Dear readers,

Our Winter issue celebrated the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and introduced you to his vision for the future, his personal biography, his family, and his Vice President. I hope you enjoyed the articles.

Now President Obama has been in office not quite 100 days. What are the tasks that a president of the United States must face in that time? For this Spring issue of American View, we are pleased to present “Early Challenges for a New Administration,” by Kurt M. Campbell, chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security. Mr. Campbell writes that the Obama team must focus on three core transition issues: reassessing campaign commitments, choosing people and processes, and setting an agenda.

How well a president meets these challenges is assessed early and often, in fact constantly, by the media. The need for good press relations is particularly acute during a time of transition. Martha Joynt Kumar, a scholar of White House communications strategies, tells us that every U.S. president needs a team aware of the rhythms between the president and the press, with a sense of how to take advantage of them.

In February, Hillary Rodham Clinton had a wonderful visit to Tokyo on her first trip overseas as Secretary of State. Secretary Clinton has said that she often finds inspiration in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom we profile in this issue. After carving out a role as trusted policy advisor during the presidency of her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt served as chairwoman of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights after his death in 1945. Of the many roles in her lifetime, she considered her time on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights her most important work.

I hope that this issue gives our American View readers a sense of dynamics surrounding the White House, as well as a peek back into the history of Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In closing, I would like to pay tribute to Dennis Askey, who came to this Embassy in 1969 as a Foreign Service Officer and was the founding editor of Trends magazine. Written in Japanese, the magazine covered political, economic, social, and cultural topics related to the United States. American View looks to Dennis Askey, who died last month in Washington at age 89, as a guiding spirit.