This is a superb biography of John Milton Hay, personal secretary and biographer of Lincoln and Secretary of State for William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt. Hay was from a Mississippi River town in western Illinois and a graduate of Brown who met Lincoln as a 22-year-old in the summer of 1860. He was by his side almost every day for the rest of Lincoln's life. He and John Nicolay were the White House staff. They took care of scheduling, all correspondence, slept at the White House, and travelled with the President. They knew him better than anyone else, witnessed his sufferings and triumphs throughout the war, tried to keep Mrs. Lincoln at bay and under control, and were at his deathbed in April, 1865. Hay idolized Lincoln and measured everyone and every issue for the rest of his life through the prism of Abe Lincoln. His first postwar job took him to Paris and the beginning of his diplomatic career, leading to followup assignments in Vienna and Madrid. His lifelong facility with the English language led to a job at Greeley's New York Tribune in 1870. He established a national reputation as a man of letters and was the lead editorial writer for the paper. His marriage to Clara Stone, daughter of a Cleveland industrialist, brought him wealth and afforded him the opportunity to begin work on his and Nicolay's mammoth ten-volume biography of "the Ancient". Lincoln had picked them to write his biography and Robert Lincoln, who had possession of his father's papers, stuck to the deal. They toiled intermittently for a decade and a half on the authorized biography. Hay served as an Asst. Sect. of State, authored a popular novel, wrote for newspapers and magazines, settled his father-in-law's estate and travelled the world during this period. Throughout the 80's and 90's Hay lived the life of a wealthy American at the height of the Gilded Age. He had homes in Cleveland, New Hampshire, New York City and famously, across the street from the White House. He dabbled in Republican politics and was tempted, but never ran for office. After Mckinley's first victory in 1896, he sought to be and was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James in London. In September, 1896 just after the Spanish-American War, he became Secretary of State. He stayed on until his death in 1905. His term encompassed all of the complexity and issues we associate with America's early rise as a world-power: settling the Treaty of Paris concluding the war with Spain, resolving differences with the United Kingdom over our boundary with Canada, and, more importantly, working around an old treaty whereby we had agreed to a neutral Isthmian Canal, managing all of the diplomatic efforts to establish the Canal and Panama as an independent country, keeping the Germans out of the Caribbean, establishing the Open Door Policy in China, suppressing the Boxer Rebellion, and beginning to negotiate the settlement of the Russo-Japanese War. He was the only one of McKinley's appointments to stay on through T.R.'s election in 1904, and was universally adored as the heart and soul of the Republican party, its living, very personal connection to Lincoln. His death in 1905 was cause for national bereavement. A friend wrote, "We shall all of us love always to think that the frankness, the honesty, the brave humanity which characterized his diplomacy was the heart of Americanism, and in any moment of hesitation concerning this or that fact, we could say to ourselves that it must be right because Hay did it."
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