The chattanooga Rotary Club, a hub for good works in Tennessee's fourth-largest city, had a busy start to April. At their lunch meeting on April 9th members paid tribute to a deceased colleague and discussed a school tennis contest that they sponsor. Then came a briefing from Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons programme, diplomatic efforts to constrain it and the very large bombs that America has built to drop on Iranian bunkers if all else fails. Mr Corker, who was mayor of Chattanooga before being elected to the Senate in 2006, acknowledged a certain incongruity. A multi-millionaire businessman (he began his career adding drive-in windows to burger bars and ended up building shopping centres in 18 states), he normally talks taxes and spending to Rotarians. But the softly drawling 62-year-old has spent weeks at the centre of a geopolitical drama, leading a push to give Congress a say over American nuclear diplomacy with Iran. The task required overcoming years of painful history between the main actors, involving mutual distrust, fiery bombast and paranoia (but enough about Barack Obama's relations with Congress).
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