All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt

As personal secretary to President Lincoln and then as secretary of state under Presidents McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, John Hay (1838–1905) moved in the highest political circles and participated in the crafting of major policies. He recorded many of his experiences in thousands of pages of diaries and letters as well as in published writings such as his biography of Lincoln. Taliaferro (former senior editor, Newsweek; In a Far County: The True Story of a Mission, a Marriage, a Murder, and the Remarkable Reindeer Rescue of 1898) takes the reader on an intimate historical journey through the public and personal lives of Hay, whose decades in Washington, DC, brought him in contact with politicians, diplomats, and intellectuals such as Henry Adams and Mark Twain. Taliaferro offers a fairly positive interpretation of Hay's foreign policy accomplishments, heralded at the time but less well regarded by modern historians, for example, for their imperialist nature.