'The Old Lion' review: Bully for this Teddy Roosevelt novel

Midway through Jeff Shaara’s “The Old Lion: A Novel of Theodore Roosevelt,” Roosevelt, “a tornado of energy,” whirls about the White House on Christmas Day, 1901. He entreats his wife, Edith, his children and others gathered there to dance along. As one guest, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, observes, “It is apparent to those of us who love him that the president is 6.”

Roosevelt’s childlike enthusiasms enliven Shaara’s appealing and spirited portrait of the 26th President of the United States. Replete with the author’s vividly imagined Western showdowns, cavalry charges and jungle expeditions, “The Old Lion” entertains the 6-year-old in all of us.

Shaara explains in his preface that he shaped the life story of the president he reveres as one of the three best in American history — the others are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — as a novel. He explains that this fictional narrative affords insight into the ways in which Roosevelt perceived and reacted to the major events of his life.

Thus the novel opens with a point-of-view passage that evokes a Stephen King thriller as 9-year-old Teddy awakens from one of the asthma attacks that afflict him: "The creature pursued him, caught him now, long snakelike tendons wrapping around the boy’s throat. He fought, struck out with useless fists, the tendons now stronger, sharp sinews strangling him, the creature growing, a dragon, fire in its face, the burn engulfing the boy, spreading all through him."

Healthier, more vigorous times ensue.

Roosevelt’s days in the late 1880s as a cattle rancher in the Dakota territory — justly named the Badlands — read like a vintage Western. As Roosevelt bunks down at the Pyramid Place Hotel, the proprietor warns “Beware of a fist or two. … You carry a pistol? … Folks around here like to sometimes shoot at each other."

And a seamstress, pointing a rifle at Roosevelt, warns that her husband "made the mistake of getting blind drunk and comin’ after me with a couple of fists. I leveled him out with a frying pan."

Roosevelt determines to bring law and order to this rambunctious territory. When friends suggest shooting horse thieves, Roosevelt objects: “You can’t have people acting like the only law is frontier justice. Sooner or later, there has to be a real sheriff."

Shaara’s depictions of Roosevelt’s exploits in Cuba during the Spanish-American War are harrowing and reveal a shaken man. The death toll after the Battle of Las Guasimas challenges Roosevelt’s faith. At a memorial for his fallen men, he realizes “he cared desperately for his men, but the emotional calls to God, the reliance on religion pushed him away.”  

The book’s most exciting and exotic section follows Roosevelt’s exploration in 1914 of a part of the Brazilian jungle “no white man had ever seen, floating along a river no white man had ever traveled.” On what he terms a “bully adventure,” Roosevelt swims nude in waters that are home to anacondas and piranhas, listens to a howling monkey and sidesteps a coral snake. When hostile, unseen natives kill with arrows a guide’s pet dog. Roosevelt muses prophetically: “We come here to spread our civilization, to open up this land to the eyes of the world, as though we are doing a good thing. But already the jungle, the river have given us a lesson, that we do not own this place, that we will not win. … And unless we understand that more men will die.”

Against the Wild West, Bunker Hill and the jungles of Brazil, the White House appears as a far less exotic setting. Perhaps this explains why the sections of the novel that follow Roosevelt’s presidency read more like straightforward and familiar history. Many of the details and events in this section are nevertheless significant and lively. We see Roosevelt confront racism in Congress, we learn how the term “Speak softly and carry a big stick” evolved and we discover the origin of teddy bears.

Still, a reader will likely empathize with Roosevelt’s sentiments when, nearing the end of his life at Sagamore Hill, he longs for his days in Brazil. They were, he recalls, his “last chance to be a boy.” The adventures of this boy make “The Old Lion” roar.