Released
2006
Part of PBS's estimable "American Experience" series, and narrated by the late Jason Robards, "TR" is the fullest portrait yet of the rough-riding Nobel Prize-winning commander-in-chief. We get a strong sense of the times, as well as Teddy's willful temperament and his contributions to social reform and environmental protection in a period when big industry (and corruption) was going into overdrive. But Teddy was also driven by contradictory impulses: he built the Panama Canal by fomenting a revolution, and, as Vice President, went behind McKinley's back to orchestrate the Spanish-American War. No wonder he was called a "steam engine in trousers!"