Father's Son

WAR & PEACE

No Life with Father was life at the White House for the children of Theodore Roosevelt. They crawled through the space between ceiling and floors, dragged their spotted pony into the elevator, whooped on roller skates down the historic hallways, walked on stilts up the circling stairways, with Father egging them on, often whooping it up ahead of them. Less like his father than the other children, but his father's favorite, Kermit followed in Father's boisterous wake, but liked to take books out of the Library of Congress and read while Archie and Ted played, argued with the whole White House staff. Father interrupted his studies at Harvard by taking him along as official photographer on the African game hunt in 1909. Out of college, he sailed away with Father to explore the "River of Doubt" in South America.

At Father's death, Kermit Roosevelt carried on the family tradition, but the old whoop and holler was gone. Banking in Buenos Aires, war service with the British and U. S. Armies (he served with the British in Mesopotamia, commanded an artillery battery in the U. S. Army), shipping after the War, exploration in China, hunting in India, books about the Far East--Son Kermit could follow the pattern of Father's life but he could not quite get its spirit. Last week it became plain that Kermit Roosevelt, plump and 50, had followed Father's fading footsteps out of the U. S. He had signed up as an officer in the British Army, thus automatically renouncing the U. S. citizenship of the son of the U. S.'s most rambunctious Presidential citizen. Said he to U. S. reporters: "The sooner the war is over, the better for you and the better for all of us."

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