In all of American history, millions of men and women have served in the nation’s armed forces. Of those many millions, only 3,517 have received the nation’s highest award for military valor: the Medal of Honor. The Medal is sometimes referred to as the Congressional Medal of Honor because it is awarded “in the name of Congress,” but “Medal of Honor” is the correct designation. Only twice have a father and son both received the award. The first father-son recipients were Arthur and Douglas MacArthur for actions in the Civil War and World War II, respectively. The other father-son tandem includes the only President of the United States to receive the Medal: Theodore Roosevelt, who received it for his actions in the Spanish-American War; and his son, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., for fighting on D-Day in World War II.

A young Abraham Lincoln once lamented that his generation had nothing to accomplish that could ever eclipse the glory of the Founding Fathers. He was wrong, both about his generation and certainly about his own role in American history. Similarly, Theodore Roosevelt, born in 1858, revered the men who fought and won the Civil War for the Union and worried that he would never have a similar chance to prove himself in the “manliest” test of all: combat. Roosevelt had views on masculinity and the romantic appeal of war that seems antiquated and even naïve to us now, but both they, and an idealized remembrance of the Civil War, were commonplace in the era in which he lived. Even as he got older, TR advocated for the “vigorous life” and regularly pushed himself to overachieve in both the physical and political realms.

Roosevelt was nearly forty years old and serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898. Remembering his youthful idolization of Civil War veterans and still obsessed with proving his mettle, he leapt at the chance to participate in America’s first foreign conflict in more than three decades. (One wonders why he never joined the army to fight in the so-called Indian Wars, which lasted long enough for TR to have come of age and fought. Perhaps the well-known drudgery of the frontier army—even during the Indian conflicts—and the assumed lack of opportunities for glory kept him away.) He went to work raising a regiment that would eventually become the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, commonly known as the “Rough Riders.”

Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt Sr. (Library of Congress)

On July 1, 1898, Roosevelt led his men in the battle of San Juan Hill, the bloodiest and most famous battle to come out of the conflict that Secretary of State John Hay called “a splendid little war.” The Rough Riders actually assaulted Kettle Hill, supporting an assault by the African American “Buffalo Soldiers” of the regular 10th U.S. Cavalry. Much of the fighting in the battle of San Juan Hill was done by African American infantry and cavalry units, but those soldiers never received near the level of recognition and praise heaped upon the Rough Riders and Roosevelt. When the war ended soon after, Roosevelt returned to his native New York a hero and was elected governor just a few months later. He ran as President William McKinley’s vice presidential candidate in the 1900 presidential election, becoming the twenty-sixth President of the United States upon McKinley’s assassination in September 1901.

Exactly 100 years later, in January 2001, President Bill Clinton awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously to Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt for his actions at the battle of San Juan Hill more than a century before, making TR the only president to be a recipient of the nation’s highest military award. Decades after Roosevelt’s death, President Harry S. Truman, himself a World War I combat veteran, told a soldier to whom he awarded the Medal of Honor, “I’d rather have that medal than be President of the United States.”

Theodore Roosevelt died at the relatively young age of 60 in 1919, just six months after his son, Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt of the U.S. Army Air Service, died in aerial combat over France during World War I. The former president’s son Theodore “Ted” Roosevelt III, commonly called Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was thirty-one and himself serving in World War I when his father died. Ted Roosevelt fought in several major battles and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, eventually commanding the U.S. Army’s 26th Infantry Regiment. He received the Distinguished Service Cross at war’s end, then went home to the United States to begin his own political and business career. Like his father, he served in the New York State Assembly and as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He was Governor of Puerto Rico and then Governor General of the Philippines in the 1930s.

In 1940, Ted Roosevelt attended a military refresher course and was made a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. He entered active duty in April 1941 and became commander, once again, of the 26th Infantry Regiment of the 1 st Infantry Division. He led the regiment in battles in North Africa and Sicily. Roosevelt did not get along well with General George S. Patton, and in early 1944 he received a promotion to brigadier general and reassignment as assistant division commander of the 4th Infantry Division.

On June 6, 1944, the 4th Division assaulted Utah Beach during the D-Day landings. General Roosevelt was the only general officer to land by sea with the first wave of troops on D-Day, and at 56 years old he was the oldest American soldier participating in the invasion. He was also the only man whose own son also landed in the invasion forces that day: his son, Captain Quentin Roosevelt II, named for his brother, landed in one of the first waves to hit Omaha Beach.

Roosevelt coordinated attacks and greeted every successive regiment landing at Utah Beach, despite a heart condition and arthritis that forced him to use a cane. On July 12, 1944, just five weeks after the D-Day landings, he died of a heart attack on the same day that General Omar Bradley had ordered his promotion to major general and written orders reassigning Roosevelt to command of the 90th Infantry Division. Years later, when someone asked Bradley to name the most heroic action he had ever seen in combat, he immediately answered, “Ted Roosevelt on Utah Beach.” General Roosevelt was initially buried in Sainte-Mere-Eglise, but his remains were later moved to the American cemetery in Normandy. In 1955, the Roosevelt family had the remains of Ted’s brother, Quentin Roosevelt, the pilot killed in World War I, moved to this cemetery and placed next to those of his brother.

General Roosevelt was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on D-Day on September 28, 1944, just two-and- a-half months after his death. President Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.” He could have been speaking of both himself and his son.