Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt became president because of a bullet that was not aimed at him. On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. He died 8 days later, and Roosevelt, his vice president, was sworn in at 42, the youngest person ever to hold the office. Roosevelt had been put on the ticket partly by party bosses who wanted him out of their way as governor of New York.

He was already famous. A sickly child born in New York City in 1858, he built himself up through exercise and spent years ranching in the Dakota Badlands after his first wife and his mother died on the same day in 1884. In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, he helped raise a volunteer cavalry regiment known as the Rough Riders and led a charge in the fighting around San Juan Heights in Cuba. The photographs of Colonel Roosevelt in his slouch hat made him a national hero.

As president he was photographed more than anyone before him, and he liked it. He was elected in his own right in 1904. He pushed the building of the Panama Canal, and in 1906 he went to see the work, the first sitting president to travel outside the country. A picture of him at the controls of a giant steam shovel became one of the best known of his presidency. He also protected about 230 million acres of public land as national forests, parks, bird reserves and monuments.

His family was always in the papers. Alice, his daughter from his first marriage, was a celebrity in her own right and married in the White House in 1906. With his second wife, Edith, he had 5 more children, including Theodore Jr., Archie and Quentin. Quentin was killed flying in France in 1918. Roosevelt died the following January.

In the portraits, look at the eyeglasses. Roosevelt was badly nearsighted, and he wears them in nearly every picture, including on horseback. In 1912 a folded speech and a glasses case in his coat pocket helped slow an assassin's bullet.