I began the week reminiscing about my travels with four secretaries of state, so I thought I’d end it by answering another question I’m frequently asked: What happened to the three secretaries I covered before Hillary Clinton? Starting with the most recent, they are Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright.
I’ve also been asked often about the differences between those former chief U.S. diplomats, especially during travel. I usually point out an obvious similarity among them first: None of them is a white male. In fact, the last secretary to fit that description was Warren Christopher, who left office in January 1997, when Albright ended the centuries-old tradition.
So here is a brief summary of my impressions and experiences with three people who had very different backgrounds but rose to the highest levels of the U.S. government and became household names around the world.
Condoleezza Rice
After handing the job over to Clinton in January 2009, Rice returned to Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., where she has spent most of her career, and where I first met her in January 2000. We did an interview for the Financial Times over a long breakfast at the famed Ricky’s Hyatt hotel, after which we drove — in our separate cars — to her office at the Hoover Institution.
I was a student at Harvard at the time and was first introduced to Rice indirectly through a book she co-authored with Philip Zelikow, “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed.” I thought she had a great story, and my editor in London agreed, so I sent Rice an e-mail message requesting an interview and she agreed to do it. I flew to San Francisco a day after my last final exam for the semester.
Condi, as she introduced herself, was utterly charming and exhibited great confidence while responding to my questions about various foreign-policy issues.
The next day, I was in New York to interview Barbara Walters, and I told her about the fascinating woman I’d just met, who might be national security adviser or secretary of state some day. Barbara’s reaction was, “She is not big enough for me yet.” In 2005, Barbara included Rice in her “10 Most Fascinating People” ABC special, but Rice declined to be interviewed. I take absolutely no credit for that decision.
In her first year as secretary, Rice was far from the confident woman I’d met five years earlier. On the plane, she appeared closed off and a bit insecure, which had a lot to do with getting used to the sudden and overwhelming public attention focused on a very private person.
That, of course, changed, and eventually she became one of the most influential secretaries of state in history, mainly because of her closeness to President George W. Bush. She recently published a book about her parents, which she has been promoting in the media, including on the “Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. A book about her experience in the Bush administration is planned to next year.
Colin Powell
I didn’t meet Powell until he was already secretary of state. I always had deep respect for him, but what impressed me on trips with him more than anything was his rare ability to hold meaningful conversations with various kinds of people — from a handyman or a cleaner to presidents and kings.
While Rice couldn’t wait to get back to her private cabin after a briefing on the plane, Powell spent a lot of time with us, often joking — and teasing me for being the youngest in the press corps. Looking back, perhaps that was an escape from the fierce battles he was fighting with Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who would often use his absence from Washington to outmaneuver him.
In 2004, I did an interview with Powell for an eight-part series on the Foreign Service, and he expressed anger with detractors who accused him of undermining Bush’s agenda — in fact, he called those accusations “bullshit,” but we couldn’t print that, even though he’d said it was “quotable.”
Still, I built the whole story around that theme, and he wasn’t happy about it. He told me so himself on a flight from Islamabad to Kabul, and that moment was captured on the above photo.
I’ve seen Powell several times since he left office, though not since last year’s White House Correspondents Dinner at the Washington Hilton. I’ve also been to his office in Alexandria, Va., from where his trusted assistant Peggy Cifrino runs most of his post-government life. He is on several boards and often gives speeches around the country and abroad.
From time to time, he resurfaces in the media — usually, on Sunday morning TV shows, as he did to endorse Barack Obama for president in 2008, or on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” where he appeared this week.
He stays very informed about current events and reads most foreign-policy stories in the press. Sometimes, he sends the reporters he knows comments about their articles, mostly to correct what he perceives as inaccuracies.
In 2008, I was surprised to receive an e-mail message while I was in Singapore with Rice, covering the annual meeting of foreign ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In one of my stories, I’d mentioned in a brief sentence at the end of a paragraph that Powell met with the North Korean foreign minister in Jakarta in 2004. My editor had changed “met” to “had coffee,” and Powell thought that inaccurately diminished the meeting’s importance.
Madeleine Albright
I have a soft spot for Albright, not only because she was the first secretary of state I knew personally, but also because she has been very helpful to me — and she is a lot of fun.
I first met her in an ornate suite at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel in 2000, while working on a profile of her for the Financial Times. Then I went on a trip with her to Europe and the Middle East — the first time I traveled on the secretary’s plane. We were flying when word came that Slobodan Milosevic had been driven out of power in Belgrade. I was surprised when she winked at me during a press conference in Egypt, but later I learned that she had winked at other reporters before.
When I got a job offer from the Washington Times in 2001, I was concerned about the newspaper’s affiliation with the Unification Church, so I asked Albright for advice. She pointed out that the Times had a stellar foreign coverage, and she didn’t see anything wrong in working there.
Over the years, she’d send me her newly published books with lovely inscriptions, writing “You are a star” in one and calling me “one of the outstanding journalists of our time” in another. In 2002, we had breakfast in her native Prague during a NATO summit.
At 73 — the same age as Powell — Albright is astonishingly active and extremely busy. She owns and runs two companies, travels around the world all the time and is involved in many projects. She recently chaired an expert group tasked with drafting a new NATO strategic concept. She is also chairman of the National Democratic Institute.
In October 2008, a couple of weeks before the last presidential election, I invited Albright to meet with the Washington Times editorial board. We left together from her office and she drove to the Times’ building in Northeast D.C.
During the ride, she said she was tired of people asking her who would be Obama’s secretary of state, because she wasn’t close to him and had no inside information. I suggested it would be fun for the press corps if Hillary Clinton got the job. Albright, who has been a good friend of Clinton’s since the mid-1990s, said: “It’s not gonna happen.” Of course, Clinton herself was shocked when Obama offered her the position weeks later.
We had a wide-ranging discussion about various foreign-policy issues during the meeting, and one of the things Albright said was that she opposed a deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. The Clinton administration’s experience in the Balkans had taught her that the president shouldn’t commit to a specific date not to tie his hands.
The Times’ executive editor at the time, John Solomon, thought our headline should be that Albright disagreed with Obama, who had proposed a deadline. I tried to write a story based on the facts without a “gotcha” element, but Solomon thought my lede wasn’t strong enough and wrote it himself.
Albright, who flew to Nevada to campaign for Obama the next day, was furious. Even though she and her aides have assured me it’s all in the past, things between us haven’t been the same since then. As thick of a skin she claims to have, she clearly still holds a big grudge against me, which she seems to have shared with other people.
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United Airlines fulfilled its promise this week by finally allowing one-way mileage awards on its partners in the global Star Alliance. More importantly, it showed that its Mileage Plus program is truly an industry leader — it didn’t follow American Airlines in taking away stopovers on award tickets, which will save travelers many frequent-flier miles.
Mileage Plus has become one of the most customer-friendly loyalty programs in the world. As odd as it sounds, offering one-way awards is a rather progressive step, given how rare it is in the industry — for no good reason. United has been offering one-way awards on its own flights since February.
Stopovers on international awards are incredibly useful — they are usually not permitted on domestic tickets. I don’t use them all the time, but I do often enough to mourn their loss on United. They are partly responsible for my visits to 82 countries.
When American banned stopovers last year, its justification was that the introduction of one-way awards eliminated the need for stopovers — one can now visit two cities or countries by booking three one-way segments. The problem for customers was that such an award now costs many more miles.
It would have been easy for United to copy American’s move. After all, taking stopovers away would have taken more miles off its books and decrease its liabilities. United has historically matched various practices initiated by its arch rival, but this time it made its own decision. Mileage Plus members should be grateful — preserving stopovers will save them tens of thousands of miles per trip.
I must admit, I was a bit confused about the stopover policy, and an earlier version of this column said United was doing away with them. I was misled by a reservations agent last weekend, and by a sentence on United’s website, saying “That means no stopovers.” It appears that only applies to one-way awards.
I received a comment from a reader who had seen a thread about the column on FlyerTalk.com, which prompted me to speak with a supervisor at Mileage Plus. He checked his resources and assured me that stopover are still permitted on round trips.
I’ve been praising Mileage Plus repeatedly since Graham Atkinson became president two years ago. In February, I wrote about all the right things Atkinson did — one negative thing he couldn’t change was the infamous StarNet award blocking. At the time, he told me that no decision had been made about stopovers.
Atkinson left United in September, as part of the management changes resulting from the merger with Continental, but I’m glad to see that his approach to customer loyalty lives on.
By the way, don’t forget the 24-hour international connection rule, which lets us do a mini-stop en route, so look for those day-long layovers if you want to sample a new country on the cheap.
Continue reading about United keeps free stopovers on awards
Captain Dennis Flanagan, the United Airlines pilot I profiled last year, just reminded me about the upcoming anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the scholarship fund in the name of his former colleague, Captain Jason Dahl, who was at the controls of United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania.
The charity, whose official name is the Captain Jason Dahl Scholarship Fund, was established soon after the pilot’s death by his wife Sandy. Each year, two aviation students — one at Dahl’s Alma Mater, San Jose State University, and one at Metro State University in Denver, where Dahl lived — are awarded $5,000 grants. There have been 16 recipients so far.
The fund’s ambition is to expand and offer scholarships nationally, and it uses this time of year to do fund-raising, said Flanagan, who is better known as Captain Denny. “It seems the farther we get away from that tragic day, the less people remember. Our goal is to keep Jason’s memory alive and not let anyone forget,” Flanagan said.
You can learn more about the fund, its board of directors and past scholarship winners on its website, where you can also make a contribution.
“Jason Dahl represented the best in the American aviation community, always providing assistance to others in both his chosen vocation and his community,” the site says. “The family and friends of Captain Jason Dahl strive to be more like him.”
As has been well documented in press reports, Dahl, who was 43, wasn’t originally scheduled to work that fatal flight on Sept. 11, 2001. He traded trips with a colleague so he can take time off for his wedding anniversary on Sept. 14. Still, he seems to have had second thoughts, as he later sent out an e-mail message looking for another pilot to replace him on Flight 93.
The hijacked flight, a scheduled service from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco and the subject of the film “United 93,” is believed to have been headed to Washington. The Boeing 757 aircraft was ultimately brought down by passengers who apparently stormed the cockpit and attacked the hijackers. The plane crashed in a field in Stonycreek Township, near Shanksville, Pa.
Most of us remember where we were and what we were doing when we first heard of or saw those planes smashing into the World Trade Center. Each year on Sept. 11, commemorative ceremonies take place in New York, Washington and in that Pennsylvania field.
As it happens, this year I’ll be teaching an “On the Fly” Seminar in New York on that day, and two weeks later in Boston, from where the two planes that hit the Twin Towers departed. We have our own ways of remembering and paying respects, and mine is helping travelers make their journey less stressful and more enjoyable.
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Air travel is one of those topics that no radio or TV show can go wrong with — it’s certain to touch a nerve with many people and provoke numerous comments and questions. That’s what happened yesterday on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, which I was on for the first time.
I always thought the reason to be invited would be to talk about foreign policy on the Friday news roundup, where Diane has three Washington journalists discussing issues from the passing week. That never happened, but a couple of weeks ago I suggested to one of the show’s producers that the summer is a good time for a program on travel.
The Diane Rehm Show is widely considered the best talk show on NPR, with more than 2 million listeners a week. It’s produced by WAMU, the NPR station in DC, and airs in dozens of markets across the U.S. Diane is on vacation this week, so the guest-host was Frank Sesno, a former CNN bureau chief in DC who now heads the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.
There were two other guests except me: from Dallas, Scott McCartney, who writes “The Middle Seat” column for The Wall Street Journal, and from New York, Susan Stellin, a New York Times contributor.
You can listen to the show and read some of the comments left by listeners on its website. We actually got hundreds of comments and questions by phone, e-mail and on Facebook and Twitter.
We talked about various familiar topics, such as airline fees, seats, delays, the proposed Passengers’ Bill of Rights, re-regulation prospects and others.
Since the show’s topic was “Navigating the not-so-friendly skies,” I wanted to offer some advice on how to do that. The main point I tried to make was about the need for travel education, realizing that most people don’t see such a need because they think they know how to travel. But if that were true, we’d be hearing many fewer complaints and horror stories about air travel.
It’s convenient and popular to blame the airlines all the time — and they often deserve much of that blame — but there is a lot travelers can do to make their own experience less stressful and more seamless.
The airlines have made the system very complex, confusing and frustrating. It is what it is, and we can’t changed it that much. However, we can find ways to make the system work for us — and to do that, we need to know it really well. That’s why I believe every traveler can use a bit of education.
My other main point was about the importance of elite airline status, which is the only decent way to travel today. The reality is that airlines don’t even pretend to try taking care of you if something goes wrong unless you are a loyal customer. More practically, elite passengers are exempt from luggage and other fees.
Unfortunately, most people don’t even try to achieve elite status, because they only travel a couple of times a year. As I wrote last month, you only need 4,000 miles on Greece’s Aegean Airlines to get silver status on the Star Alliance, and Aegean gives you 1,000 miles just for signing up. You don’t have to fly on Aegean — just to credit your miles from flights on any of the 28 Star carriers to that program. Silver status waives baggage fees on United Airlines, US Airways and Continental Airlines.
I was amused to read in the comments on the Diane Rehm Show’s website that a listener accused me of being unpatriotic for recommending membership in a foreign airline’s frequent-flier program.
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How do airlines decide what fares qualify as “sales,” and why do they advertise certain fares, but not other, much lower ones? Why is United Airlines promoting a “sale” between Washington and Boston for $109 each way, when there are currently six published lower fares in that market, beginning with $49 each way?
For the most part, I don’t bother to figure out why airlines do certain things anymore. I just gather all the information I need about what they do and try to work with it — or around it. Years of watching fares have taught me not to fall for those “sales,” because in many cases, I can find a much lower price to the same destination, on the same dates and on the same carrier.
Both United and American Airlines are currently advertising two fall sales on their websites. My review of the American fares showed that most of them are indeed the lowest available prices at this time. There are a few small exceptions — for example, I found a fare from New York to San Diego that is $5 lower than the advertised $164.
There are many more and much bigger differences on United. The unadvertised — but published — fares between Washington and Boston, in addition to $49 each way, are $54, $64, $74, $84 and $99. They all have fewer restrictions than the $109 “sale” price.
I say between Washington and Boston — not from Washington to Boston — because domestic fares are the same in either direction, unlike international fares, which are usually very different.
Let’s take another example. The advertised fares between Denver and Los Angeles in two separate United “sales” are $99 and $89 each way. However, I found $68 each way. In addition, Denver-New Orleans is on “sale” for $123 each way, but there is also $109, and even $89.
Some of the advertised United fares are truly the lowest published at this time. For example, $88 each way for Washington-Chicago, $108 for Chicago-Denver, and $157 for Chicago-Los Angeles.
There is another catch that could increase the benefit of the unadvertised fares to you. Typically, “sale” prices require a round-trip purchase. In contrast, most of the lower fares I found have no such condition. In fact, the major U.S. carriers have been publishing more and more truly one-way fares in recent months, which has always been the case with Southwest Airlines and other low-cost carriers.
To United’s credit, some of its current sales don’t require a round-trip purchase. That is, indeed, the prudent thing to do. If a round trip is mandatory, why advertise one-way fares? Of course, for marketing purposes, but I’ve always found that a bit dishonest and deliberately misleading.
I mean no criticism of United for promoting as “sales” fares that are higher than other published fares. I wrote this to warn travelers that they should check all existing fares between two cities before settling for what they think is a “sale” or the best deal.
Those of you who have attended my “On the Fly” Seminars know how easy it is to bring up on your computer screen all fares published by every airline on a certain route in just seconds.
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