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Tough Teddy and Old Hickory: America’s Most Badass Presidents

Khalid Elhassan December 4, 2024 14 min

Tough - An 1828 woodcut of the Andrew Jackson vs Charles Dickinson duel — An 1828 woodcut of the Andrew Jackson vs Charles Dickinson duel. Wikimedia

13. Teddy Roosevelt’s Sickly Childhood

Teddy Roosevelt as a child – yes, boys wore dresses back then. K-Pics

America’s 26^th president, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt (1858 – 1919), was a sickly child whose frequent bouts of ill health made his parents fear that he would never reach adulthood. The son of a Manhattan socialite and a businessman philanthropist father, young Teddy often suffered severe nighttime asthma attacks that defeated the remedies of America’s best doctors. As he described the bouts in later years, they felt as if somebody had sat on his chest and tried to smother him with pillows.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.