This he admitted over and over again, and he made no
pretense of not taking satisfaction from the popularity his
countrymen showered upon him. In writing to a friend that he
wished to be a candidate in 1904, he distinguished between the
case of Lincoln in 1864 and that of himself and other
Presidential candidates for renomination. In 1864, the crisis was
so tremendous that Lincoln must have considered that chiefly,
irrespective of his own hopes: whereas Roosevelt in 1904, like
Jackson, Grant, Cleveland, and the other two-term Presidents,
might, without impropriety, look upon reelection as, in a
measure, a personal tribute.
One of my purposes in writing this sketch will have failed, if I
have not made clear the character of Roosevelt's ambition. He
could not be happy unless he were busily at work. If that work
were in a public office he was all the happier. But the way in
which he accepted one office after another, each unrelated to the
preceding, was so desultory as to prove that he did not begin
life with a deep-laid design on the Presidency.
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