President Theodore Roosevelt

He begins as a small boy fighting air and time. The asthma comes at night like a thief and sits on his chest; the child hears the rattle of his own breathing and learns, much earlier than most, that life does not hand out strength—it must be built. In a brownstone on East 20th Street, in a house that smells of books and leather and ocean salt carried in on his father’s coats, he studies insects in jam jars, birds through a little window onto the roof, muscles through pain with the help of a doting, formidable parent who tells him the sentence he will carry like a creed: you have the mind but not the body; make the body. He sets up a gym in the family home, lifts iron dumbbells until his arms shake, pounds a bag, rows, hikes, wrestles his own lungs into submission. He reads like a person storing fuel—Plutarch and Darwin, Froissart and Prescott, Audubon and the Federalist—feeding a mind that wants the world entire. His father, Theodore Senior, is philanthropy in a waistcoat, a reformer who despises cruelty and idle vanity and takes his son to the charitable societies and the workshops where the city’s other children learn to survive. The boy watches, notes, decides that duty can look like joy if you refuse to notice how heavy it is.

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