By EDWARD F. O’KEEFE | Politico
When you’re born in North Dakota, you get a few idols to choose from: Peggy Lee, Lawrence Welk, Roger Maris — or Theodore Roosevelt. For me the choice was easy. When I was a child, my family would take summer road trips to Medora, North Dakota, where Roosevelt rediscovered himself after the tragic loss of his wife and mother on the same day in 1884, to visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park. On those long car rides, I read and reread Edmund Morris’ Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, so many times that its pages are tattered and torn.
When I first considered writing my own history of my childhood idol, my intention had been to tell the story of how North Dakota saved Roosevelt’s life. After those tragic deaths, he spent the better part of two years as a rancher and cowboy, living the “strenuous life,” as he would later call it. I held up Roosevelt’s legendary life as an example of resilience and willful determination — the self-proclaimed “man in the arena” — sui generis and well-nigh supernatural. But as I poured through 100-year-old documents and undertook my own exhaustive examination of his life, a more nuanced and compelling story emerged: Theodore Roosevelt was not a self-made Hercules. Instead, the legendary “man in the arena” — like so many successful men — was the product of extraordinary women. Women who sacrificed for him, propped him up in crucial moments, and whom history, the times and to some extent Roosevelt himself largely airbrushed from the legend. “History is written by the victors,” goes that famous adage. And those victors are almost always men.