Leadership in Turbulent Times
Doris Kearns Goodwin

Chapter #6 Theodore Roosevelt pages 124-125

By midnight, both women were in a semi-conscious state. His forty-nine year old mother, Mittie, still a youthful looking, beautiful women, had been suffering from what was considered to be a severe cold, but which turned out to be a lethal case of typhoid fever. Theodore was a his mother’s bedside at 3 a.m.  when she died. Less that twelve hours later, as he enfolded his young wife in his arms, Alice died from what was later diagnosed as acute kidney disease, its symptoms masked by her pregnancy. In his diary that night, the twenty-six year old Theodore placed a large X, along with the simple words “the light has gone from my life.”

Chapter #6 Theodore Roosevelt pages page 133

Roosevelt’s crucible experience had heightened his awareness of mortality, drastically reducing the span he felt remaining for him to live and fulfill his ambitions. His intensified sense of passing time, his awareness that life could turn on a dime, made his impatient, sometimes unbearably so, to get things accomplished. The hectic speed with which he had introduced dozen of bills in the legislature following Alice’s death became a lifelong pattern, a confrontation and often abrasive mode of leadership that put him at odds with the established procedures and the sluggish metabolism of any bureaucratic