by Glen Johnson
As an adult, he lived in a world with a fractured media landscape and specialty news channels, letting viewers select the viewpoint for the information they received.
Consensus was a casualty of proliferation. And that lack of unity bred social and political unrest around the world, especially with low-tech, individualized broadcasting made possible by YouTube.
_________
EXACERBATING THINGS, THE SECRETARY of State doesn’t have the luxury of focusing on just one region, hot spot, or issue—unlike some of his European or Asian counterparts.
US engagement around the world is expected, if not a necessity.
“The nature of this job now is you’ve got to have a lot of balls in the air,” Kerry said on November 12, 2013, while addressing a meeting of his assistant secretaries and other top State Department leaders.
He’d just returned from a 23,000-mile trip taking him to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Israel, Jordan, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.74
The secretary would frequently lead his listeners on a virtual trip around the world. He’d “stop” in Africa, where he would discuss US efforts to stop an Ebola outbreak; the South China Sea, where the country sought to limit Chinese efforts to impinge on the freedom of navigation; Ukraine, where the United States and its European allies worked to keep Russia from moving West after it seized Crimea and separatists took control of the eastern part of the country; and Yemen, where he tried to broker a cease-fire between opposing forces in a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
“I think if you measure all of American history, there has never been a moment where the United States is more engaged, in more places, simultaneously, on as significant a number of complicated issues, as we are today—and with impact,” Kerry said in September 2016, after ticking through the list at a forum sponsored by The Atlantic and Aspen Institute.75
The secretary’s belief in personal diplomacy inspired a “Hometown Diplomacy” series that ran throughout his four years. It was a pet project of mine and developed a template: invite foreign leaders to Boston, embrace them with drinks or dinner in the secretary’s home, take them to a cultural attraction, and hold meetings in a venue far removed from the formalities of the nation’s capital.
“Literally, some of the most candid and productive conversations that I have had have been over a good meal in somebody’s country,” Kerry said once while addressing an event celebrating the State Department’s culinary diplomacy efforts. “A little good wine doesn’t hurt, either,” he added.76
During the first Hometown Diplomacy visit, Kerry hosted British foreign secretary Philip Hammond in October 2014 during his first official trip to the United States. The two delivered speeches at the Wind Technology Testing Center in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood, toured the USS Constitution, and stopped by the secretary’s former cookie shop in Quincy Marketplace: Kilvert & Forbes.
A week later, Kerry welcomed Chinese state councilor Yang Jiechi for lunch at Legal Sea Food’s Harborside restaurant and a tour of the John Adams Historical Site in Quincy, Massachusetts. Another time, the secretary and his wife had Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and his wife, Akie, for dinner at their townhouse on Beacon Hill.
Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop, an avid runner, was given a tour of the Boston Marathon finish line and offered a special advance screening of the movie In the Heart of the Sea—a Nantucket whaling adventure starring Australian actor Chris Hemsworth.
The final invitees, a group of European foreign ministers, climbed a spiral staircase from the secretary’s private office to the roof deck of his townhouse, where they posed for a photo together against the setting sun and Boston skyline. Earlier, they held meetings at Tufts University, home of the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy, and took a cruise around Boston Harbor.
Most of the meetings were conducted without neckties, and all of them engendered goodwill between the participants and among their staffs. The 2014 China meeting, in particular, was credited with igniting cooperation between the two countries on climate change that led to passage of the 2015 Paris accord.77
In mid-February 2015, the secretary was invigorated after hosting the Mexican and Canadian foreign ministers in Boston for the annual North American Trilateral Meeting.
They met at historic Faneuil Hall, walked down a snowy street for clam chowder and lobster rolls at the Union Oyster House, and then sat in a skybox and watched a Boston Bruins game. The secretary’s counterparts wore black-and-gold Bruins team jerseys he gave them, heresy for the Canadian foreign minister John Baird.
“It really works to break it down, make it less official,” Kerry told a meeting of assistant secretaries and other senior State Department leaders.
_________
THE PRIMACY SECRETARY KERRY placed on personal interaction was rooted in his sense of human nature.
“Everybody comes from somewhere,” he told CNN in that September 2016 exit interview. “They come from a background, they have parents, they have families, they have aspirations, they like to laugh and live a life—most of them—that’s decent and safe. And you need to see another person in another country through their eyes and get to know them a little bit and talk to them and find out where common ground might be. I don’t think anybody had to be an enemy. I’ve never met a child two and a half years old who hates anybody. Hate is taught.”78
The secretary expanded on the theme in October 2015 as he addressed students at Harvard University.
One asked how he assessed Russian president Vladimir Putin as a negotiator, and what were his main insights from negotiating with him.
“President Putin has very, very strong ideas about the ways in which he perceives Russia to have been either wronged or threatened over the course of these last most recent years. And as you know, he famously has lamented the fall of the Soviet Union as a great geostrategic loss,” Kerry said. “I think a very important part of diplomacy is listening and making sure you hear what’s really beneath the other person’s, leader’s complaints or perceptions, and not allowing yourself to get distracted by the daily din and screed of the 24-hour talk circuit and politics and particularly in a presidential year.”79
He added: “I think that there’s no room for hubris in diplomacy. It’s an invitation to disaster.”80
Besides the patience and understanding permeating his diplomatic style, the secretary exuded optimism. It was a facet of his personality I hadn’t fully appreciated before working for him.
“I will say also that while sometimes things look bleak and difficult, there’s opportunity in everything, and you have to find the opportunity, you have to work to do that with creative leadership,” he said in July 2016. He spoke in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, as he and the country’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, reacted to the recent Brexit vote.
“I am absolutely confident that if people approach this thoughtfully, studiously, soberly, with creativity, there is a way to find strength out of whatever we do ahead,” Kerry said.81
The secretary conceded that his approach and style—an aptitude for globe-trotting and an iron constitution at the negotiating table—had its critics. Some accused him of naiveté or self-delusion.
Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon famously refused to confirm or deny his exasperation with Kerry’s relentless Middle East peace efforts, after being quoted in January 2014 as saying the secretary was “obsessive” and “messianic” in leading the negotiations.82
Ya’alon supposedly added: “The only thing that can ‘save’ us is for John Kerry to win his Nobel Prize and leave us alone.”83
The secretary remained undeterred.
“I’ve read people say, ‘Kerry thinks that if he talks at them long enough, he can persuade.’ I don’t believe that,” he told CNN. “There’s a ripeness to diplomacy, there’s a ripeness to any negotiation, actually, any negotiation. And if the other side, if their interests can’t be met in a way that also meets your interest, you’re
never going to have a deal.”84
The interviewer asked if he feared failure, which I felt often set him apart from the more risk-averse Secretary Clinton. She was always worried about preserving herself for her future presidential campaign.
Kerry dismissed the thought. He was on the opposite side of any such calculus. Having a job he loved toward the end of his career liberated him to act as he felt was best.
I admired his willingness to take a risk.
“Why worry about failure?” Kerry said on CNN. “I lost the presidency of the United States, so you can’t lose anything much bigger than that. And what it taught me is, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ If you have the opportunity to get things done, go get them done.”85
While the secretary was self-deprecating, I can say without equivocation there were certain things that wouldn’t have happened but for his presence and drive.
One was the power-sharing agreement in Afghanistan he negotiated over several visits between rivals Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah (he adopted the same last name as his first).
Abdullah accused Ghani’s backers of rigging a June 2014 national runoff election, a charge Ghani denied.
Amid fears of a possible civil war, the secretary met with each man individually in the US ambassador’s residence in Kabul, and with them together and their small group of advisers in a downstairs meeting room—several rounds each.
Finally, he reached an agreement in principle in July 2014, and Abdullah waited nervously as Ghani walked into the ambassador’s apartment and embraced his former foe.
A gasp went up from reporters attending a subsequent news conference when Kerry announced both men had agreed to an audit of each and every one of the 8 million ballots cast in the runoff. They also promised that Abdullah would have an important role in the new government, even if Ghani’s tentative victory were affirmed.86
Ghani ended up winning the audit, and Kerry finalized the deal with Abdullah in September 2014. Despite occasional friction, Ghani remained president—with Abdullah as Afghanistan’s chief executive officer—even after the secretary finished his term in January 2017.87
In January 2016, Kerry also visited Nigeria amid election recriminations between President Goodluck Jonathan and his challenger, retired Major-General Muhammadu Buhari. He urged both candidates to accept the outcome of their contentious race—regardless of the winner.
They both followed through on their pledge even after Buhari staged an upset and Jonathan became the country’s first incumbent president to lose reelection.
The secretary returned to the central African nation on May 29, 2016, to attend President Buhari’s inauguration and commemorate the peaceful transition.
“He told the party in government then, and those of us in opposition, to behave ourselves, and we did,” President Buhari said of Kerry two years later.88
In addition, Kerry distinguished himself in October 2016 by being one of the only—and certainly the most high-profile—foreign ministers to attend a climate change meeting in Kigali, Rwanda.
Attendees from 170 nations ended up adopting a legally binding agreement aimed at reducing the use of hydrofluorocarbons, chemicals in air-conditioners and refrigerators that could raise the Earth’s atmospheric temperature.
The New York Times reported the following day, “The talks in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, did not draw the same spotlight as the climate change accord forged in Paris last year. But the outcome could have an equal or even greater impact on efforts to slow the heating of the planet.”89
Kerry walked from room to room, meeting with any wavering delegations. Low-level technical experts were stunned at one evening session when the US secretary of State walked into their meeting, listened to their discussion, and then deferentially asked if he could address the group.
Negotiations continued late into a Friday night before the final deal was sealed at 7 a.m. on Saturday.
By that time, John Kerry was already flying on to different meetings in Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
_________
AFTER SECRETARY KERRY LANDED at Andrews Air Force Base in March 2013 to complete his first trip abroad, then State Department spokesperson Toria Nuland asked me how I enjoyed our eleven-day, eleven-city, 16,000-mile inaugural journey.
I told her it was exhilarating, if exhausting.
“Good,” she replied as we rolled our luggage back across the airport tarmac. “Now be ready to do it forty more times.”90
I got her point, but she was a little bit off.
In the end, we took 109 overseas trips. That didn’t include domestic jaunts to New York City for UN meetings or places like Austin, Texas, where the secretary delivered a speech about climate change.
No matter the numbers, there was mind-numbing routine to our trips that simultaneously comforted the travelers while leaving them feeling like they were on a merry-go-round.
It’s no small irony that “Ferris Wheel” was the code name the Diplomatic Security Service gave to the plane carrying the secretary of State. It’s much like “Air Force One” is the call sign for the aircraft carrying the president of the United States.
The DS agents would radio to colleagues on the ground, “Ferris Wheel, wheels up,” each time we took off, and “Ferris Wheel, wheels down,” each time we landed.
I sent my wife, kids, and a few other relatives that same “wheels up/wheels down” message each time, so they knew where we were and that we were safely moving about on our journey.
We went on all those trips for a variety of factors.
Some were prompted by tradition: the first stop for any new secretary usually is the UK, our mother country, or Canada and Mexico, the two countries with which the United States shares a border.
Others were dictated by fixtures on the diplomatic calendar, such as NATO meetings held twice a year in Brussels.
Others were requested by ambassadors. They might ask for a secretarial visit if they faced a thorny problem or if his presence would add a grace note for a host country’s special occasion. That might be a momentous national anniversary or a presidential inauguration, like the one we attended in Nigeria.
Still others were driven by crisis management, like the condolence visits Kerry paid after terrorist attacks.
Another segment of our travel was directed by the White House, including an extended stay in Bali when the president canceled his own visit to Indonesia because of a government shutdown back home. The secretary was there for preparatory meetings and was told to remain as a stand-in for President Obama.
A final category was trips prompted by the secretary’s interests or priorities. That accounted for the bulk of our travel.
An “interests” trip included a November 2016 visit to our seventh continent—Antarctica—so Secretary Kerry could see and learn firsthand about the effects of climate change. A “priorities” trip included his numerous stops in the Middle East for peace talks, or cities across Switzerland as he drove toward the Iranian nuclear agreement.
Whether a trip was a need-to-do or want-to-do venture, the request for travel set off a chain of action within the State Department. Most immediately, it triggered the production of reams of paper including briefers about the countries being visited and biographies of the meeting attendees.
The paperwork and tentative schedule were then discussed during a series of planning meetings held in one of two conference rooms on the 7th Floor at the Harry S Truman Building.
Kerry occasionally popped his head in, looking for someone. He’d inevitably be shocked by the twenty or so people sitting around the table, with more looking on from the backbenches.
“It takes all these people to plan my trip?” he’d say, eliciting laughter.
The numbers in part stemmed from the complexity of secretarial travel.
Wherever a secretary of State goes, the US Air Force has to fly him, so a liaison to the 89th Air Wing at Andrews is at the meeting. The secretary also is under twenty-four-hour protection
by DS, so the security team has to hear about plans and make arrangements for agents to meet and escort him at each destination. The Line has to book hotels and meet with the host government to plan out the specifics of each stop and meeting. A medical officer began traveling regularly with Kerry after he had a bike accident and broke his leg in May 2015. The Pentagon and State Department also had an arrangement where the assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would travel with the secretary, in case there was a crisis or he needed instant advice about military programs or capabilities.
Other seats at the meeting were taken by subject-matter experts for different stops, and representatives of the different three-letter regional offices whose territory we’d visit as we progressed around the world.
Finally, there were people like me, members of the secretary’s direct staff. We were charged with ensuring a trip advanced the administration’s public policy priorities and achieved Kerry’s personal goals.
We also made it our priority to expose him to the local community and culture, and ensure that people in the places we visited—and the folks back home—got a sense of him as a person. In Mongolia, this meant going to an outdoor cultural fair, where he watched men wrestle in loincloths and children race across the tundra on horseback. In Abu Dhabi, we took a tour of the massive Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque.
We’d all also aim to meet with the local embassy staff at each stop to thank them for their service and work on our trip. (They’d celebrate our departure with their own “wheels-up” party.)
Our Public Affairs staffers would listen to each of these elements and offer insights about how much time reporters might need to file their stories at a specific destination, and how to sequence the events to ensure maximum media coverage of the secretary’s activities.
The constant tension between “The Building” and the secretary’s staff was over how to make a trip work for him, rather than all the other people around the table claiming equities in a specific stop.
The strain between must-dos and nice-to-dos was constant in devising a trip schedule. So too was our attempt—and “attempt” is the right word—to make a trip survivable.