Teddy Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt was explicit in his assertion of an American right to use military force against other countries for ethical reasons. For Roosevelt, it wasn’t necessary that the miscreant country had first slaughtered large numbers of its own people. The Monroe Doctrine had famously proclaimed an American right to use force to prevent (or reverse) European intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt went further, enunciating an American right to land soldiers anywhere to avert “chronic wrongdoing.” Although this justification might appear a bit expansive, the question remains: Where was Teddy Roosevelt when we so needed him in the past few weeks? Wherever he was, he wasn’t in the White House.

Teddy Roosevelt is a bad ass

The full story indicates that Roosevelt was shot before making his speech, the manuscript reducing the bullet's impact to just a flesh wound. He didn't even realize he had been shot as the assassin was wrestled to the ground. Nevertheless, after a cursory  examination by doctors and having his injury declared a "flesh wound" we went on to make his speech.


"Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best."

After the speech he spent he spent 8 days in the hospital and only allowed the doctors to administer a tetanus shot, the bullet still 3 inches deep in his chest (remember, flesh wound), where it remained for the rest of his life. Those 8 days cost him the election of 1912 against Woodrow Wilson. Afterwards, when he became president after the assassination of McKinley, Roosevelt was known to have carried his own gun, prepared to shoot back should another assassination attempt be made against him.