How would Roosevelt have handled the Great War?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...tructing_teddy.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_2
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...tructing_teddy.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_2
When TR sought to return to the fold in 1916, the still-bitter party leaders nominated the pallid Charles Evans Hughes instead. Even so, Hughes, "the bearded iceberg," came within a whisker of beating Wilson. Hughes lost California by fewer than 4,000 votes, on a day when TR's GOP ally Hiram Johnson was winning his California senatorial race by 300,000. Had Roosevelt been on the ballot that day, California would have been his, and with it an Electoral College victory. "This was my year to run," he said glumly after Wilson's re-election. "I did not want to run in 1912. Circumstances compelled me to run then. This year it was different."
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What if he had waited until 1916? He could have led a united party to victory on a "preparedness" platform. It would have been Roosevelt, not Wilson, as the hero-president of World War I; Roosevelt shaping the peace terms; Roosevelt the all-around titan of 1918, bestriding the transatlantic world like a colossus. Then he would have died right on cue on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference, preserved like Lincoln in the perfection of his victory. That would have capped a far more astonishing career than the one Roosevelt actually had, impressive as it was.