Robert Bacon was born in Massachusetts and attended Harvard University, where he befriended Theodore Roosevelt. He worked in business, becoming a partner at J.P. Morgan, before entering the foreign service. He was Assistant-Secretary of State from 1905 and in 1909 was appointed Secretary of State for the last months of his old friend Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. He was later ambassador to Paris and served with the AEF in France in 1917. He died in 1919. (By John Osborne)