It was serendipity that brought me to John Hay. In reading accounts of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and then of William McKinley’s, I was astonished to see that Hay had been at the bedside of both presidents as they lay dying. I soon learned from the seminal biographies of Hay written by William Roscoe Thayer and Tyler Dennett that these events, indelible to be sure, were but two of the benchmarks in Hay’s brilliant life. Next I plunged into Hay’s Civil War letters and diaries, as transcribed, edited, and annotated by Michael Burlingame. I proudly count myself among the hundreds, more likely thousands, of researchers in Dr. Burlingame’s debt. My work would have been exponentially more difficult without the advantage of his painstaking and groundbreaking scholarship on Lincoln’s private secretaries, John Hay and John George Nicolay.
Lincoln has had many beneficial biographers over the years, besides Nicolay and Hay. The most valuable—which is to say, the most informative, intelligent, and influential—are Burlingame, David Herbert Donald, and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Theodore Roosevelt has his own cohort of skilled portraitists, the most trenchant, to my eye, being Henry F. Pringle, David McCullough, Howard K. Beale, Kathleen Dalton, and Edmund Morris. And to appreciate the noble and nuanced statuary that is William McKinley, I climbed upon the shoulders of his three keenest observers, Margaret Leech, H. Wayne Morgan, and Lewis L. Gould.
Even the best libraries are only as good as their librarians. For their cooperation, indulgence, and kindness, I whisper my hearty thanks to Ann Sindelar and the staff of the Western Reserve Historical Society Library; Holly Snyder and the staff of the John Hay Library at Brown University; the staffs of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, and Houghton Library of Harvard University; and, once again, the conscientious and convivial minders of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.
Likewise I am grateful to John Simpson, director of the Winous Point Marsh Conservancy, who showed me around John Hay’s old duck club, where the logs of Hay’s shooting days are well cared for, along with a few of his original decoys. Mary Kronenwetter, education director at the Fells, gave me an enlightening tour of the New Hampshire retreat where the spirit of its long-ago resident yet abides in peace and lovingly curated beauty. In Washington, James Symington was equally generous with his time and family lore.
Let me also thank Rebecca Onion, who helped me with early, essential spadework in Austin; the Livingston (Montana) Public Library for allowing me to hog its microfilm reader; Ann Adelman for superb copyediting; Cyndi Hughes for uncrossing my i’s; Jane Martin for ferreting photographs; and Jonathan Cox for directing traffic all along the way.
To spend four years in the company of John Hay has been my great prize, and I would not have been able to start or complete my worthwhile endeavor without the advice, consent, and encouragement of my agent, Esther Newberg, and my editor, Alice Mayhew. I trust that I have lived up to their high standards, as I trust that I have done justice to John Hay, a biographer’s dream come true.