Most of us don’t think we are cut out to be doctors or engineers. Then why do so many of us believe we can be diplomats? Does one need training or a particular background to become a U.S. ambassador? I find myself asking these questions every time I hear about a failed non-career ambassador.
President Obama promised change in Washington, but he continued the decades-long tradition of dishing out ambassadorial posts to people whose only “qualifications” were their big donations to his election campaign. As I’ve written before, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the American Foreign Service Association have called him out on this disgraceful practice.
Many of those political appointees actually do a fine job. Although the two weeks of training they get at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute are grossly insufficient, they work hard to understand what it takes to handle the international relations of the United States, and what the daily conduct of diplomacy requires from them as civil servants.
But then there are those who think they already know what an ambassador should do and care little about tradition and bureaucracy. None of us admits to liking bureaucracy and we all express disdain for bureaucrats from time to time.
That’s exactly what Douglas W. Kmiec, the U.S. ambassador to Malta, did last week. He blasted a report by the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which criticized him for neglecting his overall duties and engaging in “outside activities [that] have detracted from his attention to core mission goals.”
Instead of focusing on broader foreign policy and national security issues, Kmiec has been spending most of his time promoting his Roman Catholic faith, mainly by writing various articles and speaking about religion, as well as issues such as abortion.
Following the OIG report, Kmiec offered Obama his resignation, vehemently rejecting the investigation’s findings. “I doubt very much whether one could ever spend too much time on this subject,” he wrote in a letter to the president.
Unwittingly, Kmiec hit the nail right on the head. No single issue, with the exception of very few vital national security matters, deserves the time and attention the ambassador has apparently spent on religion. He is certainly not the first political appointee to make one issue the sole emphasis of his tenure.
Previous ambassadors have dedicated themselves to very noble causes, including raising awareness about terrible deceases. A prime example is the focus on fighting cancer that marked Nancy Brinker’s stint as ambassador to Hungary at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration. While that was enormously helpful, many of Brinker’s subordinates and other State Department employees felt that other important issues suffered as a result.
Kmiec is a well-respected law professor and former legal adviser in the Reagan White House. I don’t know him, and I usually try to avoid criticizing people who are my father’s age for no good reason. But just because he has been successful in his field and donated a lot of money to Obama’s 2008 campaign doesn’t necessarily make him a good ambassador by default.
The U.S. Embassy in Malta, which I have visited, may be small, but it still has representatives of many federal agencies with sometimes competing interests and needs to be run by the ambassador in the best possible way. Supporters of appointing political ambassadors often laud their personal relationship with the president, but what good does that relationship do if it’s not put to an effective use?
Obama deserves credit despite his failure to end the longtime practice. He has just launched his re-election campaign and needs support from conservatives like Kmiec, so his resignation is an unnecessary distraction. However, Obama has not tried to defend Kmiec, who said he would leave his post in the summer.
One would hope that the president will think twice before rewarding campaign donors with embassies if he wins the 2012 election. Kmiec is not Obama’s first political ambassador to be embarrassed by an OIG report. As I wrote in February, Cynthia Stroum, ambassador to Luxembourg, was forced to resign because of her poor management style and serious damage done to her embassy.
Kmiec has said he was not pressured to resign and made the decision without outside intervention.
Related stories:
The greatest understated U.S. diplomat
Why are political ambassadors tolerated?
Political ambassadorships hold at 30%
Career diplomats protest Obama appointments
Diplomats in the news for wrong reasons
Foreign Service: America’s other army
Continue reading about Who qualifies to be a U.S. ambassador?
During my decade as a State Department correspondent, I never expressed personal opinions about the diplomats I covered — as it should be. The closest I came to offering a glimpse of how I felt was a 2009 profile of William J. Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs. Last week, President Obama nominated Burns to be Hillary Clinton’s deputy.
As I wrote in a private e-mail message to Burns, whom I consider one of my friends in the Foreign Service, there is no one more deserving. My sources tell me that Clinton has been enormously impressed with him in the two years they have been working together. I haven’t found a single person with a negative opinion of Burns.
Deputy secretary of state is a political post, and very few career diplomats have held it. It’s extremely telling that of all Democrats in the foreign-policy establishment, Clinton didn’t see one better suited for the job than Burns.
It’s also a great testament to Burns’ abilities and achievements that Obama went along with Clinton’s choice and didn’t nominate a person from his inner circle. Clinton’s current deputy, James Steinberg, is considered Obama’s man at the State Department. The deputy secretary during the eight years of the Clinton administration was Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s onetime roommate at Oxford University.
Steinberg, who advised Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, is stepping down to become dean of the Maxwell School of Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
Here is my profile of Burns, which ran in the Washington Times on April 12, 2009, with contribution from Barbara Slavin.
Diplomatic Dedication
By Nicholas Kralev
Call him the understated undersecretary.
The highest-ranking career diplomat in the U.S. government, William J. Burns, held onto his job as undersecretary for political affairs when the administrations changed in January — a testament to his abilities, experience and, unusual for Washington, apparent lack of desire to grab the limelight, his friends and colleagues say.
There are many subjects he can discuss with ease — from Russia to the Middle East — but one he always shies away from: himself. Predictably, he declined to be interviewed for this profile. Many others, however, were happy to share their views.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Mr. Burns was the first State Department official she met with after she was nominated by President-elect Barack Obama in November.
“He immediately lived up to his stellar reputation as a seasoned diplomat, and I have valued his insight and judgment every day,” she said. “He personifies the very best of our Foreign Service and is a model of dedication to our country.”
Mr. Burns was appointed a year ago by Mrs. Clinton’s predecessor, Condoleezza Rice. Although it is typical for every secretary to hire her own undersecretary, Mrs. Clinton made the almost unprecedented decision to retain Mr. Burns. “She knew from the start she wanted him to stay and wasn’t ever in doubt,” said one of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides.
Just before Ms. Rice left the State Department in January, she said she was “really sad to leave people like” Mr. Burns, but “delighted” that he would continue to work with the new team, which “will never find a better repository of skill and dignity and integrity and honor.” Similar praise from departing political appointees to civil servants is not unusual, but Ms. Rice teared up when she uttered those words, and Mr. Burns was visibly touched.
During his nearly three decades of public service, Mr. Burns has received the nation’s highest honors, including two Presidential Distinguished Service Awards and several State Department awards. But perhaps most telling is the fact that both Democratic and Republican administrations have appointed him to senior positions.
“He is one of the two finest diplomats I’ve ever met. The other happens to be a Japanese diplomat,” said Richard L. Armitage, who was deputy secretary of state during President George W. Bush’s first term, when Mr. Burns was assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs. “What makes Bill so special is that he is calm, unflappable, informed, with an absolute steel core. He is a man of principle who will not bow to expediency.”
Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III called Mr. Burns a “top-notch public servant” who “speaks truth to power in an understated way.” He is “not ideological, calls it like he sees it, and everybody has confidence in him,” Mr. Baker said. “I don’t know anyone who thinks ill of him, and if you look at the results of his work, you’ll know why.”
Elliott Abrams, the top Middle East expert in the Bush White House who has often been described as a neoconservative, said he traveled with Mr. Burns “quite a bit and had a very pleasant experience.”
“He knows how to make the machinery work and to serve the secretary well,” Mr. Abrams said of Mr. Burns, who was the Bush administration’s point man on diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. “He worked within the policy guidelines, and he did everything he could within that framework. So critics of the policy should focus on people who made the policy.”
The Bush administration refused to join European Union-led negotiations with Iran unless Tehran suspended uranium enrichment. Ms. Rice sent Mr. Burns to a meeting with an Iranian official in Geneva last summer, but he was not authorized to engage directly with the Iranian. On Wednesday, the Obama administration decided that Mr. Burns will participate in such discussions with Iran from now on.
Mr. Burns is expected to have a major influence on U.S. policy toward Iran and the wider Middle East, a reflection of experience that goes back to the administration of George H.W. Bush. Then Mr. Burns was one of a handful of so-called food processors” who churned through ideas for Arab-Israeli peace following the 1990 Gulf War.
Toby Gati, who was assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research in the Clinton administration, said that, although Mr. Burns has been able to serve both Republican and Democratic administrations “without losing his core beliefs,” he appears “liberated” working for the Obama administration. “Whenever we have a problem, I would sleep a lot easier knowing that Bill Burns is in charge of it,” Mrs. Gati said.
Several State Department officials said Mr. Burns has been an inspiration for young Foreign Service officers, because his career is proof that a modest but capable civil servant can reach the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Unlike his predecessor, R. Nicholas Burns, who loved being in the spotlight and held regular on-camera press briefings, “Bill Burns is not a politician — he prefers to do things quietly,” said one official who has worked for both men but asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Burns gave a rare speech at Princeton University last month, during which he talked about humility in foreign policy and seemed to be criticizing the Bush administration’s “lecturing” other countries on human rights and other issues, rather than leading by example.
“We do make mistakes,” he said, “and we gain in global status when we admit them, and then show how our own democratic system can reliably correct them.”
Mr. Burns returned to Washington last year after a stint as ambassador to Russia. His expertise is highly valued by the current administration, and he sat at Mr. Obama’s right during a meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in London earlier this month.
“I entered the Foreign Service in 1982, in a world defined largely by the Cold War and an international order organized largely around Russian-American rivalry,” Mr. Burns said at Princeton. “Twenty-seven years later, the world is, of course, a much different place, and a constant source of humility for those of us trying to navigate through it, in pursuit of our country’s interests and values.”
Earlier in his career, Mr. Burns was ambassador to Jordan and also held senior staff positions at the State Department, such as executive secretary and executive assistant to Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeleine K. Albright.
Mrs. Gati, who has known Mr. Burns since he was on the Soviet desk in the 1980s, said that one of Mrs. Clinton’s most challenging tasks would be “to produce the next generation of Bill Burnses.” “These people don’t appear from nowhere,” she said. “It takes 20-30 years to nurture someone like that.”
Related stories:
Why are political ambassadors tolerated?
Career diplomats protest Obama appointments
Diplomats in the news for wrong reasons
Foreign Service: America’s other army
Continue reading about The greatest understated U.S. diplomat
President Obama is very smart and highly intelligent man who knew more about the world than most presidential candidates do before taking office. So why did he appoint a political ambassador whose tenure has been nothing short of a disgrace, just because she was a significant contributor to his election campaign?
There are some excellent political appointees, but Cynthia Stroum, ambassador to Luxembourg, wasn’t one of them. She was forced to resign last week, following a scathing report of her management style and the damage she did to her embassy by the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG).
I’ve covered the department for a decade and have rarely seen such a categorical, pointed and harsh document. Obama has every reason to be embarrassed.
“Most employees describe the ambassador as aggressive, bullying, hostile and intimidating, which has resulted in an extremely difficult, unhappy, and uncertain work environment,” the OIG report said after a two-month investigation last fall. “The bulk of the mission’s internal problems are linked to her leadership deficiencies, the most damaging of which is an abusive management style.”
Since Stroum assumed her post in December 2009, “most of the senior staff, including two deputy chiefs of mission (DCM) and two section chiefs, has either curtailed or volunteered for service in Kabul and Baghdad. Other U.S. staff members have also departed early,” the OIG said. “Of the seven permanent and temporary staff who served” as DCM, “only one has remained for longer than 6 months.”
Many ambassadors and their wives indulge in costly renovations of their residences, but Stroum apparently went too far. The OIG “believes that too many of the limited resources of this embassy have been allocated to issues related to her personal support,” the report said.
During a six-week period in 2010, an embassy employee spent 80 to 90 percent of his time searching for a temporary residence for Stroum. “In late summer, he and several other staff members, as well as the management officer, spent several days locating and purchasing an umbrella” for the ambassador’s new patio, it said.
Most career diplomats — and many others — think the practice of awarding campaign donors with ambassadorships, which began in the Kennedy administration, should be ended. The infamous WikiLeaks cables showed the general public how complex and intricate the work of U.S. diplomats is. Why do people think that anyone can do it? Would you let someone operate on you if they don’t have the necessary medical training?
In July 2009, I broke a story that the White House, unaware of historic norms, had been on track to give more than the usual 30 percent of ambassadorial posts to political appointees until objections from career diplomats forced it to reconsider. Overall, that number still holds, but according to a list of ambassadors maintained by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), so far Obama has appointed 60 percent career and 40 percent political ambassadors.
Although campaign fund-raising is not a sufficient qualification for being a U.S. ambassador, there is a case to be made that political appointees are useful from time to time. I’ve met several good ones over the years, including Howard Baker, a former Republican senator and White House chief of staff under President Reagan, who was President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Japan.
Even Foreign Service officers say that they need an outsider’s point of view and a fresh perspective on things every once in a while. Someone with Baker’s political skills, stature and connections in Washington can actually be a huge asset to an embassy and the country where he serves.
On the other hand, Stroum wasn’t quite qualified for the job — even in tiny Luxembourg — but it seems the White House didn’t much care about that. She is by no means the only one. Bush’s ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, Roy L. Austin, was the subject of two OIG reports. Before his appointment, Austin was a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University — but his best achievement was that he befriended Bush when both studied at Yale University. He changed five DCMs during his tenure, but amazingly he survived all the eight years of the Bush administration.
So while I don’t expect political ambassadors to disappear, the White House should take their appointment much more seriously and consider their knowledge and skills before they start acting like kings and queens around the world.
Related stories:
Political ambassadorships hold at 30%
Career diplomats protest Obama appointments
Diplomats in the news for wrong reasons
Foreign Service: America’s other army
Continue reading about Why are political ambassadors tolerated?
The silver lining for U.S. diplomats of this week’s WikiLeaks release of secret State Department cables is that there is more buzz about their work than there has been in years. Even though it’s for the wrong reasons, it provides a chance to use the public attention for a serious debate on modern diplomacy.
The general public usually hears about diplomats when there is a spy scandal, or when a diplomat is arrested for selling U.S. entry visas to foreigners — for money or sex.
Members of the U.S. Foreign Service often complain that it’s an unknown entity to the very people diplomats represent abroad. My extensive research in the last seven years confirms that concern. Most Americans have no idea what their representatives do every day — and many have no interest in learning about it, either.
How can that change? Although individual diplomats sometimes give talks at universities and other venues, there is much more the State Department can do in a concerted effort to educate Americans. For decades, the department was banned from interacting with domestic audiences — not to be seen as engaging in propaganda — but times have changed, and the substance of the outreach I have in mind would be very different.
My press colleagues and I have witnessed many excellent town-hall meetings Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has done around the world. It’s easy to see the tremendous impact those exchanges have on the people in those rooms. Why not hold such events in the United States? The interest in Clinton’s persona could translate in more curiosity about diplomacy and the Foreign Service.
In fact, this is a good time for a public discussion of the future of diplomacy and the Foreign Service.
The duties of Foreign Service officers have changed so much in the last two decades that they no longer truly reflect the traditional job description of a diplomat — helping to defeat an insurgency is certainly not what most people expect when they join the service.
The Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions of diplomacy. The first is “the (skill of) management of a country’s affairs by ambassadors and ministers living overseas,” and the second is “(the skill of) dealing with people so that business is done smoothly.”
During my visits to more than 50 U.S. embassies and in interviews with hundreds of Foreign Service officers, I got the sense that many of them were confused about what exactly they were supposed to be doing and why. The problem was not that they were sitting around with nothing to do, but that there was a lot to be done, and to prioritize well, they needed to know what exactly was expected of them.
In recent years, diplomats have been asked to prevent conflicts, broker peace, drum up support for war, sell unpopular policies, help build nations and improve America’s image abroad. They have stretched the definition of a diplomat to include everything from a diligent bureaucrat with good analytical and writing skills who knows the workings of Washington, to a charming and persuasive socialite, to a fearless mover and shaker venturing into war zones.
But should all Foreign Service officers be doing all those things? If the answer is yes, the State Department should make significant changes in the way it recruits, trains and promotes American diplomats.
More broadly, what kind of Foreign Service should the United States have in the 21st century?
Related stories:
Foreign Service: America’s other army
Where are my ex-secretaries of state?
Political ambassadorships hold at 30%
Career diplomats protest Obama appointments
Continue reading about Diplomats in the news for wrong reasons
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.
Related stories:
My trips with Clinton back in the news
Powell: “I am on the president’s agenda’
Political punch in a package of charm
Continue reading about Where are my ex-secretaries of state?
