archive them in some fashion. but in the moment i have them all stashed in steel cabinets in my house in kent. >> here's a chronological note in the back of the book. an important chapter in t.r.'s life came to an end on 14 november 1915 when booker t. washington died. t.r. spoke at the memorial service in tuskegee, alabama. why was that an important moment in his life? >> well, he'd always had a special relationship with booker t. washington. who was the most eminent black man in america in those days.

in fact, when t.r. became president, booker t. washington was the first person he telegraphed to come to washington and consult with him. as everybody tends to know, he also entertained booker t. washington to dinner in the white house a few weeks after he became president and created a national scandal by actually sitting down to dinner with a black man. it had never been done before in the white house. their relationship became commiecatcommie ka complicated later on, but when booker t. died in 1914, t.r. was enormously moved and felt he had to go to tuskegee and give him his tribute. >> this is odds and ends. archibald roosevelt jr. in conversation with the author, meaning you, in 1988, speculated that t.r., quote, probably had, was born with, bicuspid aortic valve like cousin kim's instead

of the normal tricuspid. people with that problem often compensate for it in early life, but they get a telltale heart murmur which is probably what t.r.'s doctor at harvard heard when he warned him to lead a sedentary life. when did he warn him to do that? >> oh, back in 1880 when he graduated. his doctors said to him, mr. roosevelt, you have this problem with your heart, and i advise you to live a scholarly, sedentary life and not do anything too physical. and t.r.'s reaction was, i'm going to do everything you've told me not to do. i'm going to climb mountains. i'm going to live a vigorous life. and i am going to die -- i'm going to live life to the hilt and i'm going to die at the age of 60 which is exactly what he did. >> what did he die of? >> a pulmonary embolism is the general conclusion. although i did put together a

come pependium of all his medic information and i chaired it chairman of sloan-kettering and his son, two dr. marks, and they both had the feeling that it was primarily a heart problem, not a lung problem. failure of the heart, en endocarditis. >> when did he die? >> the epiphany of the feast in january of 1919. >> it went far beyond the normal politician's knack of remembering names and faces although his ability in that regard was phenomenal. what he saw or heard and particular what he read registered with almost mechanistic clarity. how did you discover that? >> well, everybody commented on his memory throughout his life.

ample testimony to how brilliant his memory was. but what really freaked me out researching this book, i came across a letter t.r. wrote his son kermit in response to a question by kermit, dad, do you remember a poem by edith waters living south of the border. and t.r. said, yes, writing back, yes, i remember it very well, it goes like this, and he wrote out this entire two stanza poem. by this very obscure poet who i never heard of. i thought, i'll just check this out. i looked her up. i found when this poem was published. t.r. wrote that letter, i believe, in 1914. the poem was published in 1898 in the "atlantic monthly." i looked up that issue of the magazine and found that t.r. himself had an article in that same issue. in other words, 1898, looking at his own article he'd come across this poem in the magazine.

registered in his head. i compared the written words that he'd written in 1914 and i could see they were not copied from the magazine because there were several minor mistakes. but otherwise it was word for word what he had written -- what he'd read and memorized, 14, 15 years before. quite creepy. >> this is a historial graphical note, throughout his public career he could be cavalier, even with the scripts of his major addresses printed as text in t.r., works. >> that's his collected works. >> collected works. the improvisational humor he used to temper his seriousness can only be imagined along with the radiance of the personality that infused these frequently dull texts with life. how much humor did he use?

and i assume it wasn't in the text of these, how did you find out? >> he was one of the funniest men who ever lived. his humor was like mark twain's, it came pouring out all the time, and unfortunately transcriptions of his speeches tend to be from the actual type script that he would hand out to reporters, so his improvisation, his witticism, the jokes that he would tell are not there in the transcriptions. but there is so much testimony from people who knew him that he was hilariously funny. when he wanted to be funny on paper as in the long letters he wrote describing his grand tour of europe in 1909 and his participation in king edward viii's funeral. one of the delights of working about him all these years was to write about somebody who was so

funny. >> on the three roosevelt books, which one did you enjoy the most and which one was the hardest to write? >> "theodore rex" was the hardest because it was a political story. i do have to struggle when i'm writing about politics. because my nature is to write about events and action and character. i'm not very happy with abstract issues of policy and stuff. so, "rex" was hard to write. but the one i've enjoyed writing most oddly enough has been this last book, "colonel roosevelt" because the story, it's a narrative set back. and it's constantly changing. he's running for the presidency one moment. he's exploring the longest river and tributary of the amazon in 1914. an apostle of american participation in world war i. writing these intellectual

essays, so the subject matter is constantly changing and there's a very tragic scene at the end and all writers love to write about that. >> another footnote, a biographical note, churchill dined with the roosevelts in albany and, quote, incensed his host by slumping in his chair, puffing on a cigar and refusing to get up when women came into the room. >> winston churchill. t.r. used to say that winston churchill, the novelist, there was an american novelist called winston churchill, that he's the gentleman. winston churchill, the english politician, is someone i do not care to meet. when he was in england for the funeral, churchill tried to meet with him and he refused to see him. i became intrigued why t.r. should have this animus against winston churchill. i went through it. and i think it's two prima

donnas. churchill admired t.r. very much and constantly wanted to meet him, but t.r. who is the older man, regarded churchill as a vulgarian, a political turncoat, i think he was jealous of churchill's literary abilities. churchill when he was young was a better writer than t.r. was young. >> bob bloom is your editor throughout all of this? >> yes. >> how much did bob bloom at random house edit for you, all five? >> i worked with bob on "theodorerex" and "dutch." he's asked me what i want to do next. he's 85, i believe. >> what do you want to do next? >> i haven't decided. i just know it will be short. i wouldn't mind writing about another musician or for that matter about a writer.

but no more presidents. >> why not? >> there's no more presidents more interesting to me than theodore roosevelt. >> where would you put ronald reagan next to theodore roosevelt in your interests? >> pretty well on the same level. i found reagan quite fascinating, but for a different reason. he fascinated me because of his remoteness and because of his unconsciousness of who and what he was. whereas t.r. knew exactly who he was and what he was about. totally upfront personality. >> are you glad this is over? >> yeah. i am. it's about time. >> three books as we said on theodore roosevelt, "the rise of theodore roosevelt," "theodore rex" and the brand-new book

"theodore roosevelt." thank you very much. >> thank you, brian. >> for a dvd copy of this program, call 1-877-662-7726. for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at qanda.org. "q and a" programs are also available as c-span podcasts. all day monday, "american history tv" is feature america's first ladies. who do you think was our most influential first lady? vote and join the conversation with us on facebook at facebook.com/c-span. there's a new website for

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