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

Kinda one-sided...
I am a self-admitted Lincolnophie and the world that revolved around him. Included in this obsession are his secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay. When I saw author's John Taliaferro book "All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt" I knew I had to read it.
For this injestment I chose the audiobook narrated by Joe Barrett. Who I may say did a very good job.
Taliaferro's book on Hay is a hagiography about the one-time secretary, and statesman. The author reflects the life of a man who was loved by all, did no wrong, and if he did it was not with maliciousness, and throughout his life was a Midas man whose life was as golden as the bank vaults in which his wife's family's gold was kept in.
I show more feel if you are going to do your biographical subject any justice, you as the writer must also include the bad as well as the good. This gives the subject life! Makes them real!
The author seemed to gloss over Hay's weaknesses, for example Hay was a somewhat womanizer/philanderer and lusted over other women in his life and the affairs he had. While noted, as this was such a part of who he was the author couldn't skip it. Taliaferro writes about it as if it was just another thing and didn't really address the fact that he had life long affairs!
Taliaferro would also, it seemed would be so focused on one part of his life that he would skip or barely acknowledge another part was happening. Such as when John Nicolay died. Nicolay played a humongous role in Hay's life and when Nicolay died Taliaferro noted it with a part of a sentence. Not even a full sentence! And that was it no other mention of it. Things like that bothered me.
But Taliaferro does write well, can boil down complex subjects and explain the world and people around it. He exposed me to the world Hay enjoyed with his rich, powerful and well-known friends that I was unfamiliar with, and generally gave me a 10,000 foot view of a man who seemed to be about everywhere from the mid 1800s until his death after the turn of the century.
I give it a three star review, it was good, not great and probably not something I would recommend unless the person was as big a Lincoln fan as I am. show less

5051. All the Great Prizes The Life of John Hay from Lincoln to Roosevelt, by John Taliaferro (read 12 Aug 2013) On 26 Jan 1999 I read the biography of John Hay which won the Pulitzer prize for biography in 1934, and enjoyed it. So I really did not think I needed to read another biography of John Hay. But this looked so competent and I decided to give myself the pleasure of reading it. It is a fine work, and fun to read. Hay is an interesting person and one wonders what he would think of the people running the Republican Party today. They would probably call him a RINO. But he was an admirable person and his biography is composed almost perfectly. If I had any complaint, I would say the author overdid the quoting of Hay's mushy letters show more to Lizzie Cameron, even though it was interesting that he spent so much time mooning over Lizzie while married to a wife of his own. And Hay no doubt did the country a service in restraining TR a bit, since TR would have liked to have a war if he could find one. There is one amazing error in the book. At two places it is indicated that Albert Beveridge was TR's Vice President! The Vice President serving with Teddy Roosevelt was Charles Fairbanks. Beveridge was never Vice President. show less

There's a famous photo of Abraham Lincoln with his two private secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, that almost every Lincoln fan will be aware of. In it John Hay, age 24, stands with his hand on the back of Lincoln's armchair in easy intimacy, his right knee relaxed, his left arm akimbo and holding his hat. His clothes are notably more stylish than Nicolay's office attire and Lincoln's formal suit. He's the picture of confidence, and you want to learn more about him, especially after you find out that he ended his career as the greatest Secretary of State to that point (under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt) and that he was also close by during the assassinations of James Garfield and McKinley.

John Hay had style, and this show more biography does not. It is complete as can be, yet dry and unspeculative. Too little attention is paid to the times in which Hay moved; too little effort is made to consider what historical documents leave out. This is nowhere more apparent than in the treatment of Hay's marriage to a strikingly plain heiress, and his nearly lifelong love affair with a beautiful politician's wife. The biographer does not venture a word about the inferences that might be drawn from the engagement of a talented, somewhat famous young man with relatively little money to the—let's say it—ugly daughter of one of the country's richest men, and his subsequent employment by his new father-in-law. In a more vivid biography, one whose boldness lies elsewhere, this reticence might represent admirable restraint, but in a book that lacks boldness altogether, it only reads as timidity and lack of imagination.

It doesn't help that John Hay led a largely charmed life and was rarely faced with a challenge he didn't overcome. But such a subject means that the biographer has to spend particular effort describing the drama of the times in which his subject played an important part. Instead, Hay's time with Lincoln is discussed not in terms of his position as a resident of the White House during the most dramatic times it's ever seen, but more as if its importance lies mainly in the fact that it was Hay's first job. Did he do a good job? Yes, he was very good. He might have even authored the Bixby letter signed with Lincoln's name. But Lincoln died, and that put Hay out of work. On to Hay's trip to Paris....

There's a passage near the beginning of Mark Twain's autobiography that tells a funny and sad story about Hay, who had been a pal of Twain's when they both worked on Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. I'm tempted to copy out the whole thing here—it's more lifelike and telling in two pages than anything in the 600-page biography. show less

Great way to learn history, by reading the bio of a man who was at the forefront of almost everything that happened in US history from 1860-1905.