Poker and Foreign Policy

I came across an interesting bit of history the other day.

In 1907 the US Ambassador to Turkey - John Leishman - bought an impressive piece of property in downtown Istanbul to serve as the US embassy. Leishman just assumed that he'd be reimbursed by the US government for the expense of buying the building known as the Palazzo Corpi.

When Leishman returned to Washington he was told the the purchase was considered a personal expense and that he would not be reimbursed. Undaunted Leishman made a deal in which the question of reimbursement would be settled by a game of poker. Leishman beat House Speaker Joseph Cannon at the card table and got his money back.

The Palazzo Corpi was the very first embassy in all of Europe that was owned by the United States and it is also certainly the only US embassy ever won at the poker table.

The US moved into a new embassy in 2003 and possibly just in time:

But the building's vulnerable architecture and location fated it for replacement, and in 2003 the consulate moved to a new building so impregnable that it has been likened to a maximum-security prison. Just a few months later, a terrorist bomb hit the British consulate and London-based HSBC bank, near the Palazzo Corpi in central Istanbul, killing 32 people, including Britain's consul general, Roger Short. One of the suspected perpetrators arrested after the bombing reportedly told investigators that his group would have targeted the American consulate had it not moved to a more secure facility.

As I said - an interesting bit of history.