As America enters its second imperial phase at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are sorely lacking in national leaders who can explain to us our current place in the world, and persuade us to show the discipline and sacrifice that world leadership demands. We live at a time when John McCain and George Bush can be seen as strong leaders, and yet they would appear to be virtually invisible if they stood to attention next to Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), the twenty-sixth President of the United States. Roosevelt would have seen George Bush for what he is: a strong, well-meaning, likeable man who has never really done the hard work that would entitle someone to become President.

Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most extraordinary men who ever lived. He is so much larger than life that he seems like a character out of Plutarch's Lives of the Eminent Greeks and Romans, rather than an American statesman of the twentieth century. Roosevelt threw himself into the active life with abandon, almost reckless abandon. The effete Henry Adams characterized TR as "pure act." Born with a frail body and extremely weak eyes, Roosevelt shot grizzly bears at close range, knocked out a gunslinging ruffian in a Montana bar, climbed the Matterhorn on his honeymoon, went on a yearlong safari in east Africa immediately after leaving the Presidency, and explored one of the last uncharted rivers in the world (the River of Doubt in South America) at a time when most former Presidents are playing a round of golf in the morning and playing canasta in late afternoon. Imagine Bill Clinton's camping in the Big Horn Mountains!

Theodore Roosevelt was an actual war hero.

Theodore Roosevelt was Bush with a brain, and Clinton with character.

It's not that George Bush is unintelligent or that William Jefferson Clinton is without character, of course, but nobody can argue that Bush reads much or knows history or has ever viewed the world through the lens of what great books can offer. By world standards he is a quintessential American: handsome, confident, a little vapid, woefully understudied and unreflective, moralistic, and absurdly prone to violence. If the White House press office reported that Bush read a book a day or that he had written a single book, nobody would believe it. But Roosevelt read a book a day all of his life. He wrote forty books, among which one of the two or three best Presidential memoirs. Bill Clinton is an intellectual - with an almost eerie command of current events and the leadership structure of the world, but by Roosevelt's standards he frittered away his Presidency by gravitating always to comfortable compromise, and his recklessness in his private life handed his enemies nearly fatal clubs with which to defeat him. Roosevelt understood that if you want to change the world you have to lead a person life more pure than Caesar's wife. In his autobiography in 1913, he wrote, "No man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can act with rugged independence in serious crises, nor strike at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful and unscrupulous foes, if he is himself vulnerable in his private character." You certainly have to keep your zipper up.

George Bush has resolve. He's a forceful leader. He is not afraid to state his opinions and act on them too. But he simply doesn't know enough about the nature of civilizations, the history of the world, the role of ideology and faith in human decision making. He is, in a difficult to grasp but essential way, unprepared for leadership. Common sense is not enough to rule the world. Bush will muddle through, but a man of his limited grasp of the Shakespearean glory and fragility of the human project will never take his place among the great Presidents of American history. Bill Clinton has a global consciousness a quick and nuanced mind, and a deep grounding in the humanities. But he is a trimmer. As President he lacked courage and political stamina. At Abilene, Kansas, on May 2, 1903, Roosevelt said, "There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." That would seem to sum up the Presidency of Bill Clinton, who spent most of his Presidency surviving and very little of it leading. It was a character flaw bigger than the moral failure of the mistresses. If Bush could have some of Clinton's mind and temperament, and if Clinton had possessed some of Bush's strength of character, both would have been much better Presidents.

The ideal combination is found in Theodore Roosevelt. He understood the world. He knew where he wanted to take the country. He understood the United States of 1901 and he knew what it needed to get over the social, economic, and constitutional hurdles that were holding it back. He understood that America had global responsibilities that it could not any longer shirk. He was never a captive of his party or any faction of American life. He had in full measure what both Clinton and Bush have in some limited capacity: the ability to understand, respect, empathize with, and even love the common people of America. They loved him back with all their hearts. Roosevelt always believed he was just an average man write large. That he was Everyman with fearlessness, courage, and indefatigable energy, not to mention a first-rate education. He was not afraid to act. And he never let rhetoric substitute for real action in the arena. He never shrank from controversy. He was not afraid to project American force into the world's arena, and yet he was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize - for his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War.

It's not that we would today endorse all of Roosevelt's actions and attitudes. He was a jingoist, a bully, at times a racist, and he never tired of attacking do-gooders, philanthropists, hyphenated-Americans--in short almost anyone who did not see the world quite as he did. He helped to invent the imperial Presidency - with the potential for abuse that a much-enlarged Presidency invites. His extreme assertions of executive authority, his impatience for the glacial pace of legislative activity in our system of checks and balances, are troubling to constitutionalists. He was a benign master leader. It is not for nothing that he is sometimes known as Theodore Rex.

But he was a bold and honest man who said what he thought, believed what he said, was not afraid to tell the American people what he believed they needed to hear. He combined great intellectual powers and accomplishment with a thirst for action, adventure, vitality, and joie de vivre.

When the Spanish-American war broke out in 1898, Roosevelt instantly resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to form what he called a "harum scarum" cavalry of Indians, cow boys, and Yale and Harvard bluebloods. He believed that a man who advocates war and who might send American boys to war ought to be willing to fight himself. Roosevelt prided himself on never asking another to do what he was not willing to do himself. So, against the pleas of his ailing wife Edith, his closest friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, and even against the express wishes of the President of the United States, Roosevelt quit his desk job and led troops in Cuba - up Kettle Hill on July 1, 1898, the "great day of my life."

Every American would feel better about George Bush if one or both of his two daughters were involved in the war effort, if only in some completely safe way. The fact that the Bush daughters feel free to play the role of American sorority queens while young men and women exactly their age are bleeding out their lives for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan is offensive to the idea of an American republic. It even strikes an unsettling note in Bush supporters, if they were willing to be candid. And whatever exactly he did during Vietnam, George Bush did not, like the great Roosevelt, demand to be allowed to get to the front to fight for a cause that he believed to be righteous. He sat out the war, as did Bill Clinton, as did Dick Cheney, as did Rush Limbaugh.

We, the numb, over-stimulated, and disillusioned American people, need a President who exhibits true integrity and conviction, who understands the world and helps us to understand our destiny in it, who matches word to action, and who embodies the best of the American spirit: physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual.

When he left the Presidency voluntarily in 1909 Roosevelt said, "I don't think any President ever enjoyed himself more than I did." Indeed.

In reading Edmund Morris's masterful The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, and Patricia O'Toole's When Trumpets Call, one can only look around bleakly and ask, where is such a man now that we really need him?