Theodore Roosevelt Book I and II by Edmund Morris (III - Colonel Roosevelt in another episode)

This classic  biography is the story of seven men—a naturalist, a writer, a lover, a  hunter, a ranchman, a soldier, and a politician—who merged at age  forty-two to become the youngest President in history.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt begins at the apex of his international prestige. That was on New  Year’s Day, 1907, when TR, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, threw  open the doors of the White House to the American people and shook  8,150 hands. One visitor remarked afterward, “You go to the White House,  you shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk—and then you go home  to wring the personality out of your clothes.”

The rest of this  book tells the story of TR’s irresistible rise to power. During the  years 1858–1901, Theodore Roosevelt transformed himself from a frail,  asthmatic boy into a full-blooded man. Fresh out of Harvard, he  simultaneously published a distinguished work of naval history and  became the fist-swinging leader of a Republican insurgency in the New  York State Assembly. He chased thieves across the Badlands of North  Dakota with a copy of Anna Karenina in one hand and a Winchester  rifle in the other. Married to his childhood sweetheart in 1886, he  became the country squire of Sagamore Hill on Long Island, a flamboyant  civil service reformer in Washington, D.C., and a night-stalking police  commissioner in New York City. As assistant secretary of the navy, he  almost single-handedly brought about the Spanish-American War. After  leading “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” in the famous charge up San Juan  Hill, Cuba, he returned home a military hero, and was rewarded with the  governorship of New York. In what he called his “spare hours” he  fathered six children and wrote fourteen books. By 1901, the man Senator  Mark Hanna called “that damned cowboy” was vice president. Seven months  later, an assassin’s bullet gave TR the national leadership he had  always craved.

His is a story so prodigal in its variety, so  surprising in its turns of fate, that previous biographers have treated  it as a series of haphazard episodes. This book, the only full study of  TR’s pre-presidential years, shows that he was an inevitable chief  executive. “It was as if he were subconsciously aware that he was a man  of many selves,” the author writes, “and set about developing each one  in turn, knowing that one day he would be President of all the people.”