T.R. worse than G.W.Bush? Read on...

Misadventures of America's Worst President
(Surprise--it's NOT G.W. Bush)
by Ed Tant

Though the stone image of President Theodore Roosevelt stares resolutely from the heights of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, a new book strips Teddy bare and cracks the granite face of this nation's 26th president.

"The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War," by James Bradley is a readable and revealing portrait of the racism and warmongering of the youngest man ever to serve as president, exposing flaws of character and policy that have been buried by most historians who have written about Roosevelt, who died 91 years ago this month.

James Bradley's father, John Bradley, was one of the U.S. Marines who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima during one of the most iconic and patriotic scenes of World War II. In "The Imperial Cruise," historian Bradley traces the roots of the American war in the Pacific back to the foreign policy of Teddy Roosevelt and says, "Maybe my father didn't have to suffer through World War II in the Pacific."

"The Imperial Cruise" takes its title from a diplomatic mission orchestrated by Roosevelt in 1905. Embarking from the port of San Francisco, the seagoing diplomats traveled to the newly annexed Hawaii, then on to Japan, Korea, China and the Philippines, where the United States had been fighting a long and brutal war against indigenous tribes that was reminiscent of the Indian wars not so many years before, a war that also had parallels with today's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

William Howard Taft, Roosevelt's secretary of war who would become his handpicked successor in the White House, led the diplomatic delegation, negotiating secret and unconstitutional treaties with Asian leaders while reporters on the cruise were distracted by the wild-child antics and shipboard romance of Roosevelt's daughter Alice, who went along for the trip, keeping the Roosevelt name in the news while Taft made deals for trade and military might.

At Harvard and Columbia, the student Teddy Roosevelt was steeped in doctrines of white supremacy and Aryan myth taught by professors at those universities. Roosevelt carried those doctrines with him all his life, calling blacks "a perfectly stupid race" and comparing Native Americans to "wild beasts." In 1897, just four years before he became president, Roosevelt wrote that "democracy needs no more vindication for its existence than the fact that it has kept for the white race the best portions of the new world's surface."

The now largely forgotten American war in the Philippines was nothing short of a race war waged by America against the Filipino population. Waterboarding was used as torture by U.S. soldiers, who gleefully sang a marching song called "The Water Cure." Filipinos were called "Pacific Negroes" and "brainless monkeys" by American military men.

In 1906, when the U.S. army massacred about 1,000 Muslim men, women and children in the Philippines, the outraged writer and anti-war activist Mark Twain called the carnage the work of "Christian butchers." Teddy Roosevelt called the war crime which predated the My Lai massacre by more than 60 years "a brilliant feat of arms that upheld the honor of the American flag."

When I interviewed historian Howard Zinn in 2004, I asked him to name America's most overrated president. Without hesitation, he said, "Theodore Roosevelt." James Bradley's new book proves that Zinn was right. Bradley is the author of the best-selling books "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Flyboys." His newest book, "The Imperial Cruise," deserves to sail right to the top of the best-seller lists as well.