by Glen Johnson
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LESS THAN TWO MONTHS after the outlines of the final deal were agreed to in Lausanne, Secretary Kerry flew back to Switzerland for a one-on-one meeting with Foreign Minister Zarif.
The endgame for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had begun.
The venue was familiar: the hilltop InterContinental Hotel in Geneva. The counterpart also was well known. Additionally, the routine was the same: a posed photo for the media at the top of their 11 a.m. meeting, followed by a closed-door conversation.
A State Department official made anodyne comments to reporters when the meeting ended after six hours.
“Secretary Kerry and Foreign Minister Zarif, along with their teams, had a thorough and comprehensive discussion of all of the issues today,” Agence France-Presse quoted the official as saying. “We are committed to working to close the remaining gaps and to staying on the schedule we’ve set forth to get this done.”239
In reality, the meeting had grown so contentious, Zarif got up from the table at one point and sat in a chair on the side of the room, his head in his hands. Kerry, meanwhile, slammed his pen down on the table so forcefully it flew across the room and hit one of the Iranian negotiators.
“It stunned everyone, because it was so out of character,” one State Department official later told The New Yorker for a reconstruction about the negotiations.240
The Iranians headed off for the rest of their business abroad. Kerry was set to fly to Madrid the following afternoon, but not before fulfilling a pledge he’d made to himself during his many visits to Switzerland.
The avid cyclist planned to ride his bike through the Col de la Colombière, a mile-high pass in the French Alps just south of Geneva.
It’s reached by pedaling up hills that, at points, have a grade of more than 12 percent—a rise of twelve feet in height for every one hundred feet in distance. It’s so challenging it served as the 10th Stage of the 2012 Tour de France bicycle race.
Because this wasn’t an official event, the press corps and bulk of our staff remained back at the hotel in Geneva. In fact, many members of our usual travel team had stayed at home in Washington to handle other business on what was supposed to be a routine six-day trip to Nigeria, Switzerland, Spain, and Paris.
The secretary set off from the InterContinental around 8 a.m. on May 31, 2015. He traveled in a pared-down motorcade, accompanied in the limousine by his biking companion and senior aide, Jason Meininger. I rode in the spare limo.
We took a beautiful Sunday drive around the end of Lake Geneva before crossing into France and pulling off the highway at the commune of Scionzier. The motorcade stopped in a municipal parking lot so the secretary and Meininger could take off their sweats and get on their bikes.
While Kerry said he wanted a “small footprint” for the ride, that belied the fact that he was our country’s chief diplomat and fourth in line to the US presidency. He may have been blasé about taking a bike ride on public roads, but our hosts weren’t.
Because we started in Switzerland, we had a Swiss police escort to the border. Because the ride was in France, French police had the security lead, along with the Diplomatic Security Service.
The police didn’t want the secretary and Meininger riding alone, so they found experienced cyclists within their ranks who could ride alongside and form a protective peloton, should the need arise.
There were also the requisite helicopters overhead—Swiss to the border, French from there on—and the usual caboose, an ambulance staffed with paramedics.
All in all, it was a sizable group, so much so that the parking lot was filled with cars as the secretary checked his bike and posed for photos with local officials who’d come out to welcome him. Everyone waited as he completed a solemn task: making final edits to a statement we were issuing after the death of Beau Biden, the elder son of Vice President Joe Biden. He’d died of a brain tumor at age forty-six.
When it was finally time to go, Kerry reset the GPS tracker mounted on his handlebars, snapped his cycling shoes into the toe clips on his pedals, and started to move.
I took that as my cue to stop taking pictures and run back to the spare limo, about four cars back. I’d no sooner jumped into the back seat when I looked through the bulletproof windows and saw John Kerry on the ground.
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
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“HE FELL,” SAID THE agent sitting in the front seat as he and I bailed out of the passenger-side doors of our Chevy Suburban. When we made it across the parking lot, the secretary was writhing in pain. Meininger, despite being shaken by what he’d just seen, provided an instant and decisive diagnosis: “It’s over. He broke his leg.”
I tried to process this statement as I looked down at Kerry, sitting on his butt. He was dressed in his helmet, sunglasses, gloves, and a sleek white riding suit. He was trim, muscular, and looked the picture of fitness—except he was now lying next to his bike.
The severity of his injury became evident when he reached down and grabbed his right thigh. The top half moved in one direction, the bottom half in the other. It was as if someone were wiggling a bowl of Jell-O.
In reality, he’d suffered a clean break of his femur, the longest and strongest bone in the human body.241
While the security personnel had game-planned for an injury during their preparations, the real thing was a little different from practice.
There was a moment of shock before the full breadth of the team sprang into action. First, agents removed the bike. Then one got behind the secretary and held up his back and head. Then the paramedics ran up from the ambulance.
They opened their medical bags and began treatment immediately.
Kerry was in considerable pain, so the medics checked his vital signs and gave him a dose of morphine. As it started to take effect, he grew woozy and concerned about his heart rate and breathing.
“I’m dying,” he said in his haze. The comment startled me and, I’m sure, everyone else within earshot.
We reassured him he wasn’t, although none of us could truly be sure the broken bone hadn’t pierced his femoral artery, the main carrier of blood in the leg. It wasn’t an implausible scenario.
The paramedics looked at him closely, as did a DS agent who happened to be from Massachusetts and was the designated medic on the protective detail that day.
A broken bone was bad, for sure, but this was a potentially dangerous situation.
Meininger started to talk with the security team about the evacuation plan, while I called the senior staff member on the trip—Deputy Chief of Staff Tom Sullivan—to tell him and the others back in Geneva what had happened. Sullivan is one of the calmest and most decisive people I have ever met, but even he was taken aback when he heard the news.
After we hung up, I pulled out a pen and piece of paper and began documenting the times and everything the medics were doing.
The reporter in me did so not just so I could remember, but for the sake of history and the questions sure to come from the rest of the staff, the White House, and Secretary Kerry’s younger daughter, Vanessa. She was a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital.
As the medical team worked to stabilize the secretary, DS agents grabbed umbrellas from their vehicles and opened three to shield him from the brilliant morning sun. A few minutes later, the French Gendarmerie helicopter descended in a buzz of noise and landed in a field next to the parking lot.
The plan was to fly the secretary back to Geneva for treatment at the Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève, or HUG, the Geneva University Hospitals. It had been designated as the medical facility of choice during the preride planning. That planning included a check to ensure it was stocked with a sufficient quantity of Kerry’s blood type.
In addition to the two pilots, there was room for only four passengers in the helicopter: Kerry, the two paramedics, and the DS special agent in charge of the secretary’s protective detail. Neither Meininger nor I wanted to lose sight of the Bos
s, so the flight crew agreed to let one of us also hop on.
Meininger had known the secretary for years and become very close while working with him, driving him, and riding alongside him for hours and miles. Nonetheless, he suggested I take the spot. He deferred to my relative rank in the Department, the note taking I was doing, and my own longtime relationship with our boss.
I shook his hand and jumped aboard.
We were soon airborne and on a flight that would have been enjoyable if not for the circumstances. We climbed to the north and flew past sheer granite cliffs, magnificent in their scale even as the aircraft bounced around in turbulence reflected off them.
Like most helicopter trips, we traveled along a valley and followed the path of a highway, doubling back on the road that had taken us from Switzerland to France little more than an hour earlier. Soon, we were over the outskirts of Geneva. Then, past the window beside the secretary’s stretcher, I saw the Jet d’eau, the geyser near the tip of Lake Geneva that’s a city landmark.
Once we landed on the HUG rooftop, we were met by local police, hospital officials, and spare DS agents who had scrambled from the hotel after the emergency call.
Kerry was taken downstairs for an evaluation by the hospital staff. Before long, Meininger and the rest of the group from Scionzier materialized in the waiting area. I could only imagine the speed of their motorcade on the thirty-mile trip, because our helicopter hadn’t arrived in Geneva much before their cars pulled in downstairs.
Over the next several hours, both the secretary and the situation stabilized. He was no longer in immediate danger, the staff that had stayed behind at the hotel or back in Washington was either on scene or fully in the loop, and Kerry was well enough to make his own decisions about how to proceed.
His first request was to get in touch with Dr. Dennis Burke. He was an orthopedic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital who’d previously replaced his two hip joints, including the one atop the femur that was now broken.
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THE QUESTION KERRY AND his doctors had to resolve was whether he should have surgery to set a femur in Geneva, where he now was, or back in Boston, where he lived and Dr. Burke worked.
The secretary’s preference was to get home. Burke consulted by phone with the doctors in Geneva and agreed Boston was preferable, assuming Kerry could be moved in a medically prudent fashion.
Soon, our trip coordinators were examining air ambulance options and even started pulling seats and tables out of our Air Force plane, seeing if they could create enough space to fly a stretcher-borne secretary back to Boston. The stretcher wouldn’t be able to turn the corner at the entrance to his usual cabin.
During this period, a subtle but unmistakable tug-of-war broke out between Dr. Burke and the HUG physicians.
The locals were confident they had the expertise and facilities to operate without subjecting Kerry to the risks of a blood clot or pulmonary embolism that might occur on a long pressurized airplane flight home.
Commercial airlines warn passengers about the risk of deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot that can form and travel from the leg to a lung or the brain if someone doesn’t get up and walk or stretch during a long flight.
Kerry had to reassure the HUG physicians he could fly, and that anything that might happen in transit wouldn’t be their responsibility.
Eventually, the two sides reached an agreement: the secretary would remain overnight at the hospital in Geneva, Burke would fly in from Boston, and if Kerry’s vitals were stable in the morning, the visiting physician would assume responsibility for his patient’s treatment and accompany him home.
The last remaining logistical challenge was a ride. Reconfiguring our usual plane was proving to be a challenge. There wasn’t a commercial air ambulance available with enough space for a medical team and even the bare-bones staff that would have to accompany the secretary of State on a potentially life-threatening flight.
The air ambulances available also were small and would have had to stop both in Ireland and Canada to refuel en route to the United States—even more ups and downs and pressure changes and time aloft.
Fortunately for us, the Air Force had an empty C-17 cargo plane flying from Qatar to its base in Charleston, South Carolina. It was big, by definition, and easily capable of crossing the Atlantic Ocean nonstop.
The plane was rerouted to Ramstein Air Base in southwestern Germany, where it picked up a five-person team of military doctors and nurses from nearby Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. On the morning of June 1, 2015, the bulbous gray plane landed in Geneva and parked not far away from the blue-and-white Air Force C-32 on which Kerry had arrived for his talks with Zarif.
A few hours later, the HUG staff loaded the secretary onto a helicopter. He flew from the roof of the hospital to the airport tarmac, touching down just behind the tail of the cargo plane.
Swiss police had lined up a pair of passenger buses next to the plane to block the view of photographers peering through the airport fence while Kerry was transferred from the helicopter. His stretcher was rolled up the ramp at the tail of the C-17 and secured in the middle of the eighty-eight-foot cargo bay.
The space was large enough to hold 102 fully equipped troops, a fleet of presidential limos, or an Abrams tank.242
I joined Meininger, Deputy Chief of Staff Tom Sullivan, and two DS agents on the flight to Boston. The rest of our group got on the C-32 and flew directly back to Washington.
Dr. Burke also rode with us on the cargo plane. He took advantage of the unique circumstance to sit in the cockpit and watch our takeoff. Then he climbed down the ladder from the flight deck and crawled into a medical litter in front of the secretary’s stretcher.
He was finally able to sleep after his unexpected overnight flight to Europe.
The rest of us sat in mesh seats along the sides of the cargo bay. We ate box lunches and used a portable latrine lashed down at the front of the cargo bay. A flight surgeon kept tabs on the secretary, who slept, made phone calls, and poked around on a laptop we’d given him.
The ten-hour flight was uneventful, but the nighttime landing was memorable. I watched from the cockpit jump seat. Boston was being pelted by rain, and the runway lights at Logan Airport weren’t visible until shortly before the pilots got to the height where they had to decide whether to land or abort their approach.
They were able to see in time and then threw an autobrake switch to ensure they didn’t skid when making contact with the ground. They landed on the pavement with an assuring thud that flattened the plane’s tires and sent a ripple down its wings.
They parked the airplane near a private aviation terminal such that photographers wouldn’t be able to get a picture of Kerry while he was in hospital garments and on a stretcher.
One of the first people aboard was Dr. Vanessa Kerry. We stood back as she greeted her father with a kiss and then gave him her own quick medical assessment. It was a touching blend of loving daughter and cool professional.
Kerry bid farewell to his pilots and doctors, thanking each with a Challenge Coin. A city ambulance backed up to the tail ramp and attendants transferred his stretcher for the trip to Massachusetts General. We arrived fifteen minutes later, pulling into an underground garage connected to the Emergency Room.
The secretary was taken upstairs and surrounded by a waiting team of doctors and nurses. Those of us who had been overseas felt a wave of relief, not just from being back in the United States but also because we were now within range of staff reinforcements. I felt especially good, since I was back in my hometown and unexpectedly close to my wife and sons.
That said, I still couldn’t believe what had happened.
A months-old idea and days of intricate planning had all pointed to a single moment: when Secretary Kerry finally pushed his pedal down to begin his ride.
While I took that as my cue to lower my camera and run for my car, a phalanx of French motorcycle officers knew it was their signal to set off at the f
ront of the traveling party. Their job was to make sure the route and each intersection along it were clear.
The sudden roar of their engines prompted the secretary—himself a Harley rider—to look over and watch the bikes pull away.
What he didn’t see was a small curb. It was shorter than normal, just tall enough to define a series of parking spaces in front of one of the Scionzier municipal buildings.
While Kerry planned to ride a route that had been a Stage in the Tour de France—a race known for its speed, endurance, and hair-raising moments—he was nowhere near any of that drama.
Instead, he was traveling no more than two or three miles per hour, on maybe his third or fourth pedal stroke, when his front tire ran into the jutting curb. Traveling too slow to go over it, the tire stopped. Looking out instead of down, Kerry was caught off guard. And because his shoes were attached to the pedals by his toe clips, he had no time to snap out and put down his foot to break his fall.
Instead, he tipped over at an angle. His right thigh led the way, coming down hard on the curb, which amounted to a wedge pile-driving into his leg.
The result was a classic paradox: an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
The femur was the thing to give.
For all our fears about a rider careening off the road, a tire blowing at high speed, or a nut job trying to attack the passing secretary, the thing that got him was a measly curb. At low speed. In a municipal parking lot.
It sounded like the finale in a perverse game of Clue.
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DR. BURKE OPERATED THE morning after we returned to Boston. He came out of the OR after four hours looking like he’d been in a knife fight. Nonetheless, he pronounced the surgery a success. He not only replaced the metal ball-and-socket joint in the secretary’s hip, but also put in an extra-long post extending through the core of the femur and down past the point of the break.
He drilled screws across the bone before wrapping it with wire for good measure. It was so solid, Secretary Kerry was able to get on his feet the morning after the operation. Within days, he was using a walker to move down his hospital corridor. A week after the surgery, we released the first post-accident shot of him, a picture of the secretary sitting in his room overlooking the Charles River.
