Publisher's Synopsis
Johann Heinrich Graf von Bernstorff (1862-1939) was a German politician and the ambassador to the United States and Mexico from 1908 to 1917. He joined the Prussian Army and served as an officer for eight years, his last position was a military attache in Constantinople. Bernstorff's diplomatic skills were noted in Berlin throughout the First Moroccan Crisis in 1905 and he was appointed the German ambassador to the United States and Mexico in 1908. In 1915, he also helped organize what became known as the Great Phenol Plot, an attempt to divert phenol from the production of high explosives in the United States (which would end up being sold to the British), and at the same time prop up several German-owned chemical companies that made aspirin and its precursor salicylic acid. Bernstorff was proposed as foreign minister in Friedrich Ebert's Cabinet in 1919, but he refused this post and left diplomatic service. He became a founding member of the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei) and a member of the German Parliament in 1921-28.
