A boy sits alone, quietly reading a book.
Elsewhere in the house, the familiar sounds of servants going about their daily chores are punctuated now and then by the calm, authoritative voice of his mother or father supervising their activities. But the boy is oblivious to everything except the book in his hands.
The time is somewhere in the early 1890s, and the boy is Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He is about ten or eleven years old, and the book he is reading represents something of a challenge. It is filled with unfamiliar technical terms, complicated charts, and curious diagrams; but because it is also filled with the clash of combat and the smell of gunpowder, and is crowded with thrilling accounts of derring-do in the age of fighting sail, the boy is enraptured and reads with the focused intensity of youth, totally lost in its pages.
He is sitting in the library of Springwood, his family’s country home in the village of Hyde Park, overlooking the Hudson River about seventy miles north of New York City. We cannot be precisely sure when he first read the book he is holding, but we know he read it at an early age—certainly before his teens—and we know that it was to have a powerful influence upon him throughout his life. It is almost certainly the single most important book he will ever read.
The book that has so captured his attention is The Naval War of 1812. From early childhood, Franklin has been fascinated with the sea and things maritime. He is an avid sailor, and under his father’s watchful tutelage he has learned his seamanship in knockabouts and ice boats and other small craft, and has served as crew on his father’s 51-foot sailing yacht Half Moon, during summers on Campobello Island in the Bay of Fundy, where the family keeps a cottage.
But it is not the subject matter that has drawn him to The Naval War of 1812 so much as it is the fact that the book is written by his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, of the Oyster Bay branch of the family. Young Franklin knows and greatly admires his ebullient, fun-loving 35-year-old Cousin Ted, who enjoys inventing strenuous games for children, and who, after a day of running and shouting, likes nothing better than to gather everyone around the fire and tell them ripping tales of his adventures as a cowboy in the Dakota Territory. At this point in his life, Theodore has already made a considerable name for himself as a writer but has not yet progressed as far as he would like in his other chosen interest, politics. At the moment, he is still a relatively obscure Washington functionary in the Civil Service Commission. World fame still lies in the future. But to those who already know him, his dynamism and boisterous energy already define his character. Throughout his life, Franklin will habitually refer to his fifth cousin Theodore with genuine awe as “the most wonderful man I ever knew.”
The Naval War of 1812 is filled with Theodore’s infectious patriotism and his delight in the exploits of the gallant and glamorous commodores who led America’s early Navy—Stephen Decatur, Oliver Hazard Perry, David Porter and the rest. But Theodore Roosevelt has not limited his narrative to heroes alone. Woven into his celebration of their adventures are broader points on the strategic value of navies in general, and of the unique role they play in shaping and carrying out national policy. He explains how warships can reach across the globe to enforce the national resolve thousands of miles from home, as even the tiny American Navy managed to do in the War of 1812, when Yankee frigates engaged the enemy off the coast of Africa and as far away as the waters of Brazil and the Marquesas.
Cousin Ted points out that when navies are large enough to be organized into fleets, they can wield devastating power in combat, much as Nelson did at Trafalgar, or, in equally effective manner, choke off an enemy’s supply lines by blockading his coast. And he makes it clear that navies are just as important in peacetime as they are in war. Unlike armies, which are apt to become expensive nuisances in times of peace, navies continue to serve the nation long after the battles are over. Properly deployed, they can foster and protect a country’s foreign trade, and their very existence will tend to discourage an attack by any potential enemy.
Again and again, Cousin Ted hammers home his basic message, that navies are vital to a maritime nation’s welfare, and young Franklin hungrily and uncritically absorbs it all. Cousin Ted’s enthusiasm and his tightly organized arguments will form the foundation for his personal philosophy and provide the boy with a matrix with which to define the world around him.
Over the years to come, Franklin D. Roosevelt will read voraciously; but that one book, The Naval War of 1812, will always remain of singular importance to him. Fifty years onward, when fate and circumstances put him in command of the most powerful military force in history, it will be to his distant relative Theodore that he turns for inspiration and guidance. And Cousin Ted’s book will never be far away, its lessons never ignored. Throughout his presidential years, FDR kept two copies in his personal library—one for the White House, the other for his boyhood home in Hyde Park.