Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of American Leadership

This is the story of perhaps the greatest leadership journey in American history.

President Theodore Roosevelt forever transformed America, ushering the country into the arena of world supremacy. His brand of leadership was entirely American: confident,compassionate, energetic, diverse, visionary.

But Roosevelt was not a born leader; his as­cent to the apex of power was not a foregone con­clusion. He made himself a leader of consequence, and it is his epic journey to the White House–a road filled with terrific failures, intimate introspec­tion, and self-made luck–that will inspire readers anew. No author has combined his key biographi­cal milestones–the lessons born from the contra­dictions of his life–with the surviving stories from those who followed and interacted with him in his various attempts to lead.

While a graduate student at Harvard, author Jon Knokey, a Roosevelt historian and business leader,unearthed hundreds of unpublished letters and interview notes from Roosevelt contempo­raries. These long-forgotten documents provide a fresh and stunning ringside seat along the twenty-sixth president's journey to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The stories from Harvard chaps, idealistic political reformers from New York, coarse cow­boys from the Badlands, and tough-as-rawhide Rough Riders from the nation's interior all com­bine to illuminate the maturation process of a man learning to lead at every stage of his life.

The story of Theodore Roosevelt's life has been told before. The story of his leadership jour­ney has not–until now. Fast-paced and written as a biographical narrative, Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of American Leadership places the reader alongside a young Roosevelt as he shapes events, people, and himself to forever change a country.He created an authentic style of Ameri­can leadership–a style that has endured for over a century.