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Forty million total cases. Three million deaths. One year. This was not the casualty of a bloody global conflict, but the state of the HIV/AIDS Crisis in 2003 when President George W. Bush launched the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR). Since the beginning of this program it has provided over $80 billion dollars […]
Journalist Euguene F. Karst knew the importance of words. He personally witnessed how communication could highlight the opinions of little known Russian farmers but also lead to embarrassing misunderstandings for the President of the United States. Through the Office of War Information, Voice of America, and other reporting, Karst worked to spread the principles and […]
On November 12, 1985, exiled General Thomas Quiwonkpa invaded Liberia through Sierra Leone to launch a coup against President Doe. Across the country, Liberians celebrated Quiwonkpa’s challenge to the fraudulent results of the 1985 Presidential Election. Hours later, those hopes were crushed as soldiers in the Armed Force of Liberia (AFL) captured Quiwonkpa and defeated […]
Approximately a third of U.S. ambassadors have been politically appointees over the last 50 years, including some of our very best. Alan Solomont’s oral history provides a candid account of his work as a fundraiser for both successful and unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidates. Solomont’s engagement at the highest levels of American politics led to his […]
It was nearing 11 o’clock at night when the phone rang. “How was the speech?” Ambassador Harriet Elam-Thomas was surprised to hear President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal on the other end, asking her opinion of a speech he had given the night before. This would not be an isolated occurrence in an unusually close relationship […]
President Putin once welcomed USAID’s assistance (at least for a time). Carol Peasley served as USAID’s mission director in Moscow from 1999-2003. This tumultuous period witnessed the fall of Boris Yeltsin and the emergence of Vladimir Putin as a tough-minded leader frequently at odds with the United States. But it was not always that way. […]
Amb. John Leighton Stuart was a central figure in U.S.-China relations until his recall in 1949, when the United States broke diplomatic relations. His ashes were interred in at his childhood home in Hangzhou in 2008, with the assistance of then-Zhejiang Party Secretary Xi Jinping, now China’s powerful President. Stuart was the first president of […]
After Fidel Castro ousted Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista, expropriated American economic assets and developed links with the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower authorized the CIA in March 1960 to develop a plan to overthrow Castro. The agency trained and armed Cuban exiles to carry out the attack. Shortly after his inauguration, John F. Kennedy learned of the invasion plan, concluded […]
On October 9, 1983, while South Korean President Chun Doo-Hwan was on a visit to Rangoon, Burma to lay a wreath at the Martyr’s Mausoleum of Swedagon Pagoda, a bomb concealed in the roof exploded, killing 21 people including four senior South Korean officials. President Chun was spared because his car had been delayed in […]
With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. began to put greater emphasis on enforcing its policy of protecting human rights worldwide, based on the core belief that people have a set of inviolable rights simply on grounds of being human. Some foreign counterparts were skeptical that the U.S. would give priority to human […]
