Diplomatic Career
On June 15, 2010 she was nominated by president Barack Obama for the post of United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom in the State Department. However, her nomination was put on hold in the Senate and therefore expired without a vote at the end of the 111th session of Congress on January 3, 2011.
She was renominated and confirmed on April 14, 2011. She was sworn in and began work on May 16, 2011. She is the first woman and first African-American to hold the post.
According to a report in the Washington Post, Chinese officials have refused to meet with her to discuss issues of religious freedom.
Read more about this topic: Suzan Johnson Cook
Famous quotes containing the words diplomatic and/or career:
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)