tied by "Seoul I.J.P.O." cds, addressed to "John Barrett, U.S. Minister Resident, Bangkok, Siam", with Nagasaki transit and Bangkok (3.10.96) arrival pmks on back, fine cover to uncommon destination (John Barrett, while working as a journalist, so impressed President Grover Cleveland during a meeting that he was appointed as the United States Minister to Siam, where he served from 1894-1898. He worked as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American War and then as a diplomatic adviser to Admiral George Dewey. Finally, he was appointed as a delegate to the second Pan-American Conference in 1901 through the following year. In 1903, he was appointed as the Minister to Argentina, and though he only served in that position for one year, President Theodore Roosevelt later remarked that he had begun a "new United States-Argentine era". He was then appointed as Minister to Panama and then to Colombia. In 1907, he was appointed as the first Director General of the Bureau of American Republics, an international organization that was renamed as the Pan American Union in 1910 (and subsequently reorganized in 1948 as the Organization of American States). He served in this capacity for fourteen years. On his death, the New York Times commented that he had "done more than any other person of his generation to promote closer relations among the American republics")
