Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy so he could take a volunteer regiment to Cuba. Leonard Wood commanded the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. Roosevelt was the lieutenant colonel the newspapers already knew. The regiment landed in June 1898 and fought at Las Guásimas on the twenty-fourth. On July 1 it went up Kettle Hill, on the right of the San Juan Heights, dismounted, with regulars of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry in the same ugly geometry. Popular memory says San Juan Hill and a horse. The after-action is a foot charge on Kettle Hill and a later movement onto the main ridge. This page will not relocate the hill to fit a poster.

He was born in New York City on October 27, 1858. The war page is the six weeks in Cuba, not the later presidency, the canal, or the Nobel. Those belong to other records. The soldier of 1898 was a man who had built a navy from a desk and then decided a desk was the wrong place to be seen when the shooting started. That vanity is part of the record. So is the fact that the regiment took casualties and that he was in front of it.

The Medal of Honor came on January 16, 2001, a century late, after a long public argument about whether a future president should also be a cited lieutenant colonel. The citation is in the official list. This register will not pretend the 2001 ceremony was a 1898 decoration. It will say the medal was awarded, posthumously, for the Heights, and that the delay is itself a documented fact.

He died at Oyster Bay on January 6, 1919. The Rockwood studio portrait on this page is the Rough Rider the country was sold — slouch hat, volunteer khaki — not a candid from the Santiago road. The hill is the work.