I was brought into intimate contact with him only during the two and a half years immediately preceding his death.

I was then President, and perforce watched all his actions at close range.
During that time he showed himself to be a man of rugged sincerity of purpose, of great courage and loyalty, and of unswerving devotion to the interests of the Nation and the people as he saw those interests.

He was as sincerely desirous of helping laboring men as of helping capitalists.
His ideals were in many ways not my ideals, and there were points where both by temperament and by conviction we were far apart.

Before this time he had always been unfriendly to me; and I do not think he ever grew to like me, at any rate not until the very end of his life.
Moreover, I came to the Presidency under circumstances which, if he had been a smaller man, would inevitably have thrown him into violent antagonism to me.

He was the close and intimate friend of President McKinley.