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26.3.16

John Kerry


John Kerry, the sixty-eighth Secretary of State of the United States, was born to a temperament of wintry rectitude. He is descended from the Winthrops, who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the Forbeses, a Brahmin clan that made its money in railways and in exporting tea, silver, and opium to China. His father was a diplomat. Kerry attended St. Paul’s and Yale (where he was in Skull and Bones) and, as a naval officer in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star, and the Silver Star. He dated Jacqueline Kennedy’s half-sister, sailed with J.F.K., and married twice into substantial fortunes. Despite the codes of his class, however, Kerry was never entirely subtle about his ambitions. When he was in prep school, his classmates used to play “Hail to the Chief” to him on the kazoo.
In 2004, when Kerry lost the Presidential race to George W. Bush, who is widely considered the worst President of the modern era, he refused to challenge the results, despite his suspicion that in certain states, particularly Ohio, where the Electoral College count hinged, proxies for Bush had rigged many voting machines. But he could not suffer the defeat in complete silence. He was outraged that Bush, who had won a stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, used campaign surrogates, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to slime his military record. He was furious, too, at Robert Shrum, his chief strategist, and other campaign advisers who had restrained him from hitting back.
“For a long period, after 2004, every time he even half fell asleep all he saw was voting machines in the state of Ohio,” Mike Barnicle, a close friend of Kerry’s and a former columnist for the Boston Globe, told me. This summer, Barnicle spent time with Kerry on Nantucket, where Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz, have a house on the water and a seventy-six-foot, seven-million-dollar sailboat called Isabel. “We were sitting in the bow,” Barnicle recalled, “and we were talking about a bunch of different things—about Iran, about what the President of Iran was like—and I said, ‘Other than not being President, this is pretty good.’ There was a security boat sailing off to the side of us. Then he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I realize how badly Shrum screwed me.’ ”
A few weeks ago, between Kerry’s trips to Europe and the Middle East, I had dinner with Kerry and Heinz at their house in Georgetown, a twenty-three-room mansion decorated with Early American portraits, Dutch still-lifes, and an amiable yellow Labrador retriever named Ben. (The Lab has the Twitter handle @DiploMutt.) I asked Kerry how long he carried around a sense of anger and resentment.
“I didn’t carry it,” he insisted. “I didn’t. I didn’t. My wife was mad at me that I didn’t carry it longer.”
From across the table, Teresa Heinz said, “I’m still carrying it.”
The Secretary of State looked up from his halibut. An ill wind of panic swept the oblong plain of his face. From the thick thatch of gray hair to the improbably long and thrusting chin, Kerry’s visage is immense and, in its implacable resting expression, resembles one of the monolithic heads that rise from the loam of Easter Island.
“Well, I’m not,” Kerry said.
His gaze turned to his wife, wordlessly imploring her to keep quiet. Heinz is seventy-seven, five years older than her husband, and, in 2013, she suffered a seizure that she has attributed to an earlier concussion “that was not properly treated at all.” It’s not easy for her to get around, and she appears infrequently at public events, but she spoke clearly and ardently throughout the evening, much as she had during the 2004 campaign.
She was not quite done. “I knew from looking at the . . .”
Kerry uses many terms of endearment for his wife; now he called her by the telegraphic “T.”
“T, let’s not go . . .” he said gently.
As she tried to speak again, he shut it down.
“T, T, we’re not . . . I didn’t want to spend time there,” he said. “I just consciously did not spend time there, and I moved on, and I moved on as rapidly as . . . It’s over. It’s behind me. . . . I could have done some things a little bit differently. We didn’t. But I’m not going to feel regret the rest of my life.”
In early 2013, after twenty-eight years in the Senate, Kerry succeeded Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. He is seventy-two, and this is almost surely his last high-ranking job as a public official. As he put it to me, “I have fourteen months left on the clock.” He has already made his historical mark by acting as the Obama Administration’s chief negotiator in the nuclear talks with Iran. That deal, which is designed to prevent Iran from building an atomic weapon and sparking a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East, was signed two months ago. But it was never a foregone conclusion. This time last year, the White House was running “Plan B” meetings about what steps to take—deeper sanctions, potential military strikes—if the talks failed.


His admirers and his critics in the diplomatic world describe Kerry in similar terms: tirelessly optimistic, dogged, rhetorically undisciplined, undaunted by risk, convinced that if he can just get “the relevant parties” into “the room” he can make a deal. “John Kerry picks his battles, and he invests body and soul in tackling conflicts where the human consequences are very high,” Samantha Power, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, told me. “When he engages, he is all in.”
Kerry has shown repeatedly that he will use any lever as a means of diplomatic persuasion—including his defeat in 2004.
In July, 2014, Afghanistan faced a potential civil war as the candidates to succeed Hamid Karzai as President—Abdullah Abdullah, a physician and the former foreign minister, and Ashraf Ghani, the former chancellor of Kabul University—charged each other with trying to steal the election. A few years earlier, Kerry, serving as Obama’s emissary while still in the Senate, had talked Karzai down from reckless decisions by recalling his own political upheavals; now he needed to do something similar.
On July 12th, Abdullah met with Kerry, in Kabul, at the American Ambassador’s residence. Abdullah’s supporters in the Northern Alliance and among various warlords—Ghani had his own warlord constituency—did not want him to back down. It was left to Kerry to argue that, despite what was delicately described as “electoral improprieties,” confrontation had to be avoided.
“I ran for President and I lost and now I’m Secretary of State of the most powerful country in the world,” Kerry told Abdullah and his entourage, according to an aide’s contemporaneous notes. “I know your anger. I know your frustration.” He pressed Abdullah not to walk away from politics, lest the country tumble into chaos and “the next generation” lose its chance.
The United Nations carried out an audit of the election and determined that although there had been fraud on both sides, Ghani had won. Abdullah was still not prepared to yield. On September 17th, Kerry called Abdullah from his office at the State Department to persuade him to concede and accept the face-saving position of “chief executive officer” in Ghani’s government.

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He asked Abdullah to put his phone on speaker so that his aides could hear. After flattering Abdullah for his strength and importance in the country, Kerry said, “I will share with you a very personal experience: When I ran for President of the United States, in 2004, against George Bush, in the end, on Election Day, we had problems in the state of Ohio on how the votes were taking place. I even went to court in America to keep polling places open to make sure my people could vote. I knew that even in my country, the United States, where we had hundreds of years of practicing democracy, we still had problems carrying out that election. The next afternoon, I had a meeting with my people, and I told them that I did not think it appropriate of me to take the country through three or four months of not knowing who the President was. So that afternoon in Boston I conceded to the President and talked about the need to bring the country together. . . . One of the main lessons from this is there is a future. There is a tomorrow.”
Several days later, Abdullah Abdullah conceded and joined the Afghan government.
Kerry and Heinz have no shortage of residences; in addition to the houses in Georgetown and on Nantucket, they live in an eighteenth-century five-story pile on Louisburg Square, in Beacon Hill; in a family compound on Naushon, a private island off Cape Cod; in a fifteenth-century English farmhouse that was reassembled on the bank of Big Wood River, in Sun Valley; and on a ninety-acre farm called Rosemont, outside Pittsburgh, where Heinz spent time with her first husband, H. John Heinz III, the Republican senator and condiments scion, who died in 1991. When Kerry ran for President, her fortune was estimated at around a billion dollars. Kerry and Heinz keep their financial assets separate, but, had Kerry won in 2004, they would, together, have been the wealthiest family ever to occupy the White House.
As Secretary of State, however, Kerry spends much of his life onboard a worse-for-wear government jet, a Boeing 757. Both Kerry and Clinton have often had the humbling experience of the plane breaking down: a blown tire, a leak in an auxiliary fuel tank, “electronic problems.”

Kerry is six-four and walks with a pained roll in his gait. He has had both hips replaced—his ice-hockey days at Yale took a toll—and he is still recovering from an accident last May, in which he steered his racing bike into a curb, crashed to the road, and shattered his right femur. He travels in a cabin in the front of the plane, where a couch unfolds into a bed, allowing him to stretch out to read briefing papers and to make calls on a secure telephone line to foreign leaders and to the White House. He doesn’t sleep much, but sometimes he brings along a nylon-string guitar and relaxes by playing Beatles songs, Spanish laments, and show tunes. (Argentina will be delighted to hear that “Evita” is a favorite.) When he’s on one of his diplomatic “death marches” through some rarely visited region—recently, it was five Central Asian nations in two days—he likes to bone up with a “crash course.”
“I usually Google a country, find an interesting article or two, read about it, get some history,” he told me. “I want to know where I am. I want to know what made this place like it is. What is it about Samarkand that’s special?”

In late October, I joined him on one of the death marches, a Thursday-to-Sunday trip from Andrews Air Force Base, outside D.C., to Berlin, Vienna, Amman, and Riyadh. His job is to give strategic advice, help execute White House policy, tamp down crises, and reach agreements; to stroke allies, send clear signals to powers considered more problematic, like Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and China; and to forge potential relationships with old enemies like Iran.
The Obama Administration, working in the political safe haven of a second term, has won two recent, if divisive, victories: the deal with Iran and the opening to Cuba. It also has a “bucket list”: reaching a ceasefire and political settlement in Syria; stepping up an internationally coördinated fight againstISIS; and advancing the fight against climate change. This trip was designed mainly to get wildly disparate parties from the West, Russia, and the Middle East to begin negotiations on Syria. In particular, the trick was to get Iran “in the room” without losing its sworn enemies, the Sunni nations of the Gulf.
Kerry’s persistence and self-assurance, coupled with excruciating economic sanctions, is what helped him succeed with the Iranians. It’s also what led to nine months of fruitless, chaotic, and, arguably, corrosive negotiations that broke down last year between the Israelis and the Palestinians—negotiations that almost no one, not even the President, believed would lead to a breakthrough. Kerry argued that the hellbound trajectory of events was heading toward calamity, and he had to try; his critics said that the conditions were not ripe, and that the effort amounted to a diplomatic vanity project. Kerry’s Middle East adventure was precisely the kind of initiative that Hillary Clinton, who was intent on running for President, and who is, by nature, more risk averse, was disinclined to take up as Secretary of State.
The President has admired Kerry’s energy and sense of commitment since they worked together on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, although, a number of sources told me, he occasionally ribs Kerry for his more headlong efforts. And yet the two have markedly different temperaments and views of what the United States should attempt to achieve, particularly in the Middle East. Obama sees the region in the throes of historical turmoil—Sunni versus Shia, civil war in Syria, threats to national boundaries drawn by France and Great Britain a century ago, threats to the stability of Lebanon, Jordan, even Saudi Arabia. Having seen one intervention after another fail, he is determined to act with restraint. “Kerry, on the other hand, sees no historical trends that can defeat us,” Philip Gordon, a veteran National Security Council official and Obama’s principal adviser on the Middle East from 2013 to the spring of 2015, told me. “His optimism is such that he thinks, We will confront this! We will deal with it! There’s got to be a solution. We just need to find it and lead people there.” Gordon does not say this with admiration.
We landed at a military airport in Berlin. Kerry got into an Embassy car and headed to a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who happened to be in Germany to see Chancellor Angela Merkel. In recent weeks, there had been an alarming uptick in street violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank—stabbings, shootings, rock throwing, face-offs with troops—and at least some of it was due to rumors that the Israelis wanted to exert more control over the Temple Mount, in the Old City, or what Arabs call the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. Some Israelis on the religious right want to build a Third Temple there; some Arabs claim, wrongly, that the site, now dominated by the Al Aqsa Mosque, never had any Jewish historical importance.

Kerry met with Netanyahu with the modest goal of dialling back the rhetoric about the Temple Mount on both sides, getting the Israelis to make it clear that the complex status quo was not going to change. But Netanyahu had just infuriated him by giving a speech suggesting that the grand mufti of Jerusalem in the thirties was the ideological inspiration for the Final Solution. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time,” Netanyahu told the World Zionist Congress, in late October. “He wanted to expel the Jews.” Netanyahu said the mufti didn’t want German Jews to come to Palestine, so, instead, he advised Hitler to “burn them.” The mufti was, in fact, anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi, but the notion that he was the ideologist of the Holocaust was preposterous.

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“Lately, I feel like the only time I have to myself is when I’m having sex with Brian.”

Although Netanyahu “clarified” his comments on the mufti before arriving in Berlin, Kerry’s circle did not see the performance as an aberration. Most of the ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet are on the record opposing a two-state solution. American officials speak of Netanyahu as myopic, entitled, untrustworthy, routinely disrespectful toward the President, and focussed solely on short-term political tactics to keep his right-wing constituency in line. Netanyahu seems not to care if he insults the Administration. Ron Dermer, his ambassador to the U.S., secretly arranged with John Boehner for Netanyahu to speak before Congress without alerting the White House; Danny Danon, his envoy to the U.N., blamed Obama’s “lack of leadership” for Turkish and Iranian aggression; and Ran Baratz, whom Netanyahu appointed last month as his media chief, wrote on his Facebook page that the President was anti-Semitic and that Kerry had the mental abilities of a twelve-year-old.
Kerry sometimes speaks vaguely of trying yet again to forge an Israeli-Palestinian settlement—“There are worse things than getting caught trying”—but his last attempt left him badly disillusioned. His public comments now make it clear that only if Israel and the Palestinians come knocking will he get involved in a negotiation. In 2014, as Kerry shuttled from capital to capital, one Israeli cabinet minister told me, “We are only doing this for you!” Moshe Ya’alon, Netanyahu’s defense minister, was quoted in the Israeli press saying, “The only thing that can ‘save us’ is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace.” Kerry, Ya’alon said, “turned up here determined and acting out of misplaced obsession and messianic fervor.”

The relationship further soured when Netanyahu brought his campaign against the Iran nuclear deal to the floor of the U.S. Congress. “The frustration with the Israelis on a lot of issues has been sky-high,” one senior U.S. official told me, characterizing the mood at both the White House and the State Department. American officials are frustrated in various ways with the Palestinians as well, but, as the official said, “they don’t have any power in this dynamic. The Israelis have all the cards.”
As a diplomat, Kerry is duty-bound to describe raw reality in upholstered platitudes. And so, after his long session in Berlin with Netanyahu, he said, in a voice that had been rendered a scratchy whisper by too many hours of talking, that the meeting left him “cautiously encouraged.” He hoped to “resolve age-old differences in a frozen conflict.” He wanted the “parties” to “pull back from the precipice” and go down a “road that takes people somewhere.” And so on.
State Department aides said that sources of Kerry’s exasperation with Netanyahu range from the injustice of settlement building in the West Bank to the way he employs Yitzhak Molcho, his lawyer and confidant, to stifle even the most inconsequential negotiation. Kerry’s special envoy Frank Lowenstein told me that Kerry will “play through the whistle,” and persist with the Israelis and the Palestinians until the end of his time in office, but he added, “The window for a two-state solution is closing, though none of us who’ve worked on it will regret that we tried to save it.”
Kerry believes that Israel, along with the occupied territories, is headed toward becoming a “unitary state that is an impossible entity to manage.” He is particularly concerned, he said, that the Palestinian Authority could collapse; that, in the event, the P.A.’s thirty thousand security officers would scatter; and that chaos and increasingly violent clashes with Israel would follow.

“I understand the passions that are behind all of this—I get it,” Kerry told me. “If it were easy, it would have been done a long time ago. I happen to believe there is a way forward. There’s a solution. It would be good for Israel; it’d be great for the Palestinians; it’d be great for the region. People would make so much money. There’d be so many jobs created. There could be peace. And you would be stronger for it. Because nobody that I know or have met in the West Bank is anxious to have jihadis come in.
“The alternative is you sit there and things just get worse,” Kerry went on. “There will be more Hezbollah. There will be more rockets. And they’ll all be pointed in one direction. And there will be more people on the border. And what happens then? You’re going to be one big fortress? I mean, that’s not a way to live. It seems to me it is far more intelligent and far more strategic—which is an important word here—to have a theory of how you are going to preserve the Jewish state and be a democracy and a beacon to the world that everybody envisioned when Israel was created.”
I asked him if he could imagine an end to the State of Israel.
“No, I don’t believe that’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s just, What is it going to be like, is the question. Will it be a democracy? Will it be a Jewish state? Or will it be a unitary state with two systems, or some draconian treatment of Palestinians, because to let them vote would be to dilute the Jewish state? I don’t know. I have no answer to that. But the problem is, neither do they. Neither do the people who are supposed to be providing answers to this. It is not an answer to simply continue to build in the West Bank and to destroy the homes of the other folks you’re trying to make peace with and pretend that that’s a solution.”
In the evening, Kerry flew from Berlin to Vienna, where, in meetings with his Russian, Turkish, and Saudi counterparts, the focus would turn to Syria. Some of the reporters on the State Department beat recall with nostalgia a time when Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice regularly came to the back of the plane to brief them, often on the record. Kerry is prone to senatorial over-talk and the occasional gaffe; recently, he had to walk back an infelicitous statement that there was a “rationale” to the murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff, as opposed to the more recent attacks in Paris. White House officials have made it clear that his bouts of verbal indiscipline are unwelcome, and his trips to the back of the plane are less frequent. Recently, at the Saban Forum, a Middle East conference in Washington, D.C., Martin Indyk, Kerry’s former aide, interviewed him onstage and began by saying, with a smile, that he would be the only one asking questions, because Kerry’s staffers “were worried about your answers.”
The State Department beat is trying. The reporters are sardined into the back of the plane for endless flights and, upon arrival, spend hours waiting in hotel and airport holding rooms, interrupted by bursts of stenography. While Kerry met with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, at the Hotel Imperial, we pecked at the birdseed of the pool report, a couple of precisely quoted non-quotes. The pool reporter concluded with this plaintive note: “That’s it. My recorder was running for a total of twenty-two seconds.”

But the talks were of real significance. Kerry was trying to persuade his interlocutors, especially the Saudis, of the wisdom of including Iran, which has worked with the Russians to prop up Assad, in future talks. The developments in Syria were clear enough: at least two hundred thousand dead, four million refugees, millions more displaced. The regime—backed by Iranian troops, Hezbollah guerrillas, Russian air strikes on rebel outposts, and support from the Iraqi Shiite militias—has regained its footing and maintains a hold over up to two-thirds of the population. ISIS is under increasing attack from coalition air strikes and Kurdish ground troops, but it has moved the fight abroad.

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“You’re right—the shipping isn’t free. They’ve folded the expense into the cost of the item.”

The dispiriting reality of American foreign policy in the twenty-first century has been neatly summarized in Politico by Philip Gordon, the former N.S.C. official: “In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster.” Some foreign-policy experts, from Leon Panetta, the former C.I.A. director, to Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, predict that the conflicts that have emerged from the Arab uprisings will lead to a “Thirty Years’ War,” a protracted, regional bloodletting reminiscent of the religious wars in Central Europe that began with the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1618.

The violent swirl of uncertainties brings out the President’s native caution. The most consequential political act of Obama’s early career was a brief appearance, in 2002, at an antiwar demonstration in Federal Plaza, in downtown Chicago, where he declared that the impending invasion of Iraq was “dumb” and would “require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” That speech set him apart from both Kerry and Clinton, who, as senators, voted to give Bush the right to use force in Iraq, and it set the ideological template for his foreign policy, not least on Syria. Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, told me, “Obama hasn’t changed his position from 2011. He is always concerned that it’s a fool’s errand, a slippery slope to another Iraq, pouring blood and treasure into another conflict.”
Kerry’s senior aides are not hesitant to say that both as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as Secretary of State he has disagreed strongly with Obama on Syria. “Obama prioritizes avoiding any entanglements where it is uncertain that such an intervention will work,” a State Department official told me. Kerry, who sees that the crisis has threatened the stability of Jordan, Lebanon, and other states in the region and has provided ISIS with a base, in Raqqa and Ramadi, has, the official said, “much more faith in our ability to avoid a slippery slope.”
From the beginning of the civilian uprisings in Syria, in 2011, and the regime’s escalating and bloody reaction, many of Obama’s advisers have argued for a more aggressive policy: arming and funding the “moderate rebels”; air strikes on Damascus; taking out Assad’s helicopters and planes, which drop barrel bombs packed with shrapnel, explosives, and, sometimes, chlorine; the establishment of safe zones and a no-fly zone. In 2012, the C.I.A. director, David Petraeus; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey; Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta; Samantha Power, who was then a national-security adviser; and Secretary of State Clinton pressed Obama to support vetted rebels against the regime. Kerry—who was influenced by the relatively successful, if belated, interventions in the Balkans, in the nineties, and also by the calamitous decision not to intervene in Rwanda in 1994—joined this chorus when he replaced Clinton. But no one could convince Obama that deeper involvement would avoid a repetition of the Iraq fiasco.
Kerry was a critical actor in the most humbling episode of the Syrian drama. Obama had warned Assad that he would be crossing a “red line” if he used chemical weapons, saying that such an act would “change my calculus.” In August, 2013, a year after the “red line” warning, Assad’s forces, according to Western intelligence services and an independent U.N. commission, fired rockets armed with sarin on Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, killing hundreds. The U.S. prepared to attack with cruise missiles. In a speech insisting that Assad give up all his chemical arms, Kerry referred to the “lessons” of the Holocaust and of Rwanda. General Dempsey said, “Our finger was on the trigger.” Obama warned of an American attack, although Kerry, following the President’s minimizing lead, allowed that the strike would be “unbelievably small.” Then, without consulting Kerry, Obama stepped back, saying that he would have to get congressional approval before an attack on Syria. He had concluded that it was worse to go to war than to be seen as weak.
Obama’s aides say that the debates over Syria are always over the cost of an action versus the cost of inaction. Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, told me, “The President has spent more time on Syria than on any other issue in the Situation Room, often testing different theories and propositions. But no one has ever been able to answer the second and third questions: If you do X, then what? If you were to take more assertive military action against Assad, what happens the day after, when Assad is still in place and we have not engaged militarily even more robustly? There’s an expectation to see it through. There is an escalatory logic that leads the U.S. to take responsibility for Syria. He’s open to different proposals, but where do they lead?”

When I spoke with President Obama last year, he made a similar point. “It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which our involvement in Syria would have led to a better outcome, short of us being willing to undertake an effort in size and scope similar to what we did in Iraq,” he said. “And when I hear people suggesting that somehow if we had just financed and armed the opposition earlier, that somehow Assad would be gone by now and we’d have a peaceful transition, it’s magical thinking.”
Nearly everyone I talked to in the Administration considered the “red line” aftermath to be a diplomatic fiasco. The Syrian government did, however, give up its main chemical stockpiles when its ally Russia stepped in and pressured it to do so. Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, worked with Kerry to close the deal. Meanwhile, Assad remains in power. The Administration, which started out saying that he must step aside, is now willing to see Assad play a transitional role in a political settlement before leaving the stage at an undetermined point. As one abashed U.S. official told me, “The meaning of ‘Assad has to go’ has evolved.”
So has Kerry’s view of Assad. In 2010, before the Arab uprisings, Kerry met several times with Assad in Damascus, at Obama’s request. The Administration wanted Kerry to see what kind of Syrian-Israeli agreement he could help forge. Assad expressed concern that the economic isolation of Syria, and its crippling unemployment, was building up enormous strain and that the regime could fall to a fundamentalist-led revolt. Walid Muallem, Assad’s foreign minister, told one of Kerry’s aides, “If we don’t succeed in opening up our economy, you’ll come back here in ten years and you’ll meet with Mullah Assad.”
Assad told Kerry that, in order to make peace with Israel, he had to get back the Golan Heights, territory lost in the 1967 war. For that to be considered, Kerry replied, Syria would have to cease the transit of arms through Syria to Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and to Hamas, in Gaza.
“We basically delivered him a pretty strong message of, ‘You better stop this or else,’ ” Kerry told me. “But I also engaged with him, because he wanted to talk about another subject—a relationship with Israel in the future. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this publicly, but he was ready to make a deal with Israel. And the proof of that is a letter I still have that he wrote and signed proposing a structure by which he was willing to recognize Israel, have an embassy there, make peace, deal with the Golan, et cetera.” (A representative of the Syrian government denied that Assad ever wrote such a letter; he also denied that Assad took any oppressive measures in 2011.) Syria asked Kerry for economic assistance, including a pipeline to Iraq and aid for technology and health care. When Netanyahu was told of the discussions, he was reluctant. “Bibi came to Washington, and one of the first things out of his mouth in the Oval Office was ‘I can’t do this. I’m not going to—I just can’t.’ ”

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“Oh, those are the lobbyists who get us our government subsidies.”

The issue was rendered moot in March, 2011, when the revolution began in Syria. As the Syrian regime increased its level of cruelty from month to month—beginning with the police torturing young protesters and moving on to the indiscriminate killing of many thousands, using barrel bombs—all talk of the “soft-spoken British-educated ophthalmologist,” of Assad as the reformist hope of Syria, was eclipsed.
Kerry shook his head at the memory of it. At dinner in Damascus, Assad had told Kerry and Heinz about how his mother could no longer go to a local mosque dressed in a skirt. He talked about how female college classmates, professional women, were now in hijab. “We want to be a secular country,” Assad said, according to Kerry. “We don’t want to be inundated by this.”
Kerry went on, “I had an impression that this guy had serious business plans, growth plans, development plans, wanted to change.” When I pressed him to describe Assad in terms of his crimes, he backed off. “You know what? I want to try to talk common sense to him through this process, and I do not want to get into any—it’s just the inappropriate moment for me to . . .”
Both Kerry and Heinz said they had heard from their Syrian sources that Assad’s mother or his brother, Maher al-Assad, the family enforcer figure and an Army general who commands the élite Fourth Armored Division and the Republican Guard, urged Bashar to crack down hard on the protesters; otherwise, the family and the Alawite regime were finished. Kerry thinks of Assad as the toxic product of his family and his political environment, a kind of rational autocrat who set out to reform his country but, when faced with the prospect of joining the list of deposed Arab dictators, acted in the predictably monstrous way of his father, who, in 1982, slaughtered twenty thousand people in the city of Hama to put down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising.

Assad, Kerry said, “made enormous, gigantic mistakes, and I think they are disqualifying mistakes.” Kerry continues to use bloodless terms like “mistakes” because he hopes he will soon be dealing with Assad—either through Russia and Iran or through the media, or even a negotiating team from Damascus. Either way, his job, as he sees it, is to persuade. The American position is still that Assad must go, but, in order to keep Russia and Iran in the discussion, Obama and Kerry have fudged the question of when.
“I believe Syria can be put back together still,” Kerry told me. “But I think this is the last shot to try to do it. I think that if you can’t do this it could break up into enclaves and Iraq could—I mean, you could see a lot of things happen. This is not the Thirty Years’ War today. But, if allowed to fester unabated by the peace process or by a solution, this could become a kind of Thirty Years’ War, because it could develop into a bona-fide, full-fledged Sunni-Shia conflagration.”

Vienna is a scene of satisfaction for Kerry. It is where he signed documents for a nuclear settlement with Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister. Obama had ramped up economic sanctions and launched cyber attacks against Iran well before Kerry joined the Administration, but when Kerry was still a senator he was involved in a series of secret American-Iranian meetings, brokered by Sultan Qaboos bin Said, of Oman, which prepared the way.
The tension in the negotiating rooms was sometimes unbearable. Opposition to the talks raged from Jerusalem to Capitol Hill, and Zarif made it known, both as a tactic and as a matter of fact, that he faced immense pressure in Tehran from hard-liners who wanted to break off negotiations. “The subtext all along was possible war,” the State Department official told me. It was discussed openly. During one exchange in Lausanne, when the two sides were arguing over Fordow, a secret underground uranium-enrichment site, Kerry asked, “Why do you care so much? You have facilities elsewhere.”
Zarif said that the Fordow installation, which was built under a mountain near the city of Qom, was an insurance policy in case Israel or the United States attacked Iran’s other sites. Kerry replied, “I don’t want to be crude about it, but that won’t save you.” The Americans in the room knew that Kerry was referring to a thirty-thousand-pound bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which is capable of destroying a facility like Fordow.
The agreement could, in time, collapse if Iran is caught violating it, but Obama and Kerry were making a bet that they could both prevent a nuclear Iran and empower more modern elements in the Iranian élites who may, after the passing of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, and his hard-line cadre of ayatollahs, liberalize the regime.
In Vienna, in the gaudy, chandeliered haunts of the Imperial, Kerry was now trying to build on that treaty. After a long day, he emerged from his sessions with the Russians, Turks, and Saudis muttering some diplomatic word globules: the meetings were “constructive and productive and succeeded in surfacing some ideas, which I am not going to share today,” and warm congratulations to Austria on the occasion of its national day, and, as for how long Assad will stay in power, “we can agree to disagree.”
The talks were more eventful than he let on. As always, some time had to be allotted for posturing and venting. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, repeatedly reminded the room of Assad’s butchery, referring to him Homerically as “the man who’s killed three hundred thousand people.” Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, scoffed at the idea of a “moderate” opposition and refused to accept a specific time line for Assad to step down. And it would not be a party if the Russians did not remind everyone of the chaos created by the American invasion of Iraq.
“I hear it all the time,” Kerry told me. “I hear it from Lavrov. I mean, we work professionally and we go at things in a constructive way, but he doesn’t let me forget Libya or Egypt or Iraq, and the ‘color revolutions’ ”—in Ukraine, Georgia, and other states where the Kremlin leadership believes the U.S. has fomented revolt. “I roll with it, but it’s important to understand it. I mean, if you’re going to try to work something with Russia, you need to understand the degree to which these things matter.”

The farrago of competing national interests, the legacies of historical blunders, the fantastical cast of characters, the sheer bloodlust, the prospect of regional if not global conflict—all conspire to make Kerry’s task in Syria nearly impossible. But now, after years of moribund diplomacy in the face of horrific bloodshed and waves of terrified refugees, he seemed to be making incremental progress. Not only were he and his negotiating partners talking; they were also heading toward getting Iran in the room. “A gathering of a group of unthinkable countries,” Lavrov called it.
Certainly, there was a greater sense of urgency in Washington, in Moscow, in Europe, and in the Gulf. The Iran nuclear deal, despite opposition in Israel, in Saudi Arabia, and in the U.S. Congress, boosted the credibility of American diplomacy, and of Kerry in particular. Vladimir Putin—in order to prop up the Syrian regime, regain leverage in the Middle East, and restore a sense of post-Soviet Russia as a world power—has returned in force to the Syrian issue, unleashing warplanes on rebel positions, in the name of the fight against ISIS. With terror attacks abroad and the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees, the Syrian crisis is no longer a “foreign” matter for Europe or the United States; it has come to seem a matter of national security.

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“Frankly, we’re at a loss, so we’re looking for someone young and stupid to tell us what to do.”

Back on the plane, Kerry sat perched on the edge of his bed, and told me, “We’re trying to break a crazy stalemate.” There was a weary desperation in his expression. He knew that the Russians and the Iranians could not endorse the idea that Assad was finished—even if they believed that, ultimately, he was. There could, however, be talks about “political transition.” No one, Kerry was saying, wanted the government institutions to “crash,” the way they had in Iraq. “And, if you don’t want the government to crash, you can’t have Assad goboom.”
Kerry could not yet know the true motivation of Putin and the Iranian leadership in agreeing to send emissaries to talks in Vienna: “Are they there only to prop [Assad] up and forever, or are they there helping to try to engineer something to happen? And so I’ve been trying to put that to the test.”

Finally, his voice gave out—I could no longer hear him above the engines of the jet, and he appeared to be in pain. He winced by way of farewell and left me to return to the back of the plane.
When Kerry was appointed by Obama to head the State Department, he made a point of meeting with his predecessors. As a young man, he’d loathed Henry Kissinger. To him, the Nixon Administration represented all that was most cynical about American politics.
Kerry returned from Vietnam a decorated veteran and, as he told the Times, “an angry young man.” He became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and, with his forthright style of confession and outrage, he won the admiration of antiwar leaders. On “Meet the Press,” Kerry said that he had “committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed”: shootings in free-fire zones, harassment, search-and-destroy missions, the burning of villages. Wearing his fatigues and his decorations, Kerry testified, in April, 1971, for two hours before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and asked a question that was quoted around the world: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Kerry said, “Someone has to die so President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, ‘the first President to lose a war.’ ” The Nixon Administration, he said, “has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country.”
Nixon was repelled and, at some level, impressed. Talking on the phone with his counsel, Charles Colson, he said that Kerry was “sort of a phony, isn’t he?” But even H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, told the President, “He did a superb job on it at the Foreign Relations Committee yesterday. A Kennedy-type guy, he looks like a Kennedy, and he, he talks exactly like a Kennedy.”
But while Kerry made his name in a radical voice, he was always a man of the establishment. More than any diplomat or politician this side of Bill Clinton, he has an abiding faith in the value of personal relationships and of his capacity to persuade. All he has to do is get the parties in a room and he can’t lose. Obama, by contrast, has no more cultivated relationships with foreign leaders than he has with Republican leaders. Where Obama is skeptical, Kerry is almost sentimental in his optimism. He has even made his peace with Henry Kissinger: “I seek his advice—he’s a brilliant guy.” He recounted a lunch that they had recently, at which Kissinger told him, “The difference between you and me is that I think that personal relations don’t matter much. I think interests matter.” Kerry replied, “I think interests matter, of course, but I think personal relations can help matters—they can be influential.”

No one seems to inspire Kerry’s outrage, including the worst of his negotiating partners. “I think they want to be valued for who they are and understood for where they come from and what their life is about,” he told me. “I think if people have a sense that you know what they’re about, they can build some trust with you. . . . I think if you can show them that you understand what their challenge is, how they have to sell it at home or how they have to, what it means, the sacrifice they might have to make to do X, Y, or Z.”
As a senator, Kerry, who grew up worshipping J.F.K., initially suffered through a vexed relationship with his senior partner, Edward Kennedy. The Kennedy people privately mocked Kerry as stiff, pompous, a “show horse,” as Michael Janeway, the former editor of the Boston Globe, once described Kerry to his face. The Kerry people resented Kennedy for grabbing credit for every joint initiative. But, with time, Kerry gained respect in the Senate, particularly for serious work on issues ranging from forging diplomatic relations with Vietnam (along with John McCain) to his investigation into the way the Bank of Credit and Commerce International helped General Manuel Noriega, of Panama, launder his drug money.
Sometimes Kerry could play maddeningly to type. During the 2004 campaign, an interviewer for GQ asked him, “What’s the best bottle of wine you’ve ever had?” A slicker pol might have mentioned a superb Florida Merlot or an unforgettable Ohio Pinot, but even a novice would know to choose a domestic wine, preferably one in a battleground state. “Probably a Latour 1961,” Kerry answered, thus assuring his campaign the Bordeaux primary.
But he is hardly a prep-school cartoon. During the campaign, for example, theGlobe discovered both that Kerry’s grandfather was Jewish and that he committed suicide, two facts that Kerry had been unaware of. His family came from distinguished lineages but had little money. Kerry’s first marriage was troubled; his wife, Julia Thorne, suffered from severe depression and wrote that her mind was “ravaged by corroding voices, my body defeated by bone-rattling panics, I sat on the edge of my bed minutes from taking my life.” When he was separated from Thorne, Kerry had what Teresa would call his “gypsy period,” with no fixed address, hustling to see his two daughters, in Boston, while he was working in Washington. (Thorne died of cancer in 2006.)
One of the governing clichés about Kerry is that his four months of combat in Vietnam and his return as a leader of the antiwar-veterans movement shaped his career as a legislator and a diplomat. Kerry told me the war showed him “that we can make some terrible mistakes when we don’t think it through right. I can remember being in Vietnam watching Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense, flying over me as we went down to do some completely staged ‘invasion’ because the original invasion place had too many Vietcong. These kinds of things stick out at you. It’s the reason that Joseph Heller and ‘Catch-22’ have particular meaning for a lot of us.”

What Vietnam did not instill in Kerry is a sense of ideological consistency. Campaigning for the Senate in 1984, he declared that he would have voted to cancel the B-1 bomber, the F-15, the Trident missile system, and many other weapons systems, only to say later that such votes would have been “ill-advised,” even “stupid.” He disagreed with the Reagan Administration’s adventures in Central America and George H. W. Bush’s decision to build an international coalition and repel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, in 1991. But he supported intervention in Kosovo and, in 2002, with tortured logic, voted for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq: “I mean, I supported disarming Saddam Hussein, but I was critical of the Administration and how it did its diplomacy and so forth.” Then he voted against the eighty-seven-billion-dollar appropriation to fund reconstruction, as well as military operations, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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“This next song’s about pain.”SEPTEMBER 5, 2005


“He always told me he wanted to be informed by Vietnam but never imprisoned by it,” David Wade, who was a Senate aide to Kerry and, until recently, his chief of staff at the State Department, told me. Vietnam, rather, was an emotional touchstone. On trips with friends to the Vietnam Memorial, Kerry pointed out the engraved names of soldiers who died after the Paris peace talks began. “He would talk about how people died while they argued over the shape of the negotiating table,” Wade recalled.
If Iraq and the general failure of the Arab Spring taught Kerry anything, it is a greater wariness of the idea of democratic crusades. “Having an election does not make a democracy,” he told me. “We learned that with Hamas not too long ago. And I don’t think we’ve always practiced that very carefully, and I think we need to practice it very carefully, frankly. If people are on a path and making legitimate moves and choices, I’m content to not push the curve beyond its ability to bend. And I think we have to be smarter about that.”
Asked whether the idealism of Woodrow Wilson was too powerful a strain in American foreign policy, he replied, “Yeah, a little bit, probably. I mean, I love Wilson and I love Wilsonian idealism, but it’s very idealistic.”
In the next two days, Kerry kept up his pace. First, he flew to Amman, where he met with King Abdullah and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader. Neither the Jordanians nor the Palestinians were in any mood to meet with Netanyahu, but the issue was violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank and, in Kerryspeak, how to “bring down the temperature.” The meetings, particularly with the Jordanians, were delicate—the King needed to show his subjects that he retained influence over the Temple Mount. And the press conference that Kerry held, alongside the Jordanian foreign minister, at an airport in Amman, was a neatly choreographed jig of indirection. At one point, Kerry, who had done his part to express excruciating evenhandedness in counselling both the Palestinians and the Israelis to ratchet down the “incitement,” watched with stolid irritation as the Jordanian foreign minister, Nasser Judeh, staggered off script. Finally, Kerry scribbled a note and handed it to Judeh, who blinked a few times and wrapped things up. But not before remarking on the obvious: “As always in this part of the world, things have a tendency to erupt.”
The press conference did not reveal that Kerry and Judeh had called Netanyahu and persuaded him to declare publicly that the Israeli government had no intention of changing the status of the Temple Mount—which he did in a video on Facebook. But this was only after hours of cajoling and “flyspecking” statements with Netanyahu and his aides—a process that caused the State Department official to joke that he had “a P.T.S.D. flashback” from the failed 2013-14 peace talks.
Kerry walked to his plane, which took off into the darkening sky for Saudi Arabia. We arrived late in the evening, which was perfect, because Saudi officials, like moonflowers, bloom at night. The foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, greeted Kerry on the tarmac. “There was an appropriately masculine embrace,” the pool reporter noted. “They each grabbed the other’s upper arm. And the traditional Arab kiss on each cheek, though there was no actual skin contact. You could say it was more of an air kiss.”
After talking for a while at the airport, Kerry and Jubeir got in cars and headed to Diriyah Farm, the country residence of the Saudi king, Salman. Salman has been on the throne only since the death of Abdullah, in January, but he is seventy-nine and in spotty health—he reads his talking points off an iPad. Intelligence agencies are already at work trying to sort out who might succeed him.
Kerry entered an opulent reception area that the pool reporter aptly described as a sunken living room the size of “an N.H.L. rink.” Aides in robes sat along the walls. “Glance at the men,” the pooler noted, “and you know that it has been a long time since Richard Burton”—the nineteenth-century British explorer—“observed that he had never seen a fat man in the desert.” Finally, Kerry met the King, in a smaller room.
“I’m happy to see you,” the King said, through his translator.
“I’m happy to see you,” Kerry replied. “This is my favorite palace. I love this place.”
“This is our original home town,” the King said.
When Kerry became Secretary, the Saudis were still angry at the Administration for, in their eyes, betraying a reliable ally-autocrat like Hosni Mubarak. What if the House of Saud came to such a pass? The Saudis were also dismayed by Obama’s reluctance to attack Syria. Turki al-Faisal, the former director of Saudi intelligence and a member of the royal family, said, in 2013, that Obama’s failure to follow through on his “red line” warning “would be funny if it were not so blatantly perfidious.”

The focus of the meeting, for Kerry, was to nail down what had been raised in Vienna the day before, persuading the King to include Iran in the talks on Syria. The King’s security council—including the foreign minister, the Crown Prince, the deputy Crown Prince, the head of intelligence—listened intently as the two men talked. Salman seemed to leave the question of Iran a little more open and told Kerry that he should now meet with the security team. Kerry’s team was hopeful, thinking that Salman had given them room to maneuver.
With the King gone, the Saudi advisers, despite their ritual expressions of distaste for Iran, agreed to be in the same room with Zarif at future meetings in Vienna. This would not be first-level news around the world, necessarily, and the war went on, and the waves of refugees kept arriving in Jordan and Turkey and on the shores of Lesvos. But, for Kerry, these were the kinds of moves—a pawn seizing a center square—that just might lead to an endgame.
The flight from Riyadh to Andrews was scheduled to take fifteen hours, with a refuelling stop in Ireland. At Shannon, the plane pulled up to a deserted terminal. Dressed in jeans and a Yale hoodie, Kerry settled down at a table near the bar and ordered a hot toddy and a plate of salmon sandwiches.
“Damn, these are good,” he said.
The proprietor of the bar, who introduced himself as Declan, presented Kerry with a bottle of Irish whiskey and a dram of advice.
“My father died when I was just a few years old and my mother didn’t drink,” Declan said, “but whenever I was sick she would take a spoonful of this and put it in hot water. Works like a charm.”
Kerry smiled professionally, but he was long past charming anyone. He was exhausted, and there was little left to his voice. Yet he kept talking; as he stole glances at a Manchester United game on the TV above the bar, he obsessed about the next week’s trip to Vienna, the players at the table, what was possible.
As a diplomat, Hillary Clinton wins credit inside the Administration for visiting a hundred and twelve countries and helping to transform America’s image in the world after the catastrophic Bush years. She led efforts to open relations with Burma, brokered a 2012 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and drafted economic sanctions on Iran. But she was as restrained in her ambitions as she was disciplined. Kerry, by contrast, is considered relentless, sometimes to a fault. There is no concealing his eagerness to make a deal; to a critic, his style is reminiscent of the customer who sternly tells the salesman, “I’m not leaving here until you sell me a car.”

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“My career doesn’t reflect what my passions are as much as where my health insurance is.”DECEMBER 19, 2005

Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser, said that the President appreciates Kerry’s “willingness to dive in without knowing how the story is going to end. You’re not going to achieve an Iran deal without that.” Kerry hates being cut out of the action. He was, Rhodes admitted, “annoyed” that the opening to Cuba this year had almost nothing to do with the State Department. “That was the only way it was going to get done,” Rhodes said. “That was the Cuban preference. They wanted to deal with the White House.”
But if there is to be any kind of diplomatic progress in Syria it will depend largely on Kerry and his negotiating partners. A week after prevailing on the Saudis to sit at the same table with Iran, he returned to Vienna. Multilateral meetings customarily begin with a round of opening statements from every party in the room, and Zarif and Jubeir, the Iranian and Saudi foreign ministers, laid bare their radically different narratives. In talks with the U.S., Zarif had reminded Kerry of the C.I.A.’s role in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, the Iranian Prime Minister, and now he reminded Jubeir that fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. Jubeir, for his part, had already remarked on Iran’s role in terrorism in the region. The Americans might have found all this amusing had it not been reminiscent of the worst moments of the nuclear talks. When the subject shifted to Syria, the atmosphere hardly lightened. The two blamed each other for fomenting fundamentalism and exploiting the chaos everywhere in the region.

Several times, the American delegation wondered if Zarif or Jubeir or both would walk out. As the afternoon wore on, one foreign minister, who was growing exasperated, turned to one of Kerry’s aides and said, “When is his hard stop?”—meaning, when does Kerry have to leave for his next flight?
“Not until ten,” the aide said.
The foreign minister sighed. The meeting lasted seven hours.
The victories were small. In the communiqué, Iran and Saudi Arabia allowed themselves to be listed together as participants—a first. The document also carried dog-whistle language about “transition” in Syria but without a time line for Assad’s departure. It mentioned the need to preserve “the rights of all Syrians,” which was meant to assure the Alawite minority, which rules Syria, that there would be no slaughter if Assad gives up power. Any election would have to include the Syrian diaspora, which would lower Assad’s odds of winning.
There is every reason to be skeptical about the effort. What roles will the warring parties in Syria play? How can Russia and Turkey possibly walk toward a common goal after the Turks shot down a Russian bomber? The rebels are deeply fractured—what’s in the talks for them? Who represents them? Under what circumstances would Assad, who, thanks to Russia, is now in a stronger position, step aside? If he is replaced by another figure in the Alawite regime, why would Sunni factions accept that person? And, if there are elections, what would happen if Assad—the ultimate recruiting tool for ISIS—wins? Why would the jihadi militia Jabhat al-Nusra lay down arms?

There will be more meetings in hotel conference rooms, as the war continues and ISIS makes its plans. But, as Kerry’s team was quick to point out, this had been a completely moribund area of diplomacy for the previous two years. When the meeting ended and Kerry read out the language of the communiqué, there was applause.
“Not celebratory, exactly, but significant,” one aide told me. “We’ll see where it goes.”
In the weeks since, Kerry has remained aloft. One day, his plane settled in Samarkand, where he patiently endured a forty-five-minute lecture from the dictator of Uzbekistan. The next day, he was in Ashgabat, the surreal, peopleless capital of Turkmenistan, a hermetic state where the post-Soviet dictator renamed the days of the week and devoted a national day to the muskmelon. Kerry had flown to Santiago to take part in a conference to save the world’s oceans. Then he was in Paris, in the wake of the terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall, to join talks designed to rescue the earth from overheating to the point of global catastrophe.
“I absolutely love this job,” he told me more than once. “It is so much fun.”
Very occasionally, he steals away to relax (to go to the gym, to attend the Harvard-Yale football game) or just to reflect. When he retires, Kerry said, he’ll write a book and stay involved “somehow” in public affairs, particularly environmental issues. But he doesn’t think about retirement. The butchery in Syria goes on, the Middle East is in a state of dissolution. At dinner at his house, Kerry was talking yet again about his optimism, the prospect for a ceasefire, the end of Assad. I asked what would come next. There aren’t any Thomas Jeffersons waiting to assume power.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe Alexander Hamilton is, who knows?” He laughed and said there was no reason that someone from the secular educated élite could not emerge: “I think the notion that the ophthalmologist from London is somehow the only guy who can run Syria is insulting to Syrians.”
On Veterans Day, he went to Arlington National Cemetery to visit the grave of one of the closest friends he lost in Vietnam—Richard Pershing, the grandson of General John J. Pershing, the commander of American forces during the First World War. When he got there, he saw that there was a crowd around Black Jack Pershing’s grave. Rather than attract attention, he ducked behind a tree and chatted for a while with a military bugler who was there to play “Taps.” After the crowd dispersed, Kerry walked in his pained, ambling way along the rows of graves, countless graves, stone after stone marking war after war. 

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