Among that “whole bunch of other stuff”, he was a writer, and one of his works is this biography of Oliver Cromwell: “Lord Protector of England, Puritan, born in 1599 and died in 1658, September.”🎶 (Once you hear the Monty Python song about him, you can never un-hear it.)
I love reading one famous historical figure writing about another. The gold standard for this is, of course, Napoleon’s commentaries on the wars of Julius Caesar, but this one is right up there. T.R.’s writing is efficient, to the point, and very opinionated. He’s making no attempt at neutrality, but arguing strenuously that Oliver Cromwell was awesome, and that the Stuart monarchy he temporarily deposed were, basically, a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.
But Teddy had a problem, in that Cromwell’s reign was, by basically any measure, just a tyrannous as was that of Charles I, if not more so. To his credit, he doesn’t deny this. He admits that Cromwell did some nasty stuff. He even puts together a tiered ranking of “guys who took over their countries after a revolution.” Top tier: George Washington. Next tier: Cromwell. Bottom tier: Napoleon. (Too bad he didn’t write this after 1917.)
He makes a lot of excuses for Cromwell, basically all of which amount to, “he meant well.” Yeah, yeah, Ted; that’s what they all say.
Nevertheless, the biographical sketch is quite interesting, and it’s kind of nice to read a politician who is unafraid to take an unequivocal stance on a relatively controversial topic. Not to mention that the idea of a politician taking the trouble to learn something about a distant period of history is rather amazing by modern standards.
Is it the best book ever written on Cromwell? Probably not. Is it objective? Definitely not. But is it the best book we’re ever likely to get about Cromwell written by an American politician? For at least the foreseeable future, yes.