Information Wars. Richard Stengel

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 in 1961, the new parts were grafted on to the old building in a completely inorganic way. To remedy that, the hallways were numbered and marked with a rainbow of colors. The legend was that Henry Kissinger had the halls painted different colors so that he could find his way around—though the idea that Secretary Kissinger was wandering the halls of the Harry S. Truman Building strikes me as implausible. I would leave early for meetings to factor in the time I would be lost. What helped one navigate is that there were enormous posters from different countries at the end of each hall. So I always remembered that my office was at the juncture of the picture from Thailand (a boy walking across a rope bridge over a river) and one of a Hindu temple in India, and that when I was going up to the seventh floor, I turned left at the picture of a snowy St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.

      Even after a decade in the building, foreign service officers would still get lost. But at least after a few months I stopped having to send text messages to my staff to come and rescue me. Like so many people there, I figured out a few different ways to get to where I had to go and then stuck to those paths religiously. It was a little like diplomacy.

      The 8:30

      Washington is an early-morning culture. When I was editor of Time, one of the first things I did was change the regular all-hands editorial meeting from 10 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. People were aghast. At State, meetings usually began at 8:30, but many started at 8, or even 7:30. But there was one meeting at the State Department that was the most exclusive in the building, and it was known only as “the 8:30.” It was the Secretary’s meeting.

      When I first started talking to people about joining the State Department, some State veterans said to me, “You have to make sure that you’re at the 8:30.” Condoleezza Rice had an 8:30. Madeleine Albright had an 8:30. Secretary Clinton had an 8:30. For all I know, Thomas Jefferson had an 8:30. Secretary Kerry continued the tradition. This was an invitation-only meeting from the Secretary for about a dozen senior staff, and it set the tone—and much of the action—for the day. It was a chance to see and hear the Secretary first thing. In the building, the 8:30 was something of a mystery. Not everyone knew about it. It was a little like a secret society. And like any good secret society, it had its rules and protocols.

      My day did not actually begin with the 8:30, but it was because of the 8:30 that I scheduled an 8. After I had gone to a few of the Secretary’s meetings, I realized that I needed to be briefed about what was happening. So I started a small meeting in my office at 8 to go over what might come up and what public diplomacy equities would be useful to talk about. On my staff at State, I had four “special assistants.” These were bright young foreign service officers who were like my eyes and ears on what was going on in the world and, more important, in the Building. They each “covered” geographical areas as well as policy functions. So, one might handle Asia, refugees, and legal affairs. Another handled South America, educational exchanges, and consular services. Each morning,