# One Hundred and Sixty-Seven *Theodore Roosevelt and the Arithmetic of a Great Man* — Legendary Biographies No. 240 - **Subject:** Theodore Roosevelt Jr. - **Written by:** Theodore Pemberton - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / American Politics - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 200 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-520-6) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-462-9) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/240-one-hundred-and-sixty-seven.html ## About this book Theodore Roosevelt comes down to us as the asthmatic boy who built himself a body, ran uphill at Kettle Hill, took the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, and protected some 230 million acres of American land. All of that is true. In August 1906 he also ordered 167 soldiers discharged from the Army without honor, without a trial, without a court-martial, without a single man charged. Shots had been fired through the streets of Brownsville, Texas, backing on the wall of Fort Brown. No shooter was ever identified. They were the First Battalion of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, a Black regular regiment whose own white officers testified under oath that they had been in barracks the whole time. The announcement was held until the polls closed in that November's elections. Roosevelt conceded a court of inquiry two days before he left office and never retracted a syllable of the judgment. The Army reversed it in September 1972: honorable discharges, no back pay. In 1973 Congress voted $25,000 to Dorsie Willis, one of two men still alive to be told, who had spent sixty-seven years shining shoes in a Minneapolis barbershop. Around that number the book builds the whole life in twenty-two chapters, and refuses to let the adventure eat the accounting. The 1884 pocket diary with its cancelling black X. The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, thanked in public in 1898 and written out of the charge in a magazine serial the following spring, answered by Sergeant Presley Holliday in a letter that waited most of a century to reach the record. Panama, the trusts, the conservation record held in one chapter against the room at Sagamore Hill full of heads. Quentin, shot down over France in July 1918. The governing question is what happens to a country when the man running it has spent his life proving his body will not fail him again. The answer ends in a crate: the equestrian bronze cut from its pedestal in January 2022, absent from the library that opened in the Badlands in July 2026. ## Contents 1. The Brownstone 2. Greatheart 3. Chestnut Hill 4. February Fourteen 5. Elkhorn 6. Sagamore Hill 7. Mulberry Street 8. The Hong Kong Cable 9. Las Guasimas 10. Kettle Hill 11. Delaware Avenue 12. Balangiga 13. October Sixteen 14. Northern Securities 15. Panama 16. Portsmouth 17. Pelican Island 18. Fort Brown 19. Eleven Thousand Specimens 20. The Gilpatrick 21. The River Of Doubt 22. The Old Lion ## Questions **Who is One Hundred and Sixty-Seven about?** Theodore Roosevelt Jr.. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case One Hundred and Sixty-Seven — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,059 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 61,000 words, 22 chapters, 200 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Theodore Pemberton is a Boston-based biographer whose books on American presidents and political operatives have been shortlisted three times for the Lukas Prize. He writes biography that takes campaign finance and procedural history seriously, focusing on the mechanics of political power. His early publications, including The Playbook and The Chief, established his reputation for meticulous archival research. His subsequent works, such as The Founder, Blexit, and The Bunker Hours, continued to examine the inner workings of political machines. With The 1972 Florida Primary, The Bletchley Park Hut, and The Mar-a-Lago Storeroom, he turned his attention to specific, high-stakes environments that shaped national policy and intelligence operations. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he spends his time teaching writing workshops and rowing on the Charles River.