by Glen Johnson
When Kerry returned, disillusioned by the war, he took a leadership role with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He sought to end the fighting in Southeast Asia, in part through his nationally televised testimony in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He famously said then, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
After running for Congress and losing, Kerry went to Boston College Law School and worked as a prosecutor in a district attorney’s office.
He later ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts before taking a shot in 1984 at an open US Senate seat. He was a member of the upper chamber of Congress until he resigned to become secretary of State.
He served some facet of the state or federal government continually from his college graduation to his nominal retirement.
Until he was tapped to be secretary, my most intimate contact with John Kerry had come as I reported on the run-up to his 2004 presidential campaign.
I’d chased him across the country from 2001 to 2003 as he courted donors and built a campaign staff, almost person by person from venture capitalist Mark Gorenberg in San Francisco to political activists John and Jackie Norris in Des Moines, Iowa. During one visit to the Bay Area, he commandeered a rented car and drove me over to Treasure Island to show me where he had trained in 1967 to deploy on the Gridley.
I was at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, on March 16, 2004, when Candidate Kerry made one of the biggest blunders of his campaign. He disputed suggestions he didn’t support supplemental funding for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq by telling a crowd, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”
President Bush and his campaign seized on the remark as evidence of Kerry’s tendency to flip-flop on major policy issues. Vice President Dick Cheney and campaign strategist Karl Rove also hammered the theme, while other critics derided the French-speaking Kerry for his interest in foreign affairs and “continental” air.
Then House Majority Leader Tom Delay used to bring down the house at Republican events starting his speeches by saying, “‘Hi!,’ or as John Kerry might say, ‘Bonjour!’”
Then Commerce Secretary Don Evans once derided Kerry by saying, “He looks French.”57
Secretary Kerry had just attended a lunch at the Hotel Seehof in Davos, Switzerland, when he motioned to me and senior aide Jason Meininger and told us to join him on a walk.
We headed across the street to the St. Theodul Kirche, a small, sandstone-colored sanctuary with a flame-like crimson dome.
We walked through a reception room and then had to duck down—with the six-foot-four secretary of State leading the way—to get through a Hobbit-sized entry into the main part of the church.
When we did, I was overwhelmed by the heavy wooden beams on the ceiling and the simple wood pews running from front to back.
I wasn’t surprised we did this little diversion; John Kerry was endlessly curious everywhere we went. But after looking up, down, and around, the secretary told me and Meininger why this place was different.
He recalled being a young boy when his father took him into the solitude of that very church to tell him about the death of an aunt.
She was the first person the younger Kerry knew who had died.
Meininger and I said nothing and simply listened as he unexpectedly replayed this most personal of moments.
After one more silent look around, Kerry headed out. He ducked back under the low doorframe and paused on the other side to write a message in the guest book for this family sanctuary.
Everyone who traveled with him never knew what to expect, no matter where we went.
John Kerry points to the spot where he learned a childhood lesson.
As a reporter, I frequently wrote about Kerry’s preference for nuance and his proclivity for arguing both sides of an issue. But I never understood the derision over his interest in the world or his active engagement in foreign policy.
When John Kerry took the lead at the State Department, I knew it was the meeting of man and moment. If ever there was a job for him, secretary of State was it—perhaps even more than president.
Kerry himself would regularly admit as much during our four years together.
He argued that secretary of State is a unique post because it offers the chance to focus on a single subject—foreign affairs—without the usual demands of politicking, chief among them fundraising or reelection campaigns.
In fact, State Department officials are prohibited by the Hatch Act from engaging in many of the usual forms of political activity. Officially named “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities,” it prohibits public campaigning by members of the executive branch.
“It’s one of the best jobs in the world,” Kerry told CBS News during an interview in September 2016 as he prepared to leave office.58
“This is a fascinating job because it’s an opportunity to actually have an impact on challenges that make a difference in life and death, that for the long run can make a difference for our kids,” he added.59
Around the same time, a reporter from Britain’s Sky News asked the secretary whether he felt he could have more influence on the world in his current job than he may have had as president of the United States.
That concrete comparison prompted a quick reply.
“No, I think that the president of the United States is obviously the most powerful position in our country, certainly, and one of the most powerful in the world, if not the,” the secretary said.60
In perhaps the greatest irony of his four years in office, many of the things that had been demerits during his own run for the presidency in 2004 proved to be assets in the job he landed nine years later.
During our first trip abroad, from London to Doha, Qatar, it quickly became clear that Kerry didn’t have to be introduced to many world leaders. Most, it turned out, were old acquaintances.
Regardless of the subject at hand, whether it be Russian aggression in Eastern Europe or Chinese expansion in the South China Sea, Kerry had become versed in it as a senator, as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, or as a first-term foreign affairs emissary for President Obama.
That French-speaking ability? A huge plus. French is the official language of diplomacy—all signs at the United Nations are French first, English second—and French is spoken in far more places around the world than France.
Crowds would light up in central Africa and Southeast Asia when the secretary would greet them in their native French. His schoolboy studies in Switzerland and Norway also acquitted him well when he’d offer up phrases in German or Norwegian—even his Mozambique-born wife’s native Portuguese—while traveling the world.
You can’t overstate how such fluency combats the image of the ugly American abroad.
Kerry’s command of French also proved useful, sadly, when he visited Paris and Brussels following their terrorist attacks. In each, he offered condolences—in French—on behalf of President Obama and the American people. It had special resonance with the locals.
Meanwhile, while John Kerry can be excitable, he more often exudes a level-headedness that’s extremely valuable for a diplomat.
In April 2016, as we stood in the apartment that Lyndon Baines Johnson had used while visiting his presidential library at the University of Texas at Austin, the secretary said, “One of the things diplomacy requires is patience.”61
He explained that quality was underscored for him in the 1960s, when the United States was rocked by a succession of assassinations: President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. It could have deflated political activists, he said, but it ended up spurring them to greater action.
I’d often think of this as I considered the possibility that Susan Rice might have served as President Obama’s second-term secretary of State, instead of John Kerry.
She’d served as US ambassador to the United Nations during the president’s first term, bu
t her expected ascent to secretary was thwarted in September 2012. Rice was tapped for a series of television interviews and suggested the deadly attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi was the result of a spontaneous attack, sparked by the violent reaction to an anti-Muslim video released earlier in Cairo.62
Subsequent investigation showed the attack—which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others—was planned, and Stevens had previously requested extra security at the compound he was visiting.
Congressional Republicans pilloried Ambassador Rice over her initial explanation, effectively preventing her from being confirmed as secretary of State. That prompted her to remove her name from consideration. President Obama picked her instead to be his second-term national security adviser.
While Secretary Kerry would go on to have weekly meetings with President Obama, Rice became the day-to-day link between the White House and the military and diplomatic establishments.
She wasn’t shy about calling out foreign officials or the secretary if they didn’t agree with her views.
“You Palestinians,” she was once quoted by The New Republic as saying to Palestinian Authority chief negotiator Saeb Arakat, “can never see the fucking big picture.”63
That temper, belying her doctorate from Oxford and background as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, contrasted with the modulated manner of Kerry, who was twenty years older than Rice.
While John Kerry would later be criticized for being a secretary of State who was too optimistic in his world view and too willing to hear out his adversaries, his military and political backgrounds, prior relationships, and patience left him well suited for the job when he assumed office.
As President Obama said when he announced his nomination as secretary, Kerry was “not going to need a lot of on-the-job training.”64
And with no disparagement intended toward Susan Rice, Vice President Biden acknowledged as much before he asked him to raise his right hand so he could administer the final oath the onetime Lieutenant Kerry would take in public service: “John, it’s now your time,” the vice president said during that ceremony in the State Department’s prestigious Ben Franklin Room. “And this moment, as I said, in the history of our country and the management of our foreign policy, I can honestly think of no man or woman whose hands I’d rather that responsibility be in than John Kerry.”65
3
WELCOME ABOARD
BY ALMOST ANY INDEX, the twenty-first century is the most connected in world history.
You can capture an instant with Snapchat, share a moment on Facebook, and speak face-to-face for hours using Skype and FaceTime. If you’re the US government, you also can connect leaders around the world using encrypted Secure phones and videoconference equipment.
While Secretary Kerry carried an iPad everywhere he went for four years, when it came to diplomacy, he was decidedly old school.
He made clear—through his words and the mileage he racked up—his belief that diplomacy was best conducted through a face-to-face conversation.
“I’ve got to feel it out,” he told his senior staff the morning of February 21, 2013, three days before he set out on the first trip of his term. “That’s what this trip is all about.”66
That inaugural trip included visits with longtime allies in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, but after further stops in Italy and Turkey, the secretary continued to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
All four nations would be pivotal if Arab states were ever to offer Israel a peace extending across the Middle East. The secretary wanted to meet their leaders immediately to get input for the administration’s final stab at brokering peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Over the ensuing four years, Kerry became the most traveled secretary of State in history while working out a power-sharing agreement in Afghanistan, convincing Iran to get rid of its nuclear weapons program, developing a counter-ISIS coalition, and brokering climate change agreements, including the 2015 Paris accord.
No matter the challenge, the secretary’s impulse wasn’t just to pick up the phone. It was to get on the plane.
“The only way for me to manage this is face-to-face,” he told his senior aides in December 2014, explaining why he was headed to Rome for yet another conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.67
A reporter had picked up on his style in October 2013, barely eight months into his tenure.
“The 69-year-old former senator and 2004 Democratic US presidential nominee made an unannounced visit to Kabul last week for one-on-one talks with (Afghanistan) President Hamid Karzai, after scrapping plans to visit the Philippines due to a typhoon,” wrote Reuters Diplomatic Correspondent Lesley Wroughton. “The personal touch seemed to work with Karzai. The pair reached a preliminary deal that would keep some US forces in Afghanistan beyond a 2014 deadline.”68
Wroughton went on to quote an unnamed senior State Department official who said, “He decided that making this trip, spending the time, rolling up his sleeves, and doing personal diplomacy, which you all know he enjoys doing, was important.”
The secretary’s peripatetic nature was nothing new.
Once while he was in a meeting, we staffers killed time by watching a replay of his 1971 appearance on 60 Minutes. That interview came after a twenty-seven-year-old John Kerry had burst onto the national scene with his antiwar testimony before the US Senate.
In providing background about Kerry and his then-wife, Julia, CBS correspondent Morley Safer told viewers, “The Kerrys have a house in Waltham, Massachusetts, but they are rarely there. He is almost continually on the road, speaking on behalf of the veterans.”69
Everyone nodded at the affirmation of a lifestyle they were sharing forty years later.
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KERRY WASN’T THE FIRST secretary ribbed or criticized for his penchant for travel.
Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard Co. and a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, chastised Hillary Clinton when she was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination that same year.
At the time, Clinton held the record for the most destinations visited by a secretary of State—a total of 112.
“Like Hillary Clinton, I, too, have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe. But unlike her, I have actually accomplished something,” Fiorina said in January 2015, while addressing the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines, Iowa. “Mrs. Clinton, flying is an activity, not an accomplishment.”70
Some opponents made similar comments about Kerry even before he surpassed Condoleezza Rice for most miles traveled by a secretary, which had been 1.059 million. Secretary Kerry exceeded that in April 2016 and ended up with 1.41 million in total. That equaled fifty-seven times around the world.
He never matched Secretary Clinton for destinations visited, hitting ninety-one countries—some twenty-one fewer than she. That was largely because Kerry spent extended periods in a handful of places, such as Jerusalem for the Middle East peace talks, Vienna for the Iran deal, and Paris during its 2015 climate change conference.
On that final point, some critics needled Kerry by saying if he really cared about the environment, he’d spend less time on his carbon-emitting airplane.
Whenever I heard these criticisms—not all unjustified—I thought back to one of my earliest conversations with him.
At that time, he said he wasn’t interested in breaking any records as secretary, only in what he termed “purpose-driven” travel.
He defined this publicly on August 31, 2016, before an audience at the India Institute of Technology–Delhi in New Delhi. A student had asked him about surpassing the record for most miles traveled.
“I honestly am not counting countries, or miles for that matter,” Kerry said. “We’re going where we think we need to go when we need to go and trying to make things happen.”71
A month later, as he began a series of exit interviews to review his tim
e as secretary, he elaborated in response to a question from CNN.
“I go to Nigeria because it is vital that Nigeria be able to beat Boko Haram, an ISIL adjunct, and it’s vital that Nigeria be able to build better governance and stronger ability to deliver to its citizens,” the secretary said. “Similarly in Somalia, I went to Mogadishu because it’s important for us to beat al-Shabaab, which is another violent terrorist group that threatens stability. And so each of these, all of my trips are connected to really trying to make us safer.”72
In fact, Kerry said repeatedly his voluminous travel stemmed from him holding his job at a unique time in world history.
And he explained that wasn’t just a product of events occurring during his four years in office, but a social and political transformation coinciding with the rise of technology—especially smartphones and social media.
I remember once motorcading through the poverty-stricken Solomon Islands, passing children who lacked clothing while they played next to signs in the roadside vegetation hawking smartphones and high-speed data plans. People would stand at unpaved intersections, using their phones to shoot video of us driving by.
The secretary argued technology gave much to people but had an unexpected effect. It showed them what they didn’t have by letting them see how people lived elsewhere in the world.
“It is a huge benefit, but also a disrupter in terms of economies and lifestyles,” Kerry said.
He told the IIT students in New Delhi that technology “moves change at a pace that different places have difficulties keeping up with. In many places there is a clash of culture, of religion, of local mores with modernity itself. . . . And, so, governing is harder. It is harder today to build consensus around an issue than it used to be.”73
When he was a child, Kerry recalled, a president could deliver a speech that was covered by three or four national television networks. The following day, everyone stood around the office water cooler and talked about what they’d heard.
