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To understand anybody, it's very important to understand their childhood, and this is certainly so for Theodore Roosevelt. But what makes it especially so is that the boy Theodore Roosevelt never leaves stage, so to speak. This little boy quality that he had was one of his most salient characteristics when he was in the White House, his whole life.

One of his friends, the English diplomat Cecil Spring Rice, once said, "The thing you have to remember about the President is he's about six." Woodrow Wilson called him a "great big boy". He went off later in life, after leaving the White House, on a very dangerous, very risky adventure in South America, and when they asked him why he was doing it at his age, he said, "It's my last chance to be a boy again."

His empathy, his ability, his genius for being with children, for playing children's games, for telling children's stories, for reading children's stories all is evocative of this boy in him. And I think he understood that if you want to have more fun in life, that was a very good quality to have. He burned bright all the way through and what's so fascinating is to see how he's also aging while this boy in him keeps burning. When he was 48 years old, he describes himself in confidence to a friend as becoming a "decrepit old man". By age 60, he is an old man. He looks old, he acts old, feels old, and yet this light, this hyperactive child is still flaming inside of him.

His desire to be front and centerstage so much, I think, is part of that. He loved it. He loved being the center of attention. When he was shot at by a fanatic in Milwaukee during the 1912 Bull Moose campaign, his life was saved by the fact that he had his eyeglasses case and his folded-up speech inside of his coat pocket. And he was bleeding. It looked as though he were mortally wounded, but he insisted on standing up to finish that speech. I think he really wanted to die giving that speech. What an exit. Nobody would ever forget it. And he knew that. He felt that. He loved it.

Sometimes cabinet meetings had to be called off because the children were banging around upstairs on stilts or whatever. He permitted their calico pony, Algonquin, to be taken into the White House and carried aloft on the White House elevator to visit one of the children who was feeling rather down in the dumps. All the pets, the menagerie, that they were allowed to have in the White House, was also for Father. Father loved them. Father wanted those pets around, the little snake, Emily Spinach, and Jack Dog, the terrier and the rest. And the father would sometimes be late for state banquets because he was upstairs either reading the bedtime story or telling them a tall tale or having a good all-out pillow fight. He was -- he was literally, factually the youngest President in our history.

He took office when he was only 42 years old. But he was a lot younger than that in many other ways, too.