SOURCE: "A Case Study In Philosophical Rhetoric: Theodore Roosevelt," in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1968, pp. 228-54.

In the following essay, Zyskind studies Roosevelt as an example of a public figure who embodied conflicting views and qualities whose source of may be found in the nature of philosophic rhetoric.

The minds of many men of action are opaque, or so they seem when we seek their logic. It is reasonable and important to ask whether the thought of a political figure had an intelligible pattern; but the question seems to admit of opposed answers. Plato shows this in his treatment of Pericles: In the Phaedrus Pericles is an exemplar of intellectual coherence. But in the Gorgias he exemplifies irrationality. What makes him subject to this variable treatment is that he was so excellent a rhetorician; the problem of intellectual integrity is nowhere more acute than in those men...