Life and Harsh Times of Teddy Roosevelt on ‘TR’

Theodore Roosevelt so much embodied the United States at the last turn of the century that it is hard to separate the nation from the man.

Both were ebullient and confident and pushing to stand on the world stage. Both were romantically addicted to the idea of war. Both were ardent believers in self-improvement. Yet both had dark periods of trouble and self-doubt.

The man and the times come vividly to light in “TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt,” a four-hour look on Sunday and Monday nights at one of the most interesting men ever to be president.

On Sunday, you can compare leadership as it was with leadership as it is. “TR” airs at 8 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28, right after the debate between President Clinton and his Republican challenger, Bob Dole.

Roosevelt’s leadership was, well, frenetic. “A steam engine in trousers,” someone called him. Producer and director David Grubin, who did the similar “FDR” and “JFK” biographies for “American Experience,” and writers Grubin and Geoffrey C. Ward convincingly show you how he got that way.

Born in 1858 into an eminent and wealthy New York family, Theodore was terribly sickly with asthma as a child. It was his father who cared for him. He was, the son said, “the best man I ever knew.” As president, Theodore made decisions only after considering what his father would have done.

The son, before and during attendance at Harvard, pushed himself to build a strong and healthy body. He pushed himself to persuade his beloved Alice to marry him. And unheard of in someone of his class, he pushed himself at 23 into winning a seat in the New York Assembly.

His daughter Alice was born, and then on the same night his wife and mother died. Theodore never spoke his wife’s name again. He moved west and ranched for two years in the North Dakota badlands.

Renewed, he threw himself into life again, marrying Edith Carow, with whom he had four sons and a daughter, then hurling himself into public office. As assistant secretary of the Navy, he helped push President William McKinley into the war with the Spanish Empire that brought the United States a little empire of its own.

Resigning, he recruited his own “Rough Riders,” whom he led up San Juan Hill in Cuba to victory. “The great day of my life,” he called it.

Quickly he was elected governor of New York, then vice president. When McKinley was assassinated he became president, and in his next term filled the White House with his energy and his boisterous children.

He wrote 36 books and 100,000 letters. His two greatest tangible achievements as president were the vast expansion of national parks, monuments and forests and the building of the Panama Canal.

The story is ably narrated by Jason Robards and deftly told by members of the Roosevelt family and historians, among them David McCullough, author of books about both Roosevelt and the Panama Canal.

* “TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt” airs on “American Experience” at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday on KCET-TV Channel 28. Another documentary about the former president, “The Indomitable Teddy Roosevelt,” first broadcast on ABC in 1986, will be shown Friday on the History Channel at 6 and 10 p.m.