MR ROSENZWEIG: May I have your attention, please? Ladies and gentlemen, please, can I have your attention? Good afternoon. I’m Ethan Rosenzweig, the acting chief of protocol of the United States. Welcome to this wonderful celebration and unveiling. If you’ll please join me in watching your video monitors to start the evening. Thank you. Please, come into the room, everybody. Please.
(A video was played.)
ANNOUNCER: Distinguished guests, the Secretary of State of the United States, Antony J. Blinken, and the 68th Secretary of State of the United States, John F. Kerry. (Applause,)
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Good afternoon. (Applause.) Welcome. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the State Department. Welcome back to the State Department. Welcome to, I think, one of our shared favorite places in the State Department, the Ben Franklin Room. I’m always inspired being in this room. We have Franklin looking down upon us. He, of course, was our first diplomat. Negotiated our first treaty. Secured our independence. Charted the Gulf Stream. Pioneered electricity. Gave us our ethos of self-governance. And virtually none of this did he do while sober. (Laughter.) So I take that as an instruction for all of us when we’re done with the wonderful ceremony that we’re about to embark on.
On behalf of myself, my wife Evan Ryan, who’s here with us today, I’m so thrilled to have you here, particularly for this occasion.
Mr. Secretary, welcome home.
John once described his life as having an almost Forrest Gump-like quality.
And think about it. It’s true. Flip back through some of the pages. Flip back through the decades. One consequential moment after another, there is John Kerry.
We see him as a 12-year-old, the son of an American diplomat in Germany, taking his bicycle through the checkpoints to ride around Soviet-controlled East Berlin. Then he’s volunteering to fight in Vietnam, where he earns combat medals for bravery. And years later, delivering a searing indictment of the U.S. government’s failures in that war before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And then scroll forward a few more decades and there he is on the other side of the dais at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as its chair.
Years later, that same man, now our Secretary of State, walks up to the podium at the UN General Assembly, as you just saw, and, with his granddaughter in his lap, signs the Paris Climate Agreement on behalf of the United States. (Applause.)
Now for other human beings, for the rest of us mere mortals, any one of these experiences would have been defining. For John, just a few of the chapters in an extraordinary lifetime of public service that he continues to write. And from each chapter, I think it’s fair to say that he drew lessons that further shaped his character and enabled his genuinely historic contributions.
Those childhood years, living abroad, taught John from an early age, much as it did me, to see his country through the eyes of others, to grapple with the expectations, the critiques, the stereotypes, and then when he returned home, he learned to do the same with Americans’ perceptions of the places that he had been.
It was during that time that his father passed along what John considers, I think, the most important advice that he got about diplomacy: learning to see the world through the eyes of others.
Among the indelible lessons that John took away from Vietnam was, as he later put it, “if you are going to ask young men and women to put their lives on the line, you better make damn sure that you have tried everything possible to first exercise diplomacy.”
The loss of some of his closest friends in that war, the sense that it could just as easily have been his life that was cut short, instilled a lasting determination to treat every day as extra, a burning sense of purpose that John brings to every hour of every endeavor, including his tenure as Secretary of State.
Now his team called him, and I was part of it, the Energizer Bunny – though I’m confident John could tire out that bunny.
He would go anywhere. He’d meet anyone. He’d endure exhaustion, physical pain, to advance the mission.
When John was in Geneva for marathon negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal, he took advantage of a rare break in talks to get a little bit of exercise.
John, being John, decided that exercise means cycling a leg of the Tour de France. Uphill. Through the Alps. (Laughter.)
John was looping around a police motorcycle when his wheel clipped a curb. He crashed to the ground, snapping his leg. He was rushed back to Boston for surgery.
Now, as it happens, as his deputy at the time, I was minding my own business – it was a Sunday – and I got a call from Jon Finer, who said to me, “What are you doing tonight?” And I said, “Well, nothing much, getting ready for work tomorrow.” And he said, “Can you get on a plane to Paris?” So I did, to take the Secretary’s place at an important counter-ISIS conference that was taking place. But here’s what happened.
Normal people would take weeks to recover. Not John. Within hours of the operation, he was holding bilats from his hospital bed. He beamed in to the conference in Paris. (Laughter.)
He refused pain medication, not wanting to lose one iota of his mental sharpness, and then just days later, back in Geneva.
In a particularly tense moment, John’s counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, abruptly stood up from the table and made his way to the door. John took his crutch, jutted it out – (laughter) – and blocked Zarif’s exit. “Not until we talk this out.” Zarif sat back down. And they worked through it.
I think one of the reasons that John was so effective with foreign leaders is that, of course, he was fluent not just in policy, but in politics. As a former elected official, he understood the constraints facing politicians and what it would take to overcome them. Like when he went and spent a week in Kabul, working with the rival Afghan candidates to prevent a disputed presidential election from descending into civil war.
Now, one other aside. I had a chance on one occasion with now-President Biden to visit Afghanistan with John, and we went out to a forward operating base all the way in the northeast of Afghanistan. And we’re heading back to Bagram Air Base, and John says to the pilot, “Why don’t we fly over Tora Bora?” I think he was trying to find bin Laden. (Laughter.) This was before we got bin Laden. And the pilot said, “Well, it’s going to take us out of our way and it’s going to take more time,” and John said, “No, no, no, we have to go to Tora Bora.” So we divert to Tora Bora, and no bin Laden, but we at least got to see Tora Bora, and then we start heading back.
And we hit the last mountain ridge before Bagram, and this ferocious snowstorm kicks in. And John and then-Senator Biden were in the lead helicopter with Chuck Hagel, and the staff was in the second helicopter. And I have the headphones on in the second helicopter, and we hear, “We’ve lost sight of helicopter number one.” Then a couple of minutes later, as we’re going back and forth across this mountain ridge, “Helicopter one is down.” What does that mean?
We land on this ridge, the second helicopter. Thankfully, the first helicopter is there. The ridge is no wider than the blades of the helicopter. We’re out there for four or five hours waiting for them to come rescue us by road because the snow is so intense the helicopters couldn’t fly over that last mountain ridge and get to Bagram. And we all discovered that the warmest place to be, because it was freezing, was actually outside of the helicopter standing behind the air exhaust, and we took turns doing that. It was the most extraordinary adventure, but that’s because John wanted to see Tora Bora. (Laughter.)
In 2016, countries met in Kigali to try to reach an international agreement to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, greenhouse gases that are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. When the negotiations hit an impasse, John walked over to the room where some of the experts were hammering out the text, which, if you’re a climate expert, is a little bit like Michael Jordan showing up at your pickup basketball game. With John’s help, they found a way forward, and then John personally lobbied the few holdouts and closed the deal.
John’s willingness to go wherever he could be useful, wherever there was at least the opportunity to make some progress, that racked up some legendary mileage here at the State Department. As Secretary, he flew 1,417,576 miles, 3,000 hours in the air, 596 days on the road. His team nicknamed the plane the Kerry-go-round because once you got on it, you never quite knew when you would actually get off. (Laughter.)
Now, only a few things could slow John down. One, of course, was family. If there was a call from Teresa or from Alex, from Vanessa, that took precedence over everything else.
And he also knew how to savor a hard-earned victory. After clinching the climate deal, John led his team on a midnight tour of Paris, roaming the streets on foot. After reaching an agreement to remove and destroy much of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, he insisted on taking a sleep-deprived team in Geneva for a little bit of wine and cheese. I had this experience on the couple of occasions when, as his deputy, we actually traveled together and none of us – none of us – could keep up with him. The DS team at the end of these crazy long days would say, “Well, the Secretary wants to go out,” and out we went.
Now I know that some people who don’t know John as well, haven’t worked with him, may just see him from a distance as the kind of quintessential Boston Brahmin. And it’s true. He did once take President John F. Kennedy sailing and, when in London, he’s not always been a stranger to Savile Row.
But if you ask anyone who traveled with John, they’ll tell you this: On flights, he subsisted almost entirely on Oreos – (laughter) – so much so that the Air Force crew started hiding their stash of Oreos. (Laughter.) He covered nearly every one of those million and a half miles with the same battered Orvis suitcase that he’d had since his early Senate days, which he insisted on carrying himself, with the duct-taped handle and all.
For all this remarkable diplomatic work, for all the feats that he pulled off as Secretary, what’s equally inspiring, maybe more inspiring, is an enduring willingness to throw himself into causes that he believed in. Even when the odds were long. Even when it seemed impossible.
And to me, what was so inspiring, what remains inspiring to this day, was that John always preferred to get caught trying. For in his eyes, the worst thing is never trying and coming up short – it’s not trying at all. And that philosophy is important, because, like all of us, John has also endured his share of setbacks.
He lost battles to get Congress to adopt climate legislation, ratify the Disability Rights Treaty. He lost a very close presidential election. He saw a successor administration pull out of Paris. The Iran Deal. To name a few.
But what’s so powerful about John’s story is that there’s never any wallowing in setbacks. There’s no holding of a grudge. There’s no abandoning public service. As his friend and colleague Wendy Sherman put it: John doesn’t do animus. He took a beat. He reflected on how we might do things differently. And then he dusted himself off and got right back into the fight.
That’s also the story of our country, of our nation. As John wrote in his book, “America makes itself stronger when, despite long odds, despite searing setbacks, everyday citizens stand up and decide the way things are isn’t necessarily the way they have to be.” And I think if we look back at America’s trajectory, it’s easy to assume that our progress was foreordained. And yet, the individuals who have led our nation and led our nation out of its darkest moments, never did that knowing in advance that they would succeed.
That’s the story of Valley Forge. That’s the story of Normandy. That’s the story of Selma. Of Stonewall. Of the moon shot. Of John’s 2004 Boston Red Sox. (Laughter.)
Teddy Roosevelt famously spoke of the man in the arena. “Whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming … who spends himself in a worthy cause … who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
That is John Kerry. That’s how he’s lived his entire life in the arena.
We live in a town where people often measure success in these four-year increments. That’s the wrong metric – especially when it comes to this ongoing experiment that is our great democracy.
So if we take one lesson from John’s extraordinary life, from his extraordinary career, it’s that this struggle that we’re all embarked in, this struggle to form a more perfect union, is the work not just of years or administrations, but of lifetimes and generations.
It demands that each of us step into the arena – even, perhaps especially, when we don’t know if we’ll succeed. To get caught trying.
That’s the only way we’re going to continue to deliver on the promise of our nation – for the American people, for people around the world.
And again, my friends, my colleagues, that is the man that I have the honor and pleasure to introduce to you – the 68th Secretary of State of the United States, John Forbes Kerry. (Applause.)
SECRETARY KERRY: All I can say is wow. That’s a remarkable introduction. Unfortunately, every word of it was true, except for a few things I have to correct very quickly. The speech to the assembled foreign ministers in Paris about the Syria affair was highly post-operative narcotic-induced. (Laughter.) And so we all have to put that in its right place. (Laughter.)
Secondly, the Tora Bora – (laughter) – a guy named Joe Biden was sitting on a seat going forward in the chopper, and the general was sitting there with maps on his thing giving him a briefing. And Chuck Hagel and I had sort of heard the briefing, and we were looking at each other, and we started down in this massive down, and the head lost track of the other helicopter. And someone – I don’t know whether it was Chuck or me who said it – but somebody remarked, “Hey, the three senators ought to just give a speech and keep us airborne.” (Laughter.)
So – but Tony, that – honestly, that was just an extraordinary introduction, extremely thoughtful and generous, and obviously somewhat mischievous, but welcomed in the spirit of our friendship and of all of our experiences. And as I look out at this group, I just got to thank you all. There are folks here from so many different layers of that journey that you heard described. And I’ve been warned if I start singling out a face and mentioning a name, I am in serious trouble because I can’t do it for everybody here.
So please suffice it to say to all of you that I am just deeply grateful, very, very touched by your presence here today. So many tiers and different chapters of that journey that was described by the Secretary.
I want you all to know that history will always remember the two of us as the greatest guitar-playing duo in the history of this building – (laughter) – assuming that Dean Acheson didn’t secretly have a Fender Stratocaster or something. I don’t know. (Laughter.)
But I’m grateful for all of you making the effort to be here. I also sensed beforehand as I was coming over here there’s got to be some poetic justice that so many veterans of the Obama administration and the Biden administration are all assembled here on the first day of a post-Assad-free Syria, and we should celebrate that. (Applause.)
And many miles and many meetings were chewed up, many hours in the Situation Room. And I won’t go into them now, but I’ll just say that that was hard fought over and now we have an enormous opportunity, which Tony allowed me to sort of have a discussion with him about a little earlier.
I want to let you know that during the Obama years, a lot of people weren’t aware of this, but Tony and I really enjoyed a terrific working relationship during that period of time. And I greatly appreciated the work he was doing as deputy national security advisor. I was really flattered when I heard that he was interested in coming over here as deputy secretary, and then I realized his plan actually had a lot more to do with working in the same building as a very talented assistant secretary for ECA Evan Ryan. (Laughter.) And we all know where that led, the history. But that’s an example of Tony – strategic to the core. (Laughter.)
Evan, thanks for coming over. Is Evan somewhere here? Thanks for coming home today. You’re one name I do mention, and I appreciate everything that you have done for the department and for all of us.
I have to tell you that in my last job as presidential envoy I often thought that Tony must have wondered just how long John Kerry was going to keep hanging around the State Department. (Laughter.) And now with this portrait he still can’t shake me. (Laughter.) But honestly, Tony could not have been more supportive, more welcoming, more solicitous, more empowering, and I’m so grateful for the partnership that he gave me in that.
When I was privileged to serve as secretary, I always believed that a diplomat’s job was to try to calm things down, to try to find the better angels of our God-given gifts, to be able to find a way forward, to avoid violence, and to try to find the path to peace and to make certain that war is genuinely a last resort above all, and any cause worthwhile for our country. And it’s important, needless to say, to get caught trying, as has been quoted a number of times.
The world that President Biden and Secretary Blinken were presented has been as complicated as it gets, moving faster with technology, with transformation, with so many different ingredients and difficulties that you see in almost every government around the world. And I admire Tony Blinken’s unbelievably visible determination as he traveled the world and in order to be caught trying. In a world that is so transformational as it is today, it’s hard to find the center that is so critical to organizing ourselves in order to do better things.
So Tony, I genuinely look forward to the day when your portrait is hanging on a wall near mine. Because in a world that does move faster day to day, everyone here understands you have done an extraordinary job of fighting for people all over the globe to have peace, to have dignity, to live better, to push back the specter of overt aggression, and you’ve put your heart and your passion into trying to resolve conflict, and that is truly what diplomacy is all about. So I think everybody here wants to join me in saying a profound thank you to you and Evan for the incredible work you’ve both done. Very good. (Applause.)
From number 68 to number 71, as we’ve come to be known out here – mere numbers – I am really excited by what he has done. And the spirit of teamwork, of course, is what defines this building and the relationships that we all build when we’re in this building and privileged to be in this building. It’s really easy for people to drive by on Constitution Avenue or C Street or wherever it is, and most people have never had a glimpse of all the things that happen here. They’ve never had a glimpse of the thousands of people who, every single day, empower the secretary of state and the president to be able to advance our interests.
And I was blessed to experience the best of that as secretary – to see the everyday extraordinary character; the loyal men and women of the Civil Service, the Foreign Service, the tandem couples, the S/EX; the patient people who made possible the audibles that I would call and suddenly pull together a trip that was never planned; the line, the ops center. Boy, did I drive them nuts a few times. (Laughter.) Protocol, the consular officers who touched so many lives directly and are so important to our mission around the world; USAID, MED, the Marines, the Diplomatic Security who keep us safe on trips and work extraordinary hours – all of whom make up the core of America’s extraordinary diplomatic team. All of this forming the incredible mosaic that is the home of diplomacy, which I wish all people in this city and in all branches of government would be more sensitive and thoughtful about.
It’s also special to be here in this unbelievable room surrounded by the treasures that decorate it, letters penned by Franklin’s hand, the architect’s table on which our first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, drafted the blueprints of democracy, the antique silver shaped by a near neighbor of John Adams’, Paul Revere. And it reminds you that these founding statesmen – statespeople – did not know if their experiment would succeed, as we know from the famous words of Ben Franklin who walked out of Constitution Hall and asked, “What do we have, a monarchy or a republic?” And he answered succinctly, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
It reminds you that these founding statespeople did not know if their experiment was going to succeed, and we – all of our generations – have a responsibility to try to answer that question. They were unfailingly willing to get caught trying. Think about riding a horse from Braintree, Massachusetts, Quincy, all the way down to Philadelphia in the dead of winter to begin that work.
Ultimately, it was their creativity and their courage, their persistence, their confidence about the possibilities of the future that left the world vastly different and far better than they found it. And I know looking at the faces here that is what has brought every single one of you to public service.
Ultimately, their creativity and their courage, their persistence, did break through. That is what you do, my friends. That is what we do together. And that’s the work that continues here today and must continue into the future to keep the promise of our democracy for all of the world – in the quiet corners of the globe where people aspire to be what we are: to be free and to shape their own futures.
It’s no secret that my experience in war shaped my understanding of the human costs of failed diplomacy, and the rest – the cost of conflict itself. But you don’t have to fight in a war or fight to stop a war in order to know that it is always worth get caught trying – trying to find the road to peace and avoid sending the young of any country into the slaughterhouse of those battlefields.
That is the most fundamental mission of this indispensable institution: to prevent wars, to rid us of nuclear threats; to help people help themselves; to protect children, to strike out against injustice; to stand up for our planet and the health of future generations from the climate crisis to the oceans; to help young girls pursue education in places they can’t achieve it; to invite people to embrace the values that have always inspired us. And at our best, that is what the Department of State can do.
Some of you may have heard me say that while we know and we are proud – and we are – that America is exceptional, but it’s not just because we say we are. We need to do more than that, not less. And we don’t need to always beat our own chests and brag on ourselves. Humility is a strength when we work with nations that we have long wanted to be strong and be independent.
Three of our founders – Franklin, Jefferson, and John Adams, whose effects are preserved here at the State Department – were charged on July 4th, 1776, by the Continental Congress. They were charged with devising an emblem for our newly minted nation. Six years later our nation adopted the Great Seal, and ever since then it has been in the custody of the Department of State. It literally watches over us today, guarding us from above right there in the ceiling. That is the seal. And it was Harry Truman who turned the eagle’s head away from the arrows of war and towards the olive branches that are firmly gripped in one of the claws. It was powerfully symbolic, folks. Truman wanted the shift in the eagle’s gaze to be aspirational. He wanted it to be America on the march, but America committed to peace.
And so carry on, my friends. And we are all lucky that you will.
Now, we came here to do something manifestly manageable: to unveil a portrait. (Laughter.) It’s been said that being president of the United States is the toughest job in the world. I wouldn’t know. (Laughter.) But the person with the single most difficult task in 2024 was a man named Steve Polson. He had to paint my portrait. (Laughter.) And this afternoon we get to honor Steve for generously taking on this mission, and I am truly very grateful to him for his talent, which you will see; his patience, which you have to take my word for; and even afterwards, for his friendship.
By the way, in getting to know him I concluded he must be a pretty religious guy, because when he finished trying to capture me on the canvas, I kept hearing him say, “May God forgive me.” (Laughter.) So we wait and see what you see here. (Laughter.) And Jasmine, his wife, was just a terrific cohort along this journey. It was a pleasure to go through the process with you, Steve, and I admire your steady and talented hand.
Just very quickly, I want to especially thank a group of people who made this day and this celebration possible. That starts, of course, with the president of the United States who gave me this opportunity of a lifetime and who trusted me to take risks and represent him all over the world, knowing that it was his name, and not mine, on the line every time we touched down anywhere.
So a profound thank you to a man I admire greatly, President Barack Obama. Thank you.
And I’m also forever grateful and inspired by the former vice president, his former vice president, my friend of 40 years who gave me the chance to serve again and did so in a way that was quite unexpected and really remarkably supported, and he is – I think you all know and we’ve seen it in the last months – a genuine leader who in foreign policy and domestically, the things we’ve done, Americans should be very grateful for President Joe Biden. (Applause.)
And there are people – there are people here in addition to Steve without whom we wouldn’t be able to unveil the portrait, and I want to just quickly mention that anybody who served as secretary knows, or even around the secretary on the line or in ops knows, how critical it is to have a great chief of staff in the functioning of this department, and someone who served Madeleine Albright and Tony with equal distinction and played a big role in bringing all of you here and making this event possible, and I want to thank Suzy George for her loyal service. Where is she? (Applause.)
And I have – just very quickly permit me, not related to this event except that they helped get me here, but I want to thank an extraordinary chief of staff of the department, David Wade and Jon Finer, together whom did enormous work. (Applause.) And of course Kitty DiMartino, who was chief of staff, for all of our climate efforts, and I thank her also for what we did. (Applause.)
Lastly, permit me to introduce the members of the family who are here. My daughter Alexandra is in California with the kids. They were just east for Thanksgiving. And – but here is Vanessa, whom some of you remember much younger, but Vanessa – (laughter) – and Brian. Vanessa, who has an extraordinary program she runs on a global basis for health and has been appointed by the WHO to be the global climate health envoy. I’m very proud of her and her husband, Brian Nahed, who’s a brilliant brain surgeon at Mass General, and their two children, Alexander, a rising soccer player – (laughter) – and Livia, a rising everything. (Laughter and applause.) And Teresa sends you her very, very best and hug and love and hope for a great holiday season to everybody.
So the unveiling that is about to take place really comes kind of full circle. You heard Tony talk about my dad and actually talk about my adventure in East Germany, for which my passport was yanked and I was grounded. But my dad was toiling anonymously in the salt mines of the State Department, and I was back in Boston rummaging through old stuff just the other day, and I found the first image that the State Department ever preserved of me. And that was my first diplomatic passport, which I mentioned when I first walked into this building, number 2927. Obviously there weren’t a lot of people around then.
But if you open it up, there’s a picture of an 11-year-old squirt smirking at the camera. And in the description it says Height: 4’3” and Hair: Brown. So as you’re about to see in this unveiling, the only thing that has changed is my height. (Laughter.) Fifty-seven years later, I was honored to enter the Harry Truman Building as secretary of state of the United States, and now 11 years later I’ve got news for you: With this portrait, I will really never leave. (Laughter.)
Thank you for sharing this. (Applause.) Thank you.
