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John Hay died in high office. He was at the time, as he had been since 1898, U.S. secretary of state. As Henry Adams declared in The Education of Henry Adams, Hay "had solved nearly every old problem of American statesmanship.... For the first time in fifteen hundred years a true Roman pax was in sight, and would, if it succeeded, owe its virtues to him." Under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Hay had become one of the nation's great heroes. But John Hay had also been a poet and historian of considerable fame. As William Dean Howells wrote in the North American Review in the year of Hay's death, "He lived to be recognized as the ablest public man of his time, the inventor of a diplomacy that was sincere, courageous and generous, and it has seemed to me, in reviewing what he wrote, that he might have had an equal and a kindred fame in literature." At some point Hay had made a choice of public service over literature.
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