A son of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, Kermit graduated from Harvard College, served in both World Wars (with both the British and U.S.

He fought a lifelong battle with depression and died by suicide while serving in the US Army in Alaska during World War II.

In 1909, as a freshman, he and his father (recently out of office as president)—both of whom loved nature and outdoor sports—went on a year-long expedition in Africa funded by the Smithsonian Institution.

[3] At the time of the expedition, Roosevelt was newly engaged to Belle Wyatt Willard, daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Spain.

The scope of the expedition expanded beyond the original plans, leaving the participants inadequately prepared for a trip tracing the River of Doubt from its source through hundreds of kilometers of uncharted rainforest.

The climate and terrain, inadequate gear and food, and two deaths (one drowning, the other murder) turned a scientific expedition into an ordeal.

Roosevelt's father contracted malaria and a serious infection resulting from a minor leg wound, weakening him to the point that he considered taking a fatal dose of morphine rather than being a burden to his companions.

Roosevelt told his father that he was bringing him back literally "dead or alive" and if he died, he would be an even bigger burden to the expedition.

Although Roosevelt contracted malaria as well, he downplayed his sickness to save quinine for TR, nearly dying himself before the physician insisted on giving him the medication by injection.

His daughter, Clochette Roosevelt, married John Gorham Palfrey, who was dean of Columbia College and a member of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.

He was attached to the 14th Light Armoured Motor Battery of the Machine Gun Corps, but the British High Command decided they could not risk his life and so they made him an officer in charge of transport (Ford Model T cars).

[8] In 1918, he learned that his youngest brother Quentin, a pilot, had been shot down over France and had been buried by the Germans with full military honors.

[1] In 1925, Roosevelt accompanied his brother Ted on a hunting expedition across the Himalayas, over uncharted mountain passes rising from the Vale of Kashmir through the ancient Silk Route into China, in search of the legendary bighorn wild sheep called Ovis poli.

[12] By October 14, 1939, when Britain was at war with Germany, Roosevelt had negotiated a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Middlesex Regiment with the assistance of his friend, Winston Churchill, who was by then First Lord of the Admiralty.

His wife enlisted the help of his cousin, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ordered the FBI to track him down, and he was brought back to his family.

In late April 1942, his brother Archibald sought to have him committed to a sanitarium for a year; at month's end, he agreed to a four-month stay at an institution in Hartford.

[18] To extricate him from his current situation, the President gave him a commission as a major in the United States Army, and had him transferred and posted to Fort Richardson, Alaska, where he worked as an intelligence officer and helped establish a territorial militia of Eskimos and Aleuts.

[24] Kermit Roosevelt appears as a minor character in the Wilbur Smith novel Assegai on safari in East Africa with his father.