Dan's Papers - September 12, 2008

The sudden rise of Sarah Palin to become the vice presidential candidate for the Republican Party has parallels in many ways to the rise of Teddy Roosevelt, a man whose roots are here on Long Island. Roosevelt made his home in Oyster Bay. And in the summer of 1898, as the head of the Rough Riders, President William McKinley met with him in Montauk to discuss, among other things, his political future. He was just two months shy of 40 at that time. Sarah Palin, at the time of her nomination, was 44. And within a year, he would be nominated to become vice president.

The parallel is confined to the sudden rise of these two people, of course. It does not necessarily continue on from this point. Teddy Roosevelt, as you know, became one of the greatest presidents of the United States. Sarah Palin's future is a question mark.

Teddy Roosevelt, an outdoorsman, three years before being offered the vice presidency, was 38, working in Washington as an obscure bureaucrat, with the job title of Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Sarah Palin, an outdoorswoman, was 38 and a housewife and mother, having just completed two terms as the mayor of the small town of Wasilla - 7,000 people - in Alaska. She was born and raised in that town.

Roosevelt, as it happened, turned the whole Department of the Navy upside down during his three years as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Under President McKinley, war clouds had begun to gather. Revolutionaries in Cuba wanted to become independent of Spain, and they had appealed to the United States to help them. The United States had just completed the building of a big modern Navy with steel ships. Everyone believed the Spanish, with their old wooden ships, would be no match for the Americans should the two forces clash.

The problem was that the Secretary of the Navy during the McKinley Administration, a man named John D. Long, was a political appointment with few positive attributes and little interest in doing his job as Secretary of the Navy. Basically, his assistant, Theodore Roosevelt, began running the department when he arrived. In 1898, after the Maine, a Naval vessel that McKinley ordered to Cuba on a peace mission, blew up in the harbor there, McKinley declared war on Cuba. Roosevelt spoke to McKinley. The Spanish fleet at that time was in Manila Harbor in the Philippines, another Spanish colony. Roosevelt said, "Why not order me to send our fleet there, surprise the Spanish and just sink their entire fleet?" McKinley ordered it done and it was. The American Navy sank 8 Spanish galleons without a single loss.

Roosevelt felt that with the Spanish navy obliterated, there was little left to do in the Department of the Navy, and so he resigned his post to go off to participate in the war. He put together a Regiment of 2,000 men - a combination of rough cowboys from the west and personal friends of his from prep school and Harvard - and this regiment, in Cuba, fought two actions, one charging up Kettle Hill, and another charging up San Juan Hill to help defeat the Spanish. In late July of 1898, just one year and six months after his appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he arrived back from Cuba with his fellow Rough Riders, as the press had called them, to spend a month on the deserted hills of Montauk, New York, recuperating with the rest of the U. S. Army - 32,000 men - from the war. He was just 39 years old. And a war hero.

President McKinley visited Roosevelt in Montauk, and urged him to run for Governor of New York. This was in August of 1898. In November, just after he turned 40, he was elected Governor of New York as a Republican, and in January of 1899 moved to the Governor's Mansion in Albany.

At that time, the state of New York was considered very corrupt. Roosevelt hit the ground running, fired as many bad people as he could lay his hands on, created reforms, and so upset the powers behind the scenes in Albany that just six months later, at a famous meeting in a smoke filled room at the Republican convention, they persuaded President McKinley, then running for reelection, to take 40-year-old Governor Roosevelt as his vice-presidential candidate. They wanted Roosevelt out of New York. Vice presidents, back then, just sat on their hands and did nothing. They were kicking him upstairs.

A year and a half later, in Buffalo at a Pan-American Exposition, President McKinley was assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt, age 42, was then sworn in as president, the youngest man to ever attain that office.

A recent article in The New York Times described how Sarah Palin, as mayor of Wasilla, also turned the place upside-down.

In 1996, she ran against a long-standing mayor and defeated him. She was 32 at the time, local born and raised, and very pretty. She was runner-up in the Miss Alaska contest in 1985. In any case, running for mayor, she campaigned as a pro-lifer, an abortion opponent, a term limits proponent, a hunting advocate - she wanted indiscriminate hunting for bears and wolves - and she wanted the arctic opened wide for oil exploration. She was also a born-again Christian with a passion for guns. She was a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. The sitting mayor, who hadn't campaigned as anything except running the town correctly, was a professional public administrator with a degree in that from the University of Oregon.

When Sarah Palin came in, she immediately fired several members of the small town's long-time bureaucracy. In a town of this size, smaller than Southampton or East Hampton Village, this is not done. But she did it. She fired the museum director, the public works director, the city planner, the police chief and the town librarian.

Many of these firings were controversial. For example, she wanted certain library books banned from the shelves of the town library. When the librarian resisted, she fired her, but then had to re-hire her after the village protested.

Her next order was to forbid persons in the village's employ from talking to the press without her permission. This sort of edict had never happened in this town before. It really amazed the publisher and editor of the town newspaper, Victoria Neagle.

But Sarah Palin was good for Wasilla. She lowered taxes. She got a public works project involving sidewalks and streets off the ground, she built an indoor hockey rink for the kids. She re-organized the police department. In 1997, when her first term was up, she ran again against the long time former mayor and this time beat him in a landslide.

In 2002, as she was leaving office to go back to private life, she learned that her stepmother-in-law, with the same last name as hers, would be running for mayor. Sarah Palin endorsed her opponent. The opponent won.

From 2002 to 2006, Palin was an appointed commissioner on the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission, holding the position of ethics officer. In 2004, she resigned in protest, because two other commissioners were on the take and not forced to resign. Subsequently, they were both fired. And one was fined $20,000. She ran for Lieutenant Governor. She lost. She bought an interest in a car wash, but failed to note it in her income tax. She became a hockey mom.

Palin ran for governor in 2006 at the urging of Republican Party leaders in the state. She won, and if she didn't turn the state upside-down, it might have been because she was there just a year and a half before being picked by McCain to be his running mate. During her brief time in that office, she opposed gun control, actively pursued corruption in the state and was looking for earmarked funds in Washington to allow drilling on more public lands (something McCain opposes). She endorsed hunting wolves from helicopters.

Maybe, like Roosevelt, she was too controversial for the powers that be. Maybe they kicked her upstairs to get her out of Alaska. Who knows.

If there are many similarities between Sarah Palin and Theodore Roosevelt, their upbringing is not one of them. Roosevelt was brought up in New York City in wealthy circumstances. His father was a philanthropist. He went to prep school and Harvard, where he got a degree in public service and foreign service. He was one of four New York Police Commissioners before going off to become the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he had gotten an appointment as one of the four New York City Police Commissioners of that time. And years later, when his presidency was done and the smoke had cleared, he became the first and only president to ever get a prize for peace - the Nobel Peace Prize - for negotiating a peace between Russia and Japan in the Russo-Japanese war. He received a prize for war, too - the Medal of Honor, for charging up San Juan Hill.

Sarah Palin graduated from high school and, after marrying Todd Palin, an oil worker, went off to college. She attended Hawaii Pacific College for one year, then North Idaho College and finally got a bachelor's degree in Journalism and Comunications from the University of Idaho. She knows very little about foreign affairs and is the first to tell you so. And she has been very involved with family life and family squabbles. As governor, she's been accused of arranging for the firing of both the Commissioner of Public Safety and the State Police Commissioner because they would not see to the firing of a Palin family member - a state trooper. This state trooper, who was married to her sister but was in the process of divorcing her, had, with his gun on his hip, publicly threatened to shoot their father.

Palin gave an excellent speech at the Republican National Convention. It remains to be seen, however, if she can convince the American people she's got the goods for high office.