Book review: Bradley's 'Imperial Cruise' goes adrift

"The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War" (Little, Brown and Company, 400 pages, $29.99), by James Bradley: Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most admired figures in American history.

He was the Rough Rider who charged up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War. The youthful president who busted trusts, offered square deals, spoke softly and carried a big stick and won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War. He was the conservationist who promoted the national forest system in the West and reserved lands for public use.

James Bradley, whose previous war-themed books "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Flyboys" were well-received best-sellers, paints a much different picture of T.R. in his new offering, "The Imperial Cruise."

In Bradley's view, Roosevelt wasn't so much a bull moose as he was a bully - and a racist whose love of Anglo-Saxon culture shaped his overly aggressive foreign policy.

We see the president - referred to throughout as "Teddy" or "Big Stick Teddy" - dropping racial epithets into his writings and conversations and implementing a race-based foreign policy designed to benefit majority white nations at the expense of the rest of the world.

The book's stated goal is to retrace the route taken by a Roosevelt-dispatched diplomatic mission to Asia in the summer of 1905.

The president sent his secretary of war, William Howard Taft, his daughter, Alice Roosevelt, seven senators, 23 congressmen and military and civilian officials on an ocean liner headed to Asia.

The Americans made stops in Tokyo, Manila, Hong Kong and Seoul and, according to Bradley, so fouled up matters that the "bruises ... would catalyze World War II in the Pacific, the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Korean War and an array of tensions that inform our lives today."

Bradley's previous books focused on the horrors of war and the courage of the American forces in World War II.

He should know a thing or two about these subjects, considering his father, John, helped raise the American flag on Iwo Jima.

In "Imperial," though, Bradley moves outside his comfort zone, and the results are uneven.

The book ostensibly is about the Taft party's travels and how it implemented Roosevelt's race-hating strategies.

But he spends dozens of pages on difficult-to-get-through histories of the Philippines, Japan and the other countries on the itinerary and doesn't spend enough time on the trip itself.

At times, it reads like a term paper - too fact-heavy and lacking drama.

Other times, it's a page-turner with solidly attributed eye-opening passages about how American servicemen used the now-controversial waterboarding technique during the conflict in the Philippines.

It's up to readers to decide whether Bradley is right to argue that Roosevelt's Asian meddling negatively impacted history.

They will find, though, a book that lacks a solid focus.

Like a ship sailing slightly off course.