Instincts...........................

     Unless, of course, one continued one's own education by watching the sometimes disorienting spectacle of youth in flight from the past.  Roosevelt's Energetik, his dirigible ability to change course at a moment's notice, his tendency to write exuberant Os in the air, made [Henry] Adams doubt his own trail across "the darkening prairie of education."  To a historian born in 1838, "always and everywhere the Complex has been true and the Contradiction certain."  Here was Roosevelt trumpeting either-or banalities, lecturing intellectuals as though they were children, and yet repeatedly prevailing in the most intricate political situations.  Might the President's simplicity be that of an idiot savant who instinctively understood how Complexity worked, even to the point of using Contradiction to generate extra energy?  If so, he was certainly not simplistic.  He was, on the contrary, formidable: twentieth-century in his eager embrace of Chaos, eighteenth-century in his utter self-certainty.  To Roosevelt, as to Kant, "Truth was the essence of the 'I'."

-Edmund Morris,  Theodore Rex