Window Seat on the World Read online

  WINDOW SEAT

  ON THE WORLD

  WINDOW

  SEAT

  ON THE

  WORLD

  MY TRAVELS WITH

  THE SECRETARY OF STATE

  _________

  GLEN JOHNSON

  Austin  New York

  The opinions and characterizations in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily represent official positions of the United States Government.

  Published by Disruption Books

  Austin, TX, and New York, NY

  www.disruptionbooks.com

  Copyright ©2019 by Glen D. Johnson

  All rights reserved.

  All photos by Glen D. Johnson / Courtesy of US Department of State / Public Domain Exceptions: pp. 37; 108; 146 (bottom); 148 (bottom); 164 (middle); 278 (middle, bottom), courtesy, Glen D. Johnson.

  p. 27, courtesy, Joan Smedinghoff.

  p. 202, 203, courtesy, Hedda K. Ulvness.

  Cover and text design by Kim Lance

  Cover photos by Glen D. Johnson / Courtesy of US Department of State / Public Domain

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission from the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected].

  Distributed by Disruption Books

  For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact

  Disruption Books at [email protected].

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63331-039-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-63331-040-7

  First Edition

  For my wife, Cathy.

  She raised two successful boys while I built a career, relished the chances to share in my professional adventures, and gave me confidence on the campaign trail and diplomatic circuit because she always had things under control at home —even while soaring as a real estate broker.

  I wouldn’t have lived a happy and complete life if I hadn’t noticed her slipping extra cheese onto my Big Beef burgers during her Friendly’s days . . .

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1  HER NAME WAS ANNE SMEDINGHOFF

  2  WELCOME TO BLAIR HOUSE

  3  WELCOME ABOARD

  4  THE BALLET OF THE BILAT

  5  ISRAEL

  6  THE IRAN DEAL

  7  RUSSIA

  8  PARIS

  9  THE TRUMP ERA, AND BEYOND

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  Window seat view of Mount Fuji, Honshu, Japan, August 8, 2015.

  AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE ANCIENT

  AND, TO OUTSIDERS, MYSTERIOUS ORGANIZATION,

  AS IT WAS TO ME WHEN I JOINED IT, REQUIRES A LOOK

  AT ITS WORK AND AT THOSE WHO DID IT.

  —DEAN ACHESON, Present at the Creation

  PROLOGUE

  MOST OF THE PEOPLE on our plane were asleep as the sun rose on July 1, 2013, and with good reason. John Kerry was amid a marathon trip typical of his frenetic four-year tenure as secretary of State.

  We sweated through 105-degree heat in Qatar for a multinational meeting about the civil war in Syria. We flew on for our annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue with India. Then we doubled back to consult with Saudi, Kuwaiti, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli officials as Middle East peace talks sputtered.

  Our final stop was the nation-state of Brunei for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

  Getting to Asia from Israel required an overnight flight, wiping out the travel team as we neared two weeks on the road.

  Nonetheless, I was awake and looking out the window next to my seat when Kerry came running down the aisle, waving to me and calling my name. I gave chase as he returned to his cabin.

  “Look outside the window,” he said, pointing his finger at the panes beside his desk. “You can see the Mekong’s headwaters.”

  I came around the desk, looked forward of the wing, and sure enough, there they were: the outlines of the Vam Co Dong River and other tributaries of the mighty Mekong River. Each sparkled against the dark countryside as a brilliant sun illuminated their twists and turns.

  With the map on a nearby big-screen TV showing most of Indochina, the secretary became tour guide while recalling a central part of his biography: his Navy service during the Vietnam War.

  “That’s the main Mekong,” he said, tracing his long index finger down the map. “And that’s the Saigon River,” he said, turning to another ribbon of blue. “I worked out of here for a while, down in here,” he said, pointing to what is now known as Ho Chi Minh City. It formerly was Saigon, South Vietnam.

  Moving his finger southwest along the coast, he said, “Then we went down here and through these rivers, then we went down on this river,” pointing to the Bô Đê.

  “We got a lot of action down there,” he added, almost matter-of-factly.

  The map abruptly disappeared from the screen, replaced by a page of flight statistics that had rotated into view. They showed our plane was at 37,000 feet, with another hour and thirty-eight minutes until landing.

  It’s possible to recount the conversation at length because I had pulled out my iPhone and started snapping pictures as Kerry looked out the windows. When he walked over to the map, I switched to video mode, because the moment had hit me like a thunderbolt.

  I was alongside John Kerry as we flew over the place that had come to define him as a man and a politician, and I was the lone pupil for a tutorial about his service.

  A place only in my mind was now before my eyes, and the person for whom it meant so much was standing in front of me, telling me his story.

  It was moments just like these that would make the grind of my four years in the State Department worth it.

  I’d had a similar experience during our first trip abroad. We were in Berlin and Kerry announced he wanted to take a walk outside. I was sitting in a staff meeting, and most of our security team had already turned in for the night.

  But as their radios crackled with the change in plans, everyone came running out of their hotel rooms. The guards threw on their clothes and shoes and earpieces and gun holsters as “Fenway”—the secretary’s security code name—headed for the exit.

  The scramble paid off.

  We walked into the square overlooking the Brandenburg Gate, the former portal between East and West Germany. It was the same spot through which a twelve-year-old Kerry famously rode his bike during the Cold War, before thinking the better of it and turning around to go home.

  His father, a US diplomat at the time, was apoplectic about how close his son had come to causing an international crisis. He responded by yanking his diplomatic passport. The story became legend as Kerry told it throughout his 2004 presidential campaign, and that near-mythic tale had now come to life in 2013.

  Kerry pulled out his cellphone to take a picture of the Gate. I pulled out my own cellphone to take a picture of him taking his picture.

  Most around him thought he was just playing tourist, but I was struck by the history of the moment.

  Less than five months later, flying over Vietnam, I had that feeling again.

  Throughout my prior work as a reporter, “John Kerry” and “Vietnam” had become almost synonymous to me. I’d heard and read much about the decorated service that sparked admiration, as well as the subsequent antiwar protests triggering condemnation.

  I was dockside at Boston Harbor during Kerry’s 1996 reelection campaign when retired Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who commanded all US Navy forces in Vietnam, defended the then senator. A Boston Globe columnist had raised the spe
cter of him committing a war crime in 1969 while recounting how Lieutenant Kerry chased down and killed a Viet Cong soldier who tried to destroy him and his Swift Boat crew with a shoulder-fired rocket.

  Likewise, I was sitting at the FleetCenter in Boston when the secretary began his 2004 presidential nomination acceptance speech by snapping a salute and declaring, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.”

  And I witnessed the remainder of the race, as the campaign team for President George W. Bush shredded his war record with attacks by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” and other critics. They accused Kerry, a Silver and Bronze Star winner, of embellishing his war record. They also said the recipient of three Purple Hearts was two-faced for opposing a war in which he once fought.

  Now, as a part of his State Department team, I was making the first of four trips to Vietnam alongside Kerry. Each of them was infused with that personal history, but all were emblematic of the possibilities he pursued elsewhere in the world while serving as secretary of State—his final job in public service.

  While Kerry had traveled to Vietnam seventeen times as a senator, he hadn’t been back in more than a decade when he accompanied Bill Clinton as the first president to visit since Richard Nixon.1

  He would visit for the first time as secretary of State in December 2013, during the last trip of his first year in office.

  His focus was on educational and environmental issues, the latter to be highlighted by a sail back up the Mekong.

  I’d first laid eyes on the river early one morning, from seven miles overhead.

  _________

  OUR FIRST STOP THAT December was Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), which had been the capital of South Vietnam when it was known as Saigon. You could still see grassed-over bomb craters surrounding the airport, and revetments where American F-4 Phantom fighters had been parked near the runways.

  HCMC is described by some as the Vietnamese version of New York, electric with energy and commerce. The people are notably friendly—especially to the Americans who were their wartime allies.

  If that analogy holds, then Hanoi—in the former North Vietnam, and now capital of the unified country—would be considered its Washington. Hanoi is home to the Communist Party and political leaderships, both operating from mustard yellow buildings flying a national flag with a simple red field and a solitary gold star in the center. In the middle of the city is the tomb where their revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh, lies embalmed for public viewing to this day.

  Ho’s gilded bust sits in every leader’s office, usually above the throne-like seats where the Communist officials greet their visitors.

  We cleaned up at our hotel before a quick tour downtown preceding a series of meetings and an official dinner. Our informal host was Tom Vallely, a Massachusetts native and Marine veteran of Vietnam who’d become friends with Kerry during the antiwar movement. “Tommy” had a sobering distinction: he was the only member of his unit not killed or wounded in the war.

  Now he was head of Harvard University’s Vietnam program.

  Vallely led the secretary across the street from the InterContinental Hotel and past an overwhelming sight: a road full of motorbikes lined up at a stoplight. They looked like they were anxiously awaiting the start of a motocross race. The only thing restraining them was a police officer dressed in a khaki uniform holding up a baton, silently transmitting the message to wait.

  Our destination was the Notre-Dame Cathedral, a Catholic sanctuary harking back to Vietnam’s French colonial days. The secretary attended Mass, offering tangible support for religious institutions in a country that, officially, does not recognize religion.

  Afterward, Vallely turned the party around and pointed out an apartment building at 18 Gia Long Street. One of the last helicopters evacuating US citizens and desperate South Vietnamese took off from its famously flat roof after the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese.

  Like Dealey Plaza in Dallas or Red Square in Moscow, it’s a spot you instantly know from the history books despite having never seen it in person.

  Following his meetings, the secretary paid a nighttime visit to the US consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. He thanked a group of elderly Vietnamese who’d worked in the now-shuttered Saigon embassy and remained faithful to their American employer, even as war enveloped the city.

  They now sat in the front row, some in wheelchairs.

  “You are the ones really defining this new relationship in modern terms, as Vietnam goes through this enormous transformation. I can’t tell you how much of a transformation it is,” Kerry said. “None of these big, tall buildings were here twenty years ago. And now there are—40 percent of the country is under the age of twenty-five, a young country for whom the war is ancient history.”2

  We left the consulate and went to a restaurant for dinner, a meal becoming less formal with each round of Tiger beers. With the group loosened up, the secretary suggested we visit one of his old haunts, the Rex Hotel.

  It was a wartime crossroads for journalists covering the fighting, soldiers on liberty, and Vietnamese looking to make money off everyone.

  _________

  THE REX HAS A famous rooftop bar overlooking Ho Chi Minh Square, a promenade running up from the Saigon River to City Hall. The hotel sat beside a traffic circle where motorbikes from all directions converged on a single loop. It collected them, circulated them, and spat them out a different path.

  During our next trip to Vietnam, we’d return to find—much to our dismay—that the circle had been replaced with traffic lights and a standard four-way intersection. The city government changed the landscape while building a subway underneath to alleviate the traffic.

  Secretary Kerry sat in the middle of a long table as the waiters brought aqua-colored cocktails and rounds of beer served in chilled mugs. Joining him was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Danny Russel, who’d evolved into an Asia expert after first visiting Japan to study karate in a dojo.

  At one point, the secretary got up and started to walk around, looking at the stage where a guitar player and his group sat framed by a pair of Rex trademarks: romping elephants and an Aladdin-like crown. He moved over to the bar, running his hand across its surface and silently taking the measure of its layout. He then went back to the balcony overlooking the traffic rotary, watching its whirl of lights and motion.

  During his remarks to the elderly Vietnamese at the consulate, Kerry foreshadowed what he seemed to be feeling at that moment:

  We would sit up there, and we were having a beer, which we couldn’t have normally where we were, and you’d look out at the flares all around the city. And every so often you’d hear this b-r-r-r-r-r-t of gunfire from what we called “Puff the Magic Dragon,” that was flying around, which was a C-130 that would shoot. It was really eerie. I can’t tell you how totally bizarre it was to be sitting on top of a hotel, having a beer, sitting around, talking with people—a lot of press people used to hang out there—while all around you, you would be seeing and hearing the sounds of a war. And that was the sort of strangeness and duality of that period of time.3

  I was the State Department’s official travel photographer, so I surreptitiously took pictures as the secretary remembered those moments from visits long ago. There were occasions such as this on each of our trips to Vietnam: times when John Kerry would go quiet and relive something none of us had been around to experience.

  Each time, I tried to recede into the surroundings, working to capture but not interrupt it.

  The following day, the group boarded a pair of propeller planes for the flight south to Cà Mau, a staging area for our trip up the Mekong Delta. The secretary wanted to call attention to the region’s environmental challenges and the Lower Mekong Initiative. It tries to prevent actions upstream—such as river damming and pollution runoff—that can harm people living downstream.

  Those men, women, and children depend on rice grown in flooded fields, and protein from the fish and shrimp in
the rivers and nearby sea.

  Our flight took us from the chaos and modernity of the city to the tranquility and simplicity of the countryside. We flew through thick clouds and over rice paddies and shrimp ponds. The latter were outlined by retaining walls and stirred with water fountains providing oxygen to farmed shellfish destined for the United States and other markets.

  After we landed, our motorcade passed houses with tin walls displaying the ever-present Vietnamese flag. Despite the remoteness, kids wore jerseys from their favorite British and Spanish pro soccer teams.

  When we boarded our boat to head upstream, Secretary Kerry took up a spot at the center of the bridge. It let him survey the landscape and get a fresh breeze in his face through the open cockpit.

  At one point, we passed under a bridge. He looked over and said, “I remember going under that,” referring to his Swift Boat patrols. Another moment, he pointed to the heavy canopy of mango and banana trees covering the riverbanks and said he and his crew never knew when the leaves of the trees would begin to shred, as hidden Viet Cong soldiers began firing at them with .50-caliber machine guns.

  When we finally reached our turnaround point, the Kien Vang Market Pier, the secretary disembarked to deliver an environmental speech. A sampan cut through the water as he spoke.

  “That river is a global asset, a treasure that belongs to the region,” he said. “Sharing data and best practices in an open and cooperative dialogue will help ensure that many resources of the Mekong continue to benefit people not just in one country, not just in the country where the waters come first, but in every country that touches this great river.”4

  Afterward, Kerry met a group of Vietnamese girls from a nearby school, many dressed in flowing white dresses. He talked to them about how the United States and Vietnam were moving past their war history and into a new future based on economic and educational cooperation.

  As sound as the trip was thematically and in execution, you could tell it really didn’t satisfy the Boss. It was clear he wanted to push upstream to the sites of his combat service, not as the lieutenant he once was, but as the secretary of State he’d become.