was a dutch knickerbocker here from new york and a mother from the bullet family. she came from georgia. 1858 -- you all know something about history. the civil war is upon us. in the roosevelt family, you have a feud, a mother who loved robert ulee and a father who loved grant. t.r. decided to love the west instead. as i talk about some of his formative years in the dakota territory, it will be clear what the west meant. if i focus for a moment on 1858, one year after he was born 1859 was darwin's on "the origin of species." theodore roosevelt's father was one of the founders of the institute next door, the american museum of natural history, but he had an uncle robert barnwell roosevelt who was called the audubon of the civil war era and went on to write books like "fishing on lake superior" and a book on the waterfowl of florida. uncle rob was an ardent darwinian and wrote seminal things about eels and frogs. she ran for congress to save the shad, because they were being fished out of the hudson river and the east river. this darwinian infusion becomes very important because it's one of the reasons why young theodore roosevelt wants to be a naturalist. he ends up going to harvard class of 1876, graduates wanting to be a biologist or wildlife biologist. darwinism is a strand in t.r.'s leadership, and it connects with learning about darwin as he was young. the quote was, "i sat at the feet of darwin and huxley growing up," and that revolution i what it meant as the evolution of man. i am evolving from an eight. my cousins from a sparrow. it shows you that breakdown. he even writes darwin's theory of revolution.he's thinking about this a lot . it coincides with him being sick, with him having asthma. i had asthma as a boy, so theodore roosevelt's struggles have always been very meaningful to me. in new york, he could not breathe here. the pollution was so thick. he was sick all the time. he started finding some wellness the further up the river he got. when he got to the catskills and more specifically to the adirondacks, he felt that nature had a curative quality to him and it got him more and more interested in being a floral and faunal activist. add to that his early penchant for hunting, which develops into a lifelong obsession. a boy, what is colder in darwin terms than not just species survival but when you get shot and you go to the carcass? all that life, and then you are gone. from his hunting experience, he did a lot of great taxidermy. theodore roosevelt, when he was a boy, his teacher was john james audubon's taxidermy specialist. these combinations of hunting and darwin and trying to conquer illness -- in those days with asthma, they would prescribe smoking cigarettes, believe it or not. his father at a famous moment when he goes up to maine, he gets beat up by some boys. he's roughed up. his father said, you are going to develop into a manly person and you have young t.r. with weights. his father gets him weights, and he starts weightlifting. you see photos of theodore roosevelt while he is in cambridge with no shirt on looking all buff, because he has been making himself strong. he is willing it through physical exertion, as well as intellectual exertion. those combos are coming to him. those strengths are coming together by the time he's at harvard. i consider myself a presidential historian. i think theodore roosevelt had the best father. he was an incredibly honest man, highest -- pious, religious. t.r.'s greatest quality is honesty. you talk about what makes him a great leader. he believed in a code of valor and honor and believed in being a doer. when he goes to harvard, his first book -- it's really a pamphlet -- it's called "the summer birds of the adirondacks." he then goes and wants to climb to the tallest mountain in maine because thoreau had climbed the mountain. he wants to hunt a moose, but he's bragging, i'm as tough -- he was with ardent outdoors people, and he wanted to be as tough as those men. he also can operate in non-masculine, more social society kind of cultures too. you see them both forming his character. he also loved early on the navy. i mentioning some about conservation and hunting, but the navy was his great love. he writes in 1882, amazing stories he's writing about -- it was taught at the naval academy forever and the naval war college, and it's still a classic. he's writing this as a young man, this two-volume thing on the war of 1812, and if you read that, you will see how much he loves the way america one-upped the british. a kind of feeling of american exceptionalism is exuding him as a young man. he defines himself not just as a darwinian but also as a mahogany and, believing that great power countries in the world realpolitik, countries that mattered, japan and britain, in particular, new how to take care of their shorelines, their homeland security. roosevelt gets from reading mahan's, we need to have a navy on both coasts. thus, you get to the panama canal and his focus on building that shortcut. you don't have to have the navy go all the way down through south america. you have that shortcut. as i speak to you, the panama canal is being doubled in size and has continued being very important to america's navy and american shipping. beyond being the scholar of the navy and hunting he becomes a legislator in albany, and he has that harrowing moment. he's a reformer. he wants to go after corruption. he's a prosecutor. his belief in leadership is being a prosecutor. the greatest thing to know about theodore roosevelt is he woke up every day wanting to get a bad guy. it is why he became a new york police commissioner. it's why when he was in dakota territory he became a sheriff. he was not a defense attorney type. he's an hour when he going after corruption, and i'm sure most of you know the story -- he gets called in by his brother because his mother is very sick, her kidneys are failing, and his wife alice is in labor with his child who becomes alice longworth roosevelt, a great washington d.c. wit and philanthropist. that same day in february when he was just a young politician here in new york on valentine's day, his mother dies on one floor, and his wife dies on another, in the same building. in one of the more moving documents i've seen, he puts an "x" into his diary and says, the life has gone out of my life forever. he had huge amounts of depression. depression was part of the roosevelt family. his brother was an alcoholic dealt with his depression by drinking and some forms of opiates. t.r. was almost a teetotaler. he barely would touch any alcohol in his life. he sued once when somebody said he drank because he thought it was libel. he drank about a gallon of coffee a day. he's very caffeinated. what happened was, when he put that "x" in an left his baby daughter in new york, his sister said to theodore, go out west. he always felt this western vector and target. he went with his brother ralph hunting in the most western counties of iowa, and he had also been in the red river valley on the border of north dakota and minnesota. he didn't really get to see that wild west. why is he so inflamed with the west? if i said the civil war was in the 1860's, by the 1870's, the boys magazines and science magazines were showing photographs of the hidden expedition of 1871 that had gone to yellowstone. all these photographs of crater lake in oregon or the red rock canyons of utah, they are starting to be photographed and seen. you also had a geological survey charting and mapping the west because there was gold in our hills, famously in the dakotas south dakota, with the whole custard period, -- custer period. t.r. had an insight that everybody who did topography and geographical surveys of the west -- there was no biological survey. he wanted to know, what kind of insects, what sort of fish, what type of bear? he got into big darwinian debates over species. he thought there were maybe five species of bear. a man named dr. c hart million miriam -- dr. c hart merriam said there were 12 parts of bear by studying claw and snout differences. they had a famous debate, the lumbers versus the splinters and t.r. did not like to many species because he wanted the public to know them all. he thought, if you have too many, you don't know them all. it's a very interesting argument. he slaughtered miriam, t.r. he lost the debate in the end because miriam went out to the olympic peninsula in washington state, and lo and behold found the biggest elk known to man, a giant elk up there. he wrote, dear theodore, i found a new elk and would like to name it after you, but i know you don't like all of these sub specie categories. he said, in this case. you're right. that is a new one. hence, you have the roosevelt elk today. [laughter] when we talk about theodore roosevelt western vector after that tragedy on valentine's day, the northern pacific railroad in new york, you could take the train across the plains. you would get to minnesota and cut across north dakota montana . a link to puget sound, duluth, the great lakes, and then to new york -- he got off in north dakota and began what he called "his years in the wilderness." there is a biblical connotation -- wandering the desert or something, but he did kind of wander around the dakota territory and montana. yes, he wrote articles about hunting for grizzly, and yes, he wrote about killing a buffalo and eating its hump and tongue and having the head as a trophy. from killing that bison, he went on to create the american bison society to save them. as president, he ripped out pictures and the white house that were of african species and instead had bison put in them. he also commissioned the buffalo nickel. these years in the dakota, he's a cowboy rancher. he's got two brands, the cross and the alcorn. he says, i never could've been president or a leader without my time in north dakota. they milk that for everything it is worth in north dakota today. if you go up to theodore roosevelt national park in the badlands where the whole town has been saved -- what he meant was, i was raised well in new york. i had money. when i went out to dakota, i got to live with rough and ready people, what he considered the american archetype, and he liked what he saw. men of self-reliance. a blizzard would occur, and everybody would pull together in the community. he liked the type of men that our western states were developing. i don't want to say he mythologized the cowboy, because he was much more sick -- sophisticated. he became an ethnographer. as president, he got john lomax's funding from france to do studies on cowboy culture because he thought cowboys were the knights of king arthur. they called him "four eyes" at first, but he could hang in there. they became impressed with his leadership because he never quit. he would go on looking for that buffalo going day after day, and he just wouldn't stop. yet he was not a good hunter. he was a terrible shot. he later got blind in one eye from getting hit in the eye in a boxing match, but he had awful eyesight. that indomitable no-quit spirit he had -- he comes back and get three married to edith and they have a wonderful marriage. there are no affairs in theodore roosevelt life. he is very loyal. i'm telling you, theodore roosevelt doesn't lie. that's his big thing in life to admire. he comes here as police commissioner and does all sorts of things in new york, getting rid of crime. he gets telephone set up for the first time in police stations so people could coordinate. he would walk the beat to go see things talk to prostitutes gamblers swindlers, and actually bust in houses. he's showing this fearlessness. the fearlessness comes because of that darwinian side, the sense of hunting, and he overcomes his depression with what is called "exuberance." it is a form of manic depression. i didn't quite understand this before i studied t.r. but i talked to dr. kay jamison at john hopkins in psychiatry. t.r. is her model for the form of manic-depression called "exuberance," which is, instead of drinking or getting -- you take your depression, and everything becomes positive. if the positive of positive -- the power of positive thinking on steroids. if t.r. were here tonight, he would be all, it's great to be here. this is fantastic. if you look at him, he's doing it all the time, and you would think it's just a political act. what it is is coping. it's the way he coped with life. he could not turn himself off. the problem with that kind of exuberance, he was a chronic insomniac and could never shut himself off. that gallon of coffee didn't help either. he would do a lot of arduous hiking and things to kind of where himself down mentally and physically because he couldn't turn himself off. the exuberance allowed him to write 35 books. the exuberance allowed him to do 150,000 letters. the exuberance allowed him to be a police commissioner and cowboy and right on the war of 1812 and right hunting books about the dakota, one illustrated by frederic remington. he did all of that the most crowded life imaginable, and he only lived to be 60, because of that exuberance. the problem with exuberance, heart attacks, heart disease short life. today, a doctor would tell you to take ambien every night and go to the caribbean for rest. you need to relax, and he couldn't. he brought those qualities to the public sphere. after being the new york police commissioner, as you know, he famously became an assistant secretary of the navy, and then we have the spanish-american war with william mckinley. this is right up t.r.'s alley. he's a great believer in the monroe doctrine. this is america's hemisphere. he wants to the moan that canada wasn't incorporated into the united states. it bothered him as an expansionist and as a munro doctrine person. in the spanish-american war, as assistant secretary of the navy he felt he could not morally before the war and against spain while being desk-bound. how do you ask somebody to fight for you?he quits his assistant secretary of the navy post under william mckinley and goes first to san antonio. that is where the roughriders are born. t.r. one bookt.r. -- one book t.r. never wrote that he wanted to write was the history of the texas republic, what happened at the alamo. you can see where t.r. recruited his volunteers to get the roughriders on the dusty fairgrounds of san antonio to go east to tampa and then to go into cuba in the spanish-american war. another aspect of t.r. which comes in is what edwin o wilson, the great naturalist at harvard, talks about -- some people being "biophilic." some people need to have animals, plants, botany -- you can't live with those things -- without those things nearby you. t.r. wasn't exaggerated case of having animals around him. at any given time, he had 20, 30 pets. in the white house when he was president, he had a badger named josiah, a baby badger, and he raised it when he was young. he picked it up in kansas. it would attack somebody. the family -- there are pictures of the roosevelt children holding the badger. if it was somebody he didn't like, he would go and bite them. it's buried in the second more hill property, josiah the badger. what is interesting about that badger -- the emperor of ethiopia gave him a hyena, and he had a horse that would ride the white house elevator. he had a dog named skip that couldn't bark but would climb trees. he had parrots snakes, turtles pockets full of nuts to feed squirrels on the white house lawn. while he was president, he wrote a book about the birds of washington dc -- washington d.c. the reason i mention it at this part of my lecture is, during the spanish-american war, beyond the roughriders in arizona, oklahoma, ivy league friends -- they all mixed together in this volunteer roughriders regimen -- he had three mascots. a cougar, a golden eagle, and a dog. they stayed with the roughriders through the spanish-american war . today in the oval office, barack obama's desk, there is a bust called the bronco busters that remington did. that was given to t.r. in montauk after the spanish-american war when he was quarantined for yellow fever. his three mascots are with him when he gets the famous statue from remington. if you get to the spanish-american war, you see the real leadership of t.r. the only time we know he ever cursed was when horses would get water in their faces, and he would start using swear words -- it would be animal torture, the water coming on them. he called it his "crowded hour." he became the great hero of san juan hill. bill clinton post humorously gave him the medal of honor for what he did. the lady -- the name theodore roosevelt became a household name, along with admiral dewey. he became a military folk hero out of the spanish-american war because he was indomitable, and all the men said he showed no fear, total courage. i'm not worried. if the bullet is meant for me, i die. that's the way it goes in life. that lack of fear gets noticed by people. it's a leadership quality. if the kernel is not afraid, we are not afraid. he comes back. he runs as a hero in the republican party as a reformer. he becomes governor of new york and as a governor, becomes a reformist. he talks about trust busting going after monopolies, weeding out corruption. all of this is seminal to him, so much so that a lot of the business class in new york weren't keen on governor roosevelt. they thought he was a cowboy. they were finding a way to get him out of alpine a, and they degraded him by saying, the only thing he will do as the vice presidency, and nobody wants that job. they thought they got him out of the way. lo and behold, as you know, in buffalo after t.r. ran for vice president, mckinley wins, and t.r. is now vice president. in 1901, september 6, mckinley dies and theodore roosevelt becomes president, mckinley murdered by an anarchist. march 10 said, "that dam cowboy is present." t.r. is his own man. he does things the way he wants to do it. he immediately makes conservation a huge part of his presidency, saves over 234 million acres of wild america using all sorts of mechanisms, mainly what you hear about president obama and executive orders. t.r. would do them a lot. if lincoln could liberate the slaves with an executive order, he could say the grand canyon with an executive order. he did just that. he went all over the country and used the antiquities act of 1906, which gave him executive power for the word "science" to save places for science. it could be 60 acres for paleontologists to study bones found in the west, or a strange natural feature, but he goes with his rough riders to the grand canyon, stands on the lip of the canyon, looks out over the abyss, and says "do not touch it. god has made it." the senate wants to mine it for zinc and copper. t.r. uses this antiquities act and saves 600,000 acres of the grand canyon. when asked this is not science this is a land grab, roosevelt said, show me a better example of a rose studying erosion at work. he went around saving near woods in california, devils tower using these executive powers. he created five national parks taking them through congress, which you have to do for that designation, but he created 51 federal bird reservations giving birth to u.s. fish and wildlife, 500 wildlife refugees. 100 years ago, every woman in here would have worn a hat with a bird on it. you'd gone down the birds, pluck their exotic feathers, and then steal the eggs. you were starting to get extinctions of species. this could not be. he found a particular place called pelican island on the atlantic, indian river country. he said, what will stop me from declaring this a federal bird refuge? the lawyers said -- [indiscernible] try telling florida -- not long after the civil war -- you are going to jail egrets and heron. t.r. did this all over the place. making people to be land stewards, fighting for refer station. the navy part of his leadership as president becomes clear with the great white fleet he builds. he wants our needed to be the best in the world and he wants us to be able to compete with japan and with britain or any great navy in the world. he does it. we build it. places start humming with ship manufacturing, whether it is groton or newport news, and he takes a great white fleet and moves them right into the pacific and shows off to asian countries. look at what we've got. we are a great, big navy. he's beloved in naval history. if you go to the naval academy he's like the all-time naval hero, theodore roosevelt. on the monroe doctrine, the spanish-american war and all theodore roosevelt in 1905 puts the roosevelt corollary to the monroe doctrine. the monroe doctrine was written by john quincy adams, and it was james monroe as president telling europeans, don't mess with our hemisphere, or you're going to get america in-your-face. you know what the europeans thought? they laughed. what is america going to do to us? we had no big navy to defend the hemisphere. by 1904 with roosevelt's navy we tell them the roosevelt corollary is, we've got the navy now. it's a very big, militaristic foreign-policy approach, yet theodore roosevelt wins the nobel peace prize for mediating the russell japanese war. he was very enamored with the japanese culture, japanese people, the food art, but he brokered that and won a nobel peace prize. for somebody who talked a very militaristic game, from 1901 to 1909, we never went to war. he's a peacetime president and a nobel peace prize winner, but his name is associated with war because he fought in the spanish-american war, but mainly because he talked about building up our armed forces. he liked big navy and big forest , and he stuck by that principle. then the panama canal situation which we don't have time to get into it all -- it's created in new york, the country of panama. waldorf-astoria -- let's build this canal. theodore roosevelt said to panama, useful panama from columbia. he said, i built the panama canal. it was an engineering marvel. david mccullough and others have written about it, combating malaria, how much machinery was needed to accomplish that, all in the name of america and the monroe doctrine and supremacy in the hemisphere and the big navy and being able to protect our borders. theodore roosevelt was a great leader as president because he knew how to manipulate the press . he would tell every reporter he saw, your article was the best thing i ever read, because he knew how the egos of writers -- you can't hate a president who just read your stuff and liked it. also, he was a genius with cartoonists. he would bring cartoonists with him everywhere. in fact, one of the bits of bravery in the leadership of t.r. was, right when he came to the white house, he invited booker t. washington to dinner. this was scandalous. the south was up in arms that in african-american was not only sitting in the white house but had his legs next to a white woman, edith, the first lady. scathing, racist bigotry, if you read the newspapers coming out of mississippi. do you know what t.r. does? he decides he's going to go back to the governor of mississippi who was calling roosevelt everywhere ugly racial name in the books, and he went hunting in his backyard with hold collier, an african-american hunt guide. today, there is a hunt collier refuge in the mississippi delta. a woman in brooklyn, ruth macomb , she ended up becoming very famous and made a lot of money -- i'll tell you why in a minute -- they are down there in mississippi, and the big thing was the south was lynching african-americans. fdr wanted federal anti-lynching laws, and the south didn't want anti-lynching laws. t.r. went there on the hunt but also to promote and sell the anti-lynching laws. a cartoonist from "the washington post," clifford berryman, showed a cartoon of a black bear, which looked like an effort in american with a rope around its neck, and it showed roosevelt drawing the line in mississippi. a real bear had been caught and roped by holt callier, and t.r. would not shoot it because that wasn't a fair hunt conservation practice. the cartoon had a double meaning. drawing the line in mississippi. we are not going to kill a trapped animal. and we are against lynching. the cartoon went, in today's parlance viral, and ruth in brooklyn wrote a letter saying -- dear mr. president, i would like to make a bear toy named after you, teddy bear. he got back to her and said madam, you may, but i don't think anybody cares. it's the most ubiquitous toy in history, the teddy bear. you know how many politicians would die to have their symbol be a child's toy? kids with their teddy bears. politicians dream of such glory. if you think it's an easy act william howard taft, his successor, wanted to bubble up some of the -- a bottle of some of the roosevelt magic. he created the billy call toy. none of you know what it looks like. i'm not even sure you can get when on ebay, but maybe. it went nowhere. nobody wanted a possum stuffed toy. something about roosevelt magic and his ability to communicate his bravery as a leadership -- as a leader is just extraordinary. he runs in 1904 and get reelected by a landslide, and he could've run again in 1908. he said, no, i'm not going to run, because president is ok, but the real people i want to be associated with our explorers -- are explorers. he thought that was a higher thing to be. he later regretted this, we think, or we are sure, but he quit right in the middle of it. 48 hours before he left, he signed an executive order saving mount olympus in washington state. still, the olympic national park out there. then he went to africa and got lost in the wild. he loved to get lost in the wilderness. he found strength in that, living against the elements. i mentioned him in the dakotas in the wilderness years, but when mckinley was shot, they couldn't find theodore roosevelt. he was on top of mount marcy in new york lost in the wild. nobody knows where roosevelt is in the bush. not only did he collect a lot of species for the smithsonian as a hunter and collector, but he also wrote a marvelous two-volume inventory of the species of africa. while he was there his successor william howard taft, a man he admired greatly -- i know you are all aware that doris kearns goodwin just wrote a book largely on this -- taft gets the nod. t.r. wants him to be the successor. he is the hand-picked guide for t.r. and taft ends up firing gifford pinchot, the chief forrester, somebody who roosevelt helped build 150 national forests with. pinchot gets fired. roosevelt was very angry. he comes back and defies everybody and runs as a republican nominee, feels as if he's being cheated out of the republican party that is being owned by corporations and banks and he breaks in 1912 and runs the most successful third-party run in american history, the bull moose party. you've got to get back to the animal bit. the progressive party of 1912. at that point, he wants to destroy taft. if you're an enemy of t.r., it is not enough to win. you have to destroy your opponent. he went after taft and destroyed the modern republican party at that time. he came in second, allowing woodrow wilson to develop -- to come in first. something more important happened in 1912 then him coming in second and letting wilson be president. in his biography, when he went to milwaukee, an anarchist pulled out a gun and shot him. t.r. is believing. he stands there with blood coming out and says, it will take more than a bullet to kill abel moose -- a bull moose. what is that? some people say it's not. some people call it courage. some people say it is true grit. what it becomes -- he becomes a greater focus here are, maybe like paul bunyan or davy crockett. he had founded the boone and crockett club. he became a specie of folklore. we don't just think of him as a president. he was nursed by jane adams who would win a nobel prize herself as a social worker. the whole left got behind t.r. in 1912, and once he loses that, he got depressed. wilson is in, and he goes for another brutal expedition, this time to south america, the amazon brazil, traveling on a river over 600 miles, the river of no return, and shows amazing fortitude, but also immaturity by going. he said, it's my last chance to be a boy but he ended up trying to unlock a couple of boats and cut his leg. that open wound caused him to get an infection, and he does developed a malaria of some kind almost died down there. he asked to be left to die. he comes back. everybody here in new york city was never the same. he was constantly having leg problems. his vitality has largely evaporated, and it evaporates more when he has his son killed in the first world war. theodore roosevelt an early and ardent supporter of going in and taking it to the hun the kaiser's in germany. he was angry at woodrow wilson for being laxatives: -- glaxo days ago -- for being lacksidasical. he was very depressed that he couldn't go over there and fight and serve. theodore roosevelt junior -- his son had that same ardor and ended up dying in the battle of normandy, d-day. 56 years old, the oldest man to die on d-day. he dies in 1919, buried in new york at oyster bay. sagamore hill, if you haven't gone, go. it's one of the great homes. historians rank him forth as the most important president after abraham lincoln, george washington, frequent roosevelt and then t.r. a peacetime president. it's quite a coveted spot. his life brings out more and more books constantly, and he's probably one of the most favorite people i've gotten the opportunity to study and write about. thank you. [applause] i'm going to be taking questions from the audience. if you would like to ask a question, please approach one of the two mics in the aisle. before asking, please tell us your name, and out of respect for the other people waiting their turn, please ask just one question. we have two staff members on hand if any of you need assistance. there's one there and one there. we will start with you. >> i am jim vicinage. i thought one of the great political moves of teddy roosevelt was his relationship with j.p. morgan, one of the first companies that he curtailed was the northern railroad that was owned by morgan. in 1908, he asks morgan to help a lot the federal government, and he does that. can you talk about that relationship? >> two points. on railroads, roosevelt wanted to lower fees on the railroads but on morgan, a very complicated and interesting relationship. there is one moment when t.r.'s attorney general tells morgan -- morgan was upset -- my administration knows no tickertape. morgan was saying, if you do this, it's going to affect the finances of america. roosevelt's guide came back and said, i don't make judgments on your financial tickertape. it's a wonderful -- there is a wonderful amount of literature on the adversarial relationship and yet in many ways, they have mutual respect in the end. >> i did quite extensive research on the roosevelts. would you say in your research if we never elected teddy roosevelt, we never would have built the panama canal? unless you think somebody else could do that job. >> well, of course, he comes in in 1901. we didn't elect him as president . he came in as our youngest president at 42 years of age. i don't know if it could have gotten built without either theater roosevelt or someone who was that bullheaded and persistent. we get worried as historians about "what if." i got to edit ronald reagan's diaries, and nancy reagan had given it to me to edit with one stipulation -- "never tell people what my husband would have done." people are very unpredictable. history unfolds the way it unfolds. one doesn't want to say it never would've gotten built without theodore roosevelt, but certainly, for better or for worse, there are many people in latin america who thought it was an ugly sign of american imperialism and colonialism. there are other people who see it as a model of can-doism like going to the moon. it depends on where you fall down. it is fair to call him the father of the panama canal because of the amount of manic energy and determination he put into that project. >> good evening, professor. dan harrison. when he died in january 1919 roosevelt was being talked about as a putative candidate for the republican party in 1920. notwithstanding his frail health and "what if" questions, what is the sense how things might have evolved in the postwar period had t.r. been elected instead of the nondescript man who was elected? >> very good question. it's something i left out of my remarks. he was the front runner for the gop in 1920. we think he would have gone for it, meaning he would have run and probably gotten elected president of the united states. it is hard to imagine -- harding could have taken on theodore roosevelt who was growing in stature. he got a little tired from the scene, but after wilson and the war and how many people were looking back with rose-colored glasses, t.r. very well could have gotten elected. there are all indications he would have wanted to go for it. that would have made the 1920's quite different, because you would have had a progressive republican claiming to be part of the party of lincoln and set of the harding, coolidge hoover corporate republican -- >> and we presumably would have been less isolationist. >> exactly. >> hi, i had a question about the security surrounding him since he followed and assassinated president. i have seen him in a film clip at the smithsonian museum of american history jumping into the wright brothers' plane. i was wondering, did he drive people crazy? >> it's a good question. it gets back to the seminal point. when you have no fear, and you don't have any skeletons in your closet, it makes you pretty powerful. trust me we have no record of him lying or cheating. he had nothing ever to cover. he never had a paranoia of that kind. he developed this darwinian philosophy. it's not so different from jonathan edwards and, the door opens, you will go tumbling down. death is upon any of us at any minute. live your life honorably and live it to the fullest. his idea of the fullest was trying anything new. he went into a summering. he went into aviation. he went catching coyotes and wolfs. he went wolf-catching riding his house, leaping off a horse and grabbing the wolf, and if you put your fist and the wolf's mouth, it turns totally passive. this guy he went with made business selling walls -- wolves to zoos and museums. t.r. got a film crew to go film some of this. he liked darren, whether it's aviation. with that said, the big lover of our navy got seasick all the time. [laughter] he really liked being on horseback and having flatland. his echo system was really the prairie, the great savanna of america, where he felt most at home. yes, he used to do a game where you walk from a to b with kids. no matter what, you go straight. he did all these strenuous life activities, constantly taking risk, and that was part of who he was. >> the big lover of conservation, however, i have also read -- i guess it was more stylish in those days than an hour day -- was a huge slaughterer of wild animals. >> it's another good question. i mentioned to you his proclivity for hunting. back in those days, what he noticed and why he created to save the big game -- if you get this is a jeopardy question what president wrote a book? the first was theodore roosevelt mcmillan about the deer of north america. he created a game reserve for buffalo in oklahoma and another reserve in montana at the flathead reservation. the point being, aristocratic hunters were in those days the original conservationists in many ways because you save this specie to hunt the specie. secondarily, even if the american museum of national history next tour, you can go to the bird area and see the carcasses. before we had bird banding or aerial photography, the way that scientists would study animals was by collecting specimens. if you wanted to understand the eastern bluebird, you shoot 20 eastern bluebirds and study variations in coloration and beak size. he didn't see himself as an animal slaughterer. he saw himself as a wildlife biologist, man of science. with that said, his kill ratio in africa seems to me to have well succeeded what he needed to have shot for his museums. it leads people to think of him as having a bloodlust. it's not as much of -- when my book came out, somebody pick this up in "the new york review of books." they said, brinkley talks about him being a lifetime auduboner and a lifetime member of the national rifle association. today, we think of him -- for too often don't meet, but in t.r. they do. >> see more:. you answer the question would he have ended world war i earlier? would there have been less hostility in germany, no versailles germany? >> that is the ultimate "what if." let me say this. theodore roosevelt was beloved in europe, almost as much as benjamin franklin had been. his famous speech at the solar bone the one that nixon used when he resigned. "damn the critics. it's better to be in the arena." he spoke foreign language is very fluently. he was very fluent in german and knew all about the german people. he had a huge disdain for the kaiser and what he saw as germany run amok. how things would have panned out differently if t.r. was president, i just don't know. i better stop. i really enjoyed it, and i'll be around if you want to talk some more. thank you. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> you are watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter @cspan history for information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. >> tonight on "q&a," dr. adrian fu berman, director of the georgetown university medical center watchdog project, on how pharmaceutical companies lobby congress and influence doctors on what medications to prescribe. >> the promotion of a drug starts 7-10 years he for a drug comes on the market, and while it's illegal for a company to market a drug before it's been approved -- been approved, it's not illegal to market a disease. drug companies have sometimes invented diseases or exaggerated the importance of certain conditions or exaggerated the importance of a particular mechanism of a drug, for example, and then blanketed medical journals and medical meetings and other venues with these messages that are meant to prepare the minds of clinicians to accept a particular drug, and also to prepare the minds of consumers to accept a particular condition. >> tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern and pacific on c-span's "q&a." >> monday night on "the communicators," fcc commissioner minyan clyburn on their recent net neutrality ruling, municipal broadband, and the subsidized phone and broadband program lifeline. >> what i am proposing that we do is overhaul the lifeline program. make it concurrent and in sync with the information age. challenge those providers to give more to their consumers. the prices and opportunities have been more explosive for the rest of us. it should be for lifeline consumers. get those providers out of the certification business. that has been the number one problem we've been seeing. it is a vulnerability in the system we need to plug. >> monday night at 8:00 p.m. eastern on "the communicators" on c-span2. at 8 p.m. eastern on "the communicators." >> each week "real america" brings you archival films that tell the story of the 20th century. 1945, u.s. army forces captured ludendorff bridge. this is a two-part 1965 u.s. army film telling the story of the battle. the documentary is narrated by several participants from world war ii, including president dwight eisenhower, general bradley, and congressman heckler , who witnessed the events as an army historian. now 100 years old, the representative is currently the oldest living former congressman. [explosions] >> every major victory

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