span that works. now available in more than 100 million homes, created by cable and provided as a public service. . an floats through open windows out into the sunny morning. do you remember what mood you were in when you had to write those first words? >> it was a mood of complete

despair. i had been trying for months to get the book started. i knew in my head that i was going to start with new year's day of 1907 because i found out quite by accident browsing the gines book of world records that on january 1, 1907, president roosevelt shook more hands than any other person in history. and i thought i could see the book growing out of that reception when he received the american people on that day. and for months i researched the day, discovering to my amazement how dense and detailed newspaper records were in those days. people didn't have television so they needed details, visual details and olfactory details, all sorts of atmospheric stuff. so i absorbed all this mass of material and then i had to sit down and write a prolog in which the reader, as it were,

meets the president, as though the reader is in that line. but i never wanted to take the stylistic liberty of saying you are there. i wanted it to be a straight historical biography. so developping a technique of writing a prolog in the third person which gives the impression that it's written in the first person was so difficult that when i wrote that first line i didn't think i would be able to finish. it took me about a year to write that prolog. >> that was in 1979. this is 2010. here are the last words you wrote in your final book out of three, one million words, 25000 pages later. as part of a class exercise, paying tribute to the late colonel, thomas ma her, maher, wrote, colon, quote,e was a if you will filler of good

intentions, unquote. >> you just gave away my last line. >> but you told me years ago that you had already written that last line. >> yes it was written in my head in fact more or less when i wrote the first line of the first book because i was doing research in his birth place in new york which in those days was a disused library full of dusty old papers and records. and i came across this yellow manila envelope of some schoolboy essays written shortly after his death, some class exercise. the children were asked to write appreciations of the dead man. and i came across this one essay with this one sentence. he was the full filler of good intentions. and i knew then of 1979 that no matter how long it took to write the three volumes, that was going to be the last line

of the last book. >> when did you physically write that last line? what time in the last several months? >> i wrote it in january of this year, 2010. i called my wife up from downstairs, i said, darling, come and look at this. and as i wrote it, she stood over me and i tapped it up, and that was the end of 30 years of work. >> this is a very broad question, but what's this experience been like? >> it's been enriching, life enhancing. educational, because i'm not an american -- i'm not american born, as you can tell from my accident but i am an american citizen who came here in 1968 wanting to learn about my country of adoption, and i couldn't think of a better way to learn all about america, its character and its history and

its essential principles than by studying the life of theodore roosevelt. >> back in 1999, i think maybe the last time we talked, was through your reagan book, dutch. i asked you, got some video of that moment. i asked you about the early introduction to theodore roosevelt. let's watch. >> there was a preliminary apprehension of him when i was a small boy in kenya. at the age of 10, i looked in the civic history of nairobi that was published to celebrate the anniversary of the city, and it had this historic photograph of president roosevelt coming to nairobi, kenya in 1909 on his great safari. i remember identifying as a small boy with that picture. the smile, the snarl, the spectacles, and something about it that attracted me. and a quarter of a century later, i ended up writing his

biography. >> when is your second edition of the three-parter on him coming out? >> it's going to have to come out on september 14, 2001 because that's the cent tenry of his emergency inauguration. as mckinley's successor. >> are you on time this time also with the third book? >> i was just thinking, thank god it did not come out on september 14, 2001 because that would have been three days after 9/11. and i don't think anybody in the country read a book for the next two months. as it happened, it was slightly delayed and it came out after thanks giving, just when people were in the need for reading something about a really positive presidential force. the book did very well, but it would have been a disaster if it had come out when it was planned to come out. >> is this on schedule? >> yes. >> how have you changed your mind about theodore roosevelt

in the last 30 plus years? >> i've been increasingly impressed by the quality of his inlebt. it was always obvious to me right from the start he was a superbly bright man but i thought his smarts were primarily political. and, indeed, they were for most of his middle years. but after he left the white house, in march of 1909, and began a life of journalism and book writing, the quality of his mind deepnd and broadened to an atonishing degree. some of the essays that he wrote about the conflict between science and religion and imagery and med evil literature and subjects like that, and in the year 1911 when he was completely out of political power, these essays are truly impressive. they reflect reading in three

languages, english, german and french, some italian, too. enormous catholic intelligence. and to think that this man was also a superbly successful president of the united states is to realize that he was, as somebody ones said, a poly gon, a man of many, many dimensions. >> in the middle of all this, your book, dutch came out. and the question i want to ask you, what's the difference about writing about a man who has been dead for years versus a man who was alive? what are the two experiences like? >> the general once asked me that question after i made the contract to do the reagan biography. he said, is it easier to write about a live person or a dead person? and i hadn't thought about it and i was struggling to think what i said and my wife shouted out, dead is easier.

and of course journalist used that line the following day. and she got a t-shirt that said dead is easier. however, i think that they both have difficulties. to write about a dead person is to be a priss anywhere of the existing -- prisoner of the existing material. if there is no material on something important. if the material was evaporated or never set down, one cannot chronical that event. but if you're writing about a live person, you have to deal with the live sensibilities, not of that person but of his family, his contemporaries, his friends. in reagan's case, i was writing about living president of the united states. so i had to deal not too much with his sensibilities because

reagan was so sure of himself, he didn't care what people wrote or thought about him. but with his wife, his children, his friends, and the american people. so that posed problems too. >> who did you get the closest to in the theodore roosevelt family? how many of his family were you able to talk to? >> i interviewed his youngest son -- his second youngest son just shortly before he died and also alice roosevelt when she was pretty ancient. and descendents, grandchildren, great grandchildren who had to a certain extent been helpful. i guess the most useful was archibald roosevelt junior who was quite a fixture here in washington. because of all the roosevelt descendents, he was the one with the best mind. he spoke 16 or 17 languages and

his intellect was enormous. very much like his grandfather. and when i published my first book about t.r., archi called me up and said, i've read your book and i'm stagrd by the number of mannerisms that you described that i thought were my own. turned out to have been my grand fattedsors. >> back when we talked in 1999 you mentioned that people who were alive and people and family and friends. and you talk about nancy reagan. i want to run that and get your reaction to what you said back then. >> always been throughout her life very insecure, very suspicious. and totally besotted with her husband. and she had any inkling or any suspicious spigs should i say that i was going to write a book that was going to make him seem less than great and less

than perfect, then it would have caused obvious problems of access. so i preserved a friendship with her which was quite jine win on a superficial level. we used to lunch regularly. and she gives good lunch. nancy is fun to be with providing you keep the conversation on the level that suits her best. >> looking back at the 11 years since this book came out, any thoughts about anything that that book brought up, the relationships you've had? have you talked to her since then? >> no. i knew i would not. i sent her the first copy the day before it was published with a letter saying i know this is not going to be what you were hoping for, nancy, but i hope that as the years go by you'll realize, if not from reading it yourself, but from what other people are saying, that this book shows that your husband was a genuinely great

president. whatever his private failings. and i just hope that gives you some consolation for the fact that i've written very honestly about him. and looking back at dutch more than ten years ago now, it's 11 years, i suppose, i look back on it as the happiest period of my life. i had an enormous sense of accomplishment with that book. i know many, many corners of washington it's perceived as failure. i heard you last week saying that on your -- during your interview with a couple of his attorneys, i know -- historians, i know it was widely criticized at the time but it also got the kind of reviews authors would die for. it's still selling. i wouldn't change a word of it now. i regard it as my best book and i'm enormously happy i had that priveleng, that unique privilege that i was able to see a sitting president in

power and write up what i saw and experienced. >> why did you consider that the happiest time in your life? >> because i'd done something original, which is what writers want. i think i pioneered a new form of biography. and over the years since, other books have come out that use similar techniques. i think i was on to something new. great britain, for example, they wrote a couple years after dutch about a romantic poet, i've forgotten his name, but used the same device of an imaginary nare ator and questionings back and forth between the nare ator and other points of view. and these techniques are being more and more part of the new nonfiction which i've been watching with great interest since it came out. >> a couple years ago, the other book you'd written was about beethoven. why? >> i've always loved music.

and what i like is literary challenges. to write about ronald reagan was a literary challenge because he was a very difficult man to penetrate. t.r. is a literary challenge because he's so enormous and so multifastested. just to portray the whole of him is a super human challenge. to write about a composer is to write about music, which is a language almost beyond the power of ordinary language to describe. as once remarked, music is a superior language to ordinary speech. so the challenge in that case was to write a short book about bait hoven which used language to communicate the essence of music. and i found that a delightful challenge. >> why beethoven among all the composers? >> he's probably one of the most complex characters of the great composers. balk, for example, is a

composer of equal stature but his character is amorphous and difficult to get at. but beethoven was so human and so complex that it was a delight to write about it. >> you came to the united states in 68, lived in london sometime before that, born in kenya. >> yeah. >> when we last talked you had a house over here on capitol hill and a place to live up in new york. what's happened since? >> well, i left washington in -- shortly after the publicication of theodore rex in 2001 and moved to connecticut. i have an apartment in new york city which is always been there. so i divide my time between connecticut and new york. >> three books, the first one, the rise of theodore roosevelt was about what era? >> that was his pre-presidential life. it ends with a cliff hanger the moment he hears on the summit of mount marsi in new york that

president mckinley's been assassinated and that he as vice president is now president of the united states. >> where did you write that? >> where did i write that? in my apartment in new york. >> the second book came out in 2001 as we're talking about. rex, what's that era? >> rex describes his presidential years. 1901 to 18909. >> the -- 1909. >> the third one, colonel roosevelt, is for what period? >> that's the final ten years of t.r.'s life. 1909 to 1919. >> given what's going on in the country right now, what can we learn from this final book about what happens in a country where people are unhappy or, in his case, he was a third-party candidate? what can we learn about

third-parties and when did he run and why? >> he ran as a third-party candidate in 1912, but exactly a century ago in 1910, shortly after hed come back to the country after having been a year away, t.r. became the spokesman, the orkle of this new force arising in america called progressivism. it was a largely middle class movement whose common denominator, apart from passion, was a mounting dissatisfaction with government. with federal government. the feeling of exclusion from the past relationship between congress and corporations and capitalistic privilege. so this white, middle class, passionate movement developed in the late years of t.r.'s

presidency largely inspired by his own gradual swing to the left, and it more or less asked him, drafted him back into politics. in the summer of 1910. so the mid-term election that is subsequently took place, exactly 100 years ago, marked it wasn't quite a party yet, it didn't have a capital p., but it had a formedable movement. which, in two short years after that election, mut tated into the third party, the progressive party. , and fought the most successful third-party candidacy in history. >> why did he not run in 1908? >> he was at the end of his very successful presidency, full of smarts and young, not

yet 50. but he sort of knew in his heart of hearts that if he had another term, which he could have had on a silver platter, if he served another four years, he would begin to be corrupt, begin to be too self-righteous, toodom nearing. there was never a question of financial or political corruption with t.r. but he sensed he had had too much power too long. and he deeply believed that an american president should serve only a finite time and follow the example of george washington and retire after two terms. >> briefly go through how he became president from the vice president. who picked him to be vice president and why? >> he was picked as vice president by william mckinley in 1900. largely to keep him out of the way because he was already

pretty universal consent destined to be president in his own right. so mckinley took him as his vice president. and that second term of mckinley lasted only a few days because he was shot in the fall of 1901, precipitating young, 42-year-old theodore roosevelt into the presidency. the youngest president we've ever had. >> so he served out almost four years of that term and then another four years. how big was he reelected by? >> it was not really a reelection. he was elected in his own right by a huge margin. i think it was the biggest presidential victory up to that time. and he would have had a similar majority if he had run again in 1908 which constitutionally he could have. he could have run as many times as he liked. >> when did it start after he left in 08 and he is getting ready for 1912, when did he actually start thinking about

doing it again? >> he went to africa on a gigantic safari which lasted almost a year. and in odd dribs and drabs, mail, which would reach him by the odd naked runner, letters from friends in america, he began to realize that president taft was turning out to be a pretty ineffective successor, and for this desire for t.r. to come back and articulate the hopes and aspirations of progressives, who is beginning to get stronger. but it wasn't until he actually returned in the spring of 1910 and discovered how he had been missed his year abroad and how urgent the need was that he reluctantly allowed himself to be cosmede back to politics. >> who was pushing it?

>> at first governor hughes of new york who needed political help there. i won't go into the details. but t.r. reluctantly agreed to do him a favor and help him campaign for primary reform. and by making that fateful decision to help out a struggling governor, he found himself sucked back into party politics. and by the fall of that year, was articulating all the new principles of progressivism. >> when did he signal that he was ready to go? >> to run for the presidency? >> yeah. re he signaled that in january of 1912. by then, the pressure for him to run was so enormous that he really couldn't resist it. and, to be honest, he had in his heart ambition which began to dominate him. like all men of great gifts,

when they give up power, even though they may give it up for principled reasons, they begin to hanker for it the moment they give it up and he hankrd for the presidency. during his four years out of power to such an extent that he agreed to run again. >> you said he was not yet 50 when he left and you tell us he died when he was 60. so he only had ten years. how sick was he all through his life? >> his health seemed to be excellent. he was a strong, flord, enormously energy genetic man. but privately he did have medical problems. i think he always had a flutry heart and his health problems began to be manifest around about 1911, 1912. he began to put on weight seriously, he began to have rue

matic problems and art material sclerosis and he had chronic malaria in his system from his years in service in cuba in the spanish-american war. and gradually, as those years progressed, he began to be more and more subject to illness. particularly he went to the amazon in 1914 and explored the river and very nearly died of tropical fever. >> when you set out to get to know him, what year was it originally? >> when i set out to get to know him? >> in other words, your first book was in 79. but when did you start the process? >> it was oddly enough after richard nixon resigned the white house. nixon, as you may recall, in his fair well speech to the white house staff, suddenly

started to quote roosevelt. >> he quoted this little passage. she was beautiful in face and form. never come to her any great sorrow as a fair young flower she lived and as a fair flower she died. i think nixon was talking about his mother but i got curious as to what circumstances had prompted theodore roosevelt to write these words. so i did a little research and found out it was the death of his beautiful young wife at the beginning of his political career and i began to get interested in this real-life drama and began to write a screen play about it in 1975, i think it was, which i hoped i could sell to television. and as i wrote the screen play, i got more and more interested in him as a character and a book grew out of the screen play, and the book grew out of book and here i am three volumes later. >> as you look back on your

process of getting to know theodore roosevelt, how did you do it? where did you go? wri did you start to see what he was all about, place that is you rummaged through? >> i began to get a physical feel for him, which is porpt for a biographer. one must have the ability to imagine this person in the room , or within visible distance. one must have a palpable feeling of the subject or it's impossible to write about them. i began to get that feeling about two years of research, after i had been out of the dakota after he had been a ranch man, after i'd held in my hand this gold lock of hair from the head of his dead young wife. after i'd read his diaries,

written harvard and had turned over the pages that his hand had turned over. i remember coming across one page discussing his honey moon night and i was naturally terested to see what he wrote about that night. and in his hand writing he said, our sake red happiness cannot be written about. and i had the distinct feeling that i, posterity, future biographer, was being addressed by him. this is private. stay out of my life. so that's when the consciouses in of him began. >> how long was he married to alice? >> four years. >> what did she die of? >> of disease, the same disease that took off woodrow wilson's wife shortly after wilson became president. >> what is bright's disease? >> acute glomlar nevada right

tiss. >> kidney disease. they had one child, alice roosevelt long worth. >> that's right. >> what happened? i mean, she is around in my lifetime. i remember seeing her in this town. what was she like and what, she was married to a former spook speaker of the house from ohio or -- speaker of the house. is there any connection there? >> well, at first he traded her away to his sister to look after the little girl he just gave away like a sack of salt and went west to recover from the death of alice. but when he came back to marry his second whife, who happened to be his childhood sweetheart, she insisted on taking this child back as the first child in their own family. so little alice lee became the first of six children and grew up to be a complex and

extremely interesting woman whose portrait i painted in quite a lot of detail. i 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? >> he married his second wife in 1886, which was only two 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 junior, was the first, and there was kerm

it and there was another girl eetsdzle, and then quinten. and archi, too. so they had four sons and two daughters. >> how did each of those die? >> i tell this story in the epi log. alice, the first to be born, was the last to die in 1980. ted turned out to be a magnificent soldier in world war one, 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 in the d-day invasion. he was one of the most highly decorated soldiers in both wars. archi was very similar, much decorated soldier who died of old age in the late 1970s.

eetsdzle was just a house we've through most of her life but dedicated much of her life to preserving the life of her father and his home on long island. alice became alice the same as princess alice. and quinten, the youngest and brighten, was very tragically killed as a fighter pilot in world war one. 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 to various producers for 30 years. but now very encouragingly, it's been taken over by a

producer who is interested, taylor, a very immint hollywood director. and i believe they're talking to h.b.o. that's the latest. >> and how about the other two books? any interest in doing movies about them? >> no. >> and i have a hard back copy about your first book. what's the status? are they reissuing all your books this year? >> yes. the rise of theodore roosevelt is coming out in a new hardback edition, which i'm happy to see you've got there, exactly uniform with the other two books. so the three of them, the complete trilogy, is going to be available this season as an irresistable gift. >> i want to go to an episode i find so many people don't know about, although we've talked about on this network but you have as much detail i've seen on it. and that is the assassination attempt of theodore roosevelt

in october of 1912 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 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. >> in theodore rex, on the day that t.r. became president, i have a little section describing how an unemployed tavern keeper in new york reacted to the death of mckinley and the acsession of theodore roosevelt by having a vision in which the dead president, president mckinley, emerged from his coffin and pointed at a monk who was manifested theodore roosevelt dressed as a monk and said avenge my death, kill this man. so i just dropped that into

theodore rex as something that did occur in 1901. that same man, john shrank that makes his appearance in september of 1912 tracking t.r. around the country as he is campaigning, hoping to shoot him at some point or other. misses several opportunities to assassinate him. and then finally caught up with him in milwaukee in october of 1912. and in circumstances uncanly 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 the hotel en route to a speech. and t.r. collapsed into his limo not realizing at first how seriously he had been shot,

john shrank was taken off. and t.r., instead of allowing his escorts to take him to the hospital, insisted on going through with his scheduled speech, marched on stage at the milwaukee auditorium, threw open his jacket, exposed this great spreading mass of blood and said, it takes more than that to kill a bull moose. and spoke for almost two hours. at times, tottering and nearly falling off the stage, audience 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 learned 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 terrifies the mind wonderfully and affects

one's physical condition ever afterwards. >> and they didn't remove the bullet? >> no. it was impacted on the rib in such a way it would have been dangerous to remove it so they left it there. so 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, and you've got a picture in here, and also this 51-page speech. and then i remember seeing a shirt in north dakota near his ranch that had a hole in it. roar that's right. and the blood stain. >> where are they keeping that now? i think that shirt belongs in med ora. >> i think the shirt and the speech, the per for yated speech with the bullet hole going through it, i think they both belong in new york. at least that's where i last saw them. and it's pretty creepy to go there and look at them. >> whatever happened to john

shrank? >> he was found meantly incomp tint and he spent the rest of his life in jail. dying, i think, in the 19 40's. >> 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 tmple r. were wrestling the guy to the ground in a frenzy, just as they wrestled john hinkley. and the one security guy was really trying to break his neck. so t.r. called out, don't kill him. bring him here. and they brought this little man to t.r., and t.r. in this 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 a portrait of him, you can just

see straight away that all ex pression this look which simtmieses insanity. so he said, what's the use? take him away. and he was taken away to be interrogated and went to jail. >> what happened from that moment forward until the end of the campaign with the other candidates? and who were they? and how long was he in the hospital? >> he was in the hospital for i think ten or 12 days. but it took several weeks before he began to recover. by which time the campaign was practically over. he made one final speech in madison square garden. a couple nights before the election of november 1912. the other two candidates were president taft running for reelection and governor 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 the election came out as t.r. knew it would come out with woodrow wilson winning because the third party candidacy of t. rrmt 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 he 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 morrell vance 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 this large constituency begins to feel that they are excluded they become extremely angry, very passionate and very unified. and the tea party movement, which in no way match it is 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 some encouragement to the leaders of the two parties right now. but at the moment the third-party threat is quite real for the presidential election of 2012. >> what did they do wrong then in the 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 the progressives with him. they were mostly republicans. and he would have had a hunal vote and without question 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 haven't got theodore rex with me but the first book you didn't do it the same way is you had these

biographcal notes, the historical notes and the cron logical notes in the back and full of a lot of interesting stuff, as i said. where did you get that idea? i had not seen that before. >> well, i wrote foot note fetish like you, brian. >> what was the point? >> well, if anyone 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 buy graphiccal foot nothe there about his mammary which goes on in great detail, gives all sorts of examples of this phenomenal memory. if i had done that if the course of the book it would have held the story up. so i felt the foot notes was the most appropriate place. >> when did you write the foot notes? >> as i was doing the book. >> as you went along, stopped, write them, put them to the

side? >> that's the joy of the computer. when i wrote my first book on enormous sheets of manu script paper 11 by 22, i would have to do all the foot notes in microscopically small hand writhing at the bottom of each page. and then if a paragraph was moved to another chapter, i would have to cut out the foot nothes and attach them. but now, working on a computer, one can attach the foot notes directly to the text, and they just follow, find their place like tad poles wherever you move your text later on. >> what was your first book that you wrote on a computer? >> i began to write on the computer half way through dutch. >> and had you already done a significant amount of your second roosevelt book? >> yes. i had done about seven chapters which i completely rewrote 15 years later when i went back

because i had changed as a writer by then. and so theodore rex, which followed dusm, 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 didn't really understand the white house. but having spent all those years in reagan's white house and seing the presidency in operation, i could go back to theodore rex and rewrite it from the point of view of somebody who had seen how power works and gotten to understand the nature of the presidency. >> we talked a lot object your being around ronald reagan. did you ever total up the number of days that you were in the white house during those, that last term of his? >> no, i didn't.

but i came and went quite 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 at your home 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? >> yes. 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 at the moment, i have them all stashed in steel cabinets in my house in kent. >> here's a cron logical note in the back of the book. an important chapter in tr's life came to an end on 14 november 1915 when booker t. washington died. t.r. spoke at the memorial service. why was that an important moment in his life? >> well, he had always had a

special relationship with booker t. washington. he was the most imminent 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 din we are a black man. never been done before in the white house. their relationship became complicated later on. but when booker t. died in 1915, t.r. was enormously moved and felt he had to go and give him his final tribute. >> this is odds and ends. buy graphcal note. arch bald roosevelt junior in conversation with the author,

you, speculated that t.r. probably had, was born with, bicuspid aortic valve. people with that problem often compensate for it in early life but they get a tell tale heart murmur which is probably what his doctor at harvard heard when he warned him to lead a sedentary life. >> when did he do that? >> in 1880. his doctor said to him, mr. roosevelt, you have this problem with your heart and i advise you to live a scholarly and sedentary life and not do anything too physical. and his reaction was, i'm going to do everything you told me not to do. i'm going to climb mountains, live a vigorous life, and 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 pull monnarey embolism is the general conclusion. although i did put together a compendium of his medical information. and i showed it to the former chairman of sloan ketering. problems, not a lung problem. failure of the heart. >> the year he died? >> he died in the feast of the epiff my of january 6, 1919. >> here's that biological note. t.r.'s memory. and you mentioned this. was as comprehensive as it was photographic. it went far beyond the normal politicians of remembering names and faces although his ability in that regard was phenomenal. what he saw and heard, and particular what he read registered with almost mecknist

tick clarity. how did you discover that >> everybody commented on his memory throughout his life. but what really freaked me out researching this book was i came across a letter that t.r. wrote his son kermt in response to a question saying dad, do you remember a poem by i think her name was edith waters about lig south of the border? and tr said, yes, writing back in his hand writing. 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 her out. i found when the poem was published. he wrote that let anywhere 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, in 1898, looking at his own article he had come across this poem in the magazine, registered it in his head. i compared it, the written words that he had 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 had read and memorized 14, 15 years before. quite creepy. >> this is a storyo graphiccal note on page 634. throughout his public career, he could be cavalier even with the scripts of his major address' printed in t.r., works . it's i assume. >> his collected works. >> the humor he used to temper his seriousness can only be imagined along with the raidians of the personality

that infused these friketly dull texts with life. how much humor did he use? and i assume it wasn't in the text so how did you find out? >> he was one of the funniest man who ever ever ever lived. his humor was like mark twain. it came pouring out over the time. and unfortunately transscription seems to be from the actual type script that he had hand out to reporters. so his improvization, the jokes he would tell are not there in the transcripts. but there is so much testimony from people who knew him that he was hilariously funny. and when he wanted to be funny on paper, as in the long letters he wrote describing his gran grand tour of europe and his participation in king edward's funeral, these letters were so funny that they could have been written by charles dickance or mark twain. they have in fact been

published as a book. so one of the delights about working on him all these years is 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 is 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 enjoyed writing most, oddly enough, has been this last book because the story is narratively so fascinating. it's so constantly changing. he's running for the presidency one moment, he's exploring the longest river in the amazon in 1914. he's at american participation

in world war one. he's writing these intellectual essays. so the subject matter is constantly changing and there's a very tragic death scene at the end, and all writers love to write death scenes. >> another foot nothe. this is a buy graphiccal note. churchill dined with the the roosevelt in albany and slumped in his chair puffing on a cigar and refusing to get up when women came in the room. >> winston churchill. t.r. used to say that winston churchill, the novelist said he's the gentleman. winston churchill, the english politician, is someone doy not care to meet. in fact, when he was in england for the funeral, churchill tried to meet with him and he refused to see him. i became intrigued as to why t.r. should have this animus

against winston churchill. and i went through it, and i think it's two prima donnas. churchill admired tmp r very much and wanted to meet him. but t.r., who was the orlando man, regarded church -- older man, regarded churchill as a vullgarne, a political turn cothe. ink he was jealous of his lilttri because when he was younger was a betor writer. primarily a conflict of personalities. >> how many books did lob published at random house edit for you? >> i worked with bob on theodore rex, on dutch, and clornl roosevelt. >> is he still active? >> yes. >> in his mid 80s? >> yes. he's already asked me what i want to do next. he's 85, in.

>> what do you want to do next? >> i haven't decided. i know it's going to be short. no more presidents. >> why not? >> there's no more president more interesting to me than theodore roosevelt. >> where would you put ronald reagan next to theodore roosevelt in your interests? >> pretpi well on the -- pretty well on the same level. i found him quite interesting. i found his fascinating because of his remotes in and because of his unconsciousness of who and where he was. where t.r. knew exactly. >> 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,

roosevelt rex, or knees door rex. and this latest book. thank you very much. >> thank you. >> the redesigned there you can view the programs, view the

transcripts and find links to the blogs. book nothes.org. a helpful research tool and a great way to watch and enjoy the authors. >> tonight on prime minister's questions, british prime minister dade cameron talks about proposed spending cuts. after that republican governors talk about their approaches to governing and the fiscal challenges they'll be facing. also, remarks from former house speaker newt gingrich riven. >> after thanks giving, the house is expected to vote on sense souring congressman rangel which could result in a public reprimand. and congressional action in boats chambers is required to keep federal government operations running. that's because congress has not approved spending for the new fiscal year. the senate is also expected to

resume work on a food safety measure expanding food and drug administration oversight and recall authority. live house coverage on c-span with life senate coverage on c-span 2. >> from barack obama to george washington, learn more about the nation's presidents on line at the c-span video library. biographies, interviews, historical perspectives, and more. searchable, and all free. it's washington, your way. >> this year's student cam video documentary competition is in full swing. make a five-to eight-minute video. your documentary should include more than one point of view along with c-span programming. upload your video before the deadline for your chance to win the grand prize of $5,000. there's $50,000 in total prizes. prizes. the competition is open to high