TR's Last War is a breathless tour de force through the final years of Theodore Roosevelt's life. Author David Pietrusza, who has published numerous “popular” histories, has divided this period of Colonel Roosevelt's life into eighteen substantive chapters and an epilogue that examines the twenty-sixth U.S. president's death. Pietrusza begins with the preparedness debates and Roosevelt's extensive criticisms of Woodrow Wilson's military policies in 1915–1916. Considerable space is devoted to the 1916 political conventions and Roosevelt's efforts at rapprochement with Republican Party leaders. Roosevelt's persistent efforts to obtain an officer's commission and an overseas command are closely examined. While the colonel is unsuccessful, his four sons succeed in securing officers’ ranks and experience combat overseas. Roosevelt's reaction to the death of his youngest son, Quentin, makes for the most gripping passages in the book. Finally, the “Epilogue” of this book has already generated some controversy. After a brief summary of the upper-class attraction to suicide, Pietrusza writes that Roosevelt had a “significant suicidal streak.” The author's best evidence for Roosevelt's suicidal impulse was his deliberations during the disastrous 1913–1914 Brazilian expedition. At the most critical point, he told his son, Kermit: “I will stop here.” But his son refused to go on without him and convincingly argued that a live human was easier to move than a dead corpse. In addition, Pietrusza observes that Roosevelt told a friend that he always carried a bottle of morphine to “have it over with at once” (288).

So what, if anything, brings coherence to this jam-packed account? Underpinning the entire narrative are two themes—political ambition and militarist adventurism—that define this man's complex character but seem oddly disconnected throughout the book. While great chunks of TR's Last War can be read as a meditation on war and death, the narrative is driven more by the ebb and flow of politics (the author's specialization). This split personality is most evident in the 1915–1916 chapters: one moment Roosevelt is manipulating both Republicans and “Bull Moose” Progressives, seeking power (mixed with a healthy dose of revenge) within the American political system; the next moment he is lecturing young men on martial values and sending inquiries to the War Department about an officer's commission for himself if the United States declared war on Mexico.

“There lay within him a sheer bloodlust,” writes Pietrusza of Roosevelt's 1890s imperialism (61). When assessing Roosevelt's stance during the Lusitania crisis, Pietrusza recounts the colonel's numerous public and private appeals to friends and countrymen to resolve foreign policy crises by force—in the 1889 Samoa Islands dispute, in the 1895 Venezuelan border controversy, and in the 1897 lead-up to the Spanish-American War. Summoning the authority of a classic study of the warrior-reformer, the author quotes Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement by George E. Mowry: “The bald fact was that Roosevelt liked war.”Footnote ¹ Pietrusza attributes much of this warlike impulse to the elder Roosevelt's failure to serve in the Civil War. However significant this episode was in the young Roosevelt's formation, it fails to explain his rich, complex appreciation of the role of modern warfare. In contrast, John Milton Cooper, considering the colonel's 1917–1918 militarism, wrote: “Neither his views of human conflict nor his own desire to fight reflected shallow, juvenile romanticism. As in 1898, Roosevelt appreciated and welcomed war's grim and brutal aspects. Only by passing through those, he believed, could men live to the utmost and attain full humanity.”Footnote ²

For Pietrusza, America's great Progressive Era rivals were very much alike; Wilson and Roosevelt were both conservatives forced leftward by the great social forces shaping the nation. Nineteenth-century attitudes about race and empire persisted in both men, “more racial in the southern Wilson's case, more imperial in Roosevelt's.” Most importantly, however, “both desired power—very, very great power” (27). To that end, Pietrusza effectively demonstrates that the power-seeking Roosevelt undermined what remained of the Progressive Party, leading the party faithful to believe he would accept the top spot on the ticket in the 1916 election cycle. “Yes, a bad colonel does make a bad regiment,” Pietrusza concludes, and Roosevelt “was the very worst colonel of all” (144). The author later quotes “Bull Moose” reformer Amos Pinchot's assertions that Roosevelt linked an anti-hyphenated “Americanism” to his military “Preparedness” campaign primarily as a mechanism to reestablish his preeminent standing in the Republican Party (169). Power, not ideology, was the driving force dictating Roosevelt's moves in this era. To this reviewer's way of thinking, the author missed a great opportunity to weave these two lines of analysis together; how were political power and martial values necessary components, for Roosevelt, of imperial America's claims to great-power status?

Where does this book fit in the massive body of Roosevelt historiography? It is impossible to tell from reading TR's Last War. Like most popular histories, it aims to tell a “story”—a story chock-full of content—presented in narrative form. It eschews any treatment of historiographical framework or methodological approach. Another ingredient absent in this popular history is a rigorous analysis of the so-called big ideas. The author never offers a comprehensive presentation of Roosevelt's view of America's role in the world, never examines in any systematic fashion what the colonel meant by “preparedness” (the U.S. Navy is barely mentioned; there is no index entry for “1916 National Defense Act”). But as narrative history, TR's Last War is a fascinating read, generously mixing manly doses of war, death, politics, and personal ambition.