Big Personalities Join Obama Foreign-Policy Team

President-elect Says He Will Set Agenda

By Spencer Ackerman 12/1/08 2:30 PM

In 1936, the Republican Party nominated for vice president an uncompromising critic of the New Deal named Frank Knox. A veteran of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, Knox attained prominence as a Chicago newspaperman, branding Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s economic agenda “alien and un-American” and repeatedly proclaiming its failure.

Four years later, knowing Knox’s prestige among the GOP faithful and mindful of the need for national unity as Europe fell to the Nazis, President Roosevelt made Knox, who agreed with Roosevelt on the scope of the German threat, his secretary of the Navy.