foreign policy, there’s the classic divide between realism and idealism. When it came to information, I’d always been an idealist. I believed that sunlight was the best disinfectant. I left office as an information realist. Disinformation, as I said earlier, isn’t a new problem, but the ease with which it can be spread on social media is. Today we are all actors in a global information war that is ubiquitous, difficult to comprehend, and unfair. It is a war without end, a war without limits or boundaries. A war that we still don’t quite know how to fight.
To say the truth is under attack is a beautiful phrase. But the problem is that people have their own truths, and these truths are often at war with one another. We no longer seem able to agree on what is a fact or how to determine one. The truth is, it’s impossible to stop people from creating falsehoods and other people from believing them.
So, looking back, there was a lot that we saw that we did something about. There was a lot that we saw that we didn’t or couldn’t do anything about. And there was a lot that we just didn’t see. I saw part of the picture but not all of it. I wish I had been able to connect the dots faster. I wish I had been able to do more. And there was always the sense that it couldn’t happen here.
The Turnstile
When you walk into the 21st Street entrance of the State Department, you have to show your ID to the uniformed guards standing outside the building. They peer down at your card to check the tiny expiration date in the upper left-hand corner before waving you through, exactly the way they have been doing it since the Korean War.
Once you’re past the guards, you have to pass through two tall, automated metal doors. To get them to open, you step onto a four-by-six-inch magnetic carpet in front of them. Some mornings you just had to touch the carpet and the doors would spring open. Sometimes you had to jump up and down. And sometimes you had to open the doors yourself. On many mornings, you would see diplomats in sensible suits hopping up and down before putting their shoulders to what must have been a two-hundred-fifty-pound door.
Once you were through the double doors and into the lobby, you needed to pass through one of five clunky-looking metal turnstiles that probably didn’t look modern when they were installed 25 years ago. You inserted your card in a horizontal slot in the main part of the turnstile and then entered your PIN on the keypad. The problem was the keypad. It was loose and soggy, and the smudged protective plastic cover made typing hard. About a third of the time when you typed in your number, it didn’t register. When that happened, you moved over to the next turnstile and started all over again.
So, each morning, as you entered what everyone always called “the Building” to do your day’s work for American diplomacy, there were a series of small fraught negotiations that failed about as often as they succeeded.
The Lobby
That eastern entrance to the State Department was the main entrance when the Building opened in 1941. It was designed in the late 1930s to be the home of the War Department. But a few years after construction started, the War Department realized that it had already outgrown the building’s capacity and commenced work on what would become the Pentagon. It was decided that the new building would house the State Department.1 The site, in a part of the District known as Foggy Bottom, was not a very glamorous location, then or now. For the employees of the State Department, who had been in the ornate Old Executive Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, it was like moving to a much less desirable zip code.
Established in 1789 under President George Washington, the State Department was the first cabinet-level agency to be created under the new executive branch. It was responsible—then and now—for managing the foreign affairs of the U.S. government. The first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, had a staff of one chief clerk, three subordinate clerks, a translator, and a messenger. There were just two diplomatic posts, London and Paris. Today, the department has more than 40,000 employees, over 200 diplomatic posts, and a budget of $50 billion. In addition to the high-level diplomacy conducted by ambassadors and envoys, the State Department does more prosaic tasks, like issuing passports for American citizens and visas for foreigners traveling to the United States.
The architecture of the State Department is not what most people think of when they imagine Washington, D.C. With its unadorned limestone art moderne exterior and its portico of rectangular columns that look like a giant sideways sans serif letter E, State’s new headquarters owes more to Mussolini than to Pierre L’Enfant. When you enter the two-story terrazzo lobby, with its floor-to-ceiling pink Tennessee marble, you are greeted by an enormous 50-foot-wide mural called Defense of Human Freedoms, which was designed for the War Department. At the center of the painting, four panels depict small-town American life and Roosevelt’s four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. These freedoms are defended by American GIs on the left side of the panel in gas masks and on the right side by American infantrymen in helmets firing M16s. Across the top of the mural stretches the wingspan of a B52 bomber. In 1954, the diplomats of the State Department found it to be too warlike for an agency dedicated to peace, and the mural was covered up by plywood and draperies, which were only removed two decades later.2
The Marshall Office
My office was on the fifth floor of the original building. I shouldn’t say “my office”—it was the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, and it was a plum. In fact, it had been the office of Secretary of State George Marshall when the building first opened. The ceiling is 25 feet high (when my youngest son first saw it, he said, “Dad, you could have two basketball hoops on top of each other”) and featured three enormous, round lights that looked exactly like the flying saucers in the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.
The office was a strategic asset in a city of beautiful offices. After all, people did make a correlation (inaccurate though it might be) between the size of one’s office and how much power one had. For that reason, I liked to have meetings with foreign ambassadors and ministers in my office, where I would serve tea and coffee and let them take it all in. (The office came with its own State Department china.)
There was another anomaly about the office, one that was not necessarily an advantage: it wasn’t on the seventh floor. The seventh floor was where the Secretary sat, as well as his two deputies and all the Under Secretaries except one: me. Yes, the seventh floor was a physical space, but it was also the mythic locus of power in the Building. The phrase “the seventh floor” was uttered hundreds of times a day at the State Department: “The seventh floor isn’t happy.” “The seventh floor wants to do the deal.” “The seventh floor is going up against the NSC.” Just as the phrase “the White House” is shorthand for the President, “the seventh floor” represented the Secretary of State.
My office was on the fifth floor and not the seventh thanks to the astute real estate sense of one of my predecessors, Judith McHale, who was Under Secretary for Hillary Clinton. In 2008, after she was sworn in, she was shown the dark, rather grotty office on the seventh floor where the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy normally sat. At the same time, someone mentioned that the Marshall office on the fifth floor in the old State building had just finished its renovations and was available. Judith chose beauty over proximity to power, and almost every morning when I walked into that lovely space, I silently thanked her.
But because I was not physically on the seventh floor, I was constantly walking or trotting—and sometimes sprinting—to it for meetings. And it was a hike. The State Department was the most nonintuitive, mazelike structure I’ve ever worked in. One reason is that when the building was expanded
