Information Wars. Richard Stengel
into the comms meeting, which was held just across the hall in the chief of staff’s office. The comms meeting was even smaller than the 8:30 and consisted of the chief of staff, the deputy chief of staff, the spokesperson, the assistant secretary for public affairs, and the chief speechwriter.
We sat at a round wooden table in a room that had a lovely view looking south toward the Lincoln Memorial. This was the most informal and candid meeting of the day. It ranged much further afield than simply comms. Yes, we might complain about a negative story that was in that morning’s Washington Post, but we would also look ahead to the Secretary’s speeches, trips, and interviews and try to plan not just for the current crisis but for the one around the corner. There was always a lot of discussion of what the White House did or didn’t want us to do. And there was always a fair amount of wry laughter.
This was dangerous, because the chief of staff’s office had a discreet side door that led directly to the Secretary’s private office, and often the Secretary would pop in to say something or call out for the chief of staff. I remember once spending much of the meeting discussing the fact that the Secretary wanted to take his windsurfing board on a trip to the Middle East because he would have a day at Sharm al-Sheikh, in Egypt, which had a beach. We were all laughing about this when he poked his head in, and then became pretty silent. He didn’t take the board on the trip.
The centerpiece of the comms meeting was that day’s press briefing. For reasons that were unclear, the State Department was the only government agency besides the White House that did a daily press briefing. I personally thought this didn’t make much sense and caused way more problems than it solved, but I was in a distinct minority on that one. Our spokesperson was then Jen Psaki, who had come from the White House communications shop. Jen was very good at what she did: she was smart, good-humored, hard to rattle. She was also routinely pilloried, caricatured, and memed by Russian state media, which coined the word “Psaking,” defining it as talking about something you didn’t understand. She took this in stride. Every morning, she would list the issues that were likely to come up that day in the briefing and go over her answers on the trickier ones. We would tweak and make suggestions. It was a good way of getting a waterfront view of policy.
The actual press briefing was held in the public affairs briefing room, a cramped, subterranean space with a podium at the front, behind which was perhaps the worst step-and-repeat banner I’d ever seen, bearing the words, “U.S. State Department.” It made viewers think they were seeing double. The foreign press, as they were called, had little cubbyholes and desks off the briefing room. They were a somewhat motley crew that ranged from crackerjack correspondents for big foreign news organizations like the BBC, Die Welt, and the Guardian to reporters from obscure Asian newspapers who barely spoke English. Add to that the handful of correspondents from state-supported Russian outlets who delighted in asking adversarial questions with dozens of often inane follow-ups. The whole crew was presided over by Matt Lee, the senior diplomatic correspondent for AP, a crotchety, contrarian, immensely knowledgeable reporter who for some reason was always given the first question at the briefing.
On Mondays and Wednesdays, I would dash out of the comms meeting to make the large formal meeting that was called the “Senior Staff Meeting” on the calendar but was always referred to as the “9:15.” This was the more general meeting for the top 100 or so people at the department—all six Under Secretaries and their chiefs of staff, the 25 or so assistant secretaries and their deputies, the heads of bureaus, and any ambassadors who might be in town. On Mondays, the 9:15 was held in the Holbrooke Room, a large, low-ceilinged, secure space. This meeting always showed one curious characteristic of foreign service officers. There were days when I arrived at, say, 9:10 and the entire room was empty and I thought, Maybe the meeting has been canceled? Do I have the wrong day? At State, people were not late for meetings, but they were never early either. What was uncanny was that no matter how large or small the meeting, people would arrive a minute or two, sometimes just thirty seconds, before it was scheduled to begin. So, the Holbrooke Room could be empty at 9:10 and then have 100 people sitting down at 9:14. And when the Secretary arrived at, say, 9:18, it looked for all the world as if everyone had been sitting there chatting happily for half an hour.
The centerpiece of the Holbrooke Room was an enormous, polished wooden table around which the senior staff sat. There were place settings on large pieces of white cardboard. To an outsider, the name cards would mean nothing: they contained a single capital letter. D or P or J or R. The tradition was that each Under Secretary and each Deputy Secretary was referred to by a single initial. Thus, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs was always known as P. The Deputy Secretary for political affairs was known as D. The Under Secretary for Management was M. The Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment was E. That all made sense. But my title, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, was known as R. Why R? No one had a good answer, except that P, D, and A were already taken.
I generally sat between J (Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights) and T (Arms Control and International Security). Some of the assistant secretaries sat at the end of the table, but most stood against the wall opposite where the Secretary sat. The 9:15 was the most communal of the department’s meetings. In the minutes before S arrived (yes, that’s the initial used for the Secretary), you could hear the hum of chatter and gossip. (Gossip was the lingua franca of the foreign service.) When he strode in, everyone got quiet. He usually began with a folksy hello. Because this was a more public meeting, the Secretary’s demeanor was both more upbeat and more formal than it was at the 8:30. He usually mentioned the same concerns he’d had at the 8:30, but typically in a shorter, sanitized version, along with a handful of announcements. He also regularly delivered what the department referred to as “attaboys” to individuals or departments that had done something positive.
This meeting was less for the Secretary than for the workhorses of the department: the regional assistant secretaries. The State Department was divided between functional bureaus—like mine, arms control, and international security—and regional bureaus, like Europe and Eurasian Affairs, African Affairs, and Near Eastern Affairs. Geography was power at the State Department, and the regional bureaus were the powerhouses in the Building. Dean Acheson compared them to the barons at a feudal court.3 The analogy was still apt. At State, it was important to own territory. And people protected it fiercely. If you tried to launch a program in one of the assistant secretary’s regions and she objected, it went nowhere. State was a Jeffersonian culture in the sense that the institution seemed to believe that the regions knew better than the center.
The Secretary would go around the room and call on the assistant secretaries. Yes, they were the workhorses, but there was definitely a show-horse aspect to this meeting, as the assistant secretaries gave a kind of bravura tour of their own areas with names and details designed to impress everyone with the depth and the reach of their knowledge. The assistant secretary for Africa might say, “Mr. Secretary, there was a coup in the Congo, and I’ve been in touch with our embassy. No danger to any U.S. personnel. You’re going to meet with the president of Nigeria next week and the trip is coming along well. I spoke to him yesterday, and I sent up a read-ahead memo on the trip this morning.”
At these meetings, you realize pretty quickly that there is no such thing as “the foreign policy of the United States.” We talk about it all the time, and the media writes about it, but it’s an invented idea. If you walked into the State Department and said, “I’d like a copy of the foreign policy of the United States,” no one would know what you were talking about. There is no such document. The foreign policy of the United States is mostly what the President and the National Security Council signal is our policy, and then folks at the State Department interpret it according to their own lights. People react to what is urgent and important, and figure out a way forward. Oftentimes, foreign policy seemed to be made by whoever made a convincing case—because often no one else had a case to make.
In government in general and at State in particular, meetings are not preparation for work, they are the work. People prepared for meetings, they participated in them, and then they summarized what had happened for another meeting. In government, meetings are the product. People judged how they had done that day by how the meetings had gone. My specials would sometimes say, “We crushed that