One reason for McKinley’s circumspection, other than his congenitally restrained nature, was his uncertainty over the proper role the United States should play in China. The commercial lobby wanted the United States to establish its own sphere of influence. But to join in the gluttony for territory seemed demeaning and in some respects more baldly colonialistic than annexation of the Philippines. On the other hand, to speak out against the conduct of the powers, after America’s own recent burst of acquisitiveness, would appear hypocritical. And what if the powers ignored American demands to curb their appetites? For all its newfound international prestige, the United States possessed neither the might nor the will to fight another war in the Pacific—not against the powers, not over China.

Inevitably the task of cobbling a practicable China policy was Hay’s responsibility. Like McKinley, he had never set eyes upon the Pacific. (The farthest west he had ever traveled was Yellowstone.) But he had followed with great interest Henry Adams’s account of his trips to Japan and the South Seas, and William Rockhill tutored him frequently on Far Eastern affairs. While in England, he had made the acquaintance of two men whose expertise would elevate and solidify his understanding of China. One was Archibald Colquhoun, who had traveled extensively in India and all parts of Asia. Hay was an avid reader of Colquhoun’s China in Transformation, published in 1899, in which the author recommended that Britain—and by extension America—adopt a “room-for-all” doctrine.

Another book, The Break-Up of China, by Charles Beresford, was even more influential. In the fall of 1898, Beresford, a member of Parliament and an admiral in the Royal Navy, had made a tour of China on behalf of the Associated Chambers of Commerce of Great Britain. From Hankow, on the Yangtze, he wrote Hay, “[I]t is imperative for American interests as well as our own that the policy of the ‘open door’ should be maintained.”

Returning from China by way of the United States, Beresford pitched his book and the principle of the Open Door to business groups in San Francisco, Chicago, Buffalo, and New York. He stressed that the interests of Britain and America in China were “absolutely identical,” but because Britain was not acting swiftly enough, it now behooved the United States to take the lead in preventing the breakup of China. To keep this disintegration from occurring, Beresford proposed a policy he entitled “The Open Door, or Equal Opportunity for All,” in which Britain, the United States, Germany, and Japan would combine “not for purely selfish motives, but to guarantee the independence of China, and the maintenance of a fair field and no favor for all comers.” The strength of such an agreement, he elaborated, “would lie in the fact that it would be too powerful to attack, and that it could maintain the peace while preserving the open door to all. . . . To China herself, the Powers would prove friends in need. By guaranteeing her integrity, they would give a new lease of life to the Chinese Empire.”

In Washington, Beresford met with the president and of course Hay, who hosted a banquet in his honor. Hay, however, was still in no hurry to mold the Beresford idea into a concrete doctrine, much less a treaty or even a set of guidelines for his Far Eastern ministers. “It is not very easy to formulate with any exactness the view of the Government in regard to the present condition of things in China,” he equivocated three weeks after Beresford’s visit. “In brief, we are, of course, opposed to the dismemberment of that Empire, and we do not think that the public opinion of the United States would justify this Government in taking part in the great game of spoliation now going on. . . . [B]ut for the present we think our best policy is one of vigilant protection of our commercial interests without formal alliances.”

In the early summer, yet another China hand, Alfred Hippisley, visited the United States, on leave from his post as British inspector of Chinese maritime customs. Hippisley was an old friend of Rockhill, going back to Peking in the early 1880s, and doubtless it was Rockhill who brought Hay and Hippisley together to discuss the situation in China. Hippisley followed up with a letter to Rockhill, offering practical suggestions on how to sustain and stimulate the China trade. Specifically, he recommended that the United States strike an agreement with the other powers, ensuring that Chinese tariffs be applied equally throughout the various spheres of influence—in short, no power would be discriminated against by another in its access to China.

Rockhill forwarded Hippisley’s advice to Hay in New Hampshire. He also wrote to Hippisley, proposing that the United States go even further in its posture toward China. “I would like to see [us] make a declaration in some form or other, which should be understood by China as a pledge on our part to assist in maintaining the integrity of the Empire,” Rockhill suggested. Still, he doubted that he could win support for any such plan, on either tariffs or the overall integrity of China, for the simple reason that it was likely to cause trouble in the next elections: “[I]t might be interpreted by a large part of the voting population of the United States, especially the Irish and Germans, as an adoption of the policy advocated by England and any leaning toward England on the part of the administration would, at this time and for some time to come, be dangerous, and might lose the President his nomination.”

By August, though, the time to act on China appeared more propitious, if not urgent. Jacob Schurman, president of Cornell University, had returned to the United States after touring the Philippines and the Far East at the behest of President McKinley and warned that China was on the verge of being divided and devoured. “[N]ow that Russia has taken Manchuria,” Schurman declared, “it will try to encroach gradually on some or all of the other eighteen provinces of China.” Accordingly, he continued, it was critical that China “maintain its independent position” and that “its doors should be kept open.” China’s future, he repeated, was “the one overshadowing question” facing American foreign policy.

On the same day that Schurman spoke out on China and Russian aggression there, the Russian government issued a ukase, or proclamation, pledging that Dairen, its trading center on the Liao-tung Peninsula, would operate as a “free port.” Hay and Rockhill took this announcement to mean that perhaps the door to China might yet be open. And recognizing the influence that Schurman, a highly respected educator and an avowed anti-imperialist, had on the president and the American public, they agreed that now was as opportune a moment as any to play their hand.

Prompted by Rockhill, Hippisley prepared a memorandum enumerating the points on which the powers might feasibly concur. Rockhill urged that any agreement ought to go beyond concerns of trade to ensure the integrity of China. Hippisley was more realistic. “Of course, if the independence and integrity of China can be safeguarded, too, let that be accomplished,” he replied to Rockhill. For the time being, he recommended that they keep their proposals to “the irreducible minimum.”

All of the points in Hippisley’s memo hinged on the premise that Russia, Germany, France, Britain, and Japan, having already established their separate spheres, tacitly accepted the legitimacy of the others. The challenge, then, was how to respect a country’s tangible investments, such as mining and railroad concessions, while keeping the spheres open to trade. Hippisley wanted the powers to agree that all ports within the spheres be declared “free,” by which he meant equitable: the proprietary nation of one sphere would not charge higher tariffs, duties, harbor dues, or railway charges to other nations doing business in that sphere. It was a modest proposal, to be sure, but at least it stood a chance. Certainly nothing like it had been tried before.

Hay read Hippisley’s memo and liked its commonsense approach. He promptly asked Rockhill to put together his own memorandum, distilling all the current wisdom on the Open Door. Citing Beresford, Colquhoun, but not Hippisley, Rockhill iterated that spheres of influence “must be accepted as existing facts,” and he endorsed (still without attribution) Hippisley’s proposal on free ports. “Such understandings with the various Powers,” Rockhill wrote, “would secure an open market throughout China for our trade on terms of equality with all other foreigners, and would further remove dangerous sources of irritation and possible conflict between the contending powers.” He stopped short, however, of making a case for the integrity of China, suggesting simply that the Open Door “has the advantage of insuring to the United States the appreciation of the Chinese Government, who could see in it a strong desire to arrest the disintegration of the Empire and would greatly add to our prestige and influence in Peking.”

Although British advice had shaped Rockhill and Hay’s thinking, the Americans still did not wish to appear in lockstep with British interests in China. Concern for the Irish and German vote was part of the reason, as Rockhill had underscored. Additionally, the United States did not feel quite so strident toward Russia as did Beresford, Hippisley, and their countrymen. Furthermore, Hay believed that the other powers would be much more receptive to an Open Door if they knew that they were all equals and not up against an Anglo-American alliance. When all was said and done, Hay and Rockhill wanted it to be an American policy in China.

After delivering his memorandum to Hay, Rockhill sent an apologetic note to Hippisley, explaining why he had incorporated Hippisley’s ideas without giving him credit: “As the memo will have to be submitted to the President I thought it better that it should seem as if coming from one alone. . . . If coming from you it would require additional explanations. I have, and shall again whenever I can, show that I am but your mouthpiece.” In the end, he never quite did give attribution where it was due.

A week later, Rockhill drew up what would forever be known as the first Open Door note, echoing Hippisley’s guidelines almost exactly. First, each power was asked to pledge that it would “in no way interfere with any treaty port or any vested interest within any so-called ‘sphere of interest’ [a term Rockhill preferred to “influence”] or leased territory it may have in China.” Second, Chinese tariffs would apply “to all merchandise landed or shipped to all such ports as are within said ‘sphere of interest’ (unless they be ‘free ports’), no matter to what nationality it may belong.” And a third leveled the commercial playing field even further: the powers would levy “no higher harbor dues on vessels of another nationality frequenting any other port in such ‘sphere’ than shall be levied on vessels of its own nationality, and no higher railroad charges over lines built, controlled, or operated within its ‘sphere’ on merchandise belonging to citizens or subjects of other nationalities transported through such ‘sphere’ than shall be levied on similar merchandise belonging to its own nationals transported over equal distance.”

Nowhere did the note mention an “open door” in so many words. Nor did it pay lip service to the integrity of China. Yet for a document so narrow in focus, so accommodating in tone, the impact of the Open Door note on China and international relations, not to mention the legacy of John Hay, would prove to be colossal.

Alvey Adee sent identical versions to Britain, Germany, and Russia on September 6, and soon thereafter to Japan, France, and Italy. In the meantime, Hay went back to New Hampshire to resume his vacation.

SURROUNDED ONCE MORE BY the green solitude of the Fells, he took stock of what he had accomplished in recent months. In a letter to Charles Dick, chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio, he shrugged off charges circulated by Democrats that a secret alliance existed between the United States and Great Britain. He proudly acknowledged that “our relations with England are more friendly and more satisfactory than they have ever been,” but quickly added, “It is a poor starved heart that has room for only one friend.”

He also refuted suggestions that the administration had embraced imperialism. “[W]e took up arms to redress wrongs already too long endured, without a thought in any mind of conquest or aggression,” he explained to Dick. “But no one can control the issue of war. Porto Rico and the Philippines are ours, and the destinies of Cuba are for the moment entrusted to our care. It is not permitted us to shirk the vast responsibilities thus imposed upon us, without exhibiting a nerveless pusillanimity which would bring upon us not only the scorn of the world, but what is far worse, our own self-contempt. But as we did not seek these acquisitions—which came to us through the irresistible logic of war—we are not striving anywhere to acquire territory, or extend our power by conquest.”

Finally, undoubtedly thinking about the Open Door notes, which were even then being circulated abroad, he declared: “The whole world knows we are not covetous of land; not a chancery in Europe sees in us an interested rival in their schemes of acquisition. What is ours we shall hold; what is not ours we do not seek. But in the field of trade and commerce we shall be the keen competitors of the richest and greatest powers, and they need no warning to be assured that in that struggle, we shall bring the sweat to our brows.”

HAY STAYED AT THE Fells until the end of September. “The hills are now wrapped in color like flame,” he wrote Henry White. “We have thousands of maples which give the dash of scarlet that makes the picture perfect.” With his usual misgivings, he returned to Washington and then went off on a two-week tour of the Midwest with the president. And still there were no firm answers from the powers on the Open Door.

On October 11, war broke out in South Africa, as the British sought to gain control of the gold-rich Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Officially the United States remained neutral, but privately Hay told Henry White, “I hope . . . that England will make quick work of Uncle Paul”—referring to Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal. “Sooner or later, her influence must be dominant there, and the sooner the better.” His wish did not come true; within days the Boers, armed with state-of-the-art German guns, gamely took the offensive, besieging the British garrisons of Kimberley, Mafeking, and Ladysmith. Perhaps there was no secret Anglo-American alliance, as Hay insisted, but there existed plenty of grounds for commiseration. In the Philippines, the United States had its hands full with Aguinaldo’s guerrillas, who, like the Boers, were fighting for independence with unexpected tenacity.

At last the powers addressed the Open Door. Japan and Italy assented with no prodding; the other four required considerably more coaxing. None wished to precede the others, and none would come forward if the others refused. Britain finally acquiesced, once the United States made clear that military ports—Weihaiwai and Kowloon for the British, Port Arthur for the Russians—did not count as “leased territory.” France quibbled over railroad rates but then came around. Germany was initially worried about being caught between England on one side and Russia and France on the other but then accepted the terms provided “all other powers do so.” That left Russia.

Hay well knew that without Russia, by far the most aggressive of the powers in China, the Open Door would dissolve. To make sure this did not happen, he and Rockhill went to work on the Russian ambassador in Washington, Count Arturo Paul Nicolas Cassini. At the same time, the American ambassador in St. Petersburg, a railroad tycoon and amateur archeologist with the storybook name Charlemagne Tower, was given the more prickly task of winning over the recalcitrant foreign minister, Count Nikolai Muraviev. Muraviev, backed by the even more skeptical Russian finance minister Sergei Witte, presented a list of objections: they suspected that the Open Door notes were a conspiracy to block Russian ambitions in Manchuria; they complained that the terms “free ports,” “treaty ports,” and “spheres of interest” were confusing; and they balked at the stipulation on railroad rates. Mostly, they just wanted to keep the advantages they already had.

Hay expected Cassini would be more amenable. An urbane diplomat who had once lived in China, now spent summers in Newport, and kept a kennel of borzois in Washington, Cassini conversed comfortably with Hay and Rockhill in French, the language of international diplomacy. Nor did it hurt that Cassini lived not far from the Hays, on I Street; Cassini’s daughter, Marguerite, and Helen Hay were dear friends.

But for all his cosmopolitan congeniality, Cassini would not budge. “I get profoundly discouraged,” Hay told Henry White, “with the infernal cussedness of the little politicians who have the power to tip over the best bucket of milk I can fill with a year’s work. Just now it is Cassini who seems likely to spoil all my ‘open door’ labor.”

Finally, it was time to call the Russians’ bluff. Hay had Rockhill inform Cassini in no uncertain terms that further delay on Russia’s part would be “misinterpreted by the people [of the United States] and would be extremely prejudicial to the friendly relations between the two nations.”

Hay also exhorted Charlemagne Tower to keep pressing Muraviev. After several frank conversations, the foreign minister did not actually blink, but he lowered his gaze just enough. Muraviev reckoned there was nothing in the terms of the agreement that warranted risking Russia’s friendship with America or isolating Russia from the other powers. Begrudgingly, lukewarmly, he communicated to Tower his general compliance with the Open Door, “upon condition that a similar declaration shall be made by other powers having interests in China.” As for its caveats on tariffs and railroad rates, Russia was willing to let these slide, knowing that the Open Door was fundamentally pliable and ultimately unenforceable—and that Washington would settle for anything other than a categorical no.

Hay made the most of it. “We got all that could be screwed out of the Bear,” he wrote Adams, “and our cue is to insist that we got everything.” Without holding a strong hand himself, he had won every card. When at last all the players had been heard from, he sent a circular to his foreign ministers in London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, Rome, and Tokyo, directing them to inform their governments that “all the various powers having leased territory or so-called ‘spheres of interest’ in the Chinese Empire” had accepted the terms of the Open Door and that the United States now regarded their assent as “final and definitive.”

THERE WAS ONE COUNTRY left out of the Open Door negotiations and final entente, however, and that was China. At a time when strict exclusion laws closed the United States to nearly all Chinese, the United States and the other powers gave little or no thought to how China might feel about the proliferation of foreigners in its midst. Wu T’ing-fang, the Chinese minister in Washington, was not aware of the existence of the Open Door note until he read about it in the newspaper. Hay belatedly wrote Wu a letter that offered no apology and asked for only token cooperation. “I sincerely hope that in this effort of ours to secure an equitable share of the commerce of China,” he informed the minister politely but emphatically, “that no arrangements will be entered into by the Government of the Emperor which shall be to the disadvantage of American commerce.”

In treating the Chinese government as an ineffectual afterthought, Hay revealed the underlying dynamic—and, for that matter, prejudice—of the Open Door. Heretofore the powers had done business with China based on their own separate treaties; their respective spheres of influence had no substantive connection to one another. It was as if all the powers boarded at the same rooming house, eating from a common kitchen, barely speaking to one another, and paying separate checks. The Open Door established a semi-formal diners’ club whose members now set the menu, agreed not to eat off one another’s plates, and ignored the landlord, so long as the lights stayed on and the meals kept coming. The assumption, of course, was that the landlord would profit by this cooperation and therefore ought to be grateful for the business the powers brought him. How enlightening—civilizing!—for China to have such diverse guests under one roof. And no matter what, the new arrangement surely beat the alternative: a shoving match, with the furniture broken up and the boarders locking themselves in their rooms. If this analogy did not translate perfectly into Chinese, it made enough sense to the powers that they adopted Hay’s ground rules.

The consensus—among the powers, anyway—was that the benefits of the Open Door exceeded the limitations, although, in the final accounting, nobody gave up less and gained more than the United States. Following the Spanish-American War, Americans were still trying to come to terms with their new accessions, and they did not necessarily welcome the stigma of international land-grabber. Part of the genius of the Open Door was that it dispelled charges of imperialism, or so the administration averred. The United States had made a point of not demanding its own sphere of influence and, in doing so, secured commercial access to all of China’s treaty ports, with very few military or administrative obligations to worry about. The Open Door boosted America’s ongoing economic expansion in the Far East—and justified cession of the Philippines. But, on its face, it was an anti-imperialistic doctrine or, at any rate, post-colonialistic. Along the way, John Hay had prevented the dismemberment of China—although this was not one of the aims articulated in the notes he sent to the powers.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the Open Door had little to do with China directly. Just as the United States possessed no sphere of influence in China, its status as a power was also inchoate. Too often America had followed Britain’s example on the world stage. Now, without establishing—indeed, by determinedly avoiding—entangling alliances, the United States commanded a position of preeminence, not so much by military might or even by economic vigor, but by the sheer intelligence and persuasiveness of its diplomacy. And John Hay, who had not coined the term “Open Door,” who could not fairly claim authorship of the Open Door note, and who honestly had no grandiose expectations for it, other than as a commercial expedient, emerged after only one year as secretary of state as a deft and forceful fulcrum, an arbiter of world events, independent but coalescent, respected and heeded by all nations.

To be sure, the Open Door policy had its share of critics, beginning with those who found it ironic that the United States had barred its own doors, at home and in the Philippines. Other cynics were quick to point out that the Open Door would splinter the moment one of the powers decided to ignore the rules. “If, for example,” posed the Independent, “Russia should, when her great eastern railroad is completed, formally annex Manchuria, and apply thereto her present laws of commerce, with free trade on the Russian side and a prohibitive tariff on foreign trade, what would the United States do? Would she resist by force?” (The answer was no, she would not, but Japan soon would, fighting Russia over Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05.)

By and large, though, public reaction to the Open Door transaction was congratulatory. The Philadelphia Press predicted that the Open Door would be for the newly arrived twentieth century what the Monroe Doctrine was in the just-ending nineteenth. The Times of London was sure that the Open Door was more than diplomatic confection. The United States, The Times vouched, “is the last Power in the world to have gone to the trouble of getting paper assurances and then to allow them to remain paper assurances only. If she has got them she has got them because she means them to be observed.”

Hay may have wondered to himself just how effective the notes would prove to be; but even he, modesty aside, could not ignore the wave of adulation that followed the announcement that the Open Door was settled. His scrapbooks hold many pages of clippings with headlines such as “Our Great Diplomatic Victory,” “One of the Greatest Triumphs Ever Achieved by This Country,” and “Hay Praised by All.”

Perhaps the most gratifying salute came not from the New York Tribune, though its attentions were plenty kind, but from the New York Post, which for the previous fifteen years had been edited by Edwin L. Godkin, an ardent anti-imperialist. Godkin’s paper treated Hay’s handling of the Open Door as if it were a magic act: “From the diplomatic point of view the negotiation appears simplicity itself. No treaties; just an exchange of official notes. No alliances; no playing off of one Power against another; simply a quiet inclusion of them all in a common policy. This is simple enough, but so is any common feat of skill when you know how to do it. . . . In the end, Mr. Hay appeared smiling with his whole sheaf of acceptances, and the thing was done. It was an exceeding daring and skillful stroke of diplomacy.”

AS ONE DOOR OPENED, the hope was that another would soon do the same. In December 1899, as Hay had waited to hear from the powers on China, Congressman William Hepburn reintroduced his canal bill, despite the fact that the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain had not yet been revised and the commission charged with weighing the relative merits of a Nicaragua or Panama route was still a year from completing its report. Congress and the American public were eager to start digging, and this time Senator Morgan was vowing that the Senate would work in concert with the House. “Nothing in the nature of the Clayton-Bulwer prohibition will finally prevent the building of the canal,” Hay alerted Joseph Choate in London. He immediately went to work on a new treaty “so at least the Administration would have its skirts clear of any complicity” if Congress ran roughshod over the old one.

A number of factors were in his favor. The canal was no longer held captive by Canada, thanks to the provisional boundary settlement earlier in the year. And with the war in South Africa going badly, Britain needed its American friends more than ever. At the start of January 1900, Hay and British ambassador Julian Paunceforte buckled down and worked out a set of terms they figured would make both their governments happy. They agreed that the United States had the exclusive right to build and regulate a canal across the isthmus. Hewing to conventions applied to the Suez Canal, their proposed treaty stipulated that the isthmian canal would be “free and open, in time of war as in time of peace, to the vessels of commerce and of war of all nations,” and that, while the United States would have the right to maintain military police along the canal, it could neither blockade nor fortify the route. Like the Open Door note—like every diplomatic transaction Hay ever conducted—the treaty that he and Paunceforte signed on February 5 and sent to the Senate was infused with the expectation that nations, like men, would treat one another fairly if treated fairly.

Given the national juggernaut favoring a canal, Hay was hopeful that he would win over the Senate with little debate. “Hay scored on his treaty,” Henry Adams wrote Lizzie Cameron the day after the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty, as it was instantly called, went to the Senate. “He beams with content.”

Soon enough, though, content collided head-on with senatorial contempt. Hay ought to have known better than to submit a treaty without first circulating a draft. His hubris was received on both sides of the aisle as gross impudence. When the senators realized the treaty did not call for a fortified canal, the impact was “that of a 13-inch shell,” Adams reported to Lizzie. The mood soured further once someone leaked a copy of the treaty to the press. “What shall be said of the value of a diplomatic victory by which we acquire ownership which does not own and a control which does not control?” the New York Sun queried scornfully. “It is a diplomacy of the empty phrase.”

Hay’s reaction was, in turn, nearly as extreme. “He is about as furious as you can imagine,” Adams went on to Lizzie, “and threatens to resign if they defeat more of his treaties. . . . He regards the Nicaragua matter” (for this was the presumed route) “as personal, and loathes the Senate with a healthy anarchical energy.”

Hay was so annoyed with Cabot Lodge that the two quit talking while the treaty was before the Foreign Relations Committee. He did, however, exchange words with New York governor Theodore Roosevelt, an unapologetic zealot on the subjects of sea power and the necessity of an American-controlled canal. Rather than writing directly to Hay, Roosevelt had issued a statement to the press, in which he insisted that the canal be fortified.

“Et tu!” Hay fired back at the Rough Rider. “Cannot you leave a few things to the President and the Senate?”

Roosevelt, never one to hold his tongue or bide his time, was not inclined to keep out of the administration’s affairs. Vice President Garret Hobart had died in November, and Roosevelt, with Lodge’s encouragement, was already angling to join McKinley on the next ticket.

Adams, from his front-row seat on Lafayette Square, could only shake his head at the conduct of Hay’s fellow Republicans. “Washington is just at the full tide of nervous ill-temper,” he gossiped to Lizzie at length. “As usual, the Senate makes the trouble; you know that to me the Senate means practically Cabot; and you know Cabot; [but] you don’t know that Cabot is ten times more cabotin [showman] than ever. The word was made to describe him, and it fits as though a Sargent portrait. The new Nicaragua treaty makes the pretence. Teddy Roosevelt, I imagine, is the cause. Teddy appears disposed to paddle his canoe and upset the [party] machine. Cabot is in deadly terror, and finds his only resource in going back on everybody. At that trick, he is, as you know, quite incomparable. So he has thrown Hay over; declared against his Treaty; alienated the Major [McKinley], and destroyed all the credit with the administration which he has labored so hard to create; and probably, within a twelve-month, he will go back on Teddy, and help cut his throat as he is helping to cut Hay’s.

“Everybody sees now that Hay must go out very soon,” Adams continued. “Cabot himself told me, on Saturday, that the Treaty would not be approved by the Senate, and that the German vote [in the upcoming presidential election] was the reason;—he disavowed the Irish, but it counts too. So every day I receive Hay’s comments on Cabot, and once a week I receive Cabot’s comments on Hay; and, what is more, I know that the brunt of it falls on Sister Anne [Nannie Lodge], and that she is, as usual, at her wits’ end to make her husband out not to be what he is. You have seen this show so often and you know it so thoroughly by heart, that you will understand all my embarrassments as well as hers. That Hay should resign and go out, is to me indifferent. If I were he, I would stay in . . . but, if he does not choose to stand kicking, it is his affair, not mine; and it is not my administration Cabot is kicking, or my treaty or my canal. . . . [B]ut it is quite useless for me to play pretend about Cabot. He knows by instinct my contempt. . . . Is it not a pretty mess?”

Hay’s own disdain for Lodge ran even deeper than Adams’s, for reasons he chose not to express fully in his letters. His distaste for the Senate, on the other hand, was well formed, deep-seated, and hardly a secret. He regarded the system of senatorial ratification of treaties as no less than a flaw in the Constitution. “You may work for months over a treaty,” he griped to Henry White, “and at last get everything satisfactorily arranged and send it into the Senate, [where] it is met by every man who wants to get a political advantage or to satisfy a personal grudge, everyone who has asked for an office & not got it, everyone whose wife may think mine has not been attentive enough—and if they can muster one third of the Senate + one, your treaty is lost without any reference to its merits.”

There was obvious spite in the Senate’s reaction to the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty and, in Lodge’s case, perhaps even a measure of personal grudge. Hay had dropped the treaty in the lap of the Foreign Relations Committee, recognizing that if he had allowed Lodge and his committee to tinker with it in advance, they would have added the objectionable fortification clause. Either way, he was damned. On March 9, the committee reported the treaty favorably but added an amendment that would allow the United States to defend its canal. Hay condemned the amendment as “a weak resort of ignorance and cowardice.” Lodge, he told Henry White bitterly, “was the first to flop.”

Yet the conversation was not over, merely postponed. Since it was an election year, and Lodge and his fellow Republicans were disinclined to expose the administration to the sniping of Democratic critics, the Foreign Relations Committee put off general debate until the following winter. In the meantime, the House went ahead and passed the Hepburn bill, authorizing construction and fortification of an isthmian canal. Once again, though, the Republican-dominated Senate decided to delay consideration until after the election.

HAY DID NOT RELISH being around for the final defacement of his handiwork. And, truth to tell, he had been looking for an excuse to quit almost as soon as he had accepted his appointment as secretary of state. “I have never had yet the evil courage to tell [the president] I shall not stay,” he had confided to White back in August. But he had told Adams of his intention to “go out” during their walks and teas throughout the winter. “[M]y natural pessimism works now on Hay’s natural pessimism, and his on mine, until we are both half out of our minds,” Adams told Lizzie in January.

Adams had never seen his friend so agitated, yet he was mildly relieved to observe that the quarrel with the Senate had brought color to Hay’s cheeks. “Curiously enough,” Adams reported to Lizzie as the treaty went before the Senate, “Hay was never in better health or spirits, and takes poundings with positive improvement of health—like massage.”

However, once the Foreign Relations Committee amended Hay-Paunceforte, Hay hit his limit. On March 13, 1900, he submitted his resignation to the president. “The action of the Senate indicates views so widely divergent from mine in matters affecting, as I think, the national welfare and honor,” he wrote McKinley, “that I fear my power to serve you in business requiring the concurrence of that body is at an end. I cannot help fearing also that the newspaper attacks upon the State Department, which have so strongly influenced the Senate, may be an injury to you, if I remain in the Cabinet.”

McKinley wrote back immediately, returning Hay’s resignation. “Had I known the contents of the letter which you handed me this morning I would have declined to receive or consider it,” he replied. “Nothing could be more unfortunate than to have you retire from the Cabinet. The personal loss would be great, but the public loss even greater. . . . Your record constitutes one of the most important and interesting pages of our diplomatic history.” The president closed with an exhortation Hay could not dismiss: “We must bear the annoyance of the hour. It will pass away. . . . Conscious of high purpose and honorable effort, we cannot yield our posts however the storm may rage.”

And so he stayed, but not happily. “We tramp in silence every afternoon an hour,” Adams mentioned several days later. “He has nothing to say. I have nothing to ask.”

Henceforth Adams began to observe a change in his friend. Hay’s anger and frustration over the canal treaty—and over the Senate’s chronic meddling with all treaties—were part of a larger dissatisfaction. Reminiscing many years later in his Education, Adams described the hardening of Hay’s spirit: “Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient and loyal, Hay had treated the world as something to be taken in block without pulling it to pieces to get rid of its defects; he liked it all; he laughed and accepted; he had never known unhappiness. . . . Yet even the gayest of tempers succumbs at last to constant friction. The old friend was rapidly fading,” Adams lamented. “The habit remained, but the easy intimacy, the careless gaiety, the casual humor, the equality of indifference were sinking into the routine of office. . . . The wit and humor shrank within the blank walls of politics, and the irritations multiplied.”

YET IF HAY SEEMED withdrawn of late, there was one door he always left unfastened. What Adams did not fully realize was that, as harried and embittered as Hay felt, he too had Lizzie Cameron to elevate his mood. The two men, of course, were aware that each was corresponding with Lizzie, and she with them, but they did not share the entirety of their letters or reveal the frequency. “Hay got your letter yesterday, and told me your news,” Adams informed her in February. “I rarely mention your letters to me, because it makes people”—Hay, for one—“jealous of me. Too many men still love you.”

Hay continued to reach out to Lizzie whenever his wife was away. “I am all alone for weeks to come,” he had written the previous November, with Clara in Cleveland. “There is not a living soul in Washington. I wonder if this letter will reach you. If so, send me a line.” He signed off: “For your beauty, and your wit, and your brightness, and your sweetness, for all you are and all you have been, active & passive, my deepest gratitude.”

A week later, he made a demonstration most daring. “Did you ever get a letter written in a Cabinet meeting,” he asked Lizzie, scribbling in pencil on “Executive Mansion” stationery. “I have said all I have to say. Root and Gage [Secretary of War Elihu Root and Secretary of the Treasury Lyman Gage] are good for the next hour and I will talk to you.”

While his fellow cabinet members and the president carried on, deliberating the affairs of the nation, Hay, seated within arm’s length of McKinley, turned his thoughts to a topic that had absorbed him for the past decade and more. “There is something unreal, something tant soit peu divine about all my knowledge of you,” he wrote Lizzie. “That you should be the most beautiful and fascinating woman of your generation, the most attractive in wit and grace and charm and yet be so good to me is a thing I never realize and I find it hard to believe when I am away from you. I live over again in memory all the happy hours you have given me, but can hardly believe them real.”

The risk of making such a proclamation in such a setting was, to his mind, yet another way of demonstrating the courage of his amorous convictions.

TOO QUICKLY HE WAS tugged back to more earthly concerns. The Danish government had approached him with a proposal to relinquish the West Indian islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix. Hay dispatched Henry White to Copenhagen to begin negotiations. He was also obliged to explain and defend American neutrality in the Boer War. American goods—not military matériel per se, but tons of flour and canned food, and horses and mules by the thousand—continued to flow to South Africa; American banks were indirectly helping finance the British campaign.

Hay’s own behavior was likewise open to aspersions of favoritism. Before leaving London, he had met cordially with Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and the most prominent champion of British imperialism in southern Africa. After the Boers had expelled British officials from the Transvaal, Hay had offered the services of the American consul to act on behalf of the British government. And when Boer peace envoys came to Washington, he had talked to them for an hour but declined to treat with them in an official capacity, under the technicality that they were not properly credentialed by their government. (“Sicrety Hay meets with them in a coal cellar, wearin’ a mask,” Mr. Dooley reported.) Gestures like these only fanned rumors of a not so secret Anglo-American alliance, which Hay was obliged to deflect again and again. “As long as I stay here,” he assured Henry White, “no action shall be taken contrary to my conviction that the one indispensable feature of our policy should be a friendly understanding with England.” But, he reiterated, “an alliance must remain, in the present state of things, an unattainable dream.”

As a gesture of equanimity to the Boers, he made a surprising and somewhat controversial decision. In December 1899, he named his son Del as American consul to Pretoria, the capital of Boer-controlled Transvaal. Adelbert Hay was twenty-three, two years out of Yale, and still at loose ends. He had helped out in the American Embassy in London while his father was there and on a lark had gone to the Philippines, as a civilian, to observe the war. This, however, was the extent of his qualifications for the consulship—along with being the son of the secretary of state. “[H]e is naturally lazy and needed something to wake him up,” Clara explained to Adams. “He has plenty of courage and capacity but lacks energy.” Perhaps Pretoria would prove to be just the tonic. After Del’s appointment, Clara remarked with maternal optimism, “He has been on the jump . . . and seems quite a different person.”

En route to South Africa, Del passed through London, where he took tea with Lord Salisbury, stirring suspicions that he had been inculcated with a pro-British, anti-Boer bias. “[H]ow could I have paid a greater compliment to the South African Republic [Transvaal] than sending my own son there?” Hay rebutted to a Boer intermediary. Meanwhile, he cautioned Del in the stern voice of the secretary of state: “You will naturally not avow any sympathies at all for either side in the contest, and you will do well not to have any.”

Two weeks later, once Del had arrived at Pretoria, Hay wrote again, this time in the voice of a concerned father: “I sometimes feel a twinge of remorse at allowing you at so early an age to go away such a distance and to be loaded with such heavy responsibilities, but I could not resist your earnest desire to go, and I am sure that such a test of character and of endurance, if you come happily out of it, will be of advantage to you all your life.” Hay was likely reflecting on his own coming of age thirty-seven years earlier, when he was working in the White House and venturing to the front on orders from President Lincoln.

To his parents’ delight and the administration’s relief, Del acquitted himself even-handedly and bravely. His greater service was to British prisoners of war in the Transvaal, but he also won the trust of the Boers. “Everyone thought of me as an enemy at first, but I am glad to say that everyone is nice to me now. I had a hard row to hoe,” he wrote home from Pretoria.

The celebrated correspondent Richard Harding Davis, who had been with Roosevelt at San Juan Hill and was next assigned to the South African war, provided a colorful glimpse of Del’s pluck. The English soldiers, it seemed, were so awed by the deadliness of Boer marksmanship that they believed the grease smeared on the enemies’ bullets was poisonous. When Del asked for proof, one of the British complainants produced a bullet covered with a suspicious green compound. “Why, these bullets must have fallen into a pudding by mistake,” Del exclaimed. “They’re flavored with wintergreen.” With that, he licked off the coating with exaggerated enjoyment. “Thus ended the story of Boer barbarism,” Davis narrated.

FEW REPUBLICANS DOUBTED THAT McKinley would win his party’s nomination in June and the general election in November. Hay, however, had made up his mind that he would not be part of the president’s second term. “Nothing—but nothing—would induce me to stay where I am,” he proclaimed to Adams, who had deserted him for France to begin work on his next volume of musings on civilization, eventually titled Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.

Hay’s disinterest in serving in the next McKinley administration was more believable than Theodore Roosevelt’s insistence that he was not a candidate to succeed Vice President Garret Hobart. Lodge had been working on Roosevelt for months; so, too, had Senator Thomas Platt, the New York Republican boss, who wanted the untamable governor out of his hair. A week before the convention was to begin in Philadelphia, Roosevelt came to Washington to try out his non-campaign on the White House. “Teddy has been here: have you heard of it?” Hay wrote Adams. “He came down with a sombre resolution throned on his strenuous brow, to let McKinley and Hanna know, once for all, he would not be Vice President, and found to his stupefaction that nobody in Washington, except Platt, had ever dreamed of such a thing. He did not even have a chance to launch his nolo episcopari at the Major. That statesman said he did not want him on the ticket—that he would be far more valuable in New York—and Root said, with his frank and murderous smile, ‘Of course you’re not—you’re not fit for it.’ And so he went back, quite eased in his mind but considerably bruised in his amour-propre.”

The convention was a different affair. Despite what McKinley had indicated to Hay, Root, Hanna, and other confidants, he never stated publicly that he did not favor Roosevelt; rather, he had merely said that he would let the delegates choose his running mate.

Mark Hanna, now a senator but still chairman of the Republican National Committee, had other ideas. He and Roosevelt had detested each other for years. Hanna had been one of the last holdouts against war with Spain, believing, along with many on Wall Street, that it would be bad for the nation’s recently revived economy. Roosevelt, a trustbuster in the making, regarded Hanna as one of those over-grasping plutocrats who believed that because business was good for the country, then business ought to run the government.

Yet there was something more fundamental, almost visceral in their mutual antagonism. The forty-one-year-old Roosevelt was in the peak of health and the prime of life; Hanna, at sixty-two (the same age as Hay), was by now riven by rheumatism. One embodied the past, the other the future—the nineteenth century versus the twentieth. And Hanna, whether he said as much, sensed that Roosevelt had the potential to overwhelm stolid, reserved, moderate McKinley. “Roosevelt burst into that campaign . . . with all the flare of a skyrocket, with the incessant clatter of a riveter; and with a new, gorgeous vocabulary of erudite vituperation,” observed the Kansas columnist William Allen White, an early acolyte. “Roosevelt challenged an acclaim which eclipsed Hanna’s presidential candidate . . . and elbowed Hanna off the stage as the savior of the nation. . . . Perhaps subconsciously Hanna was jealous of Roosevelt, the pirouetting young dervish of a Teddy who took the spotlight in the drama of the hour.”

Hanna did his best to find another vice-presidential candidate—anybody but Teddy. His harangues and arm-twisting had no effect; the delegates would have only Roosevelt, who strode into the convention hall wearing a version of the broad-brimmed hat he had worn as a Rough Rider.

McKinley was nominated unanimously. Then came Roosevelt’s turn: he received every vote but one—his own. In his acceptance speech, he struck a posture that surely caught the attention of John Hay, who had remained at his desk at the State Department throughout the convention. “Is America a weakling to shrink from the world work of the great world-powers?” Roosevelt asked in his raptor’s falsetto. “No,” he answered emphatically. “The young giant of the West stands on a continent and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand. Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks in the future with eager eyes and rejoices as a strong man to run a race.”

A week later, an exhausted but unbowed Mark Hanna wrote to McKinley: “Well, it was a nice little scrap at Phila[delphia], not exactly to my liking with my hands tied behind me. However, we got through in good shape and the ticket is all right. Your duty to the country is to live for four years from next March.”

WHILE ROOSEVELT WAS STIRRING the pride of the Republican faithful, a crisis was building that would drastically challenge the strength of the giants of the West, and, more particularly, the validity of the Open Door. As it turned out, the Chinese did have something to say about the presence of the powers in their midst.

Two years earlier, in 1898, the reform-minded Chinese emperor, Kuang Hsu, had been deposed and imprisoned by his aunt, Tzu Hsi, an ambitious and superstitious conservative who believed that the empire would be better off with the outsiders gone. The empress dowager and her imperial government realized that they could not achieve this eviction by themselves; the Chinese military, so recently humiliated by Japan, was no match against the muscle of the industrialized powers. Yet in recent months a much larger, potentially more lethal force had awakened in Shantung Province in northern China, unified by hatred of a common enemy.

They called themselves the Fists of Righteous Harmony, after the martial-arts rituals they performed en masse, working themselves into a trancelike fervor that emboldened them to confront “the foreign devils” whom they blamed for all the woes that beleaguered their lives, including a drought that in 1899 inflicted famine across northern China. They believed that, once they drove out the Westerners, the rains would come again. Westerners, slow to grasp the potency of these public theatrics, belittled the movement’s adherents as “Boxers.”

Missionaries were the first to feel the wrath of the Boxers, who accused the Christians of practicing all manner of demonic acts: incest, mutilation of orphans, drinking of blood. Boxers felt a comparable disgust for Chinese converts to Christianity—“rice Christians,” who by 1900, as the famine worsened, numbered nearly a million. To the Boxers, a rice Christian was no longer Chinese at all.

Most of the missions, Protestant and Catholic, were located in far-flung, unprotected districts; as the Boxers’ intimidation intensified, some Westerners were prudent enough to get out, but most did not. Before the Boxer Rebellion, as it would soon be known, wound down in August 1900, dozens of missionaries, along with thousands of their followers, would be murdered.

The White House was not alarmed at first. In his annual address to Congress in December 1899, McKinley declared: “The interests of our citizens in that vast Empire have not been neglected during the past year. Adequate protection has been secured for our missionaries.” On June 1, 1900, as the cables from China grew more troubling, William Rockhill, regarded as the administration’s ablest China hand, jotted a note to Hay: “I return the despatches from [American Minister to China Edwin] Conger which you kindly sent me to read. I cannot believe that the ‘Boxer’ movement will be very long-lived or cause any serious complications.”

Even as Rockhill gave this assurance, Boxers were tearing up the railroad between Peking and Tientsin and burning the stations. Two weeks later, Peking and Tientsin came under full-scale attack.

On June 15, Conger wrote Hay a chilling report from Peking: “I regret to say that since [June 11] we have been completely besieged within our compounds with the entire city in the possession of a rioting, murdering mob, with no visible effort being made by the Government in any way to restrain it. We have cleared and barricaded the streets in the vicinity of the Legation, but they are so scattered and our number of guards so limited that the gravest possible danger is imminent. . . . Since my last despatch, every American mission in the city, except the Methodist, with all their well equipped homes, has been burned, also all the Catholic and English, except one, and many hundreds of native Christians barbarously tortured and murdered. . . . We are simply trying to quietly defend ourselves until re-enforcements arrive, but nearly one hundred ‘Boxers’ have already been killed by the various Legation guards.”

That same day, Hay cabled Conger: “Do you need more force?”

Neither of these messages got through. By then, all communication with the nine hundred foreigners trapped in the Legation Quarter next to the Forbidden Palace was cut off. Making their plight more dire, the empress dowager, despite avowals to the contrary, directed imperial forces to join in the Boxer rampage.

Hay was in the most precarious position of his career thus far, faced with the dilemma of how to relieve the legation without intriguing with other powers or acting the bully in yet another faraway land—all issues that weighed heavily in an election year. The last thing he wanted was for the United States to take part in any action that would lead to a widening of the war, for he grasped that the other powers, particularly Russia, were itching for an excuse to partition all of China. Even within the administration there were some who suggested that the time had come for the United States to grab a port or at the very least a naval station.

Hay proceeded as gingerly as he dared. When Conger, in one of the last cables from Peking, asked if he ought to join the other ministers in demanding that the imperial authorities suppress the Boxers, Hay had advised: “Act independently in protection of American interests where practicable, and concurrently with representative of other powers if necessity arise[s].” Two days later—and a week before the Republican Convention in Philadelphia—Hay cabled Conger even more emphatically: “We have no policy in China except to protect with energy American interests and especially American citizens and the Legation. There must be no alliances.”

One hundred American Marines did join a force of two thousand that set out from Tientsin on June 10, heading for Peking; but even after ordering six thousand more troops from the Philippines, the administration was still not eager to enter into a more formal alliance with the powers. Soon, though, the United States would have to commit. Warships of all the powers were anchored off the Taku forts, at the entrance to the Peiho River, preparing an assault that would open the approach to Tientsin, thirty miles upstream, and to Peking, eighty miles farther. As directed by Washington, the U.S. Navy did not participate in the attack on the seventeenth, the only power not to do so. But after the Monocacy, a Civil War–era side-wheeler, came under fire from the forts, Admiral Louis Kempff cabled that a “state of war practically exists” and that he was “making common cause with foreign forces for general protection.”

It took less than a day to take the Taku forts, but now Tientsin was surrounded. Six hundred foreigners lived along the river in a settlement one mile long and a quarter-mile wide—“not chosen for defense,” noted one of the trapped residents, Lou Hoover, wife of an energetic young mining engineer, Herbert Hoover. On the day that Taku fell, thousands of Boxers, now joined by more than ten thousand imperial troops, began firing on the foreigners at Tientsin, whose hasty battlements were manned by two thousand soldiers, three hundred of them American. Enough reinforcements were able to fight their way into the settlement to keep it from being overrun, but the enemy still invested the old part of the city, from which it continued to shell the besieged.

The relief expedition that had left for Peking on the tenth made it barely halfway. It straggled back seventeen days later, reporting three hundred dead and wounded—and still no word from Peking. The sole information that Hay managed to glean on the fate of the legation was a belated dispatch forwarded by the American consul in Shanghai, confirming that the German minister, Baron Clemens von Ketteler, had been murdered by Boxers two weeks earlier. Hay tried not to dwell on what might have happened since then. The only good news came from the viceroys of central and southern China, who assured the State Department that they would do their best to keep the rebellion from spreading to their provinces and would protect the safety of foreigners in their midst.

On July 3, Hay called a meeting of the cabinet. Since the death of Vice President Hobart, and with the president in Canton for the summer, he was now the ranking officer on the bridge. He presented to his fellow secretaries a letter he intended to send to Berlin, Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, and four other capitals, reiterating his country’s position on China. With the death of the German minister, the repulsion of the first relief expedition, and the ongoing assault on the foreign compound in Tientsin, he feared that unless he took a stand diplomatically, the other powers would tear China to shreds. But if the fighting could be contained within the areas where the Boxers were at large, and the imperial government could be assured that the powers desired only the suppression of the Boxers and the relief of their citizens, then perhaps the conflict could be resolved before it escalated into full-scale war. Above all else, he wished to keep the channels of communication open, in the event that the foreigners in the Legation Quarter in Peking were still alive. And so, with the cabinet’s blessing, he issued what would thenceforth be known as his Second Open Door note.

He began with a gentle warning intended as a roundabout message to the imperial government. “If wrong be done to our citizens,” he stated, “we propose to hold the responsible authors to the uttermost accountability.” Then he presented a transparent fiction that would give the Chinese government a chance to save face, and thus save itself from larger reprisal: “So long as [Chinese authorities] are not in overt collusion with rebellion and use their power to protect foreign life and property, we regard them as representing the Chinese people, with whom we seek to remain in peace and friendship.”

By now he had to know that the Chinese government was fighting in concert with the Boxers; nevertheless, tactical use of the benefit of the doubt would not hurt his chances of getting Americans out of Peking alive, which was the aim of the next part of his circular. “The purpose of the President,” he continued, “is as it has been heretofore, to act concurrently with the other powers, first, in opening communication with Peking and rescuing the American officials, missionaries, and other Americans who are in danger; secondly, in affording all possible protection everywhere in China to American life and property.”

And finally he raised the flag he hoped would rally the powers—and draw the Chinese—to the issue that mattered most. Whatever the outcome of the rebellion might be, regardless of what befell the legations and missions, Hay wanted to make it plain that the United States would “preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity, protect all rights guaranteed to friendly powers by treaty and international law, and safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.”

This time he did not ask for a response from the various powers. Nor did the note solicit their adherence. His letter was more a promise than a plea, a statement of the steadfast intention of the United States to honor the integrity of China—the point Rockhill had wanted to stress in the first Open Door note—with the implied suggestion that it was in the best interests of all the powers to follow the example set by America. It was a long shot, fired at a time when Boxers were hacking Christians to death without mercy and foreign soldiers were cutting down fanatical Boxers by the hundreds. There was not much else Hay could do, short of threatening war against any power that stepped out of line. Yet after the reception of the first Open Door note, as unenthusiastic as some of these responses had been, he had to believe that the example of the United States counted for something.

In the end, the Second Open Door did not “save” China outright, as some have mythologized, but it paid off in several incremental ways that were nonetheless crucial. First, it served to deter one or more of the powers from declaring war on China; and second, none used the Boxer hostilities to seize advantages beyond their existing spheres of influence (although it must be said that Russia’s grip on Manchuria and the treaty port of Newchwang grew worrisomely tighter). “The thing to do . . . was to localize the storm if possible, and this we seem to have done,” Hay wrote Adams five days after the note was circulated. “All the powers have fallen in with my modus vivendi in the Centro and South.”

Hay recognized that his note was little more than a piece of paper, yet he was satisfied to have imposed at least a modicum of good intention and common sense on the chaos of the moment. “I will not tell you the lunatic difficulties under which we labor,” he continued to Adams. “The opposition press call[s] for impeachment because we are violating the Constitution [by invading China without a declaration of war] and the pulpit gives us anathema because we are not doing it enough [sending more troops to save missionaries]. . . . If I looked at things as you do in the light of reason . . . I should go off after lunch and die. . . . But I take refuge in a craven opportunism. I do what seems possible every day—not caring a hoot for consistency or the Absolute.”

His opportunism—part optimism, part pragmatism—bore more fruit in mid-July, just as all hope seemed to be lost. Over the previous month, attacks on the weary occupants of the Peking legations had been unrelenting. The Boxers had come close to burning them out and breeching their barricades on numerous occasions; food and ammunition were running low. Dozens of foreigners had been wounded or killed, making it even more difficult to defend their half-mile-square perimeter. Three weeks had passed since anyone had heard any news, good or bad. And then on July 16, the Daily Mail of London reported that the legations had been overrun and all the inhabitants butchered. A memorial service for “the Europeans Massacred in Peking” was scheduled for St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Hay was one of the first with knowledge that the story was cruelly false. Throughout the Boxer ordeal, he had maintained respectful relations with the Chinese minister, Wu T’ing-fang. (The running joke around Washington was that Wu made Hay “woozy” and Hay made Wu “hazy.”) On July 11, he delivered a message to Wu, who in turn sent it to trusted contacts in China. No one knows how many hands it passed through from the time it left the State Department until an old man appeared at the legation barricade in Peking five days later, waving a white flag and bearing three words in a code understood only by the American minister, Edwin Conger. Deciphered, it read simply: “Communicate tidings bearer.”

Conger wrote back, also in cipher: “For one month we have been besieged in British Legation under continued shot and shell from Chinese troops. Quick relief only can prevent general massacre.” The message reached Hay on July 20. There were those who questioned the authenticity of Conger’s note, but it was soon verified by another exchange of cables, requesting “bearer” to provide the middle name of Conger’s wife. (Answer: Alta.) The memorial service at St. Paul’s was canceled.

From here on, the pace quickened. While Hay’s and Conger’s ciphers were passing between Washington and Peking, an allied force of six thousand drove the Boxers and Chinese soldiers from Tientsin, suffering seven hundred fifty casualties and wantonly looting the city. Preparations began immediately for a march on Peking. A force of nearly twenty thousand—ten thousand Japanese, three thousand Russian, three thousand British, two thousand American, a few French (but no Germans to speak of)—set out before daybreak on August 4, determined to make it the entire way this time.

Hay was too exhausted to wait in Washington for the outcome. The next day, he departed for the Fells. In his absence, he trusted Adee to run the State Department and to keep him informed on the relief expedition via the tiny telegraph office in the nearby village of Newbury.

In New Hampshire, he broke down entirely. “I did not imagine when I left Washington how bad it was,” he wrote John George Nicolay, with whom he had shared more than one summer in the capital. “If I had stayed another day I should have not got away at all.” His symptoms included backache and an irritable bladder, though at least one newspaper suggested that he was “near the danger point.” He was annoyed but also somewhat tickled by the reports of his imminent demise. “I do not care to take the world into my confidence as to the state of my hydraulics. So I must let the story run,” he wrote Adee. “But so far as I can learn from my doctor, I am not moribund.”

To Nicolay, though, he was more reflective and rather more final. “[T]here is not much more to expect,” he confided. “My dreams when I was a little boy at Warsaw and Pittsfield have absolutely and literally been fulfilled. The most important part of my life came late, but it came in precisely the shape I dreamed.”

But then he could not close his letter without griping about the Senate and the aggravation of getting treaties ratified. Already he was bracing for the next round of negotiations over the canal and the other pesky chores that stood between him and the end of his term in office.