It takes great skill to hide the fact that you have great skill.
Such words may well have been on their mind last Friday, when the recently confirmed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry welcomed his first diplomat to Washington, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird, while simultaneously earning a few scowls from the French community during a news conference. After posing several questions to Kerry about the TransCanada Keystone Pipeline, a reporter ended her inquiry by wittingly asking him to answer with a little bit of French.
Rather than play along—Kerry’s mother was born in Paris, he was trained to speak the language fluently at a Swiss boarding school, and he courted his Portuguese wife with the Romantic gestures of a French tongue—the U.S. secretary deferred, claiming that he needed to “refresh” himself on the popular dialect.
Perhaps Kerry failed to anticipate the possibility that a Canadian reporter would tempt him with a foreign language he was intimately familiar, but the knee-jerk hesitation he employed was uniquely rooted in the partisanship of American politics. During a failed run for president in 2004 (and ironically, the campaign that launched the national aspirations of one, Barack Obama), then Senator John Kerry was berated in the media for several reasons, one of which involved his alleged favoritism of French interests over American patriotism.
That he spoke French was only more polarizing to several members of the voting population, so it ought to come as no great surprise that he would now, regardless of his esteemed title, claim to be a little rusty at speaking the language. Maybe the French are right. Maybe Kerry is using great skill to pretend he has no skill. But more than likely, he still has a slight uneasiness about the opinions of an American public he no longer reports to.
What Kerry will need to learn, as did the 67 secretaries who preceded him, is that he was not elected to serve the state by the will of the people. He was chosen and affirmed to serve his post by the President of the United States and the U.S. Senate, respectively. This affords him a unique freedom to observe and discuss affairs of the state, both foreign and domestic, without being directly subjected to the fickle nature of the voters.
After being sworn into office on Thursday by Justice Elena Kagan, Secretary Kerry became the first white male to hold the position in 16 years, prompting satires and self-aggrandizing humor about whether he was capable of filling the heels and dresses of his two most recent predecessors, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. No doubt Kerry has already pondered the footsteps of an even greater precedent; the long line of Americans who managed the position for two centuries.
In November of 1789, as the experiment of a new nation was fresh on the lips of the American people, Thomas Jefferson, who was abroad in Paris, received a letter of correspondence from President Washington, asking him to accept an appointment as the first U.S. Secretary of State.
Jefferson, like Kerry, had an understandable affection for France.
During the American Revolution, much of our financial and military support had come at the expense of the French, which seemed to Jefferson, like an indelible I.O.U. Should France request support for their own causes in the future, he believed the United States would come to their aid as a measure of affordable gratitude.
Jefferson received his appointment to U.S. Secretary of State while abroad, quietly encouraging the French with a sincere belief that President Washington was in full support of their early revolution. In reality, Washington had serious concerns about the origins of the revolution and most certainly perceived the United States as too young and unprepared to rally in any war with an overseas ally.
When Jefferson arrived in New York the following March to take up his post as secretary of state, what he witnessed were extravagancies and social courtesies that seemed to him as deplorable.
According to Jefferson, a Federalist party was deeply embedded in the Congress, bent on thwarting the new Constitution and making the United States no better than the corrupted central government from which the French rebels were striving to overthrow. So as to counter the insurgent rise of a misleading, corrupt party, Jefferson worked alongside James Madison to build what became known as the Democratic-Republican Party. More explicitly, however, he believed you were either a republican (in favor of giving more power to the people) or an anti-republican (in favor of a strong government). In today’s language, partisanship often takes a similar plunge: you’re either with me or against me.
With all of the political infighting of Washington’s first term, Secretary Jefferson did very little abroad during his time in office, resigning after three years to try and live the private life he had once envisioned for himself while in Paris.
Partisanship was at an all-time high when Jefferson’s successor, Edmund Randolph, resigned within one year, facing charges of corruption [by the Federalists] for attempting to be a voice of moderation in the war between England and France. However, the leader of those charges was none other than Randolph’s inevitable replacement, Timothy Pickering, who demonstrated his mastery of presidential manipulation, rarely siding with Washington or Adams on matters of foreign policy.
By the fourth attempt at secretary of state, the brief tenure of John Marshall introduced a new precedent for the office: loyalty to the party of the president. Marshall was loyal to the Federalist Party (Adams), Madison was loyal to the Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson), and so on.
Of course, this was not a guarantee that the president and his secretary of state would always be aligned on all matters of foreign and domestic policy, but their partisan allegiances would minimize the tendency toward political conflict, leaving them open to more personal conflicts.
For example, when President James Madison, who had served in the position for eight years under Jefferson, begrudgingly appointed Robert Smith to the post, Madison saw him as loyal but incompetent. The two men were often divided over matters of individual pride, but they were typically aligned on matters of political necessity.
Each of the four secretaries of state to follow Smith would eventually run for president—three of them, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Martin Van Buren, victorious in their respective elections.
From 1831 to 1973, when Henry Kissinger was appointed by President Nixon, only a few names from the office of secretary of state have continued to resonate within our memories of American history: Daniel Webster, James Buchanan, William Henry Seward (Lincoln), and William Jennings Bryan. Others, lesser known, left a mark on the office through more subtle efforts. But year after year, partisan alignment with the president has typically been the prerequisite for admission.
Secretary Colin Powell (George W. Bush) has been the first in some time to break with his party over presidential allegiance, though he did so after faithfully serving his own president’s administration with very little public complaint (even being persuaded to make a foolish proclamation to the UN in defense of a War with Iraq). During both of Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, Powell split with his conservative colleagues when he declared that he would vote for a Democrat, earning him the racially presumptive scorn of his party.
But as we all know after four years, President Obama is a lightning rod for conservative anxieties.
The highest ranked members of the State Department have been, are now, and will always be the honorable, diplomatic voices of a partisan nation.