Many in the media treat the role of Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani with skepticism and suspicion, referring to his work as "shadow foreign policy."
But a new investigation by RealClearInvestigations found such diplomacy is a "long presidential tradition."
Jesse Jackson and Bill Richardson are just two of the political figures who have been frequently used outside the traditional State Department ranks in foreign diplomacy.
Here are highlights from the article (which is linked below).
- Jesse Jackson and Bill Richardson, the latter dubbed the "informal undersecretary for thugs," are recent examples of personal presidential emissaries -- but hardly the only ones.
- Colonel Edward M. House was Woodrow Wilson's go-to envoy during World War I because Wilson was at odds with his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan.
- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt relied on Harry Hopkins as envoy to Josef Stalin because FDR thought the State Department too hostile to the Soviets to focus on defeating Hitler.
- Hopkins was accused of using his relationship with the president as a vehicle for collecting boodle abroad -- including a $500,000 emerald necklace for his wife.
- Coca-Cola boss J. Paul Austin was Jimmy Carter's personal envoy to Cuba even though he had a personal business interest there: opening a bottling plant.
- The tradition began with George Washington, who enlisted Gouverneur Morris as a "private agent" in Europe.
Read the article by clicking the link below:
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It is almost like these Presidents were acting "against the agency consensus"! Too bad we didn't have the CIA back then so they could have secretly plotted to destroy Wilson, and FDR. Not sure what happened with Johnson but maybe that is why he only had one term but they did manage to get Kennedy, didn't they so I guess we can cut them some slack for at least trying.
How old is the Deep State?