Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Rough Rider and the Professor with Laurence Jurdem

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

On today’s episode, Sharon is joined by author and professor Laurence Jurdem to discuss his book, The Rough Rider and the Professor, about the unusual thirty-five-year political friendship between President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. While Roosevelt famously “rose like a rocket,” in the political spotlight with his larger-than-life personality, it was arguably his machiavellian friend Cabot who lit the fuse, and used his vast social network to boost Roosevelt. In his research, Laurence Jurdem immersed himself in 2,500 letters of archives from the Massachusetts Historical Society to write the story of this unique Presidential friendship, and to remind us that close, meaningful friendships do not always have to perfectly align politically. We can disagree without being disagreeable.  Special thanks to our guest, Laurence Jurdem, for joining us today. Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Guest: Laurence Jurdem Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. So delighted that you're with me today. My guest is Lawrence Jordan, who has a new book out about an unusual political friendship that I think you're really going to love hearing more about. It's between Teddy Roosevelt and one of his best friends who was politically very different than him, Henry Cabot Lodge. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very excited to be joined today by Lawrence Shurdum. I really enjoyed your new book. And it just really gave me a very, very different peek into a period of history that I am very interested in. The progressive era is a very, very interesting time period for my little brain. And I'm sure that it is for you too,

which is why you wrote a book called The Rough Writer and the Professor. Thanks for being here today. Sharon, thank you so very much. It's an honor to be with you. And I love your eclectic group of guests that you have, many of whom I've listened to in the past and admire. Okay, let's start with some basics here. First of all, The Rough Writer and the Professor, who are we even talking about? Well, we're talking about Theodore Roosevelt, who was president of the United States from 1901 to 1909, a native New Yorker, one of the most dynamic people in American history, let alone

in the American presidency. And the other fellow we're talking about is Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was a Bostonian to the core, a man who was in the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts from 1893 until he died in 1924, and was one of perhaps Theodore Roosevelt's closest friend, and the man who helped him get to the White House in 18 years, far quicker than he would have on his own. But I certainly believe he would have gotten to the presidency on his own, but never as quickly without the help of Senator Lodge. How did they even meet each other? Well, it's sort of an interesting connection because both men, I mean, if I went a little back, a little further, both men had gone to Harvard. Lodge was about seven years older than Roosevelt was. They may have met when they were both members

of the Porcellian Club, which was the most elite eating club at Harvard. TR was there as a student. Lodge was there literally as a professor. Lodge had a PhD in American history, one of the first that had been given out at Harvard. And Lodge loved being at the Porcellian Club. And the other way they might have met, at least briefly, was Lodge was a distant cousin to TR's first wife, Alice Lee Roosevelt, and they may have met at an engagement party that was given for Roosevelt and his fiancee in Boston, but they actually really got to know each other during the tumultuous convention of 1884. Roosevelt had recently lost his wife, Alice Lee. He was in a pretty bad place, I think,

emotionally. His mother had also died essentially on the same day, within minutes. And Roosevelt was essentially preparing the townhouse that he was living in to be sold. And he had gotten a note from Henry Cabot Lodge, who had recently been selected by the Massachusetts delegation to attend the 1884 convention in Chicago. Roosevelt had completed his political tenure in the legislature as a last sort of duty, so to speak. He had been selected to be the delegate to the convention in Chicago from New York. They were both liberal Republicans, both unhappy with the gentleman who was to be the nominee of the party that year, a guy named James Blaine, who had been tarred with corruption in a railroad scandal.

And so they got together on a trip down to Washington to see if they could find an alternative candidate to stop the Blaine train, as many people called it, from obtaining the nomination. And as they were on the train together, they had this incredible conversation and they discovered they had so many different things in common, being love of literature, love of history, sports. They both dressed beautifully. They both rode horses. They both enjoyed living well. Personality-wise, they were very, very different. Lodge was very much Machiavellian. He was very much a man in control, not very emotional, though he did have a temper that could erupt at any moment if he thought he was being disrespected. And Roosevelt,

who was this ebullient figure who slapped people on the back at every chance he got, loved being at the center of attention, wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, they just hit it off. And perhaps Lodge may have seen something in the young Roosevelt that made him think this man is very special and could be president of the United States. I love that perhaps they met at an eating club. That's very amusing. I once interviewed a presidential historian who wrote a book on food in the White House and about how food has changed over the years and what kind of food presidents ate. And of course, he was well known for being an eater. He had more of a

gourmand sensibility of like, more is better. No, yeah, no question. I mean, the massive cups of coffee, the four or five cups of coffee, the four or five eggs he ate every day. He just was a man who loved life, who really, as they phrase, sucked the marrow out of it, you know. I mean, that was one of the reasons he lived only till the age of 60, because he physically drove himself in every single way to the point that his body just broke down. I mean, there was nothing left at the end. broke down. I mean, there was nothing left at the end. How did he get the nickname Rough Rider? Because not everybody knows. It's an interesting story. Yeah, the Rough Riders were a group of very unusual men who Roosevelt put together in a regiment during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Roosevelt had always wanted to fight on the battlefield. It was something that he and Lodge shared. Lodge never got onto the field of battle. He was too old. But both men had grown up with a civil war. It was a great influence on them, even though they were both young children. And so when he had the opportunity to fight in the Spanish-American War, he put together a group of men who had gone to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, who were the scions of these incredibly prominent families. And then he also had quite a number of friends of his from the West who were these very hardcore men who were used to carrying guns into saloons and that sort of thing, and they were all together. So it was a very eclectic group. The group was nicknamed the Rough Riders.

And Roosevelt would write these very funny letters to Lodge where he said, oh, you should see a member of the Knickerbocker Club doing the laundry of a miner from the West or whatever. It was kind of this incredible clash of cultures. And Roosevelt had a great time with it. Lodge, of course, was terrified that Roosevelt was going to be killed. And many people who had known him thought he was absolutely insane for going off to fight in Cuba. Henry Adams, who I write about in the book, who was one of the great correspondents of his age and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, said, what is Roosevelt doing? Is his wife angry at him? Is he in the middle of a divorce? Has he lost his head? And other people were saying the same thing. But TR again believed that manliness, that was the way to show one's masculinity, to put one's life at risk on the field of battle, put oneself in harm's

way to show, yes, I can do this. And this is the ultimate test of courage and bravery in the world. That's so interesting. Yeah, I mean, this could truly just be a podcast in which we trade stories about Teddy Roosevelt for four and a half hours. Like remember that one time when he planted a bunch of mint in the backyard

and then his chickens tasted like mint because they ate the mint plants. I mean, it doesn't end. There's so many stories about him. But I want to get to some of the stories that you tell in your book about why his friendship with Henry Cabot Lodge was so important, and how that friendship ultimately impacted the trajectory of American history. The first thing I want to ask, though, is probably not very consequential, but I'm always curious when people have three name names like John Quincy Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge. What did they go by in real life? It's not like his buddies were like, hello, Henry Cabot Lodge.

So nice to see you today. You know, like what were they calling him? Well, he was Henry Cabot Lodge. So nice to see you today. You know, like, what were they calling him? Well, he was called Cabot. That's what people called him. Yeah. That's what I call John Quincy Adams. I will affectionately call him the Quincy, as though I am the arbiter of nicknames. It's my right to choose.

It's my right, of course. Yeah. Uh-huh, uh-huh. So he went by Cabot. Is that what Teddy called him, called him Cabot? Everybody called him Cabot or Senator or nothing, because Lodge was not someone who really enjoyed the general public very much. And there's a story where he was invited to go speak in Buffalo,

literally several months before William McKinley was shot at this very same spot at this exposition. And TR was invited to go as well. And TR really tried to convince Cabot to go with him. And Lodge really was like, you know, basically, he just didn't want to go deal with, you know, the common folk and immigrants and all of that. But TR was able to convince them and they had a really great time together just traveling around and giving respective speeches and such. So TR was always able to get Cabot out maybe of that very introverted nature that he had. Not that he was someone who told a whole lot of jokes or would smack you on the back or anything, but I think he greatly enjoyed having Roosevelt around. Yeah, we know that kind of person.

If you are an extrovert, you probably have that friend where you're like, come on, we're leaving the house today. Or if you're an introvert, you you probably have that friend that is like constantly trying to drag you places and invite you to things. And you feel like you have to be like, yeah, I don't want to go to that. And they're like, you to things. And you feel like you have to be like, I don't want to go to that. And they're like, you're coming. And ultimately, that kind of dynamic, often for whatever reason, if there's great affection between the parties, that dynamic seems to really work well. Yeah, no, they had a great time together. And TR was always so upbeat and optimistic. And Lodge was, in a way as well,

one of the great things about that friendship was that when things were going really badly for both of them, in 1884, when Lodge lost his congressional race right after the convention, TR wrote him these really uplifting letters from the West where he said, you know what, don't worry, you're the future of the party, you'll be back, you to be re-nominated for governor and didn't know where to go, Lodge encouraged him to develop his own following and said, you know, people love you. They just need to get a chance to know you. Go around the state. Tour. Don't let the Republicans get to you. They can't knock you out. Only you can knock yourself out. So just keep with it. Keep your chin up. And this is one of the great things with friendship. I'm sure, as you know, only you can knock yourself out. So just keep with it, keep your chin up. And, and this is one of the great things with friendship, I'm sure, as you know, we all have moments that are, are difficult. We all have moments where peaks and valleys exists. And

oftentimes we're in the valley. And sometimes we need friends to be around us to kind of keep our chin up and tell us jokes and keep us good humored and move us forward in life. And that's very much what I think this friendship was about and what it did for both of them. What ways do you see as somebody who has spent a very long time researching this topic? I want to talk in a minute about how much research and work goes into a book like this. But as somebody who has become very intimately acquainted with both of these men, I would imagine by the end of this process, they feel like old friends to you. In what ways did Cabot impact TR's personal life and also his political career? impact TR's personal life and also his political career, maybe in ways that the average American isn't aware of the type of impact he had? It's very, very interesting because Theodore Roosevelt

says, one of his more famous phrases is, I rose like a rocket. In fact, there's a political biography of TR that's out there that's with that very title. But I would argue that Lodge really lit that fuse. Roosevelt had several positions before he became president of the United States. He was on the Civil Service Commission under Benjamin Harrison. He was political. He was police commissioner of New York. He was the assistant secretary of the Navy. And then he was the vice president of the United States. Henry Cabot Lodge was responsible for getting him or helping him obtain all those opportunities. Lodge had an amazing social network. He knew everybody in Washington,

and he just went out of his way to talk to every single person and said, you've got to hire this man. He's so talented. He's so great. One great story is soon after Benjamin Harrison was inaugurated, Lodge was looking for a position for TR. Lodge's wife, Nanny Lodge, one of my favorite characters, perhaps my most favorite character that I enjoyed writing about, was herself a very dynamic, very beautiful, very intellectually talented woman. New James Blaine, who was of course Lodge and Roosevelt's nemesis from 1884, and Benjamin Harrison was going to make Blaine Secretary of state. And Blaine was looking for an undersecretary of state at the time, somebody who was of a certain age, someone who had a certain

elan, certain sense of elegance, spoke several languages, knew how the world worked, and certainly had a sense of geography and diplomacy. And Nanny thought, oh boy, TR is the perfect person for this. So Lodge, who of course, there was no love lost between Lodge and James Blaine. She asked Henry Cabot Lodge, after talking to James Blaine about the idea, to go and talk to Blaine about hiring Roosevelt. about hiring Roosevelt. And Blaine was like, you know, very polite, but he said, no, I don't think I can because I like to have a relaxing vacation when I go off to Maine. And the fact that I might be lying in bed one night, open my eyes and think about what TR might be doing back in Washington. It's not stress that I really want to experience. So there was that. But in terms of these other opportunities, Lodge would just talk to anybody and everybody that he

could. He would just create this incredible sort of support system for Theodore Roosevelt to get these positions. And Roosevelt would get them, even though a lot of people who hired him had these doubts because of the fact that Roosevelt was so unpredictable in what he might say and what he might do. And Roosevelt would just was so effusive. He would write these effusive notes to Cabot after he got an opportunity to say, you know, you are just the best friend anybody could have. And he listened to Henry Cabot Lodge's advice, even for the vice presidency, which is not something that Theodore Roosevelt nor his wife Edith wanted TR to accept because it was sort of being in a gilded cage or in this very attractive office with nothing to do.

And when Roosevelt didn't have anything to do, he would descend into depression. But it got to a point in 1900 where he was not going to be renominated for governor because the New York Republicans hated his guts. We ended up accepting the vice presidency and Henry Cabot Lodge made a very prescient comment when Roosevelt was saying, oh my God, Henry Cabot Lodge made a very prescient comment when Roosevelt was saying, oh my God, you know, am I really going to be stuck in this place for four years time? And Cabot said, you don't know what can happen over four years. And boy, was he right? He was right. He was right. A lot of people, I think, maybe forget that TR became president because he was vice president and the president was assassinated.

And he became president at such a young age. Did he have this moment where he was like, I don't know if I can do this? Or did his confidence carry him through where he was like, heck yeah, I want to be president? What was his reaction to ascending to the presidency so young? Well, he actually wrote a note to Lodge after McKinley was shot. And I think it really jarred him because he, on the one hand, was very, very worried about McKinley. He liked him personally, even though he had been shut out essentially essentially, of any sort of role in the administration. It's an interesting letter because he said, you know, this is just a time of just incredible turmoil. How could this possibly happen? And then he sort of went off writing about how popular he was as he had gone around the country during this little

tour he had been doing that summer, months before McKinley was shot. And you can look at it as sort of TR being his self-centered at times self, but I actually viewed the fact that it was such a jarring thing that Roosevelt, I think, didn't know what else to say. Lodge was very happy that Roosevelt had become president, but both men, of course, knew it was not the way Roosevelt had wanted to become president. And I don't know what TR was thinking at that moment. I mean, he went to see Mrs. McKinley. He was given the oath of office in this very small parlor in Buffalo where the president, his body had been brought. And I just don't know. I do know that Roosevelt was very frustrated as vice president. Throughout his life, he had

really been a man who could control his own destiny. He had money, he had education, he had position. But when he was in the vice presidency, he was stuck. He was literally trapped in this gilded cage. And now the presidency has been given to him and he can just move with all deliberate speed as I write. And that's what he did. So many people have hated the job of vice president. John Adams famously wrote about like, this is the worst job that has ever been conceived of. It is a do nothing job, but people criticize me for doing nothing. You're just like the job is whatever the president says it will be. Okay. You know, like there, I have no actual, very few

actual duties. I can completely see how a man who was as vivacious as TR, as somebody who really, as you said, wanted to suck the marrow out of life. There was no marrow in the vice presidency. It was like eating bread and crackers. Yeah, no, as John Nance Garner, who is vice president of FDR, referred to the position as a warm bucket of spit. And he wasn't wrong about that. Delicious. Delicious. Exactly. I'm Jenna Fisher.

And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday.

Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Going back to the friendship between TR and Cabot, what sort of interactions were they having once Teddy becomes president? Is he inviting Cabot over to the White House once a week? Are they having drinks? And he's saying, what should I do? Like, what was actually happening while he was president?

Well, it's sort of interesting because there had been this rumor around Washington where Roosevelt had been known as the junior partner of the firm of Lodge and Roosevelt, meaning Lodge had been the senior man, not only in age, but also in power and influence. And when Roosevelt becomes president, he's interviewed by a journalist who says, you know, Mr. President, I think we're all wondering how you're going to handle the relationship with Senator Lodge. I mean, everybody knows how close you are. Is he going to have the kind of a carte blanche to the White House? And Roosevelt gets this very steely look, and he looks at the guy, the reporter, and he says, look, that's not it at all. You don't really understand.

That's not it at all. You don't really understand. Lodge does not run me. I run him. And that phrasing really, you can really see that Roosevelt's just kind of like, you know, I'm the man in charge now, not him. I'm not like some little kid that needs to be taken by the arm and taken across the street or whatever it was. Lodge had no ambition of becoming president. He wrote at one point to

TR that he said, I've gone as far as I can go, meaning I'm in the Senate. I'm very happy. I don't want to be anywhere else. I don't want to be in a cabinet. But Lodge also wanted to keep his hand in the game. He still was a man who was the most powerful figure in Massachusetts politics, and patronage was something within terms of political favors, which was something that he desperately needed and something that was a way of him getting reelected. But after Roosevelt becomes president, those urgent letters that Roosevelt had been writing to Lodge, I need this, I need your help, I could use this, what do you think of this? That kind of stopped. Roosevelt was where he wanted to be. Lodge was

very happy when Roosevelt became president. He was overjoyed by it. And while Lodge was invited over for drinks, as you said, they went horseback riding together. They went walking together, Lodge, and TR talked about foreign policy. But there was a lot that TR focused on elsewhere, and he kind of began drifting away from Lodge's orbit. Lodge was this very hardcore conservative, someone who was very wary of government playing a large role in the lives of the individual. Roosevelt was always more of a progressive than a conservative Republican. The progressives were his audience, not the conservatives. And Roosevelt was unhappy with the power that big business had. He believed in using government to push back on the elites in power. And Lodge was always very, very worried about TR doing things that would alienate voters within the

Republican Party or those who were more likely to vote Republican. Would that damage the Republican brand? Would it hurt the Republican party in terms of reelection? And so this was beginnings of tensions that would eventually boil up when Roosevelt ran for president in 1912. So what I'm hearing you say is that these men really enjoyed their friendship with each other, but they were not ideologically paired, where they were like, that is exactly what should happen with the country. They had very differing views, one being far more progressive and one being far more conservative. Yeah, no, I think that's true. I mean, certainly in foreign policy early on,

they both believed in the greatness of the United States. They both believed that the United States needed to expand internationally. Both believed that the country needed to get a foot in the Pacific, which is why they were so aligned in terms of the war with Spain. But in terms of domestic relations or domestic policy, there was definitely a difference there. And I think one particular interesting story was that Roosevelt was going around the country talking about his square deal, meaning, you know, equality for economic equality and trying to bridge this economic divide that existed during the progressive era, one that we continue to talk about today. And Lodge was having dinner with a very prominent Republican. And the gentleman who was a judge said to Lodge, you know, he said, a lot of people are very worried about TR and this square deal thing. I mean, you know, what's he doing? Does he realize he's unnerving the Republican establishment? And Lodge wrote Roosevelt a letter essentially saying exactly that, that you've got to be

careful. You've got to be wary because there are a lot of people out here who aren't keen on some of these policies that you're proposing. And sometimes Roosevelt listened, sometimes he didn't. Roosevelt was the man in power. He was the man in charge. And so he wasn't going to let some big money people derail his agenda. So it was definitely not an easy relationship. They had

their ideological run-ins. And Lodge, I think, was often irritated that TR no longer was listening to him as he once had. It seems too infrequent these days that people are capable of being friends without agreeing on everything politically. That for many people, agreement on politics is a litmus test for friendship. We need to agree, or I don't know if I can be friends with you. And it doesn't seem like this was the case with that. Yeah, no, no. The thing that I think, one of the things that one can learn from this book is to quote President Obama's great phrase, one can disagree without being disagreeable. And during the campaign of 1912, when Roosevelt decided to run for president against William Howard Taft, something that Lodge had encouraged him to do. Lodge became very unhappy with some of the policies that Roosevelt was proposing, like the direct election of senators, the idea that the voter can toss out a judge if they disagree with his policies, that private

property can be acquisitioned by the government if they believe it necessary. And Lodge wrote Roosevelt a very passionate note where he said, I believe you've hurt me more than anybody. I thought we understood one another. I thought we agreed on many of the same things. Clearly, I was misinformed or I misunderstood. And during that primary in 1912, between Taft and Roosevelt and Robert La Follette, the senator from Wisconsin, Lodge said, our friendship is too important for me to take sides in this and I'm going to sit it out, which he did and didn't do. He arranged for the Massachusetts primary to go Taft's way. I have no way of knowing if Roosevelt knew that or what he thought of that. But certainly,

Lodge literally said, this friendship we've had for over 20 plus years is far too important for me to jeopardize. They were kind of at a veneer during this period. There were very little letters, few letters that were exchanged. They used to send two to three to one another a day. During the 1912 campaign, very little went between them. Roosevelt, I think, was very vindictive about Lodge after he lost the nomination to Taft. He believed it had been stolen from him. At one point, he gets up in front of a Massachusetts group and doesn't mention Lodge by name, but infers, well, you have a certain senator here who was responsible for

me losing the nomination. Lodge was off campaigning for Taft, made a couple of comments about TR saying, you know, the public has really had enough of him. They're really tired of listening to complain and babble all the time. And it wasn't until Roosevelt, after he gets shot, where Lodge writes these very impassioned telegrams to him, that the two come back together. And then they come back together over their mutual hatred of Woodrow Wilson. I would love to hear from your perspective, what are some of the most impactful things that Henry Cabot Lodge said or did that have impacted U.S. history? What are some of the big takeaways from your book and from their relationship? people, you know, when you're in high school, or at least when I was in high school, you know, the only time Henry Cabot Lodge would come up is when people would say, well, he was responsible, not literally, but figuratively responsible for the death of Woodrow Wilson and the destruction

of the League of Nations. And that's not really true. Lodge, I think in principle, thought that a league was necessary, but he didn't like the way it was constructed. He didn't want the United States to take a backseat to anybody. This was a man who had spent his whole career uplifting the United States in terms of international policy and trying to expand it within the global community. He wanted the League of Nations to have more or less what the United Nations has today, which is a peacekeeping force. He wanted it League of Nations to have more or less what the United Nations has today, which is a peacekeeping force. He wanted it to have some kind of military arm so that it wouldn't just be a paper tiger. And that's what Roosevelt felt as well. So I think those were a couple of

the things. Lodge also tried to figure out a way to have African-Americans' voices heard more so in terms of voting. It was not so much that he had some deep feeling for African-Americans because he and Roosevelt both believed that they were limited in intelligence. And obviously, that's inexcusable. And unfortunately, that was the tenor of the time. But Lodge and Roosevelt both believed that African Americans should be citizens of the country, even though neither one believed they had the ability to understand the complexities of government. But I really think thinking about Lodge was what he did for Theodore Roosevelt. He loved Theodore Roosevelt. He really did.

This is really kind of a love story also between two men who just adored being with one another, who had enormous respect for one another. And I can't really think of anybody doing the amount of things that Lodge did for TR, devoting the amount of energy, putting his reputation on the line so many times and potentially taking the wrath of many of these conservative Republicans for putting TR in various positions, if he didn't really adore Theodore Roosevelt and believe that he did have, you know, to quote Franklin Roosevelt, a rendezvous with destiny. So we really owe, I think, Henry Cabot Lodge for getting TR to the White House as quickly as he did. And I'm glad

that I'm able to present Lodge to a new audience and maybe get people to get a new sense of appreciation for him, even though his love of skinny dipping was probably the only time he was ever transparent in his entire life. You did say he had Machiavellian tendencies. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, Lodge loved skinny dipping. He would dive off the cliffs of Nahant in Massachusetts and go swimming and just had a great time. and goes swimming and just had a great time. Reminds me of another Machiavellian man from history who loved swimming, Benjamin Franklin,

who is randomly in the International Swimming Hall of Fame. It seems random. I didn't know that. That's very interesting. That's in SABG for another podcast. That's a topic for another podcast. I want to talk very briefly about the process of conceptualizing this book and researching it and actually writing it. Those are topics that I know people are always interested in hearing about. First of all, what made you think to yourself, you know what I need to write a book on is this? Yeah, it's so interesting because this was a

COVID book. I was at home and was teaching remotely. And I'd always wanted to write a commercial book because at heart, I'm a storyteller. I want to write books that people enjoy and also learn something from. I'm all about making American history as accessible and available as possible. And I've always loved the camaraderie among men and friendship. And I found myself thinking, you know, I'd love to write a book about a great friendship, great presidential friendship. And I was sort of thinking and doing little Google searches and thinking, you know, who, and then suddenly I

thought, wow, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, has anybody ever done anything on this? And surprisingly, nobody ever had. And so you have to remember, this was at the height of COVID. This was 2020 or something like that. And the documentation, which is what I based my book on, these 2,500 letters that were located in the Massachusetts Historical Society, all archives then, as you know, were locked down, closed. And I wrote this proposal, submitted it. I was fortunate to have an agent take it. And then Pegasus very kindly bought the book. And they had given me 18 months or something to write this. And I was like, oh my goodness, how am I going to do it? I said, I can't get to these letters. And fortunately, my library in Connecticut was open and the marvelous people there in the interlibrary office were able to get hold of a second series of microfilms that contained all the correspondence. minutes from my home, which was wonderful. But the thing that I found most interesting was in 1925,

just right after Lodge passed away, he had arranged to have a two-volume collection of his letters, the letters between he and TR published. TR had talked to him several years earlier about this idea, essentially saying something like, well, gee, Cabot, just think if you published all of this correspondence between you and I and annotated it and put it into this great volume, it could be one of the great books about me ever written. What a great idea. What a great idea. And he wasn't wrong. And of course, Lodge, you know, being his, you know, very Machiavellian, as we've used that word, self was like, hmm, you know, I don't know. And he started reading the letters and he found that Roosevelt was making comments about people that Cabot believed might be, you know, not very complimentary for a president like he called Benjamin Harrison a short little toad and a bunch of other things

that Lodge was like, I don't know if we can publish this. So he wrote to Tiara's widow, Edith, and said, don't worry, these letters are never going to see the light of day. So Lodge took the letters and he literally edited them. He crossed words out. He cut paragraphs off. And then he published this collection, which you can find on Google Books, but it's completely inaccurate and completely unreliable, even though there are letters that are accurate. So I found myself sitting there looking at the collection, the edited collection, and looking at the actual letters and surprisingly seeing how many he just had altered. And it's so interesting because Lodge was a historian, right? I mean, you think accuracy, transparency, that's the key. But

as I said earlier, the only time the guy was transparent was when he was skinny dipping off the coast of Nahant. So I mean, it was really fascinating to discover this. I wasn't the first historian to do this, but a couple have noticed that. But I wrote a very sort of long essay at the end of the book, because I think it was important for people to know that these letters have been manipulated. And, you know, you can't have historical evidence manipulated like that. I mean, it does a disservice to Roosevelt and it did a disservice to Lodge too, because TR was right. If that book had been historically accurate, every single historian would have used it. You would have been must reading it. You couldn't

do a Roosevelt book without that collection. And now you've got to cherry pick and see what's true and what isn't. Writing it, I had to write quite quickly because I was teaching. I had at the time a two-year-old boy. And as I joked with somebody, those of you who have children, you can get a lot of work done between 5.30 and 8 a.m. But it was a real pleasure to do. And writing is really hard and really difficult, but it's very gratifying when you finish the project and it goes exactly the way you want it. And so many people enjoy reading it and appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I loved hearing more about Cabot.

And I loved hearing more about this, you know, impactful, but sort of little known friendship. And of course, it's always a pleasure to talk about the giant personality of Teddy Roosevelt. And I just really enjoyed reading your book. And I really enjoyed talking to you today. Thank you. Oh, Sharon, thank you so much for your kindness. It's been a great pleasure speaking with you. You can buy Lawrence Jordan's book, The Rough Writer and the Professor, wherever you buy your books. And if you order from bookshop.org, you can support independent bookstores. Thanks for being here today. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Sharon McMahon.

Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And if you could leave us a review or share this episode on social media, those things help podcasters out so much. Thanks for being here today.