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 are a legacy of the Cold War, when Congress and the intelligence community worried about State employees being blackmailed by Russian spies. One assumption seems pretty intuitive: if you drank too much on a foreign trip, you were more likely to be a target of a Russian kompromat operation.
As a nominee, you also needed to be investigated by law enforcement, and for that you were assigned a “special investigator,” who, well, investigated you. The investigator would question your neighbors, your work colleagues, your elementary-school teachers, and ask them if you drink too much, if you use drugs, if you are abusive, if you are trustworthy, and, oh, if you are loyal to the country.
My investigator—let’s call him Mike—was a burly, no-nonsense former cop who seemed to want to get the job done with a minimum of hassle. My introduction to Mike came when he sent me an email telling me that he would be working on my investigation. His first email to me was about a late payment on a J.Crew credit card, and why my balance was past due.
Mike also asked for names of friends and colleagues whom he might contact. But then the investigator can also call people on his own. A few weeks later I got a worried late-night telephone call from a neighbor I hadn’t seen in months.
“Rick, did you do anything wrong?”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“Because I got a call from law enforcement asking me whether I think you might be a spy or a foreign agent or whether you might be working for a terrorist organization.”
The Confirmation Process
At the time of my nomination, there were already dozens of nominees who had not been scheduled for a vote and dozens more who had gotten through various committees and were waiting for a vote from the Senate. Almost all nominations were voted on by what the Senate called “UC”—unanimous consent. The Senate had to confirm hundreds of political nominees every year, and if it took up each one individually for debate and a vote, it probably wouldn’t have time to get to any other business. “UC” simply meant that if no one objected to or put a hold on your nomination, it would go through via voice vote.
From the moment I was officially nominated, I was assigned a ground-floor office at the State Department. Just beyond the main elevators there are a couple of corridors with nondescript offices reserved for nominees. The idea is that the Senate wouldn’t look kindly on a nominee using her official office before she was confirmed, so you’re meant to make do with a temporary one. Mine was a small, dingy office with a tiny window that overlooked an alley. I wasn’t allowed to see my official office, and I had to be escorted anywhere I needed to go in the Building.
Pretty quickly, I began to suss out the idiosyncrasies of the State Department. I was besieged with emails, memorandums, and reports, and basically every one—every one—was way too long. I don’t mean an extra paragraph or page; I mean 3 to 5 to 10 times too long. There seemed to be some reward mechanism for writing long memos. It was as if people at State were paid by the word. There was also a process for everything, no matter how big or small, that always had to be followed. There was a process for nominees to meet the department, and there was a process for how I had to be escorted to my office. Oftentimes this process wasn’t written down anywhere but was part of a tradition known only by the foreign service.
The main way the department got you ready for confirmation hearings was by holding what were known as “murder boards.” Murder boards are practice runs for the hearing. You are put in a room like the hearing room, seated at a table up front, while a range of State Department officers pretend they are Senators and pepper you with possible questions and then critique your answers. In preparation for my murder board, I was given about a dozen comically large notebooks (we’re talking over 700 pages each) that covered everything from the origins of the Public Affairs Department to the
