Leadership

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  When Roosevelt first got to the Dakotas, Sewall recounted, he “was very melancholy—very much down in spirits.” The landscape of the Badlands—its lonely plains, open spaces, and haunting beauty—mirrored the desolation of his inner landscape. With Sewall, as with few people, Roosevelt expressed his feelings, confessing “that he felt as if it did not make any difference what became of him—he had nothing to live for.” Sewall suggested he had his daughter to live for, but Roosevelt countered that his sister was better positioned to take care of the child. “She would be just as well off without me.”

  Just as he had driven himself to exhaustion in Albany in the weeks after Alice’s death, so now, with reckless abandon and headlong intensity, he punished himself with the hardest and most dangerous work of the cowboys, as if, through excitement and fear, he might retrieve the possibility of feeling alive once again. He rode his horse sixteen hours a day, galloped at top speed over rugged terrain, hunted blacktail deer, antelope, elk, and buffalo, and joined in the frenzied five-week roundups when the cattle were branded and gathered for market. By flinging himself into every aspect of the daily lives of the cowboys, Roosevelt “was not playing cowboy—he was a cowboy.” The daily work of the ranch, companionship with his fellow cowboys, and the sustained pursuit of his writing endeavors distracted him from overthought, and he was finally able to sleep at night. “Black care,” he wrote, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”

  The young reformers in the East, who had once idolized Roosevelt, knew nothing about this immersion in the West. “We only knew that the man who seemed to have the brightest opportunity and the most splendid career opening had disappeared,” Charles Evans Hughes said, “and apparently had disappeared in absolute failure. He was out of politics altogether, he was no longer apparently available for anything. He had gone away, and it seemed like a candle light that had been snuffed out, mistaken for some luminary which was ever to be the guide.”

  But Theodore Roosevelt was neither a snuffed candle, nor had he altogether abandoned politics. He had retreated west seeking in a state of nature not gentle balm but a test, a strenuous challenge where he might confront his deadened heart and fear of intimacy and somehow renew confidence in himself and in a future where he might become a genuine luminary, guide, and leader.

  * * *

  And as the seasons passed, his depression slowly began to lift. By the end of his two-year hiatus, Roosevelt had emerged from his traumatic ordeal stronger in body and resurgent in spirit. Though he would periodically suffer from asthma the rest of his life, he had improved his lungs in the cool mountain air and developed a more muscular chest. When he first arrived, Sewall recalled, “he was a frail young man,” troubled by bouts of breathlessness and chronic stomach pains. “When he got back into the world he was as husky as any man I have ever seen who wasn’t dependent on his arms for his livelihood.” He had gained thirty pounds “and was clear bone, muscle and grit.” The falsetto voice which “failed to make an echo” in the legislative chamber was “now hearty and strong enough to drive oxen.”

  Transforming his body was but one step in the psychological struggle to overcome what Theodore still considered his own “nervous and timid” nature. When he arrived in the West, he acknowledged, “there were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, from grizzly bears to ‘mean’ horses and gun-fighters, but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.” While some men, he observed, were naturally fearless, he had to train his “soul and spirit” as well as his body. So, “constantly forcing himself to do the difficult or even dangerous thing,” he gradually was able to cultivate courage as “a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of will-power.” Though only a mediocre horseman, he volunteered to ride “mean” horses, those liable to buck. As the owner of the ranch, he wanted to set a leadership example, even at the cost, on several risky occasions, of breaking his ribs. Similarly, while poor eyesight prevented his becoming a crack shot, he nevertheless joined professional hunters in the hazardous pursuit of bear, antelope, and buffalo.

  “Perseverance,” he insisted, was the key to his success as both a hunter and a cowboy. With endless practice, he learned to shoot at a moving target with the same accuracy as at a stationary one. Years of studying animals allowed him to identify, track, and anticipate the behavior patterns of his prey. He hoped his example of acquired courage would prove instructive, persuading other men that if they could consider danger “as something to be faced and overcome,” they would “become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness.” So completely was he able to surmount his own fears that in the years ahead, countless observers made reference to “the indomitable courage” that seemed to them clearly “ingrained in his being.”

  In this two-year interval, Roosevelt had recast himself as a new kind of American man, a hybrid of the cultivated easterner and the hard-bitten westerner. Without his extended stay in the Badlands, his sister Corinne suggested, “he would never have been able to interpret the spirit of the West as he did.” For the rest of his life, countless countrymen regarded him as a man of the West, a romantic figure far removed from his upper-class background. He reveled in the knowledge that opponents could no longer describe him as a dude or a dandy. A cult of personality had taken root. Simply put, Roosevelt later said, “I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.”

  There are points of likeness in the seminal disasters that befell both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt in the early stages of their careers. Both crucibles were precipitated by a combination of intimate, personal crises and public repudiation that seemed to crush their core ambitions. Both swore off politics or at least paid lip service to deserting politics forever. Both suffered severe depressions. Healing change had to come from within while they waited for the historical kaleidoscope to turn.

  Yet the two men dealt with their depressions in contrasting manners, ways congruent with their very different dispositions. Lincoln opened to grief and melancholy, sharing his feelings with neighbors, colleagues, and friends. Roosevelt closed down completely. He repressed his emotions, abandoned his daughter, and refused even to speak her given name, Alice, the name of his deceased wife. He referred to her simply as “Baby Lee,” confessing, “there can never be another Alice to me.” Nor could he bear reminiscing about his courtship and brief marriage. He destroyed almost all the pictures, letters, and mementos of their shared past. It was “both weak and morbid,” he insisted, to dwell on loss.

  As Roosevelt’s spirits revived, his thoughts returned eastward to the home and friends left behind. On a short visit to New York in the fall of 1885, he encountered Edith Carow, the highly intelligent, intensely private young woman who had once been his closest childhood friend. As a five-year-old, Edith had joined Theodore and his sister Corinne in the home school Theodore Senior had established in the family’s 20th Street household. In the summers, she had been a frequent guest at the family’s Long Island estate. There, she and Theodore had become inseparable buddies; together they discovered a first love of literature, explored nature, rode trails on horseback, and sailed in the bay. As adolescents, they were dancing partners at cotillions and familiar companions at social events. In the summer before Theodore met Alice, however, the young couple had an enigmatic “falling out.” What Theodore termed their “very intimate relations” were suddenly terminated. Edith later confessed that she had loved Theodore “with all the passion of a girl who had never loved before,” and that when he married Alice, she was certain she would never love again. The chance meeting in 1885 revived long-hidden feelings in the conflicted widower as well, and in the ensuing months they met whenever he was in New York and regularly wrote when they were apart. If Theodore’s devotion to Edith Carow lacked the churning romantic sentimentalism of his passion for Alice, his marriage to Edith provided his tempestuous nature with a life-sustaining stability and sanctuary.

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p; By the summer of 1886, two years after he had fled to the West, Roosevelt was ready to reenter the political world. Life as a literary cowboy had been a formative respite, but it was never able to gratify his grand ambitions. “I would like a chance at something I thought I could really do,” he told his friend, Massachusetts representative Henry Cabot Lodge. He was ready to test himself again in the public arena, the world for which he was born and bred.

  * * *

  The loss of his wife and mother on the same day became more than a catastrophic landmark in Theodore Roosevelt’s personal life: The brutal twist of fate reshaped his philosophy of leadership as well. It underscored the vulnerability, fragility, and mutability of all his endeavors, political and personal. Career objectives now seemed air-drawn, subject to dissolving or reversing in a moment’s time. Following that gruesome February day, chance—good luck and bad—would be deemed the trump card in his deck. This basic fatalism helps explain what might otherwise seem a haphazard choice of career opportunities during the next decade.

  Shortly after returning home, he entered and lost a race for mayor of New York, despite his belief, given the city’s overwhelming Democratic majority, that it was “a perfectly hopeless contest.” After campaigning vigorously for the victorious 1888 presidential campaign of Republican Benjamin Harrison, Roosevelt had hoped to be appointed assistant secretary of state, but was finally offered a relatively minor federal post as one of three members of the Civil Service Commission. Roosevelt’s friends urged him to decline, worried that the obscure position, far beneath his standing and reputation, “would bury him in oblivion.” To their bewilderment, however, Roosevelt eagerly accepted and, furthermore, remained at the post for an astonishing total of six years. When the opportunity to return to his home state was presented, Roosevelt resigned to become one of four New York police board members, a thankless job fraught with political peril. Three years later, after stumping for the victorious Republican candidate, William McKinley, in the fall of 1896, he was offered assistant secretary of the navy, a post his friends again felt “below” what he deserved. Yet, once again he accepted, remaining at the Navy Department until the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, at which point, yet again counter to friends’ advice, he resigned to volunteer in the Army.

  What had become of the singular ascending ambition that had driven young Roosevelt from his earliest days? What explains his willingness, against the counsel of his most trusted friends, to accept seemingly low-level jobs that traced neither a clear-cut nor a reliably ascending career path? The answer lies in probing what Roosevelt gleaned from his crucible experience. His expectation of and belief in a smooth, upward trajectory, either in life or in politics, was gone forever. He questioned if leadership success could be obtained by attaching oneself to a series of titled positions. If a person focused too much on a future that could not be controlled, he would become, Roosevelt acknowledged, too “careful, calculating, cautious in word and act.”

  Thereafter, he would jettison long-term career calculations and focus simply on whatever job opportunity came his way, assuming it might be his last. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are,” he liked to say. In a very real way, Roosevelt had come to see political life as a succession of crucibles—good or bad—able to crush or elevate. He would view each position as a test of character, effort, endurance, and will. He would keep nothing in reserve for some will-o-the-wisp future. Rather, he would regard each job as a pivotal test, a manifestation of his leadership skills.

  Roosevelt’s crucible experience had heightened his awareness of mortality, drastically reducing the span he felt remaining for him to live and fulfill his ambitions. His intensified sense of passing time, his awareness that life could turn on a dime, made him impatient, sometimes unbearably so, to get things accomplished. The hectic speed with which he had introduced dozens of bills in the legislature following Alice’s death became a lifelong pattern, a confrontational and often abrasive mode of leadership that put him at odds with the established procedures and the sluggish metabolism of any bureaucratic institution.

  When Roosevelt was later asked how he was able to successfully lead such disparate departments as the Civil Service Commission, the New York Police Department, and the Navy Department, he insisted that the challenges he faced did not necessitate administrative “genius” or even “any unusual qualities, but just common sense, common honesty, energy, resolution, and readiness to learn.” While this analysis may sound banal or disingenuously modest, Roosevelt’s leadership style was, in actuality, governed by just such a series of simple dictums and aphorisms: Hit the ground running; consolidate control; ask questions of everyone wherever you go; manage by wandering around; determine the basic problems of each organization and hit them head-on; when attacked, counterattack; stick to your guns; spend your political capital to reach your goals; and then when your work is stymied or done, find a way out.

  * * *

  Friends who had urged Roosevelt to turn down the unheralded post of Civil Service commissioner failed to comprehend what Roosevelt himself instinctively grasped—that the fight to enforce the controversial new Civil Service Law represented a signature battle in the war against corruption, a battle ideally suited for this son of a reform-minded philanthropist with his own outsized crusading temperament. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, passed in the wake of President James Garfield’s murder (the assassin, a disappointed patronage seeker), was designed to replace the reigning spoils system with a merit system based on competitive examinations. Roosevelt regarded the spoils system as a cynical corruption of the democratic idea that every man should be judged on his merits. “It treats all offices,” he argued, “as prizes to be scrambled for by the smirched victors in a contemptible struggle for political plunder, as bribes to be parceled out among the most active and influential henchmen of the various party leaders.” He vowed to make the commission “a living force.” He intended to enforce the new law to the fullest, to thwart anyone, including leaders in his own party, who were doing “everything in their power” to halt “the progress of reform and hamper the execution of the law.” Roosevelt understood from the start that he would have “a hard row to hoe.” The spoils system was the heartbeat of machine politics.

  No sooner had he arrived at the Civil Service Commission than he signaled that business as usual no longer applied. To hit the ground running, to dramatize the change in direction, he launched an unexpected raid on the powerful New York Custom House, where, rumor suggested, violations of the new law were rampant. Questioning employees, he gleaned that government clerks were selling examination questions to favored party candidates for fees of $50 to $100. After hearing testimony, taking affidavits, and examining documents, Roosevelt demanded the immediate dismissal of three guilty employees, serving unmistakable notice in the press and before the public that the new law was “going to be enforced, without fear or favor.” His investigation also uncovered that party leaders continued to extort “so-called voluntary contributions” from Custom House employees as the price for retaining jobs.

  He walked the corridors to directly engage with low-level officeholders—clerks, copyists, letter carriers, and the like. They disclosed how hard it was to meet the party leaders’ demand for 2 percent of their salary. The winter assessment, he dramatically noted in a blistering report summarizing the investigation, might mean “the difference between having and not having a winter overcoat for himself, or a warm dress for his wife.” To see the problem in terms of the concrete seasonal needs of the poor provided the public with an immediate comprehension of the real meaning of civil service reform. Less than a month later, having heard that postmasters in several cities were manipulating examination scores to appoint favored party members, he set forth on an investigatory tour of post offices.

  This change in direction, hampered by interminable wrangles among a three-headed commission, prompted him to consolidate power. He seized leadership, took responsibility directl
y on his shoulders, and executed what was essentially an unacknowledged coup—not the last time he would make an inaugural move to strengthen his authority. “His colleagues were quiet men,” the Philadelphia Record observed of his fellow Civil Service commissioners. It was Roosevelt “who did the fighting in the newspapers and before Congress and everywhere else and of course bore the brunt of the consequent attack.” Swiftly, he became the public face of the commission. “My two colleagues are away and I have all the work of the Civil Service Commission to myself,” he crowed to his sister Bamie. “I like it; it is more satisfactory than having a divided responsibility; and it enables me to take more decided steps.”

  Not surprisingly, Roosevelt’s seizure angered Republican Party bosses, produced friction with colleagues, and elicited sporadic criticisms in the press. “He came into official office with a blare of trumpets and a beating of gongs, blared and beat by himself,” the Washington Post observed. “He immediately announced himself the one man competent to take charge of the entire business of the Government.” Another critic recommended that he “put a padlock on his restless and uncontrollable jaws.” But he kept talking. “Mr. Roosevelt is a young Lochinvar,” the Boston Evening Times remarked. “He isn’t afraid of the newspapers, he isn’t afraid of losing his place, and he is always ready for a fight. He keeps civil-service reform before the people and as the case often is, his aggressiveness is a great factor in a good cause.”

  By the time Roosevelt left the commission, his leadership had stoked such public support for the new Civil Service Law that open violations were no longer tolerated; a true merit system was actually in the process of being born, so that, as Jacob Riis summarized, “the fellow with no pull should have an even chance with his rival who came backed; that the farmer’s lad and the mechanic’s son who had no one to speak for them should have the same show in competing for public service as the son of wealth and social prestige.”