in his entering politics. Armed with the elder Theodore’s values
and a driving sense of purpose, he fearlessly plunged into this new
world.
Yet only three years after his marriage began, everything fell
apart.
As Theodore boldly made speeches against corruption, Alice
was nearing childbirth. She delivered a healthy baby girl and all
seemed well. But then Theodore, that same day, received a dis-
turbing telegram and rushed home, where he found in one room
his beloved and devoted mother was dying, and in another his
wife, Alice, mortally ill.
The two women died within hours of each other, Alice in
Theodore’s arms.
Again, “strange and terrible fate” had plunged him into deep-
est grief. “The light has gone out of my life,” he wrote in his diary.
The story of his yet-again remaking himself, plunging back
into politics, and then leaving the East for the raw life of the fron-
tier, was another terrible, extruding furnace. Roosevelt felt he had
nothing to live for. He embraced the strenuous rugged life, brand-
ing and driving cattle, flattening a drunken cowboy who threat-
ened him with a gun in each hand, pursuing three thieves and
capturing them himself. He exulted in the Wild West. Eloquently
describing riding horseback to the top of a plateau, he wrote this
famous line: “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is
fast enough.”
Roosevelt carried much “black care,” and he rode fast, even
frenetically, as he tried to outdistance it. But he was also remak-
ing himself. Three years after leaving the East, he came back,
husky, solid, “clear bone, muscle, and grit,” according to a friend.
The black care would always be with him. But it is what Roo-
sevelt chose to do about that care that made him emerge as such
an extraordinary leader. He led robustly with both awareness of
life’s tragedies as well as its human potential. For inspiration, he
often remembered his father’s example; between small portraits
of Lincoln and Grant, he hung above his desk a large oil portrait
of his father.
The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham