Henry White's Reputation From The Ambassador To France

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The President surprised the diplomatic arena with his early dismissal of one of the State Department's most experienced, Henry White, the Ambassador to France. The only suspected reason for this decision was that White was thought to have somehow slighted the President and his wife 25 years earlier on their honeymoon in Europe. Taft was oblivious to the serious damage which this decision caused his political reputation.[64] (The following year White accepted Taft's appointment to head a delegation to the Pan-American Conference in Buenos Aires.) The President made it a top priority to reorganize the State Department, saying, "It is organized on the basis of the needs of the government in 1800 instead of 1900."[65] The Department was for the first time organized into geographical divisions, including the Far East, the Near East, Latin America and Western Europe. This reorganization was engineered in large part by Secretary of State Knox's First Assistant Secretary, Huntington Wilson, who served as de facto Secretary of State due to the frequent absence of Knox. Again displaying his inept administrative leadership,…show more content…
The concept, referred to as "Dollar Diplomacy", called for the State Department to coordinate loans to the countries for infrastructure improvement from the largest banks in the U.S. Strategically, this was designed to strengthen security for the Panama Canal, increase American trade, and diminish the presence of European nations in the area. Progressives and Insurgent Republicans in the Senate opposed the Wall Street connection, so the effort was largely a failure.[69] The President was more successful in Argentina, where agreements were reached whereby the U.S. provided loans to enable Argentina to acquire battleships; some naval construction and design secrets were sacrificed in the
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