Been looked shorter than each other. And what happened to the friendship. It lasted for a long time. And in fact teddy makes taft his hand picked successor in 1908 when he wasnt running again and runs his campaign, gives him all the advice in the world, dont play golf, it is a rich mans game you wont look like a working class guy, fight him,. Rose William Jennings brian. Right and he is so happy when taft wins, taft will carry out my legacy, i trust no one more, he calls him a beloved person in his letters, teddy then goes to africa and gives him space, comes back and his progressive friends tell him that taft hasnt been as honest to the legacy. Rose and is cozing up to ceos. And to the regulars in the congress who he needed he thought to get the tariff bill through, it was more complicated than that, he simply didnt know how to be a public leader and he screwed up the things he tried to do to fulfill teddys legacy and then teddy comes back and he is missing being president and the progressives say we want you so he ends up, of course, running against taft. Rose and Woodrow Wilson wins. Of course when the two split the vote, actually teddy and taft together, teddy as the Third Party Candidate and taft as the regular republican candidate get more than 50 percent of the vote, but they split it and of course the democrat wins and wins the congress and wins the senate. Rose and then world war i and thats the way history happens. Thats the way history happens. Rose so but more about the friendship, i mean they were very different men, one loved the public eye, didnt like the public eye, taft was much more cerebral would you say. Yes, deliberate if the. Rose deliberate if the would be a better word. I think part of sit opposites attracting that teddy was so outdoorsy and taft except for golf hardly wanted to walk, roosevelt tried to drag him on these expeditions where you climb over rocks and mountains and he would just stay home but they a third from early on, they were new reform in other words the early corrupt age of the 18 nineties, 1900s, early gilded age they both wanted to see politics out of civil service, they both wanted to see regulation of government, and they were considered new men, so that is what they shared as young people, against the establishment of the Republican Party. Rose it is often said Teddy Roosevelt resided in a transition over americas public life. Before Teddy Roosevelt nothing really had been done to help the social and economic problems of the industrial age, you had this huge gap between the rich and the poor, so many echoes like today, it takes me so long to write this the echoes come back, the middle class is being squeezed out, you have got monopolies that are forming and not doing fairly by people, and you have tenements and slums and they thought then before Teddy Roosevelt that government had nothing to do with that, indeed if it interfered with the economy you would screw up the whole economy, so he begins to be the modern president as a steward of the people and senses through public pressure to get congress to the first regulation of meat packing, the first regulation of labor situations, antitrust suits, it is the modern world that is beginning, modern regulatory world. Rose and correlation zero todays world as we have gone to a new age which i assume you call the. Like. It is really incredible because what happens in the 1900s because of ten inventions, the telephone, the telegraph is coming, everything is speeded up, they talk about nervous disorder at the turn of the 20th century because the pace of life is so much more, you are not writing letters but telegramming and you are moving to the city and you miss the so las of the country. If that is considered speeding up the internet speeded up our life exponentially. And there is a basic question what is the role of the government . Thats right. Rose which is a still a big we looking at the healthcare debate. It was debated philosophically then, laissezfaire was almost a religious fervor, not, the overwhelming majority of people in politics and the people believed you would hurt the prosperous economy if you got too involved thats why you had to used the bully pulpit, he defind the National Platform a real estate has unlike any other political figure to educate the country as to why government had to be important in that lives, it is a big deal what he did. Rose they was the first person who used the bully pulpit of the white house. Indeed was the word and used used the bully pulpit, he loved reporters, if you were a tv guy or a radio guy or a print guy and having his hour saying, you would be in there taking pictures while the barber is trying to keep touch of his moving head. Rose and he never feared the press. He basically felt they were necessary. It is better that he thought they were necessary, he was a o he respected them and he knew that as long as he could accept their criticism, they would step his criticism because he got mad at them if they wrote things that he thought they were stupid and instead of breaking the friendship it kept going. Rose john kennedy was a bit like that, we talk about kennedy on the 50th anniversary. It means you have enough confidence in yourself and enough stebs sense of swagger that i need the public so i need the press, i mean the press is the channel to the public. Rose Lyndon Johnson never got that . No. I mean maybe in the early days he did when he was being treated well, and he liked to think, but after a while, once the press became neck, you know, then the friendship would be broken, that is a very different kind of thing. Rose because i thought it happened earlier because of the kennedy, kennedy was so charismatic and he felt they loved him more than they will ever love me and never give me a fair shake. The johnson was so interesting, nobody is more colorful, except my guy Teddy Roosevelt. Rose you think more colorful than Lyndon Johnson . Well, i will say i didnt know Teddy Roosevelt when i was 24 years old and didnt go down to his ranch, so johnson wins in that regard. Rose have you written everything you are going to write about that . I dont know, i feel so strongly still about lbj and, you know, i think maybe as i get older i would like to think about it, not as a 30year old when i wrote it, right after knowing him, and feeling that sense of friendship, but as a historian, so many years later, yeah i think soso. Rose you really should, i dont know, if any 24 years old had a relationship with a president in terms of how he actually he was crazy about you because of your brain and experience and , no it was my physical being. laughter. rose i was hoping you would say that. laughter. . Rose i wanted you to lead me into that. Squabble i did that. Rose i am so lucky. Jack welch wait until this moment. Anyway rose you cant get out now. I will always be grateful to lbj, i think what happened then, i saw him in a vulnerable stage in his life. Rose exactly. When he needed so las and i developed and empathy for him and i would like to think that empathy is what i brought to all of these people. Even with taft, you start off knowing almost nothing about him except he was fat and lost the 11 election in 12 and won in eight an he is a decent man, not a public leader like teddy but i sense a is, i felt a sense of understanding him and his wife, who he adored and had a stroke in the beginning of his presidency and i am feeling so sad for him and i would like to think that experience with lbj as a historian changed me forever because it meant i am not judging these people, i am trying to make them come to life. I could talk strolls about, this i mean, it is such and extraordinary opportunity and you wrote the, you need to write the book and soon. Uhoh. Rose no. Do it thousand, because really, it is really the perspective of someone i mean to have, with someone as larger than life as linton johnson, everybody says that, to know him at a point in which he is thinking about this life. Right. Rose like. Unparalleled, no one had that access. It was very special. Rose what was it about you he loved so much . I am serious now, other than your physical presence. Where you know what . I think because i listened to him. He told stories, half of them werent true, it didnt matter, i listened, i mean, i would listen and i loved it, i mean, i love history, right. Rose yeah. He knows i love history so how could it not be fun to have a 24yearold thinking about history and looking at this guy and he is telling stories and he is saying yeah, tell me more. Yes and a food listener can make you much more willing to talk. I think so. Rose there is a sense of you dont want to talk to the wall you want to talk to somebody who says, that is fascinating. And then asks questions like, and maybe precipitate answers or thoughts you would not have otherwise if the question hadnt been there. I think thats right. What i find myself do which any of these other people i talk to them anyway but they dont talk back to me. Rose i think also he is certainly sort of a harvard ph. D. Stuff too, didnt he. And the antiwar stuff too. Rose and it was like two people who could not be more different. Right, right. Rose sitting in a room having a conversation about big ideas. Big. Rose about war, about politics, about the country, about change, all of that. Rose i want you to go back today and write this book. But now this guy. Yes, sir. This guy is almost as interesting. Rose thats not true. Is it really . Yes, yes. Rose okay. Make the case. Okay. He was interested in 1,000 things. If he read an article one day and it could be about bushwhacking or about birds, it could be about a syria he would have a person to lunch the next day, now wait just be quiet and then he wrote 40 books, he had manic energy, thats the one who gave maxwell good to the very last drop, he was physical extraordinary, right, he had asthma as a kid, somebody says to him at one point you are becoming an invalid you have to do manager to make your body, i know your mind is great but your body has to be there for the mind so he comes out this exercise maniac. Rose and he think of what happened to him. Not only does he have the life threatening asthma, his father dies when he is at harvard his beloved father and his wife who is young dies in childbirth on the same day that his mother dies in the same house and then he goes to the badlands. Rose thats right. He went to the badlands after. On the same day his wife and mother. His mother had gotten typhoid fever and died a week later, the depression was such he went to the badlands because he thought constant activity would prevent over thought and he could finally sleep at night as he rounded up the ranch hand guys for 200 miles a day, and then he comes back, finally, and sees again the young girl, he dirt car row his best friend as a kid and loved him all his life and finally Manny Ramirez irs her and loved him with a passion of a girl. Rose did he love her with the same passion . I think he loved her not with that kind of romantic passion he had for the first one, for alice but a much deeper love, a sustaining love that lasted the rest of his life, he really loved her and she became his wife, she had a very disordered childhood, her father had been very wealthy man and lost his money and became an alcoholic so all she wanted when she married him was a home, a sanctuary, an anchor and given the energy he had he could always refresh himself at home. That is what is so interesting about these people, nellie taft grows up unconventional and wants to be something and wants to teach and she decides she will never get married and meets taft and respects and adores her and wants her independence and makes her his partner and she is his political advisor and helps them to become president he never would have run if it hadnt been for her and she tragically, eight weeks or so after his presidency starts, has a stroke, had been healthy all the way up until then could never speak connected language again and you wonder why his presidency facility erred, not just because he couldnt be a public leader and didnt understand things and he shouldnt have been a politician, this overshadowed everything so that is what interests me, these people, thats how you look ever netcally it doesnt mean you say sea great leader because of it it is just you feel is a sad. Rose was there a bounty ofs, letters, correspondence, trends who recorded and wrote memoirs about each of well, the great thing was that they had 400 letters they eckersley exchange with each other over a period of time, handwritten, later some of them typed and they really talked, thats the way people communicated them then but then there is this other great character archie butt. I love him he is the military aid to roosevelt and taft. Rose they both loved him. And he loved both of them and wrote daily letters to the family and they are a treasure because they are gossipy and tell a[ telephone ringing ] yout each person is feeling, he was so concerned when teddy was thinking of running against taft, that he didnt know what to do. Do, can i leave taft because i love teddy so much he knew he could never leave taft because he glue to love him too, so he needs to take a vacation. Rose dont they insist on it too. It is so sad, so anyway he is going to europe, and the day teddy announces he decides i cant leave taft now h he he wil need me more than anything so he canceled the reservation and taft says you go on and he comes back and it goes down and devastated taft again. They both cried, taft probably more. Rose and you. That person, you know. Rose that woman who keeps so really amazing story. It really is. I mean, what i think history is about is stories, you tell a series of connected stories, so here i am telling a series of stories about taft and teddy and about tar bell, there is another person, a great journalist, she makes another decision as a woman, a young woman at 14, she praise that she will never get mar recognize. Rose praise . Because she feels the frustration of her mother who had talent and wanted to do nothing and never gets married but becomes the most famous journalist of her era, think we can have those things together that no one of these three women thought they could have. It is good. Rose it is good. Times have changed. I was thinking about your son who went to iraq and all of that, the wonderful sons you have and so proud of. We were here together, you and me rose i remember. So then there is the campaign, was it mean . It was so mean spirited i think eventually the only way that teddy could justify his feelings of going against taft was really exaggerate what taft had done and what he was so he really came to believe that taft betrayed him and called him a fathead with a guinea pig brain and a puzzle whitt and taft thinking he is going for a third term and going for this radical proposal if it didnt like a popular decision, it could recall it, for taft that was way over the edge so he thought a dictatorship might occur or a popular member side, when taft got mean to teddy, teddy loved the fight, of course, and eventually, though, what makes a good ending, finally, is that i felt sad wondering what could have happened to the two of them after 1912, when they run against each other, and people tried to bring them together, in 1914, 1916, but it was almost like an armed neutrality, they were mad at each other. They never talked . Not, never, never during that time, well they met but very coldly, and then finally, in 1918, about the year before teddy dies he is in the hospital with an illness that taft had once had, so taft just wrote him a note saying i know what you going through it is painful because i went through it. And teddy answered it but they still hadnt a seen each other but 1919 months before ted die dies, no 1918, taft goes to the Blackstone Hotel in chicago, and he is going uh up the elevator and the elevator operator says to him, oh, mr. Roosevelt is in the dining room eating alone, i will go back down. There is a reporter there, thank god to record this, he goes in the room and 100 diners there, the wait staff is all there and he goes over to teddy, hello, throws his arm around him, teddy says sit down, the entire restaurant collapse they know this means the friendship has come together. It is so great and the reporter then. Rose that makes you crazy. And says to the reporter thank god this happens, i am so thad we are trends again and some months later, teddy dies and taft is an honored guest at the funeral and he says to teddys sister i dont know what we would have done if we hadnt come back together again i would have mourned it all my life, it is emotional. Rose so wha what happened to taft after that. The great thing that happens to taft, all he wants to do is be a justice on the Supreme Court, teddy offers it to him three times and doesnt take it either a of the three times, he is in the ill philippines and thinks he cant leave his duty so, so, and finally in 1921 he gets appointed Supreme Court chief justice. He is happy, the last decade of his life, he said in is the happiest day of my life when he became Supreme Court justice. Rose what age. He would have been in his sixties then and he lives until the end he is almost there for a decade until he dies. And the incredible thing about his weight, is that it goes up and down his whole life depending on his happiness so he is 250 at yale and then when he is happy at yale and 350 in the presidency and he is back to 250 again when he is on the Supreme Court. When he didnt need to be thin because he had a robe. Rose and he loved that work. He loved that work. He was, his father was a judge, he loved being a judge, i mean he probably meant it when he said if it hadnt been for nellie my wife i still would have been a judge in cincinnati but he said i got to see a world, my kids could always say their father had been president and i dont think he regretted it but i think he was very happy rose how many preatz have we had that became Supreme Court justices. Nobody else, not chief justice, Charles Evan Hughes had been a justice and ran for real estate but lost, so he would have been the other one had he won. Rose amazing and so how was roosevelt when he died. Only 60 so he probably hurt himself when he went on that trip on the river of doubt and had fevers left in him but he wasnt feeling well the last month or so of his life but went back to Sycamore Hill and seemed to be Getting Better and that night he spent the whole day wi