Eleven hours earlier that day, Theodore's mother, Martha "Mittie" Bulloch Roosevelt, had died of typhoid fever.

[5] Seeking solace, Theodore retreated from his life in New York and headed west, where he spent two years traveling and living on his ranch in North Dakota.

"[9] There were tensions in the relationship between young Alice and her stepmother Edith, who had known her husband's previous wife and made it clear that she regarded her predecessor as a beautiful, but insipid, childlike fool.

"[11] In later years, Alice expressed admiration for her stepmother's sense of humor and stated that they had shared similar literary tastes.

The Journal des débats in Paris noted that in 15 months Alice Roosevelt had attended 407 dinners, 350 balls, and 300 parties.

One paper alleged that she had stripped down to her lingerie at a drunken orgy held at a Newport, Rhode Island mansion, and danced atop a table; a story that proved to be false.

[5] On May 11, 1908, Alice amused herself in the Capitol's gallery at the House of Representatives by placing a tack on the chair of an unknown but "middle-aged" and "dignified" gentleman.

Upon encountering the tack, "like the burst of a bubble on the fountain, like the bolt from the blue, like the ball from the cannon," the unfortunate fellow leapt up in pain and surprise while she looked away.

The exhausted president commented to his friend, author Owen Wister, after she interrupted their conversation for the third time and he threatened to throw her "out the window", "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.

"[19] In 1905, Alice, along with her father's Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, led the American delegation to Japan, Hawaii, China, the Philippines, and Korea.

[22] In her autobiography, Crowded Hours, Alice made note of the event, pointing out that there was little difference between the linen skirt and blouse she had been wearing and a lady's swimsuit of the period.

This was followed by travels to England and the continent which included having dinners with King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Georges Clemenceau, Whitelaw Reid, Lord Curzon, and William Jennings Bryan.

[26] During that election cycle, Alice appeared on stage with her father's vice presidential candidate, Hiram Johnson, in Longworth's own district.

[27] Alice was renowned for her "brilliantly malicious" humor, even in this sensitive situation, since she had originally wanted to name her daughter "Deborah," as in "de Borah".

[28] When it came time for the Roosevelt family to move out of the White House, Alice buried a Voodoo doll of the new first lady, Nellie Taft, in the front yard.

[5] During the Great Depression, when she, like many other Americans, found her fortunes reversed, Alice appeared in tobacco advertisements to earn money.

When columnist and cousin Joseph Wright Alsop V claimed that there was grass-roots support for Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, who hoped to defeat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, she said yes, "the grass roots of 10,000 country clubs".

[32] Alice demolished Thomas Dewey, the 1944 opponent of her cousin Franklin, by comparing the pencil-mustached Republican to "the bridegroom on the wedding cake".

In an article in American Heritage in 1969, Joanna was described as a "highly attractive and intellectual twenty-two-year-old" and was called "a notable contributor to Mrs. Longworth's youthfulness....

When advancing age and illness incapacitated her Aunt Bamie, Alice stepped into her place as an unofficial political adviser to her father.

[citation needed] Alice took a hard-line view of the Democrats and in her youth sympathized with the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Writing in the Ladies' Home Journal in October 1932, she said of FDR, "Politically, his branch of the family and ours have always been in different camps, and the same surname is about all we have in common.....

[citation needed] Alice was a lifelong member of the Republican Party, but her political sympathies began to change when she became close to the Kennedy family and Lyndon Johnson.

"[40] She remained cordial with Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, but a perceived lack of social grace on the part of Jimmy Carter caused her to decline to ever meet him, the last sitting president in her lifetime.

In the official statement marking her death, President Carter wrote "She had style, she had grace, and she had a sense of humor that kept generations of political newcomers to Washington wondering which was worse—to be skewered by her wit or to be ignored by her.

"[41] Throughout her life Alice met 16 US Presidents: Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, her father, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford.

[citation needed] Of her quotable comments, Alice's most famous found its way onto a pillow on her settee: "If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me.

[35] When a well-known Washington senator was discovered to have been having an affair with a young woman less than half his age, she quipped, "You can't make a soufflé rise twice.