Information Wars. Richard Stengel
extremism, a military aide, a congressional liaison—and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few others. This, by the way, isn’t counting the bureau heads who reported to me, the assistant secretary for educational and cultural affairs, the assistant secretary for public affairs, or the coordinator of International Information Programs. So, when we had a meeting in my office for just R front office staff, there could be 16 or 17 people. At Time, I had one assistant.
Each smaller meeting at State was a microcosm of a bigger meeting. So my little morning meeting recapitulated the Secretary’s 8:30. My chief of staff would lay out the day, and then we would go around the room, starting with the special assistants, who would review what was happening in their realm. Everyone in there felt that they were looking out both for me personally and for R equities, and I appreciated it. State was “turfy,” and people were adept at protecting their territory.
I discovered that my chief of staff, a foreign service officer, would schedule me with one meeting after another throughout the day so that I had no time to think or even react to what had happened in the last meeting. When she would say to me, “You’re back-to-back today,” she wasn’t kidding. This came from a variety of things, including the simple one of trying to cram as much work into a day as possible. But the other aspect of this in Washington was what I thought of as the “infantilization of principals.” This was the idea that principals—basically political folks—should be kept so busy, with absolutely everything done for them, that they never really made any decisions or choices other than the ones baked in for them by staff. Basically, every principal in Washington had so much staff, all of whom were so eager to write or contribute something, that you could go your entire day, every day, just reading off a piece of paper or a cue card of what you were supposed to say or do at a meeting. And many principals did just that. At meetings in the White House Situation Room I was often amazed that principals of agencies and cabinet officers would just numbly read from the notes that had been prepared by staff. I sometimes wondered why we didn’t hire actors. They certainly would have read the scripts better.
Pretty much everyone at State filed out promptly at 5 p.m. I had never seen that before. If you send an email to foreign service officers or civil servants at 5:05 p.m., don’t expect to hear back until the following morning. And if you send it at that same time on Friday, don’t expect to hear back until Monday morning. They either didn’t look at it or didn’t think it was appropriate to answer during non–office hours. At first, when I didn’t get answers to my emails, I thought that perhaps the server was down or that there was some other technical problem. I remember having IT guys come to look at my dusty old Dell desktop. Some of this had to do with the State Department work ethos, which was that something asked for today could actually be done tomorrow—or even next week. But part of this was the idea that to so many at State, even the simplest email was looked at as a kind of barbed weapon, a digital Trojan horse that might be a trap of some kind. An email could get you in trouble. It was a federal record. Folks were terrified of making a mistake. Hence, the answers were almost always bland and noncommittal.
So at 4:30 we summarized the day, and then we were all back in at 8 the next morning to do it all over again. As one longtime foreign service officer said to me, “Holding back the hands of time is a 24/7 job.”
Luck = Opportunity + Readiness
It was 2013, and I was in my seventh year as editor of Time, and I was having lunch with Melody Barnes, the former Obama domestic policy advisor at the White House, with whom I’d become friends over the years. I wanted to know about her post-government life. At the end of the lunch, she turned to me and asked, out of the blue, Would you ever be interested in working at the State Department?
Why do you ask? I said.
She said her good friend was recruiting people to work for Secretary Kerry.
Would there be a particular job that you might want?
The only one I could think of—and knew a little bit about, in part because it had been held by former journalists—was the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy. She smiled when I said that, and then we said goodbye.
Ten days later I was sitting in Secretary Kerry’s elegant outer office on the seventh floor of the State Department. Unbeknownst to me at the time I had lunch with Melody, the person in the job had just told the Secretary that she would be leaving that summer.
Melody had mentioned our lunch to her friend, a longtime aide to Secretary Kerry, who was then recruiting people from outside the department. She liked the idea; she mentioned it to Kerry, who also liked the idea. I had known Senator Kerry a bit over the years. I had never actually covered him, but I’d been the national editor for Time when he had run for president in 2004. I’d always admired him and hoped that he didn’t remember the story I’d edited about how he’d never win Iowa and never go on to become the Democratic nominee.
I’d always known I’d do some form of public service. In my first summer as editor, I wrote a cover story called “The Case for National Service,” and we published an annual national service issue thereafter. I truly believed in the Framers’ idea of citizen service as a foundation of democracy.
A few days after the lunch with Melody, I got an email from David Wade, Secretary Kerry’s chief of staff, asking me if I was serious. I said I was.
I did a little research about the job. It was created only in 1999, under Bill Clinton, when a bill sponsored by Jesse Helms and Joe Biden abolished the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and transferred its public diplomacy programs to the State Department to be managed by the newly created Under Secretary at State.1 It hadn’t been an easy change: the USIA people felt that their mission had been devastated, and the State people didn’t love the idea of an information agency at the department. In the 17 years since the job’s creation, it had been empty for as long as it had been filled. The longest-serving Under Secretary had been Karen Hughes, at two years.
After being ushered into Secretary Kerry’s outer office, I sat on the light-blue-and-white-striped chaise on the right, with two chairs in front of it. Kerry bounded into the room with a big smile and a “Great to see you, Rick.” He took one of the chairs in front of the chaise and launched into how important public diplomacy was in the 21st century and how he’d like to reinvent it and I would be the ideal person for the job: I really want your help figuring out what the narrative is for this new century. He’s a terrific salesman. When he finally paused after the tornado of words, I smiled and said, “You had me at ‘hello.’”
I expected him to smile, but he didn’t (perhaps he didn’t know the movie?) and then launched into a second, just-as-enthusiastic round of selling me on the job. In the middle of this second effort, I said, Whoa, Mr. Secretary, I’m going to do it—I’d love to do it. Count me in. Then he leaned back, sighed, and gave me a clap on the shoulder. I saw firsthand what a tenacious negotiator he was. He wouldn’t even take yes for an answer.
Vetting Is Painful
For anyone who has been vetted for a Senate-confirmed job, what I’m about to write will be painfully familiar. The process is byzantine, detailed beyond imagining, uncomfortable, and invasive. It’s not hard to see why it keeps some good people from going into government. (It can also keep bad people out.) Let’s start with the SF86 Form, from the Office of Personnel Management, which is the standard questionnaire for national security clearances. Filled out, the form can run to hundreds of pages, as mine did. A State Department nominee also has to fill out the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questionnaire. Mine was again over a hundred pages. I won’t go into all the details—and the details are endless—but here’s one: For the SF86 and the Senate Foreign Relations questionnaire, you have to list every foreign trip you’ve taken over the past 14 years, every significant relationship you had with any foreign national on each trip, and, to the best of your ability, an estimate of how much you drank on these trips. Oh, and whether you used any illegal drugs.
Those questions