All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  On Friday the thirteenth, McKinley began to sink, as sepsis from his abdominal wound took over. Hay had intended to start for the Fells that morning but then had to wire Clara that he was staying put. “President’s condition more serious,” he informed her. “The worst is feared.” He spent the rest of the day in his office, monitoring the dispatches from Buffalo. An evening paper reported that McKinley looked “worn and nervous and anxious to the last degree.” At ten o’clock that night, another bulletin arrived: “The President is pulseless and dying. He may live about an hour.”

  He lived another four, dying shortly after 2 am on September 14, whispering the words to his favorite hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

  As McKinley was breathing his last, Theodore Roosevelt was racing down the slope of Mount Marcy toward the station at North Creek, New York. Throughout the previous day, runners had delivered messages advising him that the president’s condition was grave and urging him to make haste. When Roosevelt galloped up to the depot shortly after five in the morning, he was handed a telegram bearing the blunt announcement: “The President died at two-fifteen this morning.” The sender was John Hay—his first communication to the twenty-sixth president of the United States.

  It was agreed among the cabinet that Hay and Treasury Secretary Lyman Gage would remain in the capital. Hay busied himself with the necessary tasks of mourning and transition. He directed that all executive offices be closed. He drafted a letter to be sent to all the ministries abroad, announcing the president’s death and the circumstances: “Laid low by the act of an assassin, the week-long struggle to save his life had been watched with keen solicitude, not alone by the people of this country who raised him from their own ranks to the high office he filled, but by the people of all friendly nations, whose messages of sympathy, and of hope while hope was possible, have been most consolatory in this time of sore trial.”

  Next he issued a memorandum outlining the observances of the days to follow. McKinley would lie in state for a day in the Buffalo City Hall; then to Washington to lie in state in the Capitol, followed by services in the Rotunda; and finally a funeral train to Canton for burial. Recalling the lengthy, overwrought journey of Lincoln’s casket from the capital to Springfield, Hay advised, “No ceremonies are expected in the cities and towns along the route of the funeral train beyond the tolling of bells.”

  Memories of too many assassinations beset him as he struggled through the day. The similarities between Garfield’s and McKinley’s were especially haunting. Charles Guiteau and Leon Czolgosz were both unhinged loners who had lamely attempted to attach themselves to higher causes—for Guiteau, the Republican Stalwarts; for Czolgosz, the anarchist movement. They had both approached the president in a public place and fired point-blank, fully expecting to be apprehended. Both presidents lingered—though McKinley not nearly as long as Garfield—and then died of infection. (And both Guiteau and Czolgosz were determined by the court not to be insane and were executed promptly: in Czolgosz’s case, on October 29, 1901, thirty-three days after his conviction.)

  Hay’s affinity with the three assassinated leaders—combined with the death of Del—was a crueler coincidence than any nightmare could conjure. “[M]y personal grief is overwhelmed in public sorrow,” he wrote to a friend in London. “The President was one of the sweetest and gentlest natures I have ever known among public men. . . . And now he too is gone and left the world far poorer by his absence. I wonder how much grief we can endure. It seems to me I am full to the brim. I see no chance of recovery—no return to the days when there seemed something worth while. . . . What a strange and tragic fate it has been of mine—to stand by the bier of three of my dearest friends, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, three of the gentlest of men, all risen to be head of the State, and all done to death by assassins.”

  IT HAD BEEN DIFFICULT enough for Hay to adjust to Theodore Roosevelt as vice president; learning to address the man he had once called Teddy and then Theodore as “Mr. President” would take some practice. Roosevelt’s rambunctiousness—physical, intellectual, and political—seemed decidedly unpresidential, compared to the decorum of other chief executives Hay had known. There was something unsettling about Roosevelt’s push, his certainty—his very inevitability. While McKinley still lay stricken in Buffalo, Adams had written to Hay from Sweden with considerable misgiving: “[B]ehind all, in my mind, in all our minds, silent and awful like the Chicago express, flies the thought of Teddy’s luck!” With Roosevelt now president, Hay answered Adams: “I . . . shuddered at the awful clairvoyance of your last phrase from Stockholm about Theodore’s luck. Well, he is here in the saddle again.”

  Whatever uneasiness Hay may have felt, he was too much a gentleman, statesman, and patriot to convey even a shadow of disrespect for Roosevelt. On Roosevelt’s second day as president, Hay wrote him a letter of bittersweet affirmation. “My dear Roosevelt,” he began, not yet using the formal appellation of office. “If the Presidency had come to you in any other way, no one would have congratulated you with better heart than I. My sincere affection and esteem for you, my old-time love for your father—would he could have lived to see you where you are!—would have been deeply gratified. And even from the depths of the sorrow where I sit, with my grief for the President mingled and confused with that for my boy so that I scarcely know from hour to hour the true source of my tears, I do still congratulate you, not only on the threshold of an official career which I know will be glorious, but on the vast opportunity for useful work which lies before you. With your youth, your ability, your health and strength, the courage God has given you to do right, there are no bounds to the good you can accomplish for your country and the name you will leave in its annals.”

  Then Hay, the graying chamberlain, presented his seal and sword to the newly crowned king. “My official life is at an end—my natural life will not be long extended,” he submitted, “and so, in the dawn of what I am sure will be a great and splendid future, I venture to give you the heartfelt benediction of the past. God bless you.” He signed himself “Yours faithfully, John Hay.”

  Almost before McKinley’s corpse was cold, speculation had begun over which cabinet members Roosevelt would keep and which he would replace. At the top of the list of discards was Hay, or so the New York Herald reported, recalling how quickly Secretary of State Blaine had departed after Chester Arthur assumed the presidency. Hay’s predicted successor was Cabot Lodge, who, like Adams, had been in Europe when McKinley was shot. And if it were not Lodge, then Elihu Root would switch chairs from War to State. Aware of Roosevelt’s long-standing disapproval of his handling of the canal treaty, Hay fully anticipated that he would not be asked to stay, and he honestly would not have minded stepping down. He had been talking about leaving at the end of the year, or soon, anyway.

  He was at the Washington station on the evening of the sixteenth when the train carrying Roosevelt, the other cabinet members, and McKinley’s casket arrived from Buffalo. Before Hay could take the initiative, Roosevelt clasped him vigorously by the hand and, “without waiting an instant, told me I must stay with him—that I could not decline nor even consider,” Hay recounted to Adams. “I saw of course it was best for him to start off that way, & so said I would stay, forever, of course, for it would be worse to say I would stay a while than it would be to go out at once.”

  At Roosevelt’s request, Hay remained in Washington while the president and the rest of the cabinet attended McKinley’s funeral in Canton. “[A]s I am the next heir to the Presidency,” he mentioned darkly, referring to an 1886 law that placed the secretary of state after the vice president in order of succession, “[Roosevelt] did not want too many eggs in the same Pullman car.” Once the funeral party had returned and Roosevelt had assured his cabinet of his support and determination to carry forward the policies and ideals of the martyred McKinley, Hay returned to the Fells.

  There he received the next sad blow. His oldest friend, fellow presidential secretary, roommate, and co-
author, John George Nicolay, had died in Washington on September 26, after a long and gradual decline.

  WHILE HAY TALLIED HIS grief and took what comfort he could from the peace and quiet of New Hampshire, Ambassador Choate was making progress in London. There was a brief moment of tension when the British got wind that the canal might be built in Panama instead of Nicaragua, but once Hay assured Choate—who in turn assured the Foreign Office—that the treaty applied to all isthmian routes, no more wrinkles remained to be ironed out. Lodge arrived in London the last week of September and gave his blessing to the last round of revisions. The expectation was that Paunceforte would bring the treaty with him when he sailed for the United States at the end of October, allowing ample time for it to be signed by both countries and presented to the Senate when its session commenced on December 2. Nothing was yet certain, Hay knew, but “it was past the breakers,” he told Roosevelt.

  These were some of the most buoyant words he had uttered in months. The pleasant air and “tingling silentness” of New Hampshire were doing him good, he acknowledged, quoting the poet Shelley. In a few more weeks he hoped he might be able to resume the rigors of the State Department. He would be sixty-three on October 8, he told Roosevelt, informing him of his intention to stay on at the Fells longer than usual. “On that day I become an old man.”

  Roosevelt encouraged Hay to take as much time as he needed and chastened him for his dim view of old age. “[Mrs. Roosevelt] is forty, and I do not think I deceive myself when I say she neither looks nor acts nor feels as if she was thirty. As for me, on the whole I have continued all my life to have a better time year after year.”

  Hay took another step in his climb out of despondency when he went to New Haven on October 23 to accept a degree on the occasion of Yale’s bicentennial. His fellow honorees included Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Princeton professor Woodrow Wilson, and Mark Twain. “I wish you might have been at Yale last Wednesday,” Hay wrote to Clarence King, an alumnus, who was bedridden in Phoenix, losing his fight with tuberculosis. “It was a splendid and most impressive sight. They were all very good to me, and I had the first day of comfort I have known for ever so long—but always there was the undertone of grief and regret.”

  He was back in Washington at the end of the month, awaiting word on the canal treaty. At last Choate was able to report from London that “the great job is accomplished.” Ambassador Paunceforte was on his way with the final version of the treaty; Choate followed soon thereafter, and all were in Washington at the first of the month. Choate lunched with the president and Hay found them “in the best of spirits.”

  They had good reason. On November 16, the canal commission issued its final report. The engineering cost of a canal across Nicaragua was estimated at $189 million. Panama, the shorter route, came in lower, at $144 million, but the French canal company had refused to set a firm price on the sale of its concession; estimates ranged from $40 million to perhaps as much as $100 million. In the face of such uncertainty and disparity, the commission unanimously recommended Nicaragua.

  Two days later, Hay and Paunceforte signed the treaty that bore their names. Lodge was quick to assure the secretary that this time the Senate would ratify it. Hay was extremely grateful to Choate, not only for his diplomacy toward Foreign Secretary Lansdowne but also for his treatment of Lodge while the senator was in London. “Lodge came home regarding it as his Treaty,” Choate told Henry White, adding wickedly, “Never breathe this to a soul.”

  True to Lodge’s word, the Senate ratified the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty, 76–6, on December 6. Four weeks after that, the House of Representatives passed the Hepburn bill, 308–2, appropriating $180 million to construct a canal across Nicaragua. “This has been a year of sorrows—but of great work as well,” Hay wrote Clara, who still had not arrived in Washington. “If success could make one happy we ought not to complain.”

  But the pall of Del’s death was still palpable. “Every year of his life comes back to me,” Hay admitted to Clara in December. “My sorrow is as keen now, when I suffer my mind to go back to it, as it was last June—so that I wonder if I will ever be any better.”

  Even so, the future did offer a slim hint of sunshine. Helen and Payne Whitney at last announced their engagement and set their wedding for February 1902. “They are old friends and playmates and Payne was Del’s most intimate friend,” Hay wrote Whitelaw Reid. “Mrs. Hay and I have seen a great deal of him this year and we like him very much.”

  THAT, HOWEVER, WAS THE last respite from gloom for the year. Clarence King had known for months that he was dying. As the end neared, he told Ada that after his death she might wish to consider changing her and the children’s names from Todd to King. He promised a small inheritance. He did not ask that she come see him, and he discouraged other visitors as well. His letters to Hay were full of regret. “In my present condition of uncertainty of folded hands and days of reflection,” he wrote in August, “I have been trying to understand why a man as well endowed with intelligence as I should have made such a failure.” If he shared with Hay or Adams the details of his double identity, any such letters have been lost, destroyed, or otherwise kept from the eyes of outsiders.

  Hay continued to send money, and Adams wrote from Europe, offering to do the same. Hay, meanwhile, kept Adams apprised of King’s condition. “He is, I fancy, quite penniless,” he reported in November. “Fate has done her worst. I send him a check now and then when I can remember it. . . . If one of us could go out there and kill him, it would be a brotherly act.”

  No such intervention was necessary. Clarence King died in Phoenix in the early hours of Christmas Eve. Hay’s tears, to the extent that he had any left, were those of frustration as well as anguish. For him, and for Adams also, King was their beau idéal, “the best and brightest man of his generation,” Hay declared, “with talents immeasurably beyond any of his contemporaries, with industry that has often sickened me to witness it.” Indeed, King had “everything in his favor but blind luck.”

  “ ‘Ca vous amuse, la vie?’ ” Hay asked Adams, Heart to Heart.

  On hearing of King’s death, Theodore Roosevelt took time from his family on Christmas Day to write Hay one more letter of condolence. “Dear John,” he began. “I am very, very sorry; I know it is useless for me to say so—but I do feel deeply for you. You have been well within range of the rifle pits this year—so near them that I do not venture to wish you a merry Christmas. But may all good henceforth go with you and yours.” He signed his letter: “Your attached friend, Theodore Roosevelt.”

  In the new year, and during the three and a half years that remained in John Hay’s life, this attachment would grow stronger and closer than either man could have foreseen.

  CHAPTER 17

  A Reasonable Time

  When John Hay and Theodore Roosevelt were in each other’s company, they got along famously. It was only when they were apart, and after Hay’s death, that their differences became more pronounced and tended to overshadow the extraordinary rapport and mutual respect they displayed when they were face to face. Those wishing to stress the distance between Hay and Roosevelt make much of two letters that Roosevelt wrote to Cabot Lodge, the first in July 1905, a few days after Hay’s death, and the second in January 1909, shortly after a selection of Hay’s correspondence, edited by Clara Hay and Henry Adams, appeared in print.

  “Personally,” Roosevelt wrote of Hay in the first letter, “his loss is very great to me because I was very fond of him.” However, Roosevelt added, “From the standpoint of the public business . . . the case is different. . . . His name, his reputation, his staunch loyalty, all made him a real asset of the administration. But in actual work I had to do the big things myself.”

  The second letter, while at first offering higher and lengthier praise, was ultimately far more dismissive. “He was a man of remarkable ability,” Roosevelt granted Hay after reading through his published correspondence. “I think he was the most delightful man to talk to I ever
met, for in his conversation he continually made out of hand those delightful epigrammatic remarks which we would all like to make. . . . He was moreover, I think without exception, the best letter-writer of his age. . . . His dignity, his remarkable literary ability, his personal charm, and the respect his high character and long service commanded thruout the country, together with his wide acquaintance with foreign statesmen and foreign capitals, made him one of the public servants of real value to the United States.”

  Then, while laying more garlands, Roosevelt could not resist crimping a few of the leaves: “He was at his best at a dinner table or in a drawing room, and in neither place have I ever seen anyone’s best that was better than his,” the president allowed; yet Hay’s “easy-loving nature” and “moral timidity” also caused him to “shrink from all that was rough in life, and therefore from practical affairs.”

  Hay’s soigné manner affected his choice of friends, a circle that the hard-nosed Roosevelt found too effeminate. “[H]is temptation,” he said of Hay, “was to associate as far as possible only with men of refined and cultivated tastes, who lived apart from the world of affairs, and who, if Americans, were wholly lacking in robustness of fiber. His close intimacy with Henry James and Henry Adams—charming men, but exceedingly undesirable companions for any man of a strong nature—and the tone of satirical cynicism which they admired, and which he always affected in writing them, marked that phase of his character which so impaired his usefulness as a public man.”

  With characteristic egotism, Roosevelt purported that he had compensated for Hay’s shortcomings with his own dynamism. “In public life during the time he was Secretary of State under me he accomplished little,” his appraisal continued. “I had a great fascination for his fastidious literary skill, and liked to listen to him; I saw much of him, and found his company a relaxation; but in the Department of State his usefulness to me was almost exclusively the usefulness of a fine figurehead. He never initiated a policy or was of real assistance in carrying thru a policy; but he sometimes phrased what I desired said in a way that was of real service; and the general respect for him was such that his presence in the Cabinet was a strength to the administration.”