To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
― Teddy Roosevelt
Toward the end of our Author Talk event Sunday, Dec. 8, at the Wellstone Center, Congressman Jimmy Panetta turned to New York Times deputy op ed editor Clay Risen, author of The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century, and told him how happy he was to be talking about Teddy Roosevelt.
For Panetta, who in 2008 earned a Bronze Star serving a tour in the war in Afghanistan as a Naval Reserve intelligence officer, tracking Al Qaeda, Teddy Roosevelt embodies a stark contrast with the current occupant of the White House. Roosevelt was a man of action, but also an intellectual, and always someone who saw his actions in a larger context – as opposed to the chaos emanating from the White House in this administration.
“It’s mind numbing, it’s dumbfounding, that this is what we have to deal with,” Panetta said.
When the President makes a sudden, unexplained choice like the decision to abandon our Kurdish allies in northern Syria to a Turkish invasion, there are consequences.
Panetta was stunned on a recent trip abroad by the impact doubts about U.S. leadership were having on allies, who told him “Your credibility is being hurt by these decisions,” he said.
“They cannot rely on us, therefore we cannot rely on our allies,” Panetta continued. “That’s going to hurt us in the long run, not just militarily but obviously our values. I firmly believe that if we pull out – and we saw it in Syria, great example – if we pull out of certain areas, you’re going to see a vacuum, and you’re going to see other entities that don’t have our values fill that vacuum, and that’s what we have to watch out for.”
If the U.S. does continue to pull back from its international commitments, including its lead role in the NATO alliance, it would represent in a sense coming full circle to where we were when Roosevelt was making a name for himself in the Spanish-American War.
“Risen’s final verdict on the Spanish-American War is not admiring — ‘a half-baked, poorly executed, unnecessary conflict that pushed an immature military power onto the world stage,'” Candice Millard wrote in a review in the Times. “He does concede, however, that it had the desired effect. After Spain gave Cuba its independence and also turned over Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to its enemy, the United States was never ignored again.”
Risen argues in his new book – named one of 100 notable books of the year by The New York Times – that Roosevelt’s leadership of the Rough Riders and the attention they generated was a key step in “America stepping onto the world stage.”
“Originally I wanted to write a book that was mostly not about Roosevelt,” he’d explained in an earlier interview. “I was interested in the Rough Riders as a group: Who were these 1,000 men who volunteered to fight America’s first overseas war? And what did their instant celebrity say about a country that, until the eve of the Spanish-American War, was so adamantly anti-military? But Roosevelt has a magnetic quality to him; it’s hard to write anything about the late 19thand early 20th centuries in America that doesn’t involve him. And of course he created and eventually led the regiment. But he is also a vital part of the larger story I try to tell – he represented, like the Rough Riders as a whole, a new idea about a vibrant, morally righteous America stepping onto the world stage.
“Roosevelt as president was something wholly new for America. While we had had presidents who commanded the nation’s esteem, we had never quite had a president who used his office as effectively and expansively as Roosevelt did – he wielded executive power, the bully pulpit and his own powers of persuasion to push the country into the 20th century. He was singular; like Churchill and only a few others, he was not only an immensely capable leader and the right time, but he was fully aware of his own strengths and vision. He understood that he was playing a world-historical role, and he exceeded even his own expectations in fulfilling it.
“Roosevelt was unlike any president since Lincoln, with the arguable exception of Ulysses Grant, who understood the full potential of the executive branch and used it to its fullest. By the time he took office, Roosevelt was fed up with the Republican Party machines and the conservative indolence of many congressional Republicans, and he had the guts to sidestep them where he could. To cite two examples, he took legal action against trusts, and he used executive power to greatly expand national protection of wilderness areas. It’s hard to imagine his immediate successor, William McKinley, do anything of the kind – and I say this as someone who thinks McKinley was a pretty good president, on the whole.”
– Steve Kettmann
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