Colonel Roosevelt had spent a typical Sunday, writing letters and retiring at 11.  “Please put out that light, James,” he asked the Negro manservant who occupied an adjoining room.  At 4 a.m., James Amos, a holdover from the White House years, was disturbed by the shallowness of the breathing next door.  Looking in, he took alarm and summoned a nurse.  Moments later, the president died without wakening.

Doctors said it was a blood clot in the lungs that had traveled menacingly from a vein elsewhere in his body, perhaps aggravated by inflammatory rheumatism.  Roosevelt had been hospitalized in recent weeks for pulmonary embolism and other illnesses but had rebounded.

Down the hill in the village, news of the passing of its most celebrated resident staggered the populace.  Townspeople lowered the flag and hung crepe on the firehouse. Grief darkened the already cold Sabbath.  “I have lost the best friend I ever had, “allowed Roosevelt’s coachman Charles Lee, “and the best friend any man ever had.”

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In the memory of millions, there had rarely been anyone quite like TR.  Born in 1858 to a wealthy New York City family, he watched Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession pass beneath an upstairs window of his grandfather’s house on Union Square.  Roosevelt lived a privileged child’s life, developing an intense interest in natural science and all manner of creatures, living and dead.  After completing Harvard, magna cum laude in 1880, he wed Alice Hathaway Lee, his college sweetheart, on his 22nd birthday. A daughter, Alice Lee, was born in 1884.

Roosevelt chose a career of progressive Republican public service, a path charted by the father whom he hero-worshipped.  Elected to the New York State Assembly in 1881 at 23, TR was the youngest ever to serve in that body.  To the surprise of few who knew his ambitious commerce-class family, he rose rapidly to minority leader and authored more bills than any other New York legislator at the time.  “…I worked on a very simple philosophy of government. It was that personal character and initiative are the prime requisites in political and social life.”

To cope with his wife’s death from kidney disease at age 22 and to satisfy his yearning for wide spaces, Roosevelt headed west to build cattle ranches on the banks of the Little Missouri River in Dakota Territory.  He hunted buffalo and supplemented his love of nature with an advocacy for conservation, a movement that would become the greatest of his legacies. “It was still the Wild West in those days.”

After finishing third in a race for Mayor of New York in 1886, “But anyway, I had a bully time,” Roosevelt turned enthusiastically to writing.  He authored a naval history of the War of 1812, historical biographies of Thomas Hart Benton and Gouverneur Morris as well as other well-received volumes on ranch life and the wilderness.

He married again in 1886 to Edith Kermit Carow, a lifetime friend.  They moved to Sagamore Hill, a turreted home he had built on Oyster Bay, Long Island.  There, he and Edith raised six children in 15 years.

In 1889, TR won appointment as Civil Service Commissioner in Washington, DC.  Battling office-mongering, then rife in government, he explained, “The opposition to reform is generally led by skilled parliamentarians, and they fight with the vindictiveness natural to men who see a chance of striking at the institution which has baffled their greed.”

Eager to escape Washington and return home, Roosevelt took an appointment in 1895 as police commissioner of New York City.  The first day on the job, he was elected president of the board.  Describing his task as “inconceivably arduous, disheartening and irritating,” Roosevelt’s bold reforms and midnight rambles in pursuit of duty-shirking policemen attracted national attention.

With the election of Republican William McKinley to the presidency in 1896, TR lobbied for and captured the coveted post of assistant secretary of the Navy.  He set about to prepare the service for an expansionist role and, as he saw it, the inevitableness of war with Spain over Cuba and the Philippines.  “Better a thousand times to err on the side of over-readiness to fight than to err on the side of tame submission to injury or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed.”

Within a year, Roosevelt answered his inner call to duty and resigned the Navy post to take a New York National Guard commission as lieutenant colonel of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, known as the Rough Riders.  Fighting in the Spanish-American War, following the destruction of the Maine in Havana Harbor, he earned legendary status in the battle charge at San Juan Heights.  “I would rather have led that charge…than served three terms in the U.S. Senate.”

His fame secured, Roosevelt was drafted by the Republicans for governor of New York.  Elected in 1898 at age 40 by a slim margin, he challenged entrenched party bosses to accomplish a respectable reform record in just two years.  “All together, I am pretty well-satisfied with what I have accomplished…”

It was in the latter months of his term that Roosevelt was chosen by national Republican leaders to run for the vice presidency on McKinley’s 1900 re-election ticket.  New York political power brokers arranged Roosevelt’s selection, wanting the reform-minded, “meddling” chief executive out of their way.  From a caboose platform, he campaigned vigorously in 567 towns in 24 states while the president, at the top of the ticket, calmly received well-wishers on his front porch in Canton, Ohio.  “I feel sorry for McKinley,” said one campaigner.  “He has a man of destiny behind him.”

Destiny indeed intervened.  On September 6, 1901, McKinley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.  Roosevelt received the startling news while on vacation with Edith and the children in the Adirondacks.  McKinley died of his wounds six days later, and Theodore Roosevelt, at 42, became president of the United States - the youngest in history.

Through the spring of 1909, Roosevelt’s presidency would shake the world and earn him veneration, along with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln on Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota.   His enduring legacy includes successful anti-trust battles with railroads, creation of the National Park Service and the National Forest System, construction of the Panama Canal, establishment of the Commerce and Labor Departments, reform of railroads and receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese war.  “The credit belongs to the man who is actively in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again…who spends himself for a worthy cause.”

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Roosevelt’s shocking death in 1919 brought grieving family and a flood of condolences to Sagamore Hill.  So many messages overwhelmed the telegraph office that two additional operators had to be called in.  In the end, the workload was beyond even their added capacity to manage.

Edith Roosevelt was said to be bearing up better than could be expected.  Her other children, now grown and scattered, commenced their sad journeys home.  Eleanor, the wife of Theodore, Jr., the eldest son, arrived first to comfort Edith and make plans for all that would follow the death of an ex-President, especially one so universally admired and loved.

The few early callers from outside the family included the late President’s private secretary, party leaders and a diminutive, 72-year-old former New York newspaperman who had enjoyed a quarter century of intimate friendship with TR.  “His death was literally a terrible blow to me,” Joseph Bucklin Bishop allowed.  His presence at Sagamore Hill in the hours immediately following Roosevelt’s death and his closeness to the family was well noted by others; he was, after all, the president’s authorized biographer, chosen by Roosevelt himself.

Taking comfort in his thoughts, Bishop wandered into the children’s library, a likely act for someone who had lived by the written word since his college days at Brown University a half century ago.  On a shelf rested “Presidential Nominations and Elections,” a book that he had written in retirement three years earlier.  It was one of more than 20 works he would author or edit in a long and well-received literary career.

Bishop’s mind drifted to the day before Christmas, a couple of weeks earlier, when he had conversed with Roosevelt for the last time.  The president had been sitting in a chair, preparing to leave the hospital for Oyster Bay the next morning.  He was going over the typewritten manuscript of “Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to his Children,” a book that Bishop had edited for publication.  As Roosevelt finished reading the letters, Bishop recalled him saying, “I would rather have that book published than anything that has ever been written about me.”  

That comment was not self-serving, Bishop understood.  He would later observe that the President “…had hitched his wagon to a star but was careful to have the rope long enough to keep its wheels on the earth…he was the eager, unresting, unswerving champion of things that ought to be, with a devotion that was a religion, a sincerity that neither yielded nor faulted, a love for the welfare of his fellow men, and a human sympathy with them which was boundless and inexhaustible.”

Bishop had been a steady object of Roosevelt’s attention from his days as a favored writer and editor for the New York Tribune, the Evening Post and the Commercial Advertiser in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and through his tenure in the new century as the president’s designated secretary of the Isthmian Commission during the construction of the Panama Canal.

“My dear Bishop,” the president began in a White House note a few days before Christmas 1901, “can’t you dine with me on Saturday the 28th?  I shall probably be alone.  I will get three or four senators or members of the Cabinet to dine with you.  Then if Mrs. Bishop is with you, won’t both of you dine with us on Sunday evening, the 29th, when Mrs. Roosevelt will be here too?  I am very anxious to see you.”

Or in another White House letter, marked personal and dated June 28, 1902, “As soon as you come back, you must come out to Oyster Bay and let me see you."  Your editorials are a real comfort to me.”

Beyond the 12 years’ difference in their ages, the contrast between the two men could not have been starker.  Roosevelt was a commanding presence in any room, self-certain and gregarious, a 19th Century action figure in spectacles.  He was ruggedly built from a lifetime of strenuous physical challenge.  Bishop, by contrast, was prim by nature, “undersized and grouchy-looking with a little pointed gray beard and a shiny bald head.”

Roosevelt was uptown New York, moneyed, well-bred and Harvard.  Bishop was a Massachusetts farmer’s son, old-line Yankee, and an inveterate schmoozer with typing calluses on his fingertips.  John Hay, once a private secretary to Lincoln and an editorial colleague of Bishop’s at the Tribune, described his personality as rooted in “a Puritan conscience.” Yet in spite of their differences, Bishop maintained an idealized view of Roosevelt: “Nature has made many millions of men but she has made only one Theodore Roosevelt.”

Bishop understood Roosevelt’s mind and mood, and expressed the president’s thoughts with uncanny precision.  “I am grateful for the editorial you have just written and for many editorials in the past,” Roosevelt wrote Bishop in 1902.  “You make exactly the points I should like to have made.  You said exactly the things I should like to have said. You help me more than I can express in driving home the points I am trying to make, the lessons I am trying to teach…”

The president rewarded Bishop with enduring friendship and confidence, and insider access to the family.  On November 27, 1901, TR wrote to him, “I am always wishing I could see you.”