Town gossip had it that twenty-one months of “strenuous Teddy” had enfeebled him—that he was being kept on only as a venerable symbol, Washington’s last link with the administration of President Lincoln. There was some truth to both rumors, although Hay was still capable of inspired diplomacy. And his relationship with Roosevelt was genuinely affectionate, rooted in a mutual memory of Theodore Senior introducing them nearly thirty-three years before—reedy boy and young
