Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  I wanted to make an effort to move the treaty forward. Dick Lugar supported the treaty, but he was facing a primary from an extremist who had made Dick’s residency in Indiana an explosive issue. Dick asked me to wait until his primary was over to push full throttle and not to force a vote. I agreed. Dick had earned that much and more over his thirty-six years in the Senate, and I’d never forgotten his collegiality with me when I was a freshman senator partnering with him on the Philippines.

  Hillary and I became a tag team gently pushing the issue. She helped me pull off a public hearing in the committee that brought together America’s top diplomat, top defense official and top military officer. Secretary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Michael Mullen all testified in support of the Law of the Sea. I took the campaign in another direction to try to persuade Republicans to give the treaty a look. Reasoning that many Republicans might not want to believe John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, but couldn’t ignore the oil industry and the single biggest, most powerful interest group of the conservative movement, I brought in the head of the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce to testify in favor.

  But write it off is exactly what the Republicans did. The Tea Party froze the Senate. Dick Lugar lost his primary. The message to the Republicans was clear: work with Democrats and you’re toast. After an extensive round of hearings and debate, two swing senators—Kelly Ayotte and Rob Portman—apropos of nothing, signed on to a letter drafted with the rhetoric of the Heritage Foundation: “No international organization owns the seas.”

  The treaty was dead in the water before it ever had a chance to sail. Thirty-four senators announced “no” votes, so we didn’t even bring it up for a vote. I liked Rob Portman a lot. He was a substantive guy, but he saw the writing on the wall. He was enough of a moderate to be a Tea Party target, and in Ohio he wasn’t going to risk his job for a treaty covering the oceans. He and Senator Ayotte together sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid, citing what they called “significant concerns” with the treaty and expressing opposition to ratification. Portman’s press release on the letter was proudly headlined “Senators Portman and Ayotte Sink Law of the Sea Treaty.” Rob knew better than this. It was just all part of the spectacle and circus the Senate was becoming.

  I asked John McCain what had happened. John was unhappy, which might have contributed to his candid response. Jim DeMint was torturing John’s wingman, Lindsey Graham, on a daily basis. John told me about the discussion in his caucus about the Law of the Sea Treaty. He told me that DeMint had passed a letter around for signatures opposing it. John had argued against that gamesmanship. He said DeMint had asserted loudly—and John said the words with a roll of his eyes—“we had to be a warrior party, this was war.” “A warrior party,” John grumbled, adding something to the effect of “most of these guys who want to be warriors have never had a single shot fired at them in their lives.”

  It wasn’t John’s caucus anymore, and that was a tragedy. John McCain could be stubborn, ideological and cantankerous as hell. He was no moderate. Admittedly against his own better judgment, to try to win his party’s nomination, John had filled out those same silly special interest group questionnaires, but he thought they were bullshit and told me so. He was in public life to do things, not to bow to the false populism of the Tea Party. John was made for the Senate, but made for a Senate that actually worked. Now he saw a Republican caucus that he barely recognized. He and I were determined to make one last fight of the Congress together, as partners once again. We were going to try to force the Senate to pass the Disabilities Treaty.

  For John, it was very personal. Bob Dole was one of John’s heroes. Bob was minority leader when John and I were freshman senators. Bob had worked every day to stand and walk and use his arms after his injuries in World War II. In the 1970s, as the Vietnam War raged, Senator Dole wore a bracelet with the name of POW John McCain etched on it. When John came to the Senate in 1986, his bond with Bob Dole was unbreakable. When Bob was the Republican nominee for president in 1996, John traveled with him across the country. Now Bob was in a wheelchair, in and out of Walter Reed hospital, in his late eighties. His proudest legislative achievement had been passing the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now Bob asked his protégé John McCain to pass the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and make America’s legacy on disability rights universal. John and I were a team again, trying to make it happen.

  To me, there was nothing controversial about the Disabilities Treaty. It just says you can’t discriminate against the disabled. It asks other countries to do what we did twenty-two years ago when we set the example for the world and passed the Americans with Disabilities Act. In four simple words, it says to other countries that don’t respect the rights of the disabled, “Be more like us.” It didn’t require any changes to American law, but it would require other countries to improve their record on disability rights—in effect, taking our gold standard here at home and extending it to the rest of the world.

  The Tea Party, however, had a bucket of excuses and conspiracy theories. In 2006, Rick Santorum had been drubbed out of the Senate by eighteen points. Unfortunately, Rick became a lobbyist. Now he was working against the Disabilities Treaty, whipping the grass roots into a frenzy by promising that the treaty would replace parents of disabled children with UN bureaucrats. It was absurd, but it seemed to be working.

  We needed sixty-seven votes. We had on our side two former presidential nominees of the Republican Party, Dole and McCain. America’s veterans’ groups endorsed the treaty, and dozens of veterans in wheelchairs went door-to-door in the Senate for weeks, pleading with Republican senators to do the right thing.

  The veterans made a powerful statement, but no statement was more powerful than what I witnessed the day of the vote. In the nearly thirty years that I’d been there, I had never once seen a former majority leader come to the Senate floor for a vote, but eighty-nine-year-old Bob Dole was wheeled into the chamber by his wife, former senator Elizabeth Dole from North Carolina. Bob Dole wasn’t on the Senate floor that day to support the United Nations, under whose auspices and convention this human rights treaty had been written, and certainly not to undermine the sovereignty he’d nearly given his life for in World War II. He was there because he wanted other countries to treat people with disabilities the way we do. He was there because he wanted to ensure that when American veterans with disabilities—our wounded warriors—traveled overseas, they would be treated with the same dignity and respect that they received at home.

  In the end, only sixty-one senators had the guts to agree with him, that the rest of the world should live by the standard of decency the United States had set in 1990 with its Americans with Disabilities Act.

  In 2012, however, this was one of those votes that leaves an indelible mark. Senators who told John McCain and me in private that they wanted to vote for the treaty had folded when it mattered. Fear was driving the Senate, so much so that senators could shake Bob Dole’s hand and then send his dream to die. It was a disgrace.

  Something is deeply wrong with politics in America when the Senate can’t do the things it was created to do. I wondered why some of my colleagues even wanted to be there if they couldn’t vote the way their hearts and minds told them. I headed back to my office. The staff had opened a bottle of Scotch that Teddy had given me in 2007, two years before he passed away, with a note: “For use after good votes and bad votes, too.” Today marked a little of both. We’d fought a very good fight with a very bad outcome.

  • • •

  A COUPLE OF days after the Disabilities Treaty met its demise on the floor of the Senate, the White House called to say President Obama needed to reach me. I sat behind my desk in the Russell Building, looking out on Constitution Avenue, which was almost pitch dark, illuminated only by the occasional headlights of cars, the glowing lampposts and, there in the distance, the lights on the Capitol dome. God, the days were
growing shorter, and I wondered whether my time in the Senate was growing shorter as well. My frustration was building with a Senate that seemed to be a shell of its former self, an institution unable to step up even when the same tried-and-true tactics that had worked for previous generations were applied and appropriate. That gnawed at me: I had learned the lessons of how to unlock the Senate, but the institution had changed. Three tokens of that celebrated Senate history sat on my desk: the framed photo from Teddy on our first day together as colleagues in 1985, with its promise of a “beautiful relationship”; John Glenn’s carved wooden Buddha, the lacquer on its well-worn belly rubbed off from so many entreaties for good luck; and the sailor’s compass that John Warner left me the day I moved into his old office.

  My internal compass left me no doubt whatsoever that I needed to find new ways of working on and fighting for the issues that had defined my life ever since I’d come home from Vietnam, and possibly find a new place for that fight if the Senate wasn’t going to be the Senate anymore. I expected the president’s phone call might give me some clarity about where my own compass would soon be pointing. I leaned forward in my chair as I waited for President Obama to come on the line. I waited and waited until the now familiar voice said my name emphatically: “John!” Barack Obama doesn’t beat around the bush. He’s not fond of small talk and gets to the point quickly. The White House would have to complete their intensive vetting of me, but he asked me to serve as his secretary of state.

  Two months later, John McCain and Hillary Clinton would join together with Elizabeth Warren to introduce me on an unfamiliar side of the dais at the Foreign Relations Committee for my confirmation hearing—a place I hadn’t sat in since 1971. Two days later, I’d be confirmed by the Senate 94–3. Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, my friend since the days she had served in the White House in the 1990s, came across the street to the Capitol to swear me in right where so much of my public service had occurred—in the historic Foreign Relations Committee room in the U.S. Capitol.

  I made a bittersweet peace with leaving the Senate and was ready for my new chapter.

  CHAPTER 16

  Diplomacy in a Dangerous World

  “I AM PROUD TO take on this job because I want to work for peace.”

  Vice President Biden had graciously come to the State Department to publicly swear me in as the sixty-eighth secretary of state, five days after my private swearing-in made me official. The ornate Benjamin Franklin Room on the eighth floor of the State Department was packed with hundreds of my friends and family from the journey of my life, from the soccer fields in high school, including a former Marine who now ran the FBI, to the debate team in college, brothers from the Navy, friends from Massachusetts and the campaigns from 1972 through 2004 and 2008, colleagues from the Senate, and my staff alumni from over twenty-eight years. It was one of those “this is your life” moments. But it was also a moment of great clarity. My time as secretary of state would fly by, and I wanted to make every day count.

  Two days before, I had stood in the lobby of the Harry S Truman Building and spoken to a sea of my new colleagues—a tradition at the department for every incoming secretary. I told them that the Senate was in my blood, but the Foreign Service was in my genes. I held up my first diplomatic passport: Number 2927—and its faded black-and-white picture of eleven-year-old John Kerry, “Height: 4-foot-3, Hair: Brown.” The first stamp in it was from 1954 in Le Havre.

  Fifty-nine years had passed—my hair was far from brown—but at its best, the work of the State Department in 2013 was still what it had been during that very different era. Good people, too many whose names never make it into the newspapers, get up every day and do their best to advance our country’s interests and live up to our values.

  I wanted to convey to the department the kind of secretary I hoped to be. I had connected with all my available predecessors to talk about the job. They were generous with their time; it was a welcoming, close-knit club of people who had done a tough job and genuinely wanted to help their successors of either political party. Their advice was as invaluable as it was incongruous. James Baker told me that you have to run the department instead of letting the department run you. He said that your value comes from traveling and doing hands-on diplomacy. Colin Powell said the opposite: don’t travel, stay in Washington, your most important job is to manage the department. George Shultz was somewhere in the middle of those two poles, as were Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Henry Kissinger stressed the importance of staying close to the national security advisor, wise words from a man who had served in both positions and written the book (literally) on diplomacy from both perspectives.

  The diversity of opinion also extended to the small details. Condi Rice stressed big goals like the importance of reforming international assistance and development programs for a modern world while Colin Powell wisely, practically pointed out the importance of tangible accomplishments like fixing the department’s email and bringing it out of a distant technological era. Some said it was important to rely on special envoys, others said a glut of envoys had “remuddled” the diplomatic architecture. All agreed there were some diplomatic efforts only a secretary could bring to reality, and all agreed that quality time to get work done is much shorter than it looks on a calendar.

  I found truth in everything they said. But like every secretary before me, I had to make the job my own. I sent an email to the entire department—in Washington and overseas—in which I recalled a previous chapter in my life. When I inherited PCF-94, I was assigned to be skipper of a crew that had been on the rivers, in grueling combat, a lot longer than I had. I had to earn my credibility with them, not the other way around. I was secretary of state, assigned the “S” on a flowchart consisting of an alphabet soup of dozens of dizzying acronyms from “D” to “DMR” to “S Specials” and more. I sat atop the organization, but I was its newest addition: I had much to learn from those who were already there, and I wanted to listen closely to their perspectives.

  I did bring to this enterprise some insight I’d gleaned many years before. My dad had sometimes found life in the Foreign Service consumed too much by bureaucracy, by a culture that could discourage creative problem-solving. Young officers I met with had a different spin on that same experience: they said that the culture was sometimes “risk-averse,” that the incentives didn’t always empower those who might fail greatly while trying to achieve greatly. Ambassador Tom Shannon, the department’s diplomatic dean on all issues Latin America, said the best way to empower smart risk-taking was for the secretary to model it himself. I took that to heart. I wanted everyone to know it was best to “get caught trying” rather than merely, as Bill Burns warned, “admiring a problem.”

  I was lucky also to have a mix of State Department veterans and my own Kerry Senate family close by to help me in the mission ahead. David McKean returned as my head of policy and planning, a position made famous by George Kennan. David was as insightful as ever and never hesitated to disagree when I needed a different point of view. Heather Higginbottom, who had been my legislative director, left a Senate-confirmed position at the Office of Management and Budget to serve as deputy secretary and lead a modernization effort for the State Department and USAID. U.S. Ambassador to France Charlie Rivkin, an old friend, and Ambassador to Italy David Thorne, the oldest of friends, joined me in Washington, as did Drew O’Brien, my Massachusetts state director. I poached a Boston Globe reporter, Glen Johnson, who would accompany me for each of the 1,417,576 miles I would travel through ninety-one countries. It was a good team of old and new, career and political, and I felt confident about our ability to get the job done.

  No matter how hard you plan in advance what you want to do as secretary of state, no matter how many interagency meetings are held in windowless rooms trying to anticipate every contingency and create policy guardrails and metrics to define whether as an administration you’re doing what you set out to do (and we held more meetings than I can count), d
iplomacy isn’t a science. It involves human decisions, imperfect actors around the globe and impossible-to-predict crises.

  At any time, a call from an embassy, a cable on your desk or a crisis wake-up alarm in the middle of the night demands a rapid decision whether and how to engage. Usually, what’s not an option is doing nothing. Wishing the problem away or saying “Well, that’s not what we planned to do” doesn’t work. The United States needs to lead.

  By the same token, even as I focused on major strategic priorities, and even as I confronted crises coming at us from unlikely places, sometimes there are opportunities in problems that couldn’t be solved but could be prevented from getting worse, or in some cases falling apart or imploding. I learned that just by dint of our engagement, good things could happen, and if we didn’t move, usually no one else would.

  I took to heart two lessons shared with me by a couple of experienced hands—my former majority leader George Mitchell and his boss President Bill Clinton while they were working on the Northern Ireland peace process. Mitchell described it as “seven hundred days of failure and one day of success.” Likewise, Clinton made the same point: “If I’m working on a problem, at least I know it’s not getting worse.” It was great advice. If I could do something that was better than staying on the sidelines, it was worth the additional jet lag.