According to former president of DC Paul Levitz in the documentary Batman Unmasked, when Nolan first met with him to discuss the character of Bruce Wayne, Nolan told Levitz that the best way to understand Wayne’s journey was to understand the 26th President.
The parallels are actually really specific: just like Bruce Wayne’s old man in Gotham, Theodore Roosevelt’s father was both a symbolic leader and financial philanthropist in New York. Like Wayne, Roosevelt suffered immense loss in his family as a young man when both his mother and wife died in the course of a single day. Teddy Roosevelt also disappeared on adventures in the wilderness and like Wayne, he reinvented himself during his time away, returning to New York as, in Levitz’s words, “this insane police commissioner bicycling through the city in the middle of the night.” You guys, Roosevelt was Batman on a bike.
