After studying his life and achievement for several years, I’m not sure I understand Theodore Roosevelt in all of his complexities, but I know that I deeply admire him for several qualities in his character, which mark him as one of the most authentic men in American history. What is perhaps most remarkable about Roosevelt (1858-1919) is that there does not seem to be much “posture” in him. He was what he was—with all of his heart and soul—and he lived according to the high standards he set for himself, and his actions appear to have been automatic rather than calculated. In other words, he was not posing as a great man. He just was one.

He loved his family more even than he loved his life of adventure and the joy of political maneuvering. He never committed adultery; he was incapable of that. He regarded the marriage vows as absolute. Roosevelt was famous for cutting short cabinet meetings to play with his rambunctious children, for joining them in dropping water balloons on secret service men from the White House roof, for engaging in pillow fights so wild that he had to redress for White House dinners.

In his Autobiography (1913) Roosevelt wrote, “There are many kinds of success in life worth having. It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful business man, or railroad man, or farmer, or a successful lawyer or doctor; or a writer, or a President, or a ranchman, or the colonel of a fighting regiment; or to kill grizzly bears and lions. But for unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.”

Even the acerbic Alice, who regarded her famous father with considerable ambivalence, confessed, “I don’t suppose any parent ever participated more actively in the pastimes of his children than my father did. He seemed to be involved in everything. He was an incredible father and great fun. He was never mean. Well, not really mean. Just noble mean on occasion.” It’s hard to imagine higher praise than this. And the father in question was the most powerful political figure in the United States.

Roosevelt’s own (ironic) account of a camping trip he took with his sons and their cousins provides a perfect portrait of a man who loved family even more than power. “I took Kermit and Archie with Philip, Oliver and Nicholas out for a night’s camping in the two row boats last week,” Roosevelt wrote. “They enjoyed themselves heartily, as usual, each sleeping rolled up in his blanket, and all getting up at an unearthly hour. Also, as usual, they displayed a touching and firm conviction that my cooking is unequaled. It was of a simple character, consisting of frying beefsteak first and then potatoes in bacon fat, over the fire; but they certainly ate in a way that showed their words were not uttered in a spirit of empty compliment.”

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Roosevelt said what he meant and meant what he said, and he led by example. He believed that it was a mistake to ask others to do what he would not do himself. In fact, he appears to have considered it inappropriate to ask others to do what he had not done himself.

The examples of this are legion. In 1898, he resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to form a “harum scarum” cavalry of Rough Riders, even though President McKinley, Navy Secretary John D. Long, and his wife Edith asked him not to do so reckless a thing. (Edith was recovering from major surgery. One of the children had recently suffered a nervous breakdown). The assault on Kettle and San Juan hills in Cuba on July 1, 1898, not only gave Roosevelt “the great day of my life,” but propelled him inexorably into the Presidency.

In 1905 he became the first President to take a submarine ride. He spent more than an hour submerged in the experimental sub the Plunger below Long Island Sound on August 25, 1905. He was even permitted to take the controls of the submarine for a short period of time.

The nation’s leading newspapers called the excursion reckless and scolded the President for putting his own love adventure ahead of the needs of the nation. The New York Times wrote, The President would do well to recognize that “his life is not his own . . . eighty millions of people have an interest in its prolongation.” Roosevelt’s reply? “I did not like to have the officers and enlisted men think I wanted them to try things I was reluctant to try myself.” Besides, he said, if he hadn’t done it, “it would have broken the boys’ hearts” [Ted 17, Kermit 15, Archie 10, Quentin 7]. It’s this last sentence that marks Roosevelt’s greatness. He was a family man first, President of the United States second.

Roosevelt was the first President in American history to fly in an airplane, to own an automobile, to have a telephone in his home, to leave the country during the course of his term in office, to intervene in a labor dispute not to crush the striking workers but to seek a just settlement. He was the first President to sent a transatlantic cable for diplomatic purposes, the first to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the first to invite an African-American to dine with him in the White House.

Late in his Presidency, Roosevelt became concerned that U.S. military officers were becoming soft. After a severely disappointing inspection, the President wrote, “Their condition,” said Roosevelt, “would have excited laughter, had it not been so serious, to think that they belonged to the military arm of the Government.” He issued orders requiring that the infantry be required to march 50 miles, and the cavalry to ride 100 miles, within a period of three days. There were howls of protest, both from the military and the nation’s newspapers. To prove that his demands were reasonable and that he was not being capricious, the (now corpulent) President, accompanied by Surgeon General of the Navy Presley Rixey and two officers, rode more than 100 miles in a single day. Roosevelt wrote, “The Virginia roads were frozen and in ruts, and in the afternoon and evening there was a storm of snow and sleet; and when it had been thus experimentally shown, under unfavorable conditions, how easy it was to do in one day the task for which the army officers were allowed three days, all open objection ceased.”

Roosevelt was the most adventuresome President in American history and the nation’s foremost advocate of the strenuous life. And yet I do not think that he was a natural outdoorsman. By birth he was a New York bluestocking, a Knickerbocker, the kind of man who could be expected to haunt the private clubs of Manhattan and Boston, and perhaps dabble on the polo grounds, but not face down a ruffian in a saloon or kill a mountain lion with a bowie knife. Roosevelt was born with a frail body. He was naturally cerebral. He had very weak eyes. His asthma was debilitating. Family doctors warned that he might not live to adulthood. Challenged (at the age of 12) by his father to “make your body,” Roosevelt set out to overcome the weakness of his physical constitution. In other words, he was not always the Theodore Roosevelt we associate with heroic activity. He decided to become that man, and he accomplished his goal by sheer hard work and an enormous discipline of his will.

It became his lifelong habit to respond to pain, discomfort, fatigue, loss, and depression with what might be regarded as unnatural expressions of delight. When he woke up under four inches of snow in Yosemite with John Muir in 1903, President Roosevelt shouted, “This is the greatest day of my life.” Perhaps it was, but surely Roosevelt was bucking himself up as much as he was enjoying nature in its raw—and therefore most authentic—form. In other words, part of the Roosevelt character was an iron refusal to whine, complain, give up, or admit defeat. Life was “bully,” and that which might have defeated a normal man was “bullier” for Theodore Roosevelt.

There is a key moment in the famous buffalo hunt in Dakota Territory in 1883. He had been at it for ten long days by now, in really unpleasant conditions (rain, mud, a deep cut in his forehead, a forward fall into a cactus patch), and what few buffalo remained on the Dakota plains had eluded Roosevelt and his expert guide Joe Ferris. Sleeping out on the plains late in the hunt, TR and his guide had to drag themselves out of their sleeping robes in the middle of the night to find their horses after they had bolted away from camp. Finally, to top off a perfectly miserable night, Roosevelt woke up at first light literally lying in a pool of rainwater. Joe Ferris, exhausted and a little smug, assumed that the New York dude was finally ready to give up.

Roosevelt sat up in the pool of water, and said, “By Godfrey this is fun!” And the hunt went on.

Perhaps most important, the people Roosevelt met in the course of his life realized that there was something profoundly authentic about him. Nobody who met Roosevelt failed to recognize his lust for life, his love of America, particularly the West, his zeal for experience, the riskier the better, and his deep commitment to American ideals, as represented by his favorite President Abraham Lincoln. Even one of his enemies confessed, you have to really hate Roosevelt not to love him.

During the critically-important negotiations that led to the Portsmouth Treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War, Roosevelt hosted Baron Kentaro Kaneko of Japan at Sagamore Hill. The meal they shared, just at the moment when America stepped through the curtain onto the world stage, was simple, casual, and abundant. Mrs. Roosevelt retired early without ceremonial fanfare. When TR and Kaneko finally went to bed, they ventured up the stairs of the ramshackle Roosevelt house with candles. Kaneko, who had known TR at Harvard, was both astounded and moved. “What manner of country [is] it that produced such simple, genuine men as this soldier, traveler, statesman and citizen, whose creed was democracy in its finest form.”

During the 1883 buffalo hunt Roosevelt met young Lincoln Lang, the 16-year-old son of his host Gregor Lang, on the mouth of Little Cannonball Creek near Pretty Butte, in southwestern North Dakota. Roosevelt hunted all day every day (in very difficult conditions) and then stayed up talking with Gregor Lang deep into the night. Their talk was about cattle, the West, good government, America’s place in the world. And on and on. Later in life, Lincoln Lang “It was listening to those talks after super in the old shack on the Cannonball, that I first came to understand that the Lord made the earth for all of us, and not for a chosen few.”

Such was the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. When he left Dakota for the first time, Gregor Lang said, “There goes the most remarkable man I ever met.”