American Experience

David McCullough
on TR's Health

RealAudio


He was not expected to live. So that -- that horror, that terror has been implanted in him and when the attack comes, he feels as if he's dying. It's not just excruciatingly painful; it's terrifying. Now it also gets everybody's attention as nothing else imaginable could do. And asthmatics very often find in later life that they are alleviated by -- or that they need-- attention. They need to be the center of attention. It was once said of Theodore that his problem was he wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. He just adored being in a limelight.

And that's not uncommon among people who have been severely asthmatic as children. There are instances of people who were severely asthmatic returning -- moving away from their homes, coming back to the house that they grew up in, having not been there for many years and having not had an asthmatic attack for many years, and suddenly having an asthmatic seizure ... not because of any pollen or pollutant in the air, but because coming back recalls, brings back all whatever it was about that house, or that childhood that triggered the asthmatic attack.

Now the psychosomatic sides of asthma are real. There are also physiological aspects of asthma which are real. But if one combs through all the possible explanations from a physiological point of view of Theodore Roosevelt's asthma, it's impossible to find any answer. But if you take a look at when his attacks came, it's very interesting, very revealing. And if you look at when the asthma went away, when he -- he overcame this demon, that's very interesting.

It went away when he went away from his family, when he went away from the house on East 20th Street to college, to Harvard. Broke out of that protective swarm of his family, which had given him the confidence, the self-confidence that he so lacked, which had given him the protection and the security, the feeling of security that he so needed as a child and he wouldn't have survived without it, and much that he did later on one can account for because of that secure, strong, safe family life that he was given, that he was blessed to have. But he becomes free of his asthmatic demon when he becomes free to be himself.

The attacks came almost always on Sunday -- the one day of the week his father is home. It's also the day he has to go to church, and if an attack comes, you don't have to go to church. And if an attack comes, your father will scoop you up in his strong arms, carry you out to a waiting carriage and you will dash out of the city, out to the country to spend the whole day in the fields and along rivers or the seashore with your father alone, just the two of you. You have your father's complete attention, complete devotion for a whole day, just you and your father, the man you admire and love more than any other.

Now that is the consequence of an attack. That's what the attack achieves. He doesn't have the attack in order to get that. He isn't planning this, but that is the result. And it has to be considered as an explanation for why the attacks come on Sunday. It also has to be very vivid and all-important explanation of one of the reasons he was devoted, so indebted to his father. And I think it can be fairly said that we, the United States of America, we Americans have in many ways been the beneficiaries of those horrifying, painful, excruciatingly painful, experiences of that little boy, because out of those Sundays with his father came his love of Nature, his love of the outdoors, his love of unspoiled America.