Books: In T.R.’s Footsteps

DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY (478 pp.)—Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr.—Double-day ($5.95).

On June 20, 1910, in Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, a pretty, impressible girl of 21 named Eleanor Butler Alexander was overshadowed at her own wedding. So. two summers out of Harvard, was the groom. Behind them, in a front pew, sat the groom’s father —famous spectacles, famous mustache, famous teeth, famous granite jaw—the great Theodore Roosevelt, not two summers out of the White House. Among the guests in the church: no fewer than 500 of T.R.’s old Rough Riders.

Then, and for 34 years thereafter, Eleanor Alexander Roosevelt* was determined that her husband, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the ex-President’s oldest son, should derive the deep strengths of the T.R. tradition from his father without being blotted out by it. “You know. Father,” she said to T.R. one day at Sagamore Hill, “Ted has always worried for fear he would not be worthy of you.” T.R. replied: “Worthy of me? I walk with my head higher because of him.”

Poison Gas & the Y. It is this quality of a woman’s pride in her husband, “cloaked inevitably and perpetually by the shadow of his father’s fame,” that lifts these meticulous, glittering reminiscences by Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. into the category of memorable U.S. biography. Her book is dedicated to her belief that Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1887-1944) is an undiscovered great American.

Ted Roosevelt himself, a small man, clean-shaven, weighing never more than 150 Ibs.. was himself determined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Like T.R., he went to Harvard, and like T.R., he went to work roughing it—two years, starting as a $7-a-week millhand in a carpet factory at Thompsonville, Conn., two years as a bond salesman in Wall Street, whose leaders hated his father. Like T.R., he joined the Army as the U.S. got into war; in June 1917, a Reserve Army officer, he went to France with the 26th Infantry Regiment, First Division, was followed by Eleanor, a volunteer worker for the Y.M.C.A. Old T.R. liked that. When told that Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law had joined the Y.M.C.A., T.R. said: “How very nice. We are sending our daughter-in-law.”

Whereas T.R. made his battle name in one slamming charge, Ted had a rough time in the trenches. He was gassed at Cantigny, shot in the leg at Ploisy; at war’s end, a lieutenant-colonel, he staggered through the Meuse-Argonne offensive on two sticks.

AL Smith & Ows Poll. In the T.R. tradition, Ted Roosevelt leaped into postwar politics and made a success at it. He was elected and re-elected to the New York state assembly, wife Eleanor making 26 speeches on his behalf. He also helped found the American Legion. Like T.R., he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy—but where T.R. had used the job at century’s turn to build up the fleet, Ted, in normalcy 1921-24, had to preside over disarmament negotiations. And when, in 1924, Ted put on a 15-speech -a-day campaign with the same energy his father had shown as G.O.P. candidate for Governor of New York, he was forced out of T.R.’s footsteps decisively. Reason: his Democratic opponent, Al Smith, held the sidewalks of New York City solid to beat Ted’s upstate lead by 108,500 votes.

“What to do next?” Eleanor mused amid the wreckage. The leaner years began. Ted hunted Ovis poll in Central Asia, giant pandas in southwestern China, took Eleanor on tiger and bear hunts in India and Nepal. After serving as Herbert Hoover’s Governor of Puerto Rico (1929-32) and Governor General of the Philippines (1932-33), Ted settled through New Deal Democracy for such jobs as vice president of Doubleday, Doran, board member of the Boy Scouts of America. Eleanor was an expert embroiderer, an authority on Victorian architecture, a witty hostess to such friends as Alexander Woollcott, Thornton Wilder. Helen Hayes.

Target: Utah Beach. By World War II, Ted Roosevelt, in his 505, knew that his father’s footsteps stretched ahead unattainably. But the impelling force of the T.R. tradition—duty first instead of safety first—led him to rejoin the Army. He proved to be such a standout training officer that he was promoted to brigadier general, was sent to combat in North Africa as deputy commander of the First Division—the Big Red One, in which he had served in World War I.

Ted took his place in the cocky annals of Big Red One in North Africa and Sicily as a front-line commander (“Soldier, I suppose you’re planning to settle down here when the war’s over”). Letters from Ted. his staff and his friends tell of a new T.R. tradition. In late 1943, Ted, as battle-slogged as his men. wrote Eleanor: “And always after days of battle the weariness—the desperate weariness. Sometimes you’d rather take a chance of being hit than throw yourself down and have to get up again.”

In Normandy in June-July 1944, Brigadier General Roosevelt fought his last and best campaign. Night before D-day he wrote Eleanor, now back home at Oyster Bay: “I don’t think I’ve written you that I go in with the assault wave and hit the beach at H-hour. I’m doing it because it’s the way I can contribute most. It steadies the young men to know that I am with them, to see me plodding along with my cane . . . This will be the last for the present. The ship is dark. Soon the boats will be lowered. Then we’ll be off.”

On July 12, 1944, in Normandy, in a captured German truck within sound of enemy small-arms fire, Ted Roosevelt died in his sleep of a heart attack, aged 57. He never knew that, for inspired leadership of the first wave on Utah Beach on Dday, he had won the Medal of Honor. Says Eleanor, now 71. recalling Ted’s father: “How I wish he could have known that by the end of World War II Ted would have won every combat decoration awarded by the U.S. Ground Forces.”

* Five years earlier, President Theodore Roosevelt similarly dominated another wedding: that of his niece, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “Uncle Ted” gave the bride away, shortly retreated to the library. When the guests followed, leaving the newlyweds alone, Franklin threw up his hands and said to Eleanor, “Well, we might as well join the party.”