Theodore Roosevelt

Born at 28 East 20th Street, Manhattan. A sickly child with debilitating asthma. His father tells him he has the mind but not the body. "You must make your body," his father says. He does. Boxing, hiking, rowing, horseback riding. He turns himself into something indestructible through pure will.

His mother and his wife Alice die on the same day. Same house. His mother of typhoid, his wife of kidney failure, two days after giving birth to their daughter. He draws an X in his diary and writes: "The light has gone out of my life." He buys a cattle ranch in the Dakotas and disappears.

Leads the Rough Riders up Kettle Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He's the only man on horseback. They take the hill. He calls it "the great day of my life." He goes home a war hero. Elected governor of New York four months later.

Becomes president at 42 after McKinley's assassination. The youngest person ever to hold the office. The New York party bosses put him on the ticket as vice president to get rid of him. They've made him the most powerful man in the country instead.

Wins the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War. The first American to win a Nobel Prize. He also signs the Antiquities Act, establishing 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, 5 national parks, and 18 national monuments. 230 million acres of protected land.

Shot in the chest while campaigning in Milwaukee. The bullet passes through his steel eyeglass case and the folded 50-page speech in his breast pocket. He delivers the speech anyway. 84 minutes. Bleeding. "Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot," he begins. "But it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."

Dies in his sleep at Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, at 60. His youngest son Quentin was killed in aerial combat over France the previous year. Vice President Thomas Marshall says: "Death had to take him sleeping. If he'd been awake, there would have been a fight."