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>President Theodore Roosevelt with Russian and Japanese diplomats at the Portsmouth Conference in 1905 during the negotiations to end the war between the latter two countries. Roosevelt later wrote that he thought Senators were hard to deal with, but they had nothing on these diplomats. "There were times when I had to patiently explain to them something perfectly obvious for the hundredth time when I wanted to jump up, whoop, and knock their heads together."

>Neither Russia or Japan were satisified with the peace settlement, which ended in the latter acquiring Port Arthur in China and the southern half of Sakhalin Island, as both felt they had won the Russo-Japanese War and that the US had cheated them out of a rightful victory, and there was a growing anti-US sentiment in both countries afterward.