Reviews for The ambiguous relationship

The average rating for The ambiguous relationship based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-05-16 00:00:00 Andrej Blejec John W. Foster was Secretary Of State for the last 8 months of the Benjamin Harrison presidency and in that time he was responsible for the palace coup that overthrew Queen Liliouakalani in Hawaii and eventually brought Hawaii into the Union. But his real importance was that he could lay claim to being America's first career diplomat. He served in Ambassadorial posts in Mexico, Russia, and Spain due to his Republican party connections post the Civil War. He also got a commission in the Union Army courtesy of Indiana's war governor Oliver P. Morton and did have a good record of military service. Eventually it got him that first appointment as Minister to Mexico in 1873 and he discovered he liked diplomatic service. He was a good friend to Benjamin Harrison and a good friend to Walter Q. Gresham and that wasn't easy as they were bitter rivals in the Indiana GOP. James G. Blaine was Secretary Of State and the relations were correct and formal between Harrison and Blaine. As often as not Foster who was counsel to the State Department did the day to day work of running the department and took on a lot of diplomatic assignments. When Blaine resigned partly because of ill health Foster took over the department. As history has it Gresham broke with the GOP and supported Grover Cleveland to return to the White House in 1892. Cleveland made him Secretary of State and due to past friendships the foreign policy transfer was an easy one. Foster was hired by the Manchu dynasty to obtain some decent peace terms from the Japanese after China lost the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. In doing that Foster for better or worse became America's first lawyer with an international practice. It's what he did the rest of his life with occasional diplomatic assignments from Republican presidents. At the time of his death in 1917 he had some influence in the Democratic Woodrow Wilson administration because his son-in-law was both State Department counsel and later Robert Lansing became Secretary of State. His other daughter married a Presbyterian minister named Allen W. Dulles who had 3 kids who were spoiled and mentored by their indulgent grandfather. John Foster Dulles became Ike's Secretary of State so the family influence extends well into the last century. And Allen Dulles was head of the Central Intelligence Agency in the same period. This short but factual study is worth looking into the founder of a diplomatic dynasty.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-04-01 00:00:00 Angelique Long Very valuable resourse for my studies on Loyalists. This segment of the large Loyalist migration is perhaps under recognized, especially by those of us not from the maritimes. The experiance of the black Loyalist was, in my opinion, harsher and more extreme, than those faced by their white counterparts. Excellent for research, good for lovers of Canadian history.