River of Doubt Archives

The River of Doubt, Candice Millard. New York: Doubleday, 2005.

Summary: Narrates Roosevelt’s exploratory expedition to South America, the decision to navigate “The River of Doubt”, and the harrowing journey that nearly cost Roosevelt his life.

What does one do with oneself after you’ve been President of the United States? What, especially does one do when still relatively young? This was the dilemma of Theodore Roosevelt, known to most of us for his adventures with the Rough Riders, his ascent to the presidency following McKinley’s assassination, and for his own reform-minded presidency and a foreign policy shaped by the dictum, “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Some even are aware of his failed run for the presidency as a third-party candidate in 2012. Fewer of us are aware of his journey down a never-before explored river in Brazil that nearly cost him his life, and irreversibly damaged his health.

It is this journey that Candice Millard brilliantly narrates in this work. I first discovered Millard in her later exploration of the assassination of James Garfield (Destiny of the Republic, reviewed here), in which she helps us understand what we lost in Garfield, the crazed personality of his assassin, and the botched medical care that resulted in his death. So I was delighted to return to this author’s earlier work, which did not disappoint.

I had previously read about this journey in Edmund Morris’ Colonel Roosevelt (reviewed here). Where it seemed that Morris focused mostly on Roosevelt’s battle with the infection that nearly killed him, and the urgent race to get him back to civilization, Millard gives us much more of the whole story behind the exploration, and much more about the journey both before and after Roosevelt sustained the injury that threatened his life. She sets the context of the invitation to go on an exploratory journey over a relatively safe portion of the Amazon with Catholic Father Zahm, and the decision, influenced by explorer Rondon, to explore a previously unexplored and unmapped river, known as the River of Doubt. We meet other key figures in the expedition from the failed Arctic explorer Fiala, who was responsible for poorly provisioning the expedition, Cherrie, the skilled naturalist who played an indispensable role in the expedition, the cameradas, some remarkably able and on whom the expedition’s success largely rested, and some dissolute, like Julio, who kills another expedition member, and ultimately is left to his fate in the rain forest. Finally, Millard sketches the intense personality of son Kermit, dedicated to his father’s survival, newly engaged, and trying to carve out his own identity in the shadow of his father.

She also narrates a journey that seems to go wrong from the start as overburdened animals shed needed supplies and die on the land journey to the river’s headwaters. And then there is the harrowing journey itself, running through the territory of a fierce tribe of Indians, involving repeated overland diversions because of rapids that might have been negotiated in the lightweight boats, but impossible to traverse in the heavy, unwieldy dugouts. It was during the effort to retrieve one of these that broke loose in a rapid that Roosevelt re-injured a leg injury that rapidly became infected. Between a serious infection, and malaria, Roosevelt’s life hangs in the balance, as does the survival of the expedition, short on food, all suffering the effects of disease and malnutrition.

We relive the struggle between the courageous resolve of the explorers, the dangers of attack at any moment, and the ravage of illness and infection as they struggle toward the junction with the Amazon. We learn the price Roosevelt paid for the glory of accomplishing this exploration. Millard also recounts the afterlife of the other explorers, including the sad trajectory of Kermit’s life, much like that of Roosevelt’s brother Elliot.

Along the way, we see the indomitable spirit of Roosevelt, the disregard for his own safety and life in the pursuit of great aims, and the survival of others, and the humility of being willing, as a former president, to do anything from do the laundry of other expedition members to rescue a stranded canoe, all the while pursuing habits of reading and writing for which he was famously known. We also see the driven character of a man who even in his sixth decade as a former president, still needed to test himself physically against rigors that had killed many younger men.

If you enjoy biography, narratives of exploration, or anything concerning Roosevelt, I would highly commend this riveting narrative of the exploration of the River of Doubt, and Roosevelt’s “darkest journey.

Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the most difficult challenges of the Presidency is being a former president. How does one move from occupying the most powerful position in the world to becoming just another citizen, albeit one who is a member of a small club of former presidents?

Edmund Morris’s third volume of his biography of Theodore Roosevelt covers the decade after Roosevelt was President. It seems to me a narrative of a man torn — torn between the love of exercising power with the thought that he might do so better than his rivals, and the recognition that his “crowded hour” for leadership had passed and that he was in a different season of life.

What Morris’s sparkling narrative reveals is that Roosevelt never resolved this underlying tension in his life. Even when he lay in the final health crisis that would end his life, he was still entertaining hopes of one more run at the Presidency in 1920.

He appears to leave office well, handing the reins of power to his old friend, William Howard Taft. Yet the differences between the two are evident even then and will become more pronounced in the coming years leading to an estrangement only partially healed that left Taft weeping at his grave. He embarks on a safari to Africa, once again the hunter. Then, he tours the capitals of Europe speaking in every place while recognizing the signs of the approaching global conflict. He speaks as one who recognizes that America might need to get into this war, putting off all the peace-lovers on both sides of the ocean.

On his return, he unsuccessfully seeks to contain himself as he sees the Taft White House undoing his reforms. He begins to speak out and maneuver within the Republican Party, finally openly opposing an incumbent who basically has the convention locked up even though the party knows it will lose to Wilson. He bolts, forms the Bull Moose party, survives an assassination attempt (carrying the bullet in his chest for the remainder of his life) only to come in second to Woodrow Wilson.

Once again he turns to the wilds for consolation, this time on an exploratory journey down the River of Doubt, the longest unexplored river in South America. It is a harrowing journey that nearly costs him his life and does cost him his health. Morris’s chronicle of this journey helps us see and imagine what a “near run” thing this was.

He returns to once again take up the cudgels against Wilson as well as the Republican Party, entangling himself in a costly libel suit he eventually wins. He is vociferous in his criticism of Wilson’s efforts to keep the U.S. out of the war and the lack of military preparedness that accompanies this. He sets up his own training camp in which two of his sons participate. Spurned once again in 1916, he watches as Wilson finally embraces the reality he had seen long before that Germany would need to be fought.

His own offers to join the fight and raise a division denied, he sends his four sons as proxies, with two wounded, all decorated, and Quentin lost in aerial combat. He presses on yet Morris chronicles that with Quentin’s death, something broke in Roosevelt. Within two months of war’s end, he is dead.

One of the spiritual writers I respect, Richard Rohr, talks about the life journey of men as broken into two parts, a heroic journey followed by either a journey into wisdom or becoming an old fool by trying to continue the heroic journey of youth. The tale Morris tells seems to describe a figure who, despite the urgings of his wife, could never give up on the heroic journey — the adventures, the relentless speech-making, the prodigious writing, the hunger for power, as well as his relentless physical appetites that ultimately broke his body.

Roosevelt himself never thought he’d live beyond sixty and never seemed to learn to live a life not filled with manic “crowded hours”. It seems to me that all Roosevelt knew was the heroic journey. It was one that left a profound legacy to this day in his prolific writing, his progressive politics, and his sense of both American greatness, and the great potentials of presidential power. Yet one wonders what might have been if Roosevelt’s greatness had been tempered with a wisdom of mind, body and spirit.

I find myself with feelings of both wonder and sadness as I to come to the end of this trilogy. In Roosevelt, Morris tells the tale of one of our greatest presidents, and with it the tale of both human greatness and limits with which each of us must come to terms.

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