#175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

**David Senra** (0:00)
I don't believe he can live through the night, George Cherry wrote in his diary in the spring of 1914 A tough and highly respected naturalist who had spent 25 years exploring the Amazon, Cherry too often had watched helplessly as his companions succumbed to the lethal dangers of the jungle.
Deep in the Brazilian rainforest, he recognized the approach of death when he saw it, and it now hung unmistakably over Theodore Roosevelt.
Less than 18 months after Roosevelt's dramatic failed campaign for an unprecedented third term in the White House, the sweat-soaked figure before Cherry in the jungle darkness could not have been further removed from the power and privilege of his former office.
Hundreds of miles from help or even any outside awareness of his ordeal, Roosevelt hovered agonizing on the brink of death.
Suffering from disease and near starvation and shuddering uncontrollably from fever, the man who had been the youngest and most energetic president in the nation's history drifted in and out of delirium. He was too weak to sit up or even lift his head.
Throughout his life, Roosevelt had turned to intense physical exertion as a means of overcoming setbacks and sorrow, and he had come to the Amazon in search of that same hard absolution.
Deeply frustrated by the bitterness and betrayals of the election, he had sought to purge his disappointment by throwing himself headlong against the cruelest trials that nature could offer him.
With only a handful of men, he had set out on a self-imposed journey to explore the River of Doubt, a churning, ink-black tributary of the Amazon that winds nearly a thousand miles through the dense Brazilian rainforest.
In a lifetime of remarkable achievement, Roosevelt had shaped his own character and that of his country through sheer force of will, relentlessly choosing action over inaction, and championing what he famously termed the strenuous life.
From his earliest childhood, that energetic credo had served as his compass and salvation, propelling him to the forefront of public life and lifting him above a succession of personal tragedies and disappointments.
Each time he encountered an obstacle, he responded with more vigor, more energy, more raw determination. Each time he faced personal tragedy or weakness, he found his strength not in the sympathy of others, but in the harsh ordeal of unfamiliar new challenges and lonely adventure.
After months in the wilderness, harsh jungle conditions and the river's punishing rapids had left the expedition on the verge of disaster.
Roosevelt and his men had already lost five of their seven canoes, most of their provisions, and one man had died.
What lay around the next bend was anyone's guess.
That was an excerpt from the absolutely fantastic book that I just finished reading, which is The River of Doubt, Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, and is written by Candice Millard. This is the second, if you remember, all the way back on Founders 156 I read David McCullough's book, Mornings on Horseback. It's about the first 28 years of Theodore Roosevelt's life and all the struggles and pain that he had to go through. He lost his father, who was his idol. His father died early. He was in his 40s from a form of stomach cancer. A few years after that, while Theodore was still in his mid-20s, his mother and his wife die on the same day. And he famously wrote in his diary that night that the light has gone out of his life. And even when he was a young man, after every tragedy that he had to endure, he would inevitably throw himself into these physical struggles to try to exhaust his body to relieve his mind, all the stress and pain that he's in. And so now this book takes place when he's in his mid-50s. He dies relatively young. He dies at 60 years old. And the same thing is happening. He just lost the election as the author was writing. And he decides, I'm going to go down and explore. He wanted adventure, so he goes down to South America. And he's exploring an unknown and unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest. And so what you and I are going to learn today, there's a lot of metaphors as he goes through this crazy near-death experience, this constant struggle that he elected into, that I think is going to be helpful when, inevitably, you and I go through struggles in our life. I want to talk a little bit about his emotional state right after he loses this election. He says, Roosevelt had never been willing to share his private pain with the public. In private, he admitted to being surprised and shaken by the scope of his crushing defeat. There is no use disguising the fact that the defeat at the polls is overwhelming, he wrote. I had expected defeat, but I had expected that we would make a better showing. I try not to think of the damage to myself personally. And so just a brief background there. He decides he can't get the Republican nomination, so he decides to run as an independent that splits the Republican vote, the Democrat wins. So a lot of the people that he thought were friends, and Teddy's an extrovert by nature, so he's going to be extremely depressed because for the first time in his life, he's shunned. He becomes a pariah. So his friends and colleagues who had once competed for Roosevelt's attention now shunned him. For the first time in his life, he was a pariah, and he was painfully aware of it. Roosevelt was famous for his almost overbearing optimism and confidence, and now he suffered from what he called a bruised spirit. And a bruised spirit is a really kind way that he's describing that he's depressed, he's lonely, he's sinking into a deep depression. And so this is where we get into his chosen method of dealing with setbacks, with struggles in his life. He says, when confronted with sadness or setbacks that were beyond his power to overcome, Roosevelt instinctively sought out still greater tests, losing himself in punishing physical hardships and danger, experiences that came to shape his personality and inform his most impressive achievements.