Teddy Roosevelt, Role Model?

What a marvelous role model Teddy is, in ways that President Bush seeks to ignore. And what a dangerous role model Teddy is, in ways that Bush seeks to emulate.

On the marvelous side is Teddy's success in preserving some of our greatest national treasures. He took the first steps to preserve the Grand Canyon. If it hadn't been for Teddy, I wonder if the canyon might now be owned by a corporation: The Canyon by Hyatt. Or maybe, Nike's Grand Canyon: Just Visit It.

How ironic that Teddy is a role model to a president who wants to plunder a pristine arctic wilderness for enough oil to keep all of America's SUVs running for five minutes. A president who refuses to join the world community in limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

I was fortunate, a few years ago, to read an excellent biography of Teddy Roosevelt. It was one of those rare experiences when a book brings a person so vividly to life that I put down the book feeling as if Teddy had been sitting in my livingroom. He really was an American original.

A voracious reader (a habit begun in a childhood prone to illness) with a photographic memory, Teddy continued to read from one to three books a day while in the White House, a habit he could maintain because he needed only about four hours' sleep a night.

In those simpler times, on Sunday afternoons he used to settle into a rocking chair on the porch of the White House, where his listeners were spellbound by his ideas and adventures. He had the charming habit of going for "White House walks," as he called them, in which he tossed a coin at each juncture of the path to determine which direction to go next. If the coin said he must walk through a pond, then walk through it he did, even if it meant becoming fully submerged, and even if he was accompanied by Japan's Foreign Minister, as was once the case. His motto was "Over, under or through--but never around."

Teddy was a man of unsurpassed enthusiasm for life, for learning, for nature, for adventure. He was not known for emotional maturity. Mark Twain once said of him, "You have to remember that the President is fourteen." And it is this that I think makes him a most dangerous role model at this time, when the United States has a power and wealth undreamed of in Roosevelt's time. It was one thing for Teddy to use the "bully pulpit" of the White House to pronounce on how the world should be, and it is another thing entirely to bully the world, as President Bush is seeking to do in his plans for war on Iraq.

Perhaps more than any other president, Teddy Roosevelt knew the blood lust of battle and gloried in it. There's a story about Teddy at war, that he noticed as he rode his horse across the field of battle a badly wounded man lying on the ground. Teddy jumped off his horse, ran to the man and shook his hand vigorously. "Isn't this splendid?!" he cried, before getting back on his horse and riding off.

Blood lust is the most stirring form of what I call Warrior energy. The energy itself isn't bad, though it has, in the history of the world, most often been used for murder and mayhem. The energy that charges into battle can be put toward many positive uses: to clean out closets, to confront a corrupt politician, to speak truth to power. Warrior energy is power, pure and simple. It is an internal fuel we cannot afford to lose.

I believe Warrior energy is what Jesus used in the marketplace when he overturned the tables of the moneychangers. All four of the gospels tell the story, and I don't wonder at it: it is the rarest of things to see power, pure and simple, used to good purpose without a desire to injure or gain domination. Jesus didn't kill the merchants; he knocked over their display stands. Some robes got dusty, some fruit got bruised, but no heads were banged together, and no lives were lost.

The Warrior's tool is the sword, the perfect instrument for setting a boundary, for drawing a line in the sand, just as Jesus did in the temple that day. His actions said, "This is a place of worship, not of commerce, and I draw this line, to exclude commerce from this place, because it is a house of worship where commerce does not belong."

I think power is what we heard in the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., and that's why we get goosebumps just listening to the recordings of his speeches. Power is the roar of the blood beneath the skin.

According to a Newsweek poll taken last Saturday, 60% of Americans now want the impetus toward war to slow down. They want to let the inspections work, and they want the U.S. to do nothing without the full consent and cooperation of the U.N. Security Council.

It is fitting indeed that, in this week when we commemorate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., we can use our Warrior energy to say to this administration: