Theodore Roosevelt

On October 14, 1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a would-be assassin. The bullet was slowed by his folded speech and a metal glasses case in his coat pocket. Roosevelt, judging from the fact that he was not coughing blood that the wound was not fatal, went ahead and spoke for well over an hour before agreeing to go to the hospital. The bullet stayed in his body for the rest of his life.

He was born at 7:45 p.m. on October 27, 1858, in a brownstone on East 20th Street in New York City, a time given in a 1959 biography, and his chart is a study in will. His Sun is in Scorpio in the fifth house, alongside Mercury, also in Scorpio. Scorpio is the sign of intensity, endurance and transformation; the fifth house governs play, creativity, children and adventure. A Scorpio Sun in the fifth describes someone who throws himself into experience with enormous force, and Roosevelt treated hunting, boxing, ranching and exploring as something close to a calling. He also raised six children with famous, rough-and-tumble enthusiasm.

He began as a frail, asthmatic boy who built his body through deliberate, punishing exercise. Mars, the planet of physical drive, sits in Capricorn in his eighth house. Capricorn is a sign in which astrologers consider Mars especially strong, disciplined and enduring, and the eighth house is the house of crisis, loss and survival. The placement fits a life marked by catastrophe and recovery. On February 14, 1884, his mother and his young wife, Alice, died in the same house on the same day. Roosevelt wrote a single line in his diary, an X, and the words "The light has gone out of my life," then left for the Dakota Badlands to work as a rancher.

He came back and climbed fast: New York City police commissioner, assistant secretary of the Navy, the Rough Riders and San Juan Hill in 1898, governor of New York, vice president, and in 1901, after the assassination of William McKinley, president at 42, the youngest in the nation's history.

With Gemini, the sign of curiosity and words, on his Ascendant, he was one of the most prolific writers ever to hold the office, publishing dozens of books on history, nature and his own adventures. His Moon is in Cancer in the second house, home to resources and values. Cancer is protective, and in the second it ties emotional security to what one guards and preserves. As president he protected roughly 230 million acres of public land, creating national forests, wildlife refuges and national monuments, and conservation became his most lasting legacy.

In 1906 he became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. He died in his sleep in 1919. The vice president of the time, Thomas Marshall, said that death had to take him sleeping, because if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.