The bullet struck Theodore Roosevelt in the chest just as he began to speak. He had been about to deliver a campaign speech in Milwaukee when a man named John Schrank stepped forward and fired. Roosevelt, a former president of the United States, felt the impact, saw the blood soaking through his shirt, and made a decision that stunned everyone in the crowd. He was bleeding profusely, and the people around him begged him to seek medical help, but Roosevelt had been shot before in the sense that he knew his own body.

He pressed a hand to the wound, assessed that the bullet had not pierced a lung, and concluded that he had perhaps an hour before his condition grew dangerous. So he walked to the podium, opened his coat to show the blood, and delivered his speech anyway, a full ninety minutes of it, before he allowed anyone to take him to a hospital. The doctors who finally examined him were astonished by what they found. The bullet had lodged in his chest, and they determined that removing it would be too risky.

Roosevelt carried that bullet in his body for the rest of his life. Before that day in Milwaukee, Theodore Roosevelt had already lived a life that most men could not have survived. Born in 1858, he entered the world frail and sickly, plagued by asthma so severe that his parents feared he would not live to adulthood. The attacks came without warning, sometimes leaving him gasping for breath in the middle of the night.

His mother and father, consumed with worry, decided to keep him at home rather than send him to school, and so Teddy was educated by private tutors. He devoured books on natural history, science, and philosophy, and by the time he was a young man, he had published several papers on ornithology and earned a reputation as a serious naturalist. In 1876, despite his fragile health, he enrolled at Harvard. There he continued his studies with the same intensity, but he also discovered something new: a young woman named Alice Hathaway Lee.

He met her through a friend and was immediately smitten. From the moment he saw her, he was certain that she was the one he wanted to marry, and they wed in 1880. Four years later, Alice gave birth to their daughter, also named Alice. The joy of that moment lasted only two days.

On February 14th, 1884, within the same day, Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother. His wife died from complications related to childbirth, and his mother succumbed to a separate medical emergency. He was left devastated, a man who had lost the two most important women in his life within hours of each other. He wrote in his diary that the light had gone out of his life.

Unwilling or unable to care for his newborn daughter, he left her in the care of his sister for the next three years. His father had died in 1878, leaving him an inheritance of sixty thousand dollars, which freed him from financial worry. He had already begun his political career, winning a seat in the New York State Assembly in 1881. Though he was new to the scene, he quickly made a name for himself by exposing corruption in Albany, earning a reputation as a reformer who would not be bought or bullied.

He had always loved the outdoors, and in 1883 he traveled to North Dakota, where he realized that what he wanted more than anything was to be a cattle rancher. After the devastating losses of 1884, he threw himself into that dream, building Elk Horn Ranch and living as a cowboy. The harsh life of the Badlands helped him cope with his grief. So did an old friend.

Before he had ever met Alice, Roosevelt had been close with a childhood sweetheart named Edith Carow. The relationship had ended somewhere along the way, but by 1879 they had reconciled. At that time, Teddy was already married to Alice, but Edith never let go of her feelings. After the tragedy of 1884, they reconnected, and in 1886 they married.

Together they would have four children. Roosevelt had proven himself a man who could get things done in politics, and in 1897 President William McKinley appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He immediately began strengthening the American fleet, convinced that war with Spain was coming. Tensions between the United States and Spain had been building for years, and in early 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor.

Roosevelt did not wait for proof; he pointed the finger at Spain and ordered many American naval vessels to ready themselves for conflict. President McKinley still hoped to negotiate, but Roosevelt’s preparations proved prudent. The two nations went to war in 1898. Roosevelt, not content to sit behind a desk, resigned his position and raised the first volunteer cavalry regiment in the United States.

He led his Rough Riders into battle and became a national hero. Returning from the war, he ran for governor of New York and won. His time in office was marked by a focus on protecting those in poverty, an early sign of the progressive agenda he would later pursue from the White House. But his aggressive style had made enemies, most notably Thomas C.

Platt, a powerful Republican politician who wanted Roosevelt out of the way. In 1899, Vice President Garrett Hobart died, and the question of his replacement arose. Many urged Roosevelt to take the position, but he refused. He knew the vice presidency was a powerless office, and he had no desire to sit idle.

Platt, however, saw an opportunity. He struck a deal with Roosevelt: if the Republican National Convention offered the nomination directly, Roosevelt would accept it. Roosevelt believed he could avoid such an outcome, but he was wrong. His enemies pushed him onto the ticket, and in 1900 the convention unanimously nominated him.

He took the office, but as he had predicted, it made him miserable. Without real power, he grew bitter and restless. He was on vacation in Vermont in September 1901 when word reached him that President McKinley had been shot. McKinley died a few days later, and Theodore Roosevelt became the president of the United States.

He was forty-two years old, the youngest man ever to hold the office. His childhood love of nature now found its fullest expression. As president, he pursued conservation with relentless energy, creating five national parks and establishing the United States Forest Service. He set aside millions of acres of public land, protecting wildlife and wilderness for future generations.

In 1904, he won a second term in a landslide. Just before his inauguration, he made an announcement that surprised many: he would serve the term, but it would be his last. He believed that sticking to two terms was essential to prevent the presidency from becoming a dictatorship. During the Russo-Japanese War, both nations asked Roosevelt to mediate a peace conference.

He agreed, hosted the negotiations, and performed his duties so well that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American president to receive it. As the 1908 election approached, he honored his promise not to run again. He supported his friend and cabinet member William Howard Taft, who easily won the nomination and then the presidency. Roosevelt trusted Taft to carry on his legacy.

With his free time, Roosevelt returned to his roots as a naturalist. In March 1909, he left the United States to lead the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition, a journey to collect specimens for the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution. He did not return until the following year. Months later, he was off on yet another adventure, this time taking to the skies.

He flew in an aircraft designed by the Wright brothers, staying aloft for about four minutes, becoming the first American president to fly in an airplane. But Taft was not the president Roosevelt had hoped he would be. Watching from the sidelines, Roosevelt grew convinced that his successor was failing, and that the Republican Party was heading toward ruin. He decided to run again in 1912, but the party nominated Taft instead.

Roosevelt refused to accept defeat. He left the Republican Party and founded his own, the Progressive Party, and entered the race as its candidate. It was during that campaign that he went to Milwaukee and took a bullet from John Schrank, a man who later explained that the ghost of President McKinley had commanded him to do it. Roosevelt lost the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson.

He did not abandon politics entirely, but his focus shifted when war broke out in Europe. A staunch supporter of the Allies, he clashed with Wilson, who insisted on American neutrality. Roosevelt wanted to serve his country again, and he was proud when each of his four sons enlisted. That pride turned to grief in July 1918, when his youngest son, Quentin, just twenty years old and flying with the Air Force, was shot down over Germany and killed.

The loss of Quentin, combined with the lingering effects of a tropical illness he had contracted years earlier, broke him. In 1913, he had embarked on an expedition to South America with his friend John Augustine Zahm and his son Kermit. What began as a trip to collect specimens became something far more dangerous when the group shifted their focus to exploring the River of Doubt, trying to determine how it connected to the Amazon. As their canoes sat tied to the riverbank, the waters rose and grew treacherous, nearly smashing the boats upon the rocks.

Roosevelt, ever a man of action, dropped into the water to steady them and suffered a wound to his leg. The injury itself was not severe, but the expedition had no proper medical supplies. Over the following weeks, he fell ill with tropical fever. The illness robbed him of his strength and his mental clarity, until he could no longer walk.

He begged the others to go on without him, planning to take his own life rather than let the party waste their limited supplies on a dying man. His companions refused to leave him. They treated him as best they could and somehow got him through the ordeal alive. When he finally reunited with his family in New York, they could see the terrible physical toll the journey had taken on him.

He never fully recovered, suffering for the rest of his life from leg inflammation and recurring bouts of malaria. After Quentin’s death and months of declining health, Roosevelt required long-term hospitalization. He died in his sleep on January 6, 1919, from a pulmonary embolism. He was, as his enemies would concede, a warrior to his last breath.

When Vice President Thomas R. Marshall heard the news, he remarked that it could not have happened any other way. “Death had to take him sleeping,” Marshall said, “for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.

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