baldridge and others closest to recent presidential wives talk about the role of the first lady and how it has changed along with the nation, tonight at 9:00 eastern on c- span. >> this week, john taliaferro discusses his newly released biography entitled "all the great prizes: the life of john hay, from lincoln to roosevelt." >> john taliaferro, when did you decide to spend a lot of time with john hay, and who was he? >> i decided he was a delicious subject for a biography when it dawned on me that he had been,

not only at abraham lincoln's bedside immediately after his assassination, but also at the bedside of william mckinley in 1901. i thought, who could this below be? of course, when i opened the archives, i realized with a rich subject it was. john hay, his life really has two bookends at either end of his biographical shelf. there is lincoln on one end, he was his private secretary, lived in the white house for every war years. so much of what we know about lincoln comes from hay's time with him. he served on the mckinley as well and was secretary of state for teddy roosevelt, so you have these iconic bookends in american history, and then when you look deeper, you realize all the chapters in between, from the civil war to the

beginning of the 20th-century, he is a presence in every one of those chapters. his fingerprints are on the pages. in many cases, he has written those chapters in american history. >> when did he live? >> born in 1838, and died on july 1 1905. >> where did his last start? >> he was born in indiana, when he was a young boy, his father was a doctor, moved to warsaw, ill., which is a mississippi river town 100 miles west of spring killed, illinois. mark twain country. >> what was his life like before he met abraham lincoln? >> he was a bright, young boy, his father was a doctor. all those around him noted his great intelligence and potential.

he had an uncle, a lawyer, who agreed to send him off to college. at age 16 he went east to brown university and providence. really, that transformed him. he was a brilliant student. his professors said he was one of the greatest translators of foreign languages they had ever met. he wanted to be a poet, he wanted to be the next and for allan poe. but when he finished college at a young age, i think 19, they were not hiring poets, even back in those days. so his uncle said, well, why don't you come to springfield and read the law? he did, reluctantly, john hay did. the guy in the next office was dark horse candidate, this long, gangly lawyer who was running for president on something called the republican ticket. abraham lincoln not only won his party's nomination, but then

won the election, and he needed somebody to write letters. hay was a gifted writer, came on as the second of two secretaries, and went off in the spring of 1861 with lincoln to washington. >> there is a picture in your book of john hay with a glove only on one hand. is that something that he did all the time? ofthat was a picture taken him when he was becoming a blade in washington. the picture was put on something to show, -- people would not send e-mails back then. they would send cards to say i will visit. that was his calling card, as it were. john hayes, being a country boy from illinois, had become something else when he came to washington, and he felt it was

fashionable. the image of him in the lincoln movie, we can talk about that later. >> there is a picture in the book of robert lincoln. they look alike. >> robert tod lincoln was abraham and mary tod's eldest son, who went off to boarding school in new hampshire when abraham lincoln was running for president. and then, of course, was away at harvard. hay and robert had known each other in springfield and kept up when robert came down from cambridge to visit the white house. but president lincoln, for some reason, did not have a warm relationship with robert. maybe because of the absence,

being away as a circuit lawyer, campaigning, and then robert at college. hay, who was in the white house, whether it a couple of away from lincoln in the second floor of the white house, sort of got taken on as a second son. his love of literature, he shared with lincoln. he would pad down the hall in his nightshirt. because of hay, we have descriptions of lincoln looking like a sport in the night. they bonded because of their love of literature. >> how old was he when he went to work for abraham lincoln? >> he would have been just shy of 21. >> where did he physically live in the white house? >> the secretary's room, the northeast corner of the white house. if you picture the white house, looking from lafayette square,

the upper left-hand window. the president and his family occupied seven rooms in the second floor of the white house. this is before the west wing. the offices and all of the affairs of the government, administration, were conducted on that floor as well. there was very little security, so there were always office seekers, messengers of running in and out all the time. >> who is nicolay? >> he was a friend. he came to the united states as a young man and ran a small newspaper in illinois, and lincoln brought him on first to be the first private secretary. they all got so voluminous that he could not handle it. he suggested they bring on the

hay. so they came to washington together on the train with the lincoln's, and were roommates for four years in the white greatand then were friends, collaborators together. once lincoln died, and even before, they have decided they were going to write a book about lincoln, so they started collecting papers with the idea that they would eventually write a biography. it took them 25 years and they wrote a million and a half by every. youow much of that have read? >> every word. >> how long did it take you? >> i was taking notes so i did not have to read it twice. i digress on that somewhat. they spent 25 years writing would be the benchmark biography of lincoln, published serially in the century magazine

at first and then 10 volumes of books. they always say, we did it together. and did not publicly put knowledge which part. i have discovered it in the papers of nicolay and the library of congress, there is a note signed by his daughter indicating which chapter her father wrote, and therefore, by logic, the other chapters were written by hay. i read through the volumes. it took me the most of a summer, with this memo from her daughter beside me, and then pay's words spring out. english was not nicolay's first language. hay was the poet. with that matrix guiding me, it is starkly obvious which parts

of the biography are written by john hay, and some of the writing is really elegant, special. >> when you think back on those 10 volumes, when were you stopped and said i cannot believe i just read that? >> two instances. hay took responsibility for writing the first 40 years of lincoln's life before he went to washington. some of the evocative descriptions of life on the front here, of lincoln's personality are really very soulful. compared to some of the lincoln stuff today, necessarily revelatory, but more in the line of carl sandburg. written almost as an elegy to lincoln.

and then hay wrote most of the civil war battle scenes. papers of nicolay and thehis abe could nail it in a paragraph, the va battles -- i think cold harbor. >> when did john hay made his bride? -- meet his prize. meat is bride? his bride? >> after he left the white house, after the assassination, -- incredibly traumatized -- but he had already planned to go abroad to serve in paris, which he did.

seward got him a job there, went on to two other stops in the vienna and madrid. instead of going to work on the lincoln biography, instead of being a poet, instead of going back to illinois, which is considered the boondocks, he went to new york and started writing editorials for the tribune and quickly became what really was said the best editorial writer we have had. while living in new york, he met the daughter of a man named amethyst stone, one of the wealthiest men in america. before there was a carnegie or rockefeller, he was a big deal. he started railroads, he was from cleveland. his daughter, clara, had come to visit an aunt and uncle, and was introduced to this promising young journalist, and they fell deeply in love.

>> what kind of marriage did they have? >> a very strong marriage. four children, they lived a grand, gilded age life, they would travel in the style and broad. they had a mansion on millionaires a row, euclid avenue, in cleveland. eventually in 1886, moved into a house in washington. having said this about their marriage, hay was still of that fellow with the glove off, one that knew how to impress the ladies. there were at least two that caught his eye, to whom he devoted a great deal of attention, even during his marriage. >> those two were? >> the first one was anna lodge, daughter of henry cabot lodge, of massachusetts.

the wife of henry cabot lodge. one of the great expansionists, foreign policy guys. theodoreriend of roosevelt. he had a beautiful young wife. hay became smitten by her. next was the wife of another senator, james donald cameron, the son of simon cameron, the guy that lincoln had kicked out of his cabinet. nanny cameron was really a femme fatale. elizabeth sherman cannon.

excuse me. cameron. i am getting tongue tied. she was a beauty and all the men in washington have their tongues out when she came to town. 25 years younger than her husband. he had grown children. first, hay's best friend, henry adams, fell for her, and then john hay himself. then he had his dalliance with danny blogged. subsided. >> we will come back to this in a moment. i want to show some video from 11 years ago, in 2002. only 35 seconds. then we will come back and ask you some questions about yourself. [video clip] >> what unsettled me about it mount rushmore was that the story was too simplified. that america could be boiled down into a bumper sticker.

i liked it when things are a little mess here. -- when things are a little messier. the fact that the creator of our been a klansman -- this is a little more complicated. that our values, as good as they are, the message of democracy, comes from a stew -- >> just a little taste. gutsentalking about borglan. who was he, and how many books have you written since? >> there is a connection, if you look at the subtitle of my book, and if you think about mount rushmore, you get it. he was the megalomaniacal sculptor of not rushmore. -- of mount rushmore. he had wanted to build kossel structures and he started in

georgia building stone mountain. as a member of the clan, he crossed some of his fellow klansmen, and they drove him out of georgia. he was commissioned to inscribe mount rushmore. 11 years ago, you asked me who was found on mount rushmore -- stage fright, i almost forgot. now i am here to tell you, george washington, thomas jefferson, abraham lincoln, and teddy roosevelt. my book, "all the great prizes: the life of john hay, from lincoln to roosevelt," who is on the cover? two of the mount rushmore people. truly the denizens of the book, -- the genesis of this book probably goes back to my research into those presidents. to write about mount rushmore, i had to know the understanding of what this president was. then and now?

>> i wrote one book, also said in the late 19th century. it is a book called "in a far country peer " it is about a couple, man and woman, who broke up to the bering strait of alaska to essentially bring civilization to the eskimos who live up there, kind of an adventure story with a lot of fun to research. i got to spend a lot of time in the wild country, go out into the ice. >> where are you from originally? >> native of baltimore, married to a texan, move to texas. welle a summer house as when it gets too hot in texas. doneat else have you before getting into the book- writing business? >> i am a recovering journalist. i work for several magazines, my latest stop at "newsweek" and that has been 20 years, and it is no more.

inback to john hay, started indiana, illinois, spent some time overseas. how many different countries did he live in, when he become an ambassador? >> after the clinton -- after the lincoln presidency, he went first to paris, then to vienna, then to spain. in all the years after that, because he was married to this wealthy woman, they traveled, took the grand tour. they would spend six, eight months abroad. they loved england above all else. in 1897, when another one of hay's fellow ohioans, william mckinley, was elected to the

presidency, he chose john hay, who was very cosmopolitan, very well connected in foreign circles, and also a very large contributor to his campaign. he said hay to london as an ambassador. the term ambassador was not officially used until 1893, under the second grover cleveland's administration. he was the second ambassador to england. then the spanish american war broke out in 1898. mckinley had a hapless secretary of state, john sherman, who was not up to the task, and was shunted aside and hay was brought back. brother? >> yes, also from ohio. hay was brought back in the fall of '89 the aid after the war was over to take over the

portfolio of state, which was a much larger portfolio. instead of being the continental united states and alaska, we now had cuba, puerto rico, guam. and the philippines with a civil war raging in the philippines. >> how many years did he spend at the new york tribune? >> about three, four. >> did he spend seven years as secretary of state? >> help me here. he started in october 1898, died in office, and june 1905. >> go back to the children. one of his children was named adelbert. what is the story of his life? robertalk about how lincoln was not very close to

his father. hay's eldest son was a great kid, but for some reason, he could not do anything right in his father's eyes, at least as a young boy. he was sort of big, ungainly. he was a physical kid. hay was an endorsement. his son wanted to play a new sport of football. they went off to yale, and did well, and in the years after he graduated, hay did an amazing thing. he chose his son to go off to pretoria, south africa, in the middle of the war, to be america's consul to the boer republic. the boy acquitted himself well, grew up on the spot, and everyone was very impressed. he came home and president

mckinley said, i would like you to come to be my private secretary. the exact same job that john hay had for abraham lincoln. you can imagine how proud his father was to see his son go through this great maturation. job,e he could start the and delbert pay went up to his yale reunion, came back to his hotel room, sitting in the window, smoked a cigarette, fell asleep, and fell. out the window and died. it was an awful year, beginning with his son dying, and then the assassination of mckinley in september, then the death of his writing partner and old friend john and george nicolay, and then his other best friend, clarence king. >> who was clarence king? >> he was sort of the ideal man

in the world of john hay. anhad gone to yale, he was explorer, he had gone out as a surveyor, geologist, the first decline of many of the mountains in the sierra. he went on to found the u.s. geological service. hansona wonderful and guy who was well-liked. but he never really thrived in any way. he would run off to start a mining inventor, fail, it would borrow money, so he was a frustrating friend. it was very crushing when he died without reaching its full potential. >> of what? >> tuberculosis. >> five of hearts?

>> a group of friends in washington, when hay came to washington, he was assistant secretary of state under president rutherford b. hayes. henry adams had just moved here to begin researching his great, great biography of the madison and jefferson administrations. cain had come to start the geological survey and then both of them and their wives would have tea afternoon, and the five of them call themselves the five of hearts. toanyone that comes down lafayette square in washington and seize the white house will be in the middle of hay country. explain what you see and how it relates to john hay and henry adams? >> as you know, lafayette

square is the six-acre square next to the white house, lined with town houses. everybody and anybody seemed to live on lafayette square, or in the blocks around that. what we forget today, washington was a very small place socially, and everyone knew their neighbors, the history of who lived there. people came and went, as they do in washington, because people change jobs, people are in office, out of office. in 1884, and john hay and henry adams began construction on side-by-side houses on the north side of the square. the idea being that the hay's would take two-thirds of the property. they had four children.

the adams, who had none, would take one third. and the two best friends with live side by side, looking across to the white house, and really, it was ground zero for the social scene in washington. all knew everybody around, in and out of each other's houses on carriage rides, at dinner party spirit it was all very tight and wonderful. that is why it was really remarkable that adams and hay, who had such wondering eyes, and not be noticed by those around them. >> located there is the hay- adams building. is that the same one? >> no, the hay house and adams

house were torn down and a hotel was built on that site. >> what is the view if you are up there and looking out? >> john hay built the house, and across the parlor, he could see out his bedroom, looking at the white house. it is very moving to go there and imagine. side was on the left-hand on the second floor? >> if your back is to lafayette square, from the hay-adams hotel, if you could look across to the white house, hay could look up to his window.

windowsl, all of those on that side, the higher stories, looked across to the white house, washington monument, and clear to the jefferson memorial. john's church. what is the importance of that? >> well, theodore roosevelt went to church there on sundays. after church, he got in the habit of walking across the street and coming into hay's house, and they would sit in the library and talk for two or three hours. this is the president of the united states and secretary of state. i mentioned, lincoln was sort of a father figure to john hay. well, theater roosevelt's father had died when he was a very young man. hay's son had recently died.

neither roosevelt nor hay said this out loud, but hay almost became a father figure to roosevelt. age? >> exactly 20 years apart. >> that church is now known as the church of presidents. let me ask you this. you read the 10 volumes. did you read the diary? >> hay's? >> yes. >> my goodness. >> how much is in there? >> you always wish for more, there are large gaps in it, but it is so genuine, so real to have somebody that was living at close to lincoln making these observations.

the most daunting aspect of the book was, ok, i'm going to have to write about lincoln. believe me, plenty of people have come before me. if you were staging a play, you have lincoln in the room, nobody will look at the other actors. what i chose to do was killed lincoln off in the first page and bring him back as john hay's lincoln. the reader realizes that so much of what we recognize and know about lincoln was given to us from john hay, also in the autobiographies, but mostly these snippets. poet,ay saw himself as a writer. he realized he was a writer in the presence of greatness. the descriptions of lincoln on horseback, what he ate for

breakfast, his moods, all of this comes from hay's diaries. we would love to have more. anyone who read or write or cares about lincoln -- so fortunate to have john hays in there. readn the average person those diaries, the 10 volumes? >> the 10 volumes you can get. there is this wonderful thing called google book, where you can look of almost anything online. the volumes were transcribed by one of the great lincoln scholars, michael berlingame, and are available in paperback. anyone who loves lincoln would enjoy reading those. it is not a chore to get through them. >> i have a quotation in your book from a fellow named david rankin-barbie. >> well, he came from humble

roots. he came from rural roots. when he reached the big city, he became cosmopolitan. he took to gentility. he did live the life. he was very wealthy. he had servants. >> where did he get his money? >> his wife. she was married to the wealthy guy from cleveland. you could sort of make that pink tea observation about him. roosevelt thought he was not strenuous or rugged enough.

he mostly hung out with other intellectuals. henry adams, the novelist henry james, artists, people like that. he was not the guy walking down the street with his sleeves rolled up. i guess that is an apt description. >> you paint a picture of hay roosevelt being close, and then you write in chapter 16 -- this is from theodore roosevelt.

>> well, this was after hay had died, wrote this. roosevelt did not keep his light under a bushel. he wanted to take credit for absolutely everything that happened in his public life. he was writing that letter also to his good old buddy henry cabot lodge. chasing, hay had been after henry cabot lodge's wife for a little bit, too. you could consider roux about writing to lodge, our old buddy john hay was a great man, but remember i am even greater. what i go on to say in that chapter is that roosevelt never ever said such a thing about hay to hay he was alive. here.

>> teddy roosevelt likes to practice fighting sticks in the white house, get up on a frosty morning, get on his horse and ride through rock creek park. lodge was also a great horseman and liked that lifestyle. hay's idea of exercise was to go out and stroll up 16th street with his friend henry adams. theodore roosevelt had a thing

about guys that did not have calluses on their hands. hay never had a callus on his hands. >> criticizing, talking in an effective manner. what did that mean? >> first of all, we do not actually know how hay talked. >> there is no audio? >> no, there is none. she died in 1901. he wrote some times in a manner that may have seemed affected. oftentimes, these letters were to his friends, sort of a tongue-in-cheek, drole, a mock- style business. i am not trying to be apologetic or defend, but anybody who reads into any of hay's letters realizes that he

was one of the great writers of his day. ofdid lindsey cameron, wife the center, live on lafayette square, too? >> she live within a stone's throw away from his door. her husband was 23 years older and did not know or care what she did. she kept hay and henry adams like tame cats. always around her. >> you have quotes in here from adams to roosevelt. >> a pretty good description. him?

>> roosevelt, no small ego there. ansevelt and to himself as historian. he was writing a history, wrote the history of 1812 practically before he got out of college and was always tried to lecture adams, one of the great historian of his day, could not stand it. roosevelt, of course, his manner, his physicality was like a bull in a china shop. this grated on adams, who was a drawing room prig. >> some great quotes from adams.

>> let me just say, if henry adams was choosing who would be on mount rushmore, he probably would not have chosen theodore roosevelt. the interesting thing about that is not so much adams' low opinion of theodore roosevelt, it is that his best friend john hay also had a very close relationship and close working relationship with theodore roosevelt, and so adams forgave his best friend for being friends with roosevelt. it was a really good flexibility in that little triangle, at least between the atoms and hay part. >> so it was the five of hearts plus one? >> the five of hearts existed for a very brief moment.

i looked through all the letters and correspondence. the moments that those five were in one room together, after call themselves the five of hearts, probably fewer than 10. after clover adams committed suicide, which she did at her house on the lafayette square, right before they were to move into their new house, december 1885, they were no longer five. it was right after that, that two of the hearts, hays and adams, started to look at other women in washington. king also had another secret wife. unbeknownst to his friends, married a black woman in new york.

>> because of what is happening in our country right now, i want to go to page 131 and get you to put this in perspective as part of the discussion, when john hay was a tribune writer.

>> have we improved any, these many years later? >> the journalism or the conduct of our country? [laughter] i think some of our civil service reform has helped some of that. getting back to hay's part of all that. there was a huge letdown. i am oversimplifying here. but after lincoln was assassinated and andrew johnson was nearly impeached, just an embarrassment, ulysses grant became president. hay and others in lincoln's circle, they thought he was a

disaster as a president. hay, as a journalist, saw grant as an insult to everything that lincoln had worked for and martyred for. scandalse a number of in the administration. one of his secretaries was driven out of office. hay, using the pulpit of the so-called great oral organ, the tribune, went after the general mercilessly. >> a couple of numbers in your book. when he was at the tribune, a circulation of 45,000? >> i am trying to remember, but it is closed.

wasremember, the tribune also published in weekly and biweekly editions that went around the country. probably the most widely read newspaper in the country. >> the other number that struck me, when he was secretary of state, only 80 people? >> assistant secretary, in 1879. remember, foreign ministers were still wearing sports and sashes and plumed hats. the state war and navy building, now called the old executive office building, next to the white house, maybe a thousand other employees at trade councils and other things like that. it was not much of an operation.

>> we are obviously leaving a lot out in the book. it is a big book. how long did it take you from researched your writing? >> every minute of five years. it was unrelenting. as soon as you finished lincoln, you would move on to hay's great career as a writer and journalist, secretary of state. you could write many volumes on his work in the state department. >> it is interesting how exciting other historians have gotten excited over hay. here is an interview with harold holzer. [video clip] >> i would like to talk to john hay. i was a political operative for mayor cuomo when he was a candidate for mayor, governor of new york state.

the idea of being so close, on such a spare staff, and writing about him, seeing him, observing him, helping him, watching him interact with other being a witness to history. writers do not think they are making history but they think they are observing and interpreting history. hay is the one i wanted to be. >> how much competition did you being written? particularly. and there were many books that were great help. if you imagine, when you get into lincoln, it is a growing library of great work. on the other end, roosevelt. lots of great work done there. all the work that has been done on america's emergence as a world power at the turn of the

20th century, great scholars have weighed in to that. i can avail myself of that. there were two other biographies of note on john hay, one written in the early part of, i think, 1914, 17, something like that. the other one written in 1933, which i believe won the pulitzer prize. >> how did you make yours different? >> i made mine different by writing about hay as he moved through history, not so much history that surrounded him. when all is said and done, you would say hay was a statesman, or lincoln's secretary, what got hay to lincoln's attention was that he was a great writer. son i realized there were

many thousands of letters of john hay, and there was a man -- people loved to keep the letters. there was so much of hay in his own riding, i decided to tell his story and let history be the backdrop to john hay's story, instead of putting him into this zealot-like character in the corner, like other historical snapshots. example,you give us an a story that you like to tell when john hay worked closely with abraham lincoln? which gives the humanity of both. >> there is one part of john hay's diary where he goes on for a few pages more than elsewhere, and that is on the election returns

for lincoln's reelection in 1884. -- at 1864. a few months earlier, no one thought lincoln would win reelection. there was a lot of gloom in the white house. hay was at the telegraph office, a short walk away from the white house. he sat up through the night with lincoln and watched him pace, watched for the returns to come in from various states. when the returns came in, they realized that the soldiers had voted, and they realized that made the difference. they had been allowed to go home on leave. hay's description of lincoln being concerned but calm, keeping everyone around him at ease by telling his great stories, one of the great moments in political history. we have all become familiar of

the stories of election night for various presidential candidates. this is one of the first. >> you start your book with a quotation from john milton hayes, 1905. >> where did that come from? >> john hay essentially wrote his own benediction. in the spring of 1905, he had a bad heart. his health was very poor. yet, theodore roosevelt, who had been elected the previous fall, been inaugurated in march 1905, said, please stay on for as long as you can for another

term. my view, he had been with the kinley as secretary of state, with mckinley being reelected, he stayed on. roosevelt came on after, stayed on for the rest of that term. he is basically headed into his fourth presidential term as secretary of state. onpoor health, he had gone to europe to what was the state of our treatment for that time, going to the balance in germany. bathstyhe b- to theb in germany. on the ship home, he knew that his health was not any better. in his diary, just about his final entry, he wrote that passage, which is where i got the title. >> before we started this, i

wanted to ask you to read that, from page 543, he died, as you told us, july 1, 1905, and then you talk about the diary, and it starts, "i say to myself." >> i knew when i read this, this would be the title of my book. this is john hay's diary. "i say to myself that i should not rebel as the thought of my ending at this time. i have lived to be old, something i never expected in my youth. i have had many blessings, domestic happiness being the greatest of all. i have lived my life. i have had success beyond all the dreams of my boyhood. my name is printed in the journals of the world without a script qualification, which, may, i suppose, be called fame. by mayor like a circus, i shall occupy a modest place in history of my time. if i were to live several more years, i should probably add nothing to my existing reputation.

what i could not reasonably expect any further involvement in life, such falls to a lot of old men. i know debt is the common lot, and what is universal ought not to be deemed a misfortune, and yet, instead of confronting it with dignity and philosophy, i cling to life, and the things of life as eagerly as if i had not had my chance at happiness and gained nearly all the great prizes." tois that when you decided title the book "all the great prizes"? >> i believe i was in the john hay library, and named after john hay, a graduate from brown university. thes looking through microfilm of his hand-written

diaries. of course, i went to the end to see how far it went. there, in his beautiful, bold handwriting, so distinctive i could recognize across the room, was that. >> the actual diary at the brown library? >> yes. >> is there any monument to him where he was born in salem, where he lived in warsaw, or the house that he had in new hampshire? >> i believe there is something in the salem where he left when he was three. i never went there. in warsaw, ill., there are a little silhouettes of him lined up and down main street, a charming little town. his summer home, which he kept in new hampshire from the late '80's until his death, is called the fells. it has been now restored as a

national state and conservation area, a beautiful place. i invite anyone to visit it. it is one of the great retreats in new england. >> how long did clara, his wife, live after he died? >> another 10 years or so, devoted to her children and grandchildren. >> what happened to henry adams? >> henry adams lived through the first world war and published his great book of "the education of angry adams" which we all have to read in school. i think the book was then published. >> what happened to lizzie cameron? >> she was much younger, so she lived much longer, forgive me for not knowing the exact date. she never remarried.

she lived most of her life apart from her husband in paris. along with edith wharton, another great figure of the time, helping with refugees and more relief in the first world war in england. i am sure, had many other men who had an eye for her, too. >> i called you john toliver when we started, it looks like john taliaferro. >> my ancestors came from came to virginia in the 1600's. got sure the pronunciation stepped on for many years. my father always used to say it means eisenhower in italian.

>> how often do people call you and john taliaferro? >> whenever i make a reservation i say, taliaferro. they will say, my second grade teacher was named toliver. you are damned if you do, damned if you don't. >> what is next? >> i have not settled on one. i have a few. i do not want to jinx it. >> a book? >> you bet. >> the name of the book we have been talking about, "all the great prizes: the life of john hay, from lincoln to roosevelt." our guest has been john taliaferro. thank you very much. >> thank you. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] >> for a dvd copy of this program, call 1-877-662-7726.

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