Making hay and sunshine
All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt. By John Taliaferro. Simon & Schuster; 688 pages; $35. Buy from Amazon.com

“IT HAS been a splendid little war.” John Hay meant the opposite: thank goodness for the brevity of the Spanish-American War of 1898. But the damage was done. As John Taliaferro, a former editor at Newsweek, shows in “All the Great Prizes”, but for that misinterpreted remark (and the comments made about him by Theodore Roosevelt), Hay would rank among the most influential American statesmen of the last century.
Hay was anything but a warmonger. He had had more than his fill of blood when, after the war against Spain, he became first William McKinley’s and then Roosevelt’s secretary of state. As his acute biographer recalls, Hay was only five when a hateful mob from his home town of Carthage, Illinois, broke into a jail to murder two Mormon leaders. He was scarcely any older when an escaping slave bled heavily in the basement of his family’s home. He was barely out of his teens when more Americans died at Antietam than in any battle before or since. And he was just 26 when, as the president’s secretary, he sat beside the bed of the dying Abraham Lincoln.
As a thinker, talker and writer, Hay’s brilliance gained him Lincoln’s confidence and earned him a post at the president’s elbow. Hay and his best friend, Henry Adams, were among the finest writers of their day and Mr Taliaferro is able to draw on their letters to each other—letters packed with inside information and malicious gossip. They must have made this biography a joy to write.
Hay’s productivity was impressive. After the death of Lincoln, he edited a New York newspaper, occupied diplomatic posts in Paris, Madrid, Vienna and London, cultivated friendships with Rudyard Kipling, Henry James and Mark Twain and still found the time to co-author a ten-volume biography of Lincoln. He was thus highly qualified to become America’s secretary of state in 1898. After providing a backbone for McKinley, a president famously described as “a kindly soul in a spineless body”, Hay became the perfect foil for Roosevelt, McKinley’s successor.
Roosevelt and Hay worked well together. The secretary of state spoke softly while the president carried his big stick. Between them they created two lasting achievements: the Anglo-American special relationship and the preservation of China as a unified country.
Hay died in office in 1905 but, aided by Roosevelt’s bluster, he had already ensured that relations between Britain and America were in better shape than at any time since the American Revolution. Simultaneously Hay struggled to keep China intact and, in Mr Taliaferro’s book, this was much the harder task. In its victory over Spain the United States had gained several Pacific islands and a formidable presence in East Asia, which provided America with the influence it needed to persuade Russia, Japan and the European powers “to preserve Chinese territorial and administrative integrity”. Their initiative prevented the partition of China and also, of course, served America’s commercial interests.
He deserved a large share of the applause. Roosevelt gave it to him in public, but in a notorious letter to a friend in 1909 he claimed Hay’s “moral timidity” caused him “to shrink from all that was rough in life, and therefore from practical affairs”. Here the president lacked guts. As Mr Taliaferro tartly notes, “Roosevelt never said any such thing while Hay was alive”.