The Peripatetic Reviewer

A BOY was fortunate who grew up during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. They were men who inspired hero worship, and they certainly imparted a personal luster to the White House; each in his different way fired the imagination of the country, and although they were opposed politically and privately, each as President strengthened the nation and made it better respected abroad. Books were an imperative to them both; not since the succession of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson have we had in one era a pair of executives so intellectually devoted to reading and writing; men who took such care in expressing themselves and who continued to read widely, especially works of history and biography, even in the thick of administrative duties.

T.R.’s intake of print was swift and photographic. Friends have told me that he could span the double-page spread of a new book in a minute and a half, then close the volume and proceed to quote the text, the topic sentences, and transitions almost verbatim. Men who worked with him were naturally skeptical of such swiftness. On one occasion T.R. was leafing his way through a long typewritten report prepared for him by his Secretary of Commerce, Oscar S. Straus. The secretary, who had slaved over it for hours, was nettled to see it taken so lightly and remonstrated until Teddy began to answer in depth the questions which the report had raised.

The details assimilated so swiftly did not vanish. After his great hunt of 1910, T.R. made a tour of the European sovereigns, encounters which are wonderfully embellished in his letters, and in Budapest he was the guest of honor at a big dinner attended by Hungarian statesmen and noblemen. When he was called on, he launched into a saga of Hungary’s past, citing the names of its medieval heroes and the exploits which had made them famous. The history of Hungary was practically unknown to cultivated Europeans at that time, yet here was an American retelling their hero stories in a way that brought the audience out of their seats. After the banquet Lawrence Abbott, who was traveling with T.R. as secretary, asked him when in the world he had found time to bone up on all that obscure history. “That was funny,” T.R. replied. “I didn’t bone up on it. When I was in college I read a book of Hungarian history, and as I stood up before that group of people, the book seemed to open before my eyes.”

Hermann Hagedorn, who has done so much to keep T.R. alive, reminds us of one inexplicable paradox. Here was a President who was tone deaf to music, who even boasted that he could barely distinguish America from the national anthem; yet how then explain his unfailing memory for bird song? Walking with Sir Edward Grey in New Forest in 1910, T.R. was able to identify every bird that he heard, although he had last listened to English birds singing a quarter of a century before.

Some of T.R,’s most lyrical passages are about birds: the Missouri skylark, “the sweet-voiced larkfinch,” and “the poorwills which frequented his ranch on the prairies. There was a man of letters in him, who got crowded out by the explorer, crusader, and practical man of politics but who kept reappearing at odd moments, and most eloquently in the letters to his elder sister, Mrs. William S. Cowles.

In this year, the one hundredth anniversary of T.R.’s birth, it is refreshing to read the self-portrait drawn from his own writings in THE THEODORE ROOSEVELT TREASURY, compiled by HERMANN HAGEDORN (Putnam’s, $6.00). Here is the impressionable young Easterner in “sombrero, silk neckerchief, fringed buckskin shirt, sealskin chaparajos,” with a pearl-hilted revolver and an unrestrained ego, writing himself down as a frontier hunter; here is the naturalist so alert and curious as he hunts the antelope and grizzly; here is the historian who began his first definitive study, The Naval War of 1812, a volume of five hundred pages, while he was still at Harvard and who turned from that to The Winning of the West in the intervals of his labor on the U,S. Civil Service Commission. Then as the reformer, the Roughrider, and the politician took over, the writing tends to be more repetitive and speechified. “Words with me are instruments,” he explained to a foreign editor who had criticized his platitudes. “I am not trying to be subtle or original; I am trying to make the plain everyday citizen here in America stand for the things which I regard as essential to good government.” The moralist in him waxed strong as he used the White House as a pulpit. But still in his letters, his love of nature and of books, his deftness in characterization — as when he writes of the Kaiser — his joy in children, and his dread of inactivity find voice.

I have said that a boy was lucky to be raised on such hero worship. I was, and my admiration burst into full flower when Teddy visited my home town in New Jersey to spend the night with one of his Roughriders, Arthur Knapp. The whole town crowded down to the station in anticipation of the arrival, and I, seeing that I would be lost in the crush and seeing also the open limousine in which he would soon be riding, took my place beside the rear mudguard. No secret service man shooed me away, and when the frock coats came pouring in from the train, I held out my flipper and actually got a handshake from Mr. President. His teeth were flashing, his cravat was off to one side, and the crowd was roaring. The Knapp house was diagonally across the street horn ours, and that evening it was very evidently guarded. But still a guy could stand on the opposite side of North Broad Street and look at the lighted windows and think of the man within.

WAR AND PEACE IN THE SPACE AGE by LT. GEN. JAMES M. GAVIN (Harper, $5.00) is a hot and nettlesome book and rather perplexing lor a layman to handle. The General’s credentials, his reasons for writing are clear and downright. A dedicated soldier of Irish stock, truly grateful tor his education at West Point, Jim Gavin is ol a probing, skeptical disposition. He studied Hitler’s blitzkrieg for portents ot tiie new warlare, and like General Billy Mitchell before him, he was eager to train troops for large-scale parachute operations. In World War II he was our foremost commander of airborne troops, and he led the jumps on Sicily and Normandy. In the aftermath, as the Army s Chief of Research and Development, persistent as ever in his search for new weapons and new strategy, lie ran headfirst into the roadblocks imposed by Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, “the most uninformed man, and the most determined to remain so, that has ever been Secretary.”

The fateful decisions of November 26, 1956, which limited the range of the Army’s surface-tosurface missiles to two hundred miles (the Russians were then working for a seven-hundred-mile range), the weight of its fixed-wing aircraft to five thousand pounds, and the weight of its helicopters to ten thousand pounds seemed to him a horror. Repeatedly in his memoranda he pointed to the fast-approaching obsolescence of the manned nuclear bombers, but his warning made no headway against a philosophy which was looking for “a bigger bang for a buck.” Thus he says that at a time when the Soviet challenge was greatest we had in effect forbidden research and development, and our failures as he lists them both in our own preparations and in our understanding of what the Russians were up to arc appalling in the light of what we know today.

General Gavin resigned from the career he loved in order to take his case to the country, and in the latter half of his argument he draws lhe blueprint of what needs to be clone if we are to reshape our national defenses for the space age with any degree of readiness by the year 1965. He realized that generalship in a democracy “is rife with compromise.” He has seen with utmost exasperation the pressure that can be exerted by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pressure which led Representative Cannon to observe in February of this year, “We are ahead of the Russians in supercarriers, tomahawks and scalping knives.” General Gavin is of the breed of Admiral Sims, and his function today, like that of Colonel Repington in England during World War I, is to challenge the conventions and the complacencies of those who look back instead of toward the future.

The Navy first exposed JAMES A. MICHENER to the Orient, and in his Tales of the South Pacific he expressed his early wonder and delight in the Orient; his observations of the fighting in Korea broadened and deepened his understanding, and in the years since he has grown to be an authority on Japanese art. I his year he has joined forces with the Vermont publisher, Charles E. Tuttle of Rutland, to produce the most enticing and graphic work of the year, THE HOKUSAI SKETCH-BOOKS, SELECTIONS FROM THE MANGA (Tuttle, $10.00). The word manga can be variously interpreted as “cartoons,” “sketches from life,” “drawing things just as they come,” and in this medium Hokusai is an absolute master. His drawings are in black ink and gray wash, highlighted with a pale pink flesh tint which makes the human faces realistic. The