At the suggestion of the American consul in Genoa, they drove down the coast to Nervi to consult a German physician. Dr. Stifler examined Hay thoroughly, testing his blood and measuring his pulse and heartbeat. The diagnosis was not simply “nervous” or “dyspeptic,” as Dr. Rixey had supposed. Stifler was sure that Hay’s heart was enlarged, a condition, he said, “very common among public men.” The doctor recommended that Hay go to Bad Nauheim, near Hamburg, and take a course of therapeutic baths. A railway strike and the dulcet Mediterranean air kept the Hays and Adams in Nervi another two weeks, and they did not arrive at Nauheim until April 22.
Nauheim had been known for its regenerative waters since the Iron Age and probably earlier. In the late nineteenth century, under the direction of Dr. Isidore Groedel, the spa began specializing in the care of cardiac patients. The rich and royal made the pilgrimage from all over Europe, Russia, and America to soak in waters naturally high in salt and carbonic acid. “The baths act like external champagne,” Alvey Adee, who knew his way around Europe, wrote to his boss, encouraging him to make the trip. “[T]he carbonic acid bites and tickles the skin as it does the tongue. The circulation is stimulated, the tired nerves wake up, and the whole ganglionic system is put in the way of regaining strength.” If Hay needed any further recommendation, he had only to recall that Lizzie Cameron had been to the spa several years earlier after a bout of influenza was feared to have weakened her heart—which, as her admirers well knew, proved to be plenty resilient.
Dr. Groedel confirmed Stifler’s diagnosis and prescribed a regimen of twenty baths, four per week. When Hay asked the doctor candidly whether his condition was such that he ought to resign as secretary of state, Groedel pointed out that six years earlier Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, secretary of the German navy, had come to Nauheim with a similar heart problem and was still at his post. Nonetheless, Hay wrote Roosevelt, telling him that, even though there was “no reason why the malady should be progressive,” he would understand entirely if Roosevelt decided to replace him. “I will not go through the form of offering you my commission,” he said, “though I often feel I have no right to hold it and not do the work it calls for.”
Roosevelt, who was hunting wolves and bears in Oklahoma and Colorado, wrote back to assure Hay that the job was still his. “I want you to rest almost absolutely this summer so as to be ready for the inevitable worries next winter,” the president counseled. In the meantime, Adee and his fellow assistant secretary, Francis Loomis, could keep the department running, with Secretary of War Taft “sitting on the lid”—Adee’s joke; Taft was obese—while Roosevelt was afield.
Adams went off to Paris, leaving Hay to his treatments. Dr. Groedel put him on a strict diet and forbade him from walking far or fast or uphill or while talking or after meals. Between baths, that left carriage rides, listening to a regimental band on the terrace, and reading. Clara reported to Adams at the beginning of May that her husband was a star patient. “He certainly does look better this morning,” she observed, “having lost that harassed look he had.” Groedel confirmed that the hydrotherapy was working and that the enlargement of the heart was diminishing.
Clara was encouraged enough that she too left for Paris; Hay would follow her when he finished his course at the end of the month. With each bath, the carbonation and salinity were increased and the temperature of the water lowered, stimulating the heart in stages. On May 22, Hay immersed himself in a thirty-two-degree bath and pronounced it “warm and comfortable after [the] first minute.”
That same day, however, he received a jolt that raised his blood pressure considerably. Henry Wilson, the American minister in Brussels, wrote Hay that Leopold II—“King of the Belgians” but also the imperialist ravager of the Congo and a “rattlepated old lunatic,” in Hay’s book—wanted to meet Hay in person. “I do not wish to see Mr. Hay as one of the great men of the world, whose services on behalf of civilization can hardly be overestimated,” the king solicited. “I simply want to know him in a democratic every day way, and as one man knows another man.”
Three days later, Hay received a telegram from Charlemagne Tower in Berlin that Kaiser Wilhelm II hoped to make his acquaintance as well. Next he heard from Joseph Choate in London that King Edward VII wished Hay could find a moment to call on his way home.
After consulting with Dr. Groedel, who strongly advised against any such royal intercourse, Hay was able to decline the kaiser’s invitation and reckoned that he had finessed Leopold as well. But two days before he was to leave Nauheim, he walked into his hotel and found the king seated in an armchair by the elevator. Hay had no choice but to invite His Highness up to his room, until, pleading fatigue, he was able to send his guest on his way.
The next day, after a final bath, Groedel informed him that his enlargement was gone, and, “although the heart still seemed rather weak and excitable and the sounds not strong, everything was much better than when I came.” Groedel then gave Hay a list of prohibitions “as long as a chapter of Deuteronomy”: no cabbage, radishes, onions, or anything flatulent; little red meat; no aerated water or champagne; no sweets except the plainest pudding; no public speaking and not much animated conversation, especially after dinner. Groedel also advised him against visiting the foreign offices in Paris and London. He must stay perfectly quiet in the first two weeks after his course of baths—a crucial element of his rehabilitation known as Nachkur (aftercare). “On the whole,” Hay grumbled, “a very dismal prospect.”
He slept well enough that night, but in the morning the chest pain was back. “I seem fated to leave Nauheim as I left New York,” he wrote. “Even when the pain would die away the pulse kept racing.”
He took an overnight train to Paris, and Adams was there to meet him in a brand-new automobile. They spent the day motoring through the Bois de Boulogne, Saint-Cloud, Versailles, and Marly-le-Roi. It was one of those sublime spring days, the roadsides abloom, and doubtless the memories came flooding back—although this was not how he had observed Paris on his previous visit, on the way back to London from Egypt in 1898. They returned to their hotel by five at “an incredible rate of speed.” Over the next two days Hay met with the French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé and took more long outings in Adams’s machine. So much for Nachkur.
Adams dropped Hay and Clara off at the Gare du Nord on the morning of June 2. “Certainly I have done what little I could,” he wrote Lizzie, “and I much doubt its use. Hay has not gained strength yet. Paris pulled him down at once. His nerves are gone. He is in no better physical condition than when we sailed.” Adams, ever the cynical outsider, could not comprehend why Hay did not embrace the inevitable and leave office while there was still life and dignity left in him. “Theodore is his own Cabinet, and especially likes to play with foreign kings,” Adams continued to Lizzie. “Hay has had no choice but to hold the hats and look on. He had better go out, now that his excuse is good. It is true that I have said so from the first:—Get out before you are kicked out! was my standing proverb. He said he wanted to see himself get kicked out. Instead, he merely stays kicked in.”
In London, Hay was even more restive than in Paris; the temptations of his favorite city on earth were too overwhelming. He spent an hour with Foreign Secretary Lansdowne, and the following day, Sunday, he went to Buckingham Palace, where, out of consideration for his health, Edward VII broke with protocol and received him in a small drawing room on the first floor. “He began talking at once with great affability and fluency,” Hay wrote, “laying great stress on the agreeable relations between our two countries”—words that may not have mended Hay’s heart but surely warmed it, for no one had been more instrumental in nurturing and preserving England’s friendship than he.
The pace did not slacken. He and Clara dined with Lord and Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox and their nephew, who had recently returned from Manchuria. Hay lunched with Whitelaw Reid, who had just begun his ambassadorship. He saw the artist Edwin Abbey and admired his latest sketches. After a
morning of shopping, he visited the Royal Academy, where in the past he had spent so many cherished hours, to see John Singer Sargent’s latest masterpiece, a portrait of the Duke of Marlborough and family. “An astonishing piece of work,” Hay declared, “worthy to rank with the greatest groups of portraits in the history of art.”
There just wasn’t enough time. On the final evening in London, a parade of devotees dropped by the hotel to say hello and goodbye: the diplomat and international gossip Cecil Spring-Rice, the journalist John St. Loe Strachey, the baronet Sir Robert Cunliffe, and James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth. The attention was touching and bittersweet. Before heading to Liverpool to board the ship for home, Hay wrote a letter to Sir John Clark in Scotland, to whom he had been introduced by Adams twenty years earlier. “When I left Nauheim the German Doctor Groedel told me I must not pass by Paris and London except under bonds to see nobody, and do nothing either sensible or amusing,” he explained contritely. “So I go away from these two homes of my heart as if I had passed through them in a nightmare. . . . Farewell, dear and generous friend. We never forget you when we think of this beautiful Elder world, and the happy days we have spent here.”
ONE NIGHT DURING THE crossing, he had a dream. “I went to the White House to report to the President who turned out to be Mr. Lincoln,” he recorded in his diary. “He was very kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness. He said there was little work of importance on hand. He gave me two unimportant letters to answer. I was pleased that this slight order was within my power to obey. I was not in the least surprised at Lincoln’s presence in the White House. But the whole impression of the dream was one of overpowering melancholy.”
The next morning, as they were approaching New York Harbor, they received a Marconi—a wireless telegram, a first for both of them—announcing the birth of a son to Alice and Jim Wadsworth, named for his father.
Helen and Payne met their ship. They spent the weekend with the Whitneys on Long Island, and on Monday, Hay took the train to Washington, intending to stay long enough to “say Ave Caesar! to the President,” he told John Clark, and to straighten his desk if he could. “I owe you a thousand thanks for your generous forbearance in my disablement,” he wrote the president from New York. “How far I can continue to accept it is a question we can talk over when we meet.”
He dined with the Roosevelts at the White House on Monday night. The president, he was relieved and mildly chagrined to learn, had the nation’s foreign affairs well in hand. Roosevelt had gotten around the Senate’s rejection of the Dominican debt-collection impasse by implementing it as a modus vivendi, a temporary agreement that the Senate could only derail post hoc.
Roosevelt’s much greater achievement was in coaxing Japan and Russia to consider peace. On May 27, the day Hay left Nauheim, the Japanese navy attacked the Russian fleet as it attempted to slip through the Strait of Tsushima, between Korea and Japan, en route to Vladivostok. It was the most decisive naval victory since Trafalgar, exactly a century earlier. When the smoke cleared, thirty-four of thirty-eight Russian ships were sunk, ruined, or captured, and ten thousand Russian sailors were dead or wounded. Japan lost only three torpedo boats and a hundred sailors.
In the days that followed, first Japan and then Russia accepted Roosevelt’s offer to mediate a meeting between the two combatants in order “to discuss the whole peace question themselves.” Hay had received the happy news when he landed in New York. “It was a great stroke of that good luck which belongs to those who ‘know how’ and are not afraid,” he congratulated Roosevelt. “I need not have worried about my being sick and away. I have evidently not been missed. Reid once told me when I had been running the Tribune in his absence that ‘the paper has been disgustingly good.’ That is what I find your management of the State Department during my truancy.”
Neither would have been so ungentlemanly to say so, but it was now quite obvious: the proprietorship of the State Department had changed hands.
HAY HAD NO DESIRE and even less strength to linger in the simmering heat of the capital. But first he had one more call to make before heading to New Hampshire to join Clara. He had heard from Adams that Lizzie Cameron had finally moved back into her house on Lafayette Square. On his first day in Washington, he stepped the short distance to her door, only to find that she had already left for Newport. Greeted by “silence and bitter-sweet memories,” he wrote her a letter, full of news about Nauheim and Adams. He signed it gallantly, demurely, wistfully, “Love to Martha” (her daughter) “and things unutterable to you.”
Lizzie read his letter and replied immediately. “My Dear and Great Friend,” she began. “The sight of your familiar handwriting . . . filled me with joy. . . . [W]hy didn’t you come sooner and spend two blissful and hot weeks with me in Washington?” Then, alluding to the mysterious kiss exchanged in Hay’s poem “Two on the Terrace,” she disclosed, “I drove up to the Capitol one hot moon-filled night, and around the Monument, and thought how very unchanged it all was, and yet how different.” She suggested that he join her at Nauheim the following summer. “Do! We can walk around the lake, which is the one thing allowed, and drink black coffee on the terrace like the best of Germans.”
She signed off: “Goodbye, dear Mr. Hay. When shall I see you? Could you not come through this way?”
ON FRIDAY, JUNE 23, Hay had a brief interview with Cassini and then saw Dr. Rixey, who listened to his heart with some concern and sent him on his way. He left Washington with Clarence that evening, and they arrived at the Fells the following afternoon. “The night was delightfully cool,” he wrote Roosevelt on Sunday, “and the morning air is like that of a new made world.”
But he was not long for it. Later in the day, he grew increasingly uncomfortable, unable to urinate, a painful problem that had afflicted him some years earlier. Worried about the strain on his heart, Clara summoned a local doctor and also telegraphed Dr. Charles S. Scudder at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Scudder enlisted a colleague and rushed to Newbury by special train, making the trip in a near-record two hours. He initially diagnosed uremia, an indication of kidney malfunction, but later suspected merely a bladder infection. He inserted a catheter, and within twenty-four hours Hay was reported to be “in no immediate danger” and “doing nicely.” Scudder noted that Hay’s heart was weak but predicted that he would be up and about in a few days. Clara urged Helen and Payne to go ahead with their trip to Europe; their ship left New York on Tuesday.
In Paris, meanwhile, Henry Adams read of Hay’s illness in the Herald and wrote to Lizzie Cameron: “Although I could not have prophesied it to a day, I fully expected it this week. . . . The doctors had been all wrong about him. . . . I imagine that Hay’s life is as good as ended.”
Dr. Scudder returned on Friday evening and was pleased with Hay’s progress. He was sitting up in bed, still very weak, but able to sign papers and dictate to Clara a short letter to the State Department. Then he asked for a sheet of stationery, saying he wanted to write a memorandum, Clara recalled, “but he was so tired after he had dictated the letter that I said he better not do it”—the memorandum—“and he said, ‘If you promise me I will be better tomorrow I will wait.’ ” With that he bid her good night and went to sleep.
A few moments after midnight, the nurse noticed him struggling for breath and summoned Scudder and the other doctor, who had remained at the Fells throughout the week. When Clara reached her husband’s bedside, she found him groaning as the doctors attempted artificial respiration and injected him with nitroglycerine. “I did not know he was dying till I saw the look of horror on the nurse’s face,” she later wrote. “Then the Doctors tried the stethoscope & neither could hear anything and he was gone.”
John Milton Hay departed the world at 12:25 am on July 1, 1905.
AFTERWARD, WHEN CLARA OPENED his diary, she discovered that he had made no significant entry since returning to the United States. On June 13, he had recorded his dream of Lincoln in the
White House. On June 14, the day before landing in New York, he had jotted these words, surely recognizing that they might be his final testament:
“I say to myself that I should not rebel at the thought of my life ending at this time. I have lived to be old, something I never expected in my youth. I have had many blessings, domestic happiness being the greatest of all. I have lived my life. I have had success beyond all the dreams of my boyhood. My name is printed in the journals of the world without descriptive qualification, which may, I suppose, be called fame. By mere length of service I shall occupy a modest place in the history of my time. If I were to live several years more I should probably add nothing to my existing reputation; while I could not reasonably expect any further enjoyment of life, such as falls to the lot of old men in sound health. I know death is the common lot, and what is universal ought not to be deemed a misfortune; and yet—instead of confronting it with dignity and philosophy, I cling instinctively to life and the things of life, as eagerly as if I had not had my chance at happiness & gained nearly all the great prizes.”
CLARA TOOK HER HUSBAND to Cleveland to be buried. “As he had told me once he did not care where I laid him and as our boy was there, it seemed more like home,” she reasoned. The flag-draped casket was placed for public viewing in the Chamber of Commerce Auditorium for a day, awaiting the arrival of Roosevelt, the vice president, the cabinet, and the rest of the mourners, a list that included current and former senators, a Supreme Court justice, the governor of Ohio, and a delegation of foreign ministers. Robert Lincoln came; Lizzie Cameron had intended to be there but changed her mind once she learned that the funeral was to be so large and “official.”
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