Secretary of State for policy, and to his left was the Deputy Secretary of State for Management. Next to the Deputy for policy sat the Secretary’s chief of staff, and next to the Deputy for Management sat the Under Secretary for Political Affairs. The other regulars in the meeting were the Under Secretary for Management, the Secretary’s two deputy chiefs of staff, the assistant secretary for public affairs, legislative affairs, and the spokesperson. The assistant secretary for public affairs was the only assistant secretary there. Only three of the six Under Secretaries were invited. Even though there were no place cards at the table, there was a strict seating chart. Before I went to my first meeting, my chief of staff drew a makeshift diagram for me and said my chair was between those of the head of policy planning and the deputy chief of staff on the south side of the table. I sat in the wrong place my first couple of times, until someone kindly pointed out the correct seat.
The first words out of the Secretary’s mouth were almost always some version of, “A lot going on,” “Lots of balls in the air,” “A lot of crap happening.” (One morning he said with a smile, “When have I not said that? I’ve got to stop saying that!”) Some mornings the Secretary launched into a tour of the international waterfront. He would touch on half a dozen issues, from helping the Syrian “moderates” to the civil war in the Congo to an upcoming trip to Kazakhstan. He would often talk about what was bothering him, like the uselessness of Congress (“They have a complete inability to do their job”); the habitual leaks from meetings he attended at the White House (“With our usual discretion, there it is on the front page of the New York Times”); the fecklessness of certain world leaders (“He doesn’t understand the first thing about economics”); Americans’ lack of interest in international relations (“There are no exit polls on foreign policy”); and the vagaries of Washington (“This is a city of snow wimps!”). He understood that just hearing what was on his mind had value for us.
In general, people would speak rapidly and tell the Secretary something he ought to know (Sir, an American in our embassy in Lima was arrested for assault); or what they were doing (Sir, I’m meeting with the deputy foreign minister of Malaysia to discuss counterterrorism efforts); or just something he might find amusing or interesting (I once surprised him by saying that CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, had the biggest news bureau in Washington, with more than 350 people).
On mornings when something was bothering him or we were in the midst of one crisis or another, or he just seemed a little down, he would sidle into his chair and mumble something. That was a universally understood signal. Because when we went around the table, people would then say, “Nothing this morning, Sir.” There were days when almost the whole table of 15 people did that. Sometimes it’s diplomatic to say nothing. But even on those days, when the meeting ended, he would bound out of his chair and offer some exhortation, like “Go get ’em,” or “Let’s get it done.”
Comms and the 9:15
At State, and pretty much everywhere in Washington, “comms” is the standard shorthand for “communications,” which basically means any and all of the outward-facing stuff, from a local newspaper interview to a speech at the United Nations. After the 8:30, I jumped 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?
