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Samuel Gándara
June 12th, 2014
Mr. Wong
BA 285
Comparing and Contrasting the Leadership Styles of
Theodore Roosevelt and William Gates III
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was born on October 27, 1858 wealthy family in New York City.
Roosevelt was born with asthma, and because of this physical weakness he embraced his life as
needing lots of effort. He attended Harvard University to study biology and develop an interest in
naval affairs. One year out of Harvard he was elected to the New York State Assembly to become
a leader of the Republican Party. He left politics in 1884 when his first wife Alice died after
giving birth to become a rancher in the Dakotas, but when a blizzard destroyed his cattle he
returned to politics by losing a race for mayor of New York. He became the city police
Commissioner in the 1890s and by 1897 Roosevelt was effectively running the Navy
Department. Roosevelt helped form the Rough Riders in 1898 during the war with Spain, a
combination of wealthy Easterners and Western cowboys, this gave him national fame for his
courage for battling in Cuba and returned to be elected governor of New York.
Roosevelt became the 25th Vice President of the United States of America on March 4,
1901. When President McKinley was assassinated Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th
President of the United States at the age of 42, still the youngest person to become president.
Roosevelt was reelected in 1904 in a landslide against conservative Democrat Alton Brooks
Parker. He promised a fair deal to the average citizen while breaking up monopolistic
corporations, holding down railroad rates, and guaranteeing pure food and drugs, he nicknamed
these domestic policies a “Square Deal.” This made him the first president to speak out against
conservation.
On October 14, 1912, a saloonkeeper named John Flammang Schrank shot Theodore
Roosevelt, but the bullet lodged in his chest only after penetrating his steel eyeglass case and
through a 50 page single folded copy of the speech he was carrying in his jacket. As an
experienced hunter and anatomist, Roosevelt correctly knew that since he was not coughing
blood the bullet had not completely penetrated to his lung, so he declined all suggestions to go to
the hospital immediately. He delivered his scheduled 90 minute speech after opening with,
“Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have been shot; but it
takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” It was found later that it would be less dangerous to
leave the bullet in his chest then to remove it. Theodore Roosevelt died on January 6, 1919
sometime between 4:00 AM and 4:15 AM, his last words were “Please put out that light, James”
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to his family servant James Amos. Theodore Roosevelt’s physician said that the cause of death
was a clot of blood that had detached itself from a vein and entered his lungs.
On October 28, 1955 William Henry Gates III, also known as Bill Gates was born in
Seattle, Washington to an upper-middle-class family. Growing up Gates’ parents had a law career
in mind for him and encouraged competition. In eighth he wrote his first computer program on a
Teletype Model 33 ASR, the program was an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed people
to play against the computer. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans were later
band for the summer after they were caught exploiting bugs in the operation system to obtain
free computer time. After the ban was lifted, the four students were hired to find bugs in
Computer Center Corporation’s software in exchange for computer time. When the school
figured out about Bill Gates’ programming abilities, they had him write the school’s computer
program to schedule students into classes, he modified the code so that he was in classes with
more girls then guys. When graduating from Lakeside School in 1973, he enrolled into Harvard
College in the fall of 1973 with a SAT score of 1590 out of 1600. He remained in contact with
Paul Allen until they found their opportunity to start their own computer software company by
dropping out of Harvard.
The software company that Bill Gates and Paul Allen decided to start was of course
Microsoft, which became the world’s largest personal computer software company in the world.
