A new book offers a fresh way to understand one of America's most important

presidents. Jeffrey Brown sits down with author Edward O'Keefe for our arts and

culture series, Canvas.

Theodore Roosevelt was known as a rugged outdoorsman, a naturalist, a soldier, a combative politician

and the 26 President of the United States, enshrined on Mount Rushmore.

But as a new book puts it, quote,

this most masculine president in the American memory

was in fact the product of largely unsung

and certainly extraordinary women.

The book, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt, the women who created a president, tells of TR as he was

known, shaped by five women.

His mother, Martha Bullock Roosevelt, his first wife Alice, who died at 22 after just

four years of marriage, his second wife Edith Kermit Roosevelt, and two sisters Anna and

Corin, key political strategists and AIDS.

Author Edward O'Keefe, a long-time broadcast and digital journalist is CEO of the

Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation and joins me now.

Welcome to you.

That's good to be with you.

I want to start with this is a president who's been written much of,

but you came to him in a very personal way

through your home state of North Dakota. Why was he so

important to you? When you grow up in North Dakota you suffer a surfeit of

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