The episode was, above all, stupid and reckless. It was something the ex-president—and this is a common refrain when it comes to this particular ex-president—could never have gotten away with today. It also—and here’s another common refrain—could have killed him. But TR's refusal to abort his speech simply because of an inconveniently located bullet was also, and there is really no other way to say it, exceptionally badass. It suggested that Roosevelt, flesh and blood like the rest of us, was somehow less freighted by this fact than the rest of us.

Which is why it has become part of the mythology of Roosevelt, and along with it the mythology of the Roosevelts, and along with that the mythology of the American presidency—all of which were transformed, in ways both small and distinctly less so, by TR’s brand of manic machismo. When Roosevelt called himself a “Bull Moose,” he did it entirely unironically. As a state legislator, he had threatened to kick a fellow lawmaker "in the balls." One of his life’s big regrets was that he had not been injured—or, even better, disfigured—during his infamous adventure in Cuba. If a new form of Manifest Destiny would be an ongoing feature of the American 20th century, it was up to him, he felt, to put the “man” in it.

This was a conviction shared, in its way, by Roosevelt’s fifth cousin. Franklin Delano may not have had TR’s trust-busting, gun-toting swagger—and only in part because of the mid-life bout of polio that left him briefly depressed and permanently crippled—but he shared his outsized ambition. As Ken Burns puts it in The Roosevelts: An Intimate History: “Each took unabashed delight in the power of his office to do good. Each displayed unbounded optimism and self-confidence. Each refused to surrender to physical limitations that might have destroyed them. And each had an uncanny ability to rally men and women to his cause."

Every president, by historical default, is the first of the modern presidents. But the Roosevelts were especially modern—particularly in their ability, on top of everything else, to do this rallying. Their presidencies coincided with the rise of the telegraph, which made newspapers newly nimble, and of the radio, which brought the concept of “the broadcast” to the American consciousness and way of life. They used those new tools—tools that exist to transform flesh and blood into something more—to enlarge their voices, their ideas, and themselves in the minds of their fellow Americans. And then, their voices and their images having stretched, taut, across the newly expanded nation, they used them for something small: to do the dirty business of governing. Their status as media figures helped give them the mandate they needed to shape themselves as historical figures.

Americans ask a lot of our presidents. We ask, you could reasonably argue, too much of our presidents. We ask them not just to champion legislation, to lead powerful armed forces, to be heads of state, to be heads of political parties, to be constantly campaigning; we ask them also to lead us in a way that is fuzzier and yet, in some sense, more meaningful. We ask them to entertain us. We ask them to inspire us. We ask them to act, like TR before them, human and superhuman at the same time. The presidency as we understand it today involves not just red lines and red tape and split-second decisions in the Situation Room, but also turkey pardons and first pitches and many, many pancake breakfasts. It involves a conviction that Americans form not just an electorate, but a public.