Questionnaire For National Security Positions - U.S. Marshals Service: Fill & Download for Free

Here are some concise highlights I have found on Wikipedia,Trump was reported to have requested the top-secret security clearance for him to attend the presidential daily intelligence briefings as his staff-level companion,Kushner was reportedly an influential factor behind the firing of New Jersey governor Chris Christie as head of the transition team, as well as the dismissal from the Donald Trump transition team of anyone connected to Christie.An anonymous source familiar with the transition told Politico, "Jared doesn't like Christie... He's always held [the prosecution of his father] against Christie."Kushner told Forbes that the reports that he was involved in Christie's dismissal were false: "Six months ago, Governor Christie and I decided this election was much bigger than any differences we may have had in the past, and we worked very well together... I was not behind pushing out him or his people."Senior Advisor to the PresidentOn January 9, 2017, Kushner was named Senior Advisor to the President](formally, "Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor"He consequently resigned as CEO of Kushner Companies, and as publisher of the Observer.Kushner's appointment was questioned on the basis of a 1967 anti-nepotism law.On January 20, 2017, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating, "The President may appoint relatives to his immediate staff of advisors."Kushner was sworn in on January 22, 2017.Kushner operated on a temporary security clearance for more than a year with access to classified information, until he was granted permanent access in May 2018On February 27, 2018, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly downgraded Kushner's interim security clearance to "secret" status, along with other White House staffers working with interim security clearancesHe worked in the White House based on an interim security clearanceuntil May 2018, when he passed a comprehensive background investigation.The New York Times reported in February 2019 that in May 2018 Trump ordered Kelly to grant Kushner a top-secret clearance, which Kelly contemporaneously documented in an internal memo. Trump had asserted in January 2019 that he had no role in directing officials to grant Kushner the clearance.Kushner's office is physically the closest to the Oval Office.Furthermore, after Donald Trump became President-elect, Kushner and his wife met with Japanese Prime Minister and other Japanese officials, while his wife was conducting a licensing deal between her namesake clothing brand and a Japanese government-owned company.His wife sat in on a meeting between her father, then-president-elect Donald Trump, and Japan's prime minister, Shinzō Abe.Kushner with President Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in March 2017In late March 2017, Jared Kushner was also given the new role of leading the "White House Office of American Innovation",where Kushner reportedly has been focusing on improving governmental efforts with regard to Veterans Affairs, information-technology contracting, and the opioid crisis.Kushner was involved in the sale of $100+ billion of arms to Saudi Arabia, and during a meeting with Saudi officials at the White House, he called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson to ask for a lower price on a radar system to detect ballistic missiles.Kushner's business activities in China have drawn scrutiny for mixing government with business.Kushner's investments in real estate and financial services have also drawn controversy for conflicts of interest.In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that he had failed to disclose all required financial information in his security clearance applications, including that he owes $1 billion in loansDuring 2017, Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump made $82 million in outside income at the same time that they served as senior White House adviser's.In March 2020, the Associated Press reported that Kushner had sold stakes in a firm that had benefited from the same Opportunity Zone tax breaks that Kushner pushed for as a senior White House adviser.Abbe Lowell, the lawyer of Kushner, in a statement admitted that Kushner used private e-mail for official White House business. No classified or privileged information was used on this account. Kushner's father-in-law repeatedly criticized his opponent Hillary Clinton for her personal e-mail usage in her role as Secretary of State.In an HBO/Axios interview released in June 2019, Kushner denied that President Trump was a racist. When asked whether birther conspiracy theories about President Obama (which Trump pushed extensively for a number of years) were racist, Kushner did not answer, saying instead twice, "Look, I wasn’t really involved in that."In the interview, Kushner spoke about how great the United States was for accepting his grandparents as refugees, "It's a great reminder of how great this country is."In the same interview, he defended the Trump administration's decision to drastically reduce the number of refugees accepted by the United States (the lowest level in 40 years).Russia investigationKushner's contacts with Russian officials have come under scrutiny as part of the larger federal investigation into Russian interference in the election.Kushner has said he had four meetings with Russians during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition, and that none of those Russian contacts were improperIn June 2016, an agent of Emin Agalarov reportedly offered Donald Trump Jr., Kushner's brother-in-law, compromising information on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government if he met with a lawyer connected to the Kremlin.A meeting took place on June 9, 2016, and included Kushner, Trump Jr., and Paul Manafort, who was then chairman of the presidential campaign, who met with Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower.According to Rinat Akhmetshin, who was also present at the meeting, Veselnitskaya claimed to have evidence of "violations of Russian law by a Democratic donor", and that the "Russian lawyer described her findings at the meeting and left a document about them with Trump Jr. and the others".The Democratic National Committee cyber attacks were revealed later that week.Between April and November 2016, Kushner had two undisclosed phone calls with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak.(In May 2017, Kushner's attorney Jamie Gorelick told Reuters that Kushner had participated in "thousands of calls in this time period" and did not recall any with Kislyak.In December 2016, Kushner met with Kislyak.That month, U.S. intelligence officials who were monitoring Kislyak reportedly overheard him relaying to Moscow a request from Kushner to establish a "secret and secure communications channel" with the Kremlin using Russian diplomatic facilities. Kislyak reportedly was "taken aback by the suggestion of allowing an American to use Russian communications gear at its embassy or consulate – a proposal that would have carried security risks for Moscow as well as the Trump team".Also in December 2016, Kushner met with Sergey N. Gorkov, a trained Russian spy who then headed Vnesheconombank (VEB), a Russian state-owned bank.Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that Kushner met with Gorkov briefly as part of his role in the transition, and as a diplomatic conduit to the State Department.However, VEB has stated that Gorkov met with Kushner on a private matter concerning his family's real estate corporation, Kushner Companies, even though VEB has been under international sanctions since July 2014.In July 2017, Kushner appeared before both the House and Senate intelligence committees in closed session as part of their investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.He also released a public statement.In October 2017 the Senate Judiciary Committee requested numerous documents from Kushner. Kushner's attorneys gave the committee many documents on November 3, but the committee followed up on November 16 with a request for many additional documents it said had not been produced.In early November 2017, Kushner was interviewed by investigators from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office. Reportedly the interview focused on former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.On December 1, Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, as part of a plea bargain. Bloomberg reported that Kushner is most likely the "senior member of the Trump transition team," mentioned in Flynn's plea documents, who is said to have ordered Flynn to contact Russia.President Trump, joined by Kushner and Netanyahu behind, signs the proclamation recognizing Israel's 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, March 2019Mueller is investigating meetings between Trump associates including Kushner and George Nader, an emissary representing the crown princes of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. In August 2016, Nader offered help to the Trump presidential campaign.In December 2016, Nader attended a New York meeting between the United Arab Emirates officials and Kushner, Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon.Mueller is also investigating Kushner's possible ties to Qatar, Israel and China.The transcript of Kushner's interview with FBI investigators was not publicly released in January 2020 as ordered by a federal judge, as the Justice Department stated it required a security review by an unnamed intelligence agency.The transcript was released on February 3, redacted nearly in its entirety.Kushner and Gen. Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Iraqi Defence Minister Erfan al-Hiyali in Baghdad on April 3, 2017On January 18, 2017, Kushner requested Top Secret security clearance,using "Standard Form 86 (SF86): Questionnaire for National Security Positions"The request omitted dozens of pertinent contacts with foreign officials, including the meetings with Kislyak and Gorkov.Failure to disclose pertinent contacts can cause security clearances to be declined or revoked, and an intentional failure to disclose can result in imprisonment.Kushner's lawyers said that the omissions were "an oversight", and that "a member of [Kushner's] staff had prematurely hit the 'send' button" before the form was completed.By July 2017, Kushner had resubmitted his SF86, this time disclosing contacts with foreign nationals.This was the first time that government officials were made aware of the June 2016 Trump campaign–Russian meeting and Kushner's role in it.On September 15, 2017, Carl Kline, the director of the personnel security office within the Executive Office of President Trump, recorded Kushner as having an interim Top Secret/SCI security clearance.Kushner and his wife were among at least 48 officials granted interim clearance giving them access to sensitive compartmented information (SCI): detailed accounts of intelligence sources and methodsIn February 2018, all White House staff holding interim Top Secret/SCI security clearances, including Kushner, were downgraded to Secret clearances, and Trump said that he would not intervene to grant Kushner a permanent security clearance.That day, White House sources said that part of the reason Kushner had not yet been granted permanent security clearance was that he was under investigation by Mueller.On May 23, 2018, Kushner received permanent Top Secret security clearanceIn January 2019, Trump told the New York Times that he had not intervened to grant Kushner's security clearancesOn February 8, 2019, Kushner's wife Ivanka also denied that Trump had intervened to grant her or Kushner's security clearancesHowever, on February 28, 2019, CNN (citing three anonymous sources) and The New York Times (citing four anonymous sources) reported that Trump had intervened to order the granting of those clearancesReportedly, this is the first time a U.S. President has intervened in such a way.Middle East peace planTrump put Kushner in charge of brokering peace in Israeli–Palestinian conflict, despite the fact that Kushner has no foreign experience or experience in the Middle EastOn August 24, 2017, Kushner traveled to Israel to talk to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu(with whom Kushner has longstanding personal links and family ties, causing Palestinians to distrust him). He then traveled to Palestine to meet President Mahmoud Abbas in an attempt to restart a peace process in the Middle East.Donald Trump formally unveiled a plan authored by Kushner in a White House press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 28, 2020; Palestinian representatives were not invited.In an interview, Kushner said he had "been studying this now for three years", and that he had "read 25 books on it, I've spoken to every leader in the region, I've spoken to everyone who's been involved in this."The plan has been characterized as requiring too few concessions from the Israelis and imposing too harsh requirements on the Palestinians.Both the West Bank settlers' Yesha Council and the Palestinian leadership rejected the plan: the former because it envisaged a Palestinian state, the latter arguing it is too biased in favor of Israel.Coronavirus outbreakAmid the coronavirus pandemic, Kushner was one of many "power centers with their own fiefdoms" within the White House who sought to influence President Trump's actionsEarly on during outbreak, Kushner advised Trump that the media was exaggerating the dangers of the coronavirus outbreak.Kushner helped write the Oval Office address that President Trump gave to the nation on 11 March 2020, along with Trump's far-right advisor Stephen Miller.The Washington Post wrote that the address that Kushner, who had "zero expertise in infectious diseases and little experience marshaling the full bureaucracy behind a cause", helped write was "widely panned".During the address, Trump inaccurately said "all travel from Europe" would be prohibited, and that the travel prohibitions would apply to goods.The speech caused markets to plunge, as White House aides had to clarify what the actual policy was. European leaders said they were blindsided by the address.The speech set off panic among Americans abroad who had to scramble to learn whether they could return back to the United States and under what circumstances; this created chaos at airports in Europe and the United States.In the address, Trump blamed Europeans and the Chinese for the virus, described the virus as a "foreign virus".Kushner also helped put together a 13 March Rose Garden event where Trump falsely claimed that Google was "quickly developing" a website that could help test people for coronavirus.Trump also overstated a project intended to set up testing sites across parking lots across the United States, taking the state and federal health care workers who oversee the project by surprise.The New York Times reported that one way that Kushner was seeking advice on how to deal with the coronavirus outbreak was to ask his brother's father-in-law, a physician, for recommendations. The physician then proceeded to crowd-source advice on a Facebook group for physicians.As you can see, he’s a despicable wanna-be, a narcissist almost on Donny’s scale and an individual who has used his “office” for immense personal gain for him and Ivanka.

Q. Which Secretary of State Office has the highest Google reviews rating in the US?A. Not a Google reviews rating.The Harry S. Truman Building located at 2201 C Street, NW in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It is the headquarters of the United States Department of State.The Ten Best Secretaries Of State (to 1981)Best US Secretaries of State (ranker.com)The post-Cold War secretaries of state, rankedWas Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State? (Polotico.com)Rescuing George Shultz, the Best Secretary of State You’ve Never Heard OfThe Ten Best Secretaries Of State… The EditorsDecember 1981 Volume 33 Issue 1When the first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, took office in 1790, his entire staff consisted of just six people, including himself and a part-time translator. The current Secretary presides over almost fifteen thousand employees scattered around the globe. During the intervening years, of course, the challenges facing Jefferson’s successors have changed dramatically as the infant republic has grown into a world power.David L. Porter, associate professor of history at William Penn College in Oskaloosa, Iowa sent questionnaires to fifty of the nation’s leading diplomatic historians, asking each to nominate his candidates for the ten best—and five worst- Secretaries of State. All fifty-six secretaries from Jefferson to Edmund Muskie were eligible. Each nominee was to be assessed solely on his record in that office. Among the suggested criteria: success in defining and achieving his diplomatic goals; political and moral leadership he exerted on foreign affairs; impact of his actions on the course of American history. More than half the historians responded.1. John Quincy Adams, who served (1817-25) under President James Monroe, was the first choice of over 80 per cent of the respondents. Stern, cerebral, conscientious, and articulate, he negotiated the acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1819 and collaborated with the President in formulating the Monroe Doctrine.John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States.2. William H. Seward served (1861-69) Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. He helped keep France and Britain from recognizing the Confederacy during the Civil War, persuaded France to withdraw her troops from Mexico after that war ended, and successfully engineered the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.William H. Seward, 24th United States Secretary of State3. Hamilton Fish served (1869-77) President Ulysses S. Grant. Calm, judicious, and untainted by the corruption that permeated the Grant administration, he helped settle the thorny Alabama Claims controversy with Britain in 1871, directed negotiations that settled American claims against Spain, and signed a commercial reciprocity treaty with Hawaii in 1875, helping to pave the way for later annexation.Hamilton Fish, 26th United States Secretary of State4. Charles Evans Hughes served (1921-25) Presidents Harding and Coolidge. He presided over the Washington Conference for Limitation of Armament (1921-22) that froze for a decade naval armament among the United States, Britain, and France, and he brought about the 1922 Nine Power Treaty, which called upon its signatories to maintain an Open Door policy toward China and respect her independence.Charles Evans Hughes,11th Chief Justice of the United States, 44th United States Secretary of State5. George Marshall served (1947-49) President Harry Truman. The first professional soldier ever to become Secretary—and the man who held the post for the shortest time among the top ten—he helped establish the postwar policy of containment. He promulgated the Truman Doctrine that provided military aid for Greece and Turkey, developed the Marshall Plan for rebuilding postwar Europe, and helped foster the Organization of American States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.George Marshall, 50th United States Secretary of State, 3rd United States Secretary of Defense6. Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor, also served (1949-53) President Truman. He helped create NATO, brought West Germany into the European defense system, and implemented a policy of armed intervention in Korea.Dean Acheson, 51st United States Secretary of State7. Henry Kissinger, our only foreign-born Secretary of State, served (1973-77) under Presidents Nixon and Ford. After four enormously influential years as Nixon’s special adviser on national security affairs, he sought, as Secretary, to relax tensions and promote trade with China and the Soviet Union and pioneered the art of “shuttle diplomacy,” traveling 560,000 miles in search of peace.Henry Kissinger, 56th United States Secretary of State8. Daniel Webster, one of only two Secretaries of State to hold non-consecutive terms, served under three Presidents: William Henry Harrison and John Tyler (1841-43) and Millard Fillmore (1850-52). He negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, averting war with Britain over Maine’s boundary, and asserted America’s right to recognize republican Hungary and other popular governments in Europe.Daniel Webster, 14th and 19th United States Secretary of State9. Thomas Jefferson served (1790-93) President George Washington. As our first Secretary of State he established a host of diplomatic and administrative precedents and, when war broke out between France and Britain in 1793, subsumed his own sympathy for the French Revolution to successfully administer a policy of strict neutrality.Thomas Jefferson, 3rd president of the United States, 2nd vice president of the United States, 1st United States Secretary of State10. John Hay (1898-1905) Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt. An expansionist, he urged annexation of the Philippines, called for an Open Door policy toward China, helped prevent partition of that country after the Boxer Rebellion, and negotiated the 1903 treaty with Panama granting the Canal Zone to the United States.John Hay, 37th United States Secretary of StateHoliday Room US State DepartmentBest US Secretaries of State (ranker.com)Left out Alexander Haig (1971–1982), George P. Shultz (1982–1989), James Baker (1989–1992), Lawrence Eagleburger (1992–1993),Warren Christopher (1993–1997), Madeleine Albright (1997–2001), Colin Powell (2001–2005), Condoleezza Rice (2005–2009), Hillary Clinton (2009–2013), John Kerry (2013–2016), and Rex Tillerson (2016-present).The post-Cold War secretaries of state, rankedFrom left, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton attend the reception before the groundbreaking ceremony for the U.S. Diplomacy Center at the State Department in Washington in 2014. (Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency)Daniel W. Drezner July 27, 2016Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.In considering foreign policy, the external environment matters a lot. So does the degree of interest and control that a president exercises over American foreign policy. To use an example, James Baker is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest secretaries of state of all time. His diplomacy helped ensure a peaceful end to the Cold War and a unified, multilateral coalition for the first Gulf War. But Baker had the wind at his back: a fading Soviet Union and a president who was keenly interested and engaged in international relations. Baker deserves credit, but not all the credit, if you know what I mean.So, with that in mind, here’s my ranking, from worst to first, of the six post-Cold War secretaries of state. I will preface this by saying that Baker towers over this lot, but I’m not including him in the post-Cold War set. Indeed, the Cold War secretaries of state (George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk and George P. Shultz) are on average of a much higher caliber than the ones discussed below.6) Warren Christopher. The “Cars 2” of the post-1992 secretaries of state, “Chris” got a bad beat. His president did not care a flying fig about foreign policy for at least the first two years of his presidency, and Christopher felt constrained by that fact. Nonetheless, Christopher’s preternatural caution generally let bad situations (Somalia, Bosnia) deteriorate on his watch. There isn’t a single account of the Bill Clinton administration’s foreign policy record in which Christopher comes out looking good — and that includes his own memoirs. Given the favorable geopolitical situation the United States inherited when he took office, it’s a lackluster performance.Warren Christopher, 63rd United States Secretary of State5) Colin Powell. Powell was badly hamstrung by the lack of trust between him and President George W. Bush. Bush overruled Powell on diplomacy with North Korea in March 2001, and things went downhill from there. Powell’s constant bureaucratic battles with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld proved problematic for his tenure, as it kept him in Washington when he needed to try to make America’s case to allies and partners. The biggest mistakes of Bush’s first term were not Powell’s, but he failed to stop most of these catastrophes, and his performance did little to compensate for them.Colin Powell, 65th United States Secretary of State4) John Kerry. This ranking is probably unfair — he still has six months left, and history will offer a better perspective. Kerry gets major points for the Iran deal, a significant feat of diplomacy that was more him than President Obama. The Paris climate change agreement is also significant. The problem comes with trying to list things after that. It is to Kerry’s credit that he has invested in tough tasks, like Iran or an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. It is to Kerry’s debit that some of those investments did not pay off. The opportunity cost of them is Kerry looking flat-footed and underinvested in other trouble-spots, such as Eastern Europe.John Kerry, 68th United States Secretary of State, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee3) Madeleine Albright. The first female secretary of state, Albright benefited greatly from a president who was more comfortable and more engaged in international relations than he was in his first term. But Albright was also willing to take more risks than Christopher, a trait that paid off in the case of Kosovo. The biggest criticism of Albright would be her absence from the most significant foreign policy crisis of Clinton’s second term — the Asian financial crisis.Madeleine Albright, 64th United States Secretary of State2) Condoleezza Rice. Well, this will be the second-most controversial ranking. Rice’s disastrous tenure as national security adviser will color most people’s perceptions of her time at Foggy Bottom. The parlous state of American foreign affairs in January 2009 will also lead many to pooh-pooh Rice’s performance as secretary of state. But it requires some willful amnesia to forget the situation that Rice inherited when she took the job, and the skillful ways in which she was able to outmaneuver Rumsfeld and Cheney. Her close relationship with the president allowed Rice to pivot American foreign policy away from the excesses of Bush’s first term to something akin to competency in her second term. It was a thankless task, and Rice’s legacy will always be tarnished by her NSC stint. Nevertheless, she did a good job in a tough time.Condoleezza Rice, 66th United States Secretary of State1) Hillary Clinton. Here’s the dirty little secret of trying to evaluate Clinton’s record as secretary of state: The Obama White House centralized foreign policy control almost as much as Richard Nixon. Which means that it’s tough to credit or blame Clinton for what happened during her four years in office. Nonetheless, she played a significant role in restoring America’s standing abroad. She was nimble in handling some thorny diplomatic kerfuffles with China (Google “Wang Lijun” or “Chen Guangcheng” to see what I mean). She helped put together formidable economic sanctions against Iran. Even on Libya, Clinton deserves credit for her ability to get NATO, the Arab League and the U.N. Security Council to endorse action; the post-Libya fiasco has less to do with Clinton and more to do with her boss. And one can argue that the Paris climate change accord only happened because of Clinton and Obama’s actions in Copenhagen.In a decade, this ranking might change, particularly for Kerry. And ranking Clinton as the best of the lot means saying that she was the best of a mediocre group, all of whom would fall below the Cold War list of names mentioned above. But it is interesting to note that the ladies on this list outperformed the men.Hillary Clinton, 67th United States Secretary of State, United States Senatorfrom New YorkWas Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State? (Polotico.com)Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton was being lauded as an exemplary secretary of state. After four years and nearly a million miles logged as America’s top diplomat, she stepped down to a torrent of praise. “The most consequential secretary of state since Dean Acheson,” enthused Google’s Eric Schmidt. “Stellar,” pronounced Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson. Even Republican Sen. John McCain, while criticizing her response to the killing of U.S. officials in Benghazi, went out of his way to compliment her “ outstanding” State Department tenure.That was then.When the Atlantic published an admiring 10,000-word profile of Secretary of State John Kerry the other day, the surprise was not so much that the author, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Rohde, found himself impressed by the headlong diplomatic forays of the peripatetic Kerry, but the downbeat assessment of Kerry’s much more reserved predecessor. The headline? “How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton.” A few days later, the New York Times chimed in with an article on the “tough comparisons with Kerry” Clinton is now facing, summing up the debate as one over whether she was anything more than a “pantsuit-wearing globe-trotter” in her years as secretary.All of which yields the question: Was Hillary Clinton in fact a good secretary of state, and will her record as a diplomat matter if, as expected, she runs for president in 2016?As Bill Clinton might have said, it depends on what the meaning of good is. Certainly, even many of her most ardent defenders recognize Hillary Clinton had no signal accomplishment at the State Department to her name, no indelible peace sealed with her handshake, no war averted, no nuclear crisis defused. There are few Eric Schmidts out there still willing to make the case for her as an enormously consequential figure in the history of Foggy Bottom.Where the debate tends to rage is over why that is so, especially now that Kerry is taking on diplomatic challenges that Clinton either couldn’t or wouldn’t—from negotiating a potentially historic nuclear deal with Iran to seeking a revived Mideast peace process—and political rivals in both parties return to thinking of Clinton in the hypercharged American political context and not so much as the tireless, Blackberry-wielding face of global glad-handing.I asked an array of smart foreign policy thinkers in both parties to weigh in, and they pretty much all agreed that Clinton was both more cautious and more constrained than Kerry. Their argument is over whether and to what extent that was a consequence of Clinton herself, the limits placed on her by a suspicious and eager-to-make-its-mark first-term White House, or simply it being a very different moment in world politics.Here’s Aaron David Miller, who negotiated Middle East peace for five presidents and is now a scholar at the Wilson Center, making the case for cautious Clinton: “Hillary was risk-averse; Kerry isn’t. He’s risk-ready.” Of course, Miller argues, 2016 politics “explains partly why she didn’t own a single issue of consequence.” The other reason is President Obama himself, “the most controlling foreign policy president since Nixon.” Miller’s bottom line: “She was a fine sec state but not consequential.” As for 2016, “It won’t hurt her other than the Republican obsession with Benghazi, but it won’t help her that much either.”An array of foreign policy thinkers all agree that Clinton was a more cautious and more constrained secretary of state than Kerry. | ReutersWhat does that Republican take look like? For sure, there will be a focus on Benghazi, where the GOP has questioned whether Clinton and other administration officials were activist enough—and truthful enough—about responding to the attack in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, that led to the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other American personnel; a case summed up by the American Enterprise’s Institute’s Danielle Pletka as “unwillingness to take risks, unwillingness to lead, willingness to stab a lot of people in the back. And dead people.” Pletka’s broader view of Clinton’s record is a harsher version of what I hear from many Democrats: “the Washington consensus,” Pletka says, “is that she was enormously ineffective … [though] no one was quite sure whether she was ineffective because she wanted to avoid controversy or because she wasn’t trusted by the president to do anything.”Not quite so harsh is David Gordon, who ran the State Department’s storied policy-planning shop under George W. Bush. He calls Clinton “good not great” in the job, agrees that her “great weakness was avoiding serious diplomacy,” gives her plaudits for outlining the strategic “pivot” to Asia whose future is now uncertain, and attributes much to “her future political considerations”:It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for Clinton, the SecState role was substantially about positioning her to run for president, especially in terms of looking ‘tough’ on some of the big issues: Iran sanctions, reassuring Asian allies. … Not taking on the big diplomatic challenges made that toughness easier to maintain even as she devoted so much of her actual time in office to ‘soft’ issues like education, women’s empowerment, etc.As for the Democrats, Clinton’s advocates tend to come in several camps, which can be broadly summed up as The Timing Just Wasn’t Right group; the Blame the White Housers; and the Asia Pivot Was a Really Big Deal crowd (“her major accomplishment,” the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon told me, and “too often underappreciated”).Howard Berman, a strong Clinton backer who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee during her tenure, offered me a great example of the first line of reasoning: You don’t pick your moments, but deal with the world as you find it. “I don’t believe Secretary Clinton was constrained by future political considerations,” he wrote to me. “Let’s look at the issues Kerry is working on and it is clear that Clinton, for rather obvious reasons, couldn’t have replicated what he has done because those issues weren’t ripe then. … It’s about a different time.”Blaming the White House, of course, is a common theme in any critique of a foreign policy record, and that’s especially so when it comes to the question of Clinton’s dealings with the White House of the president she ran against in 2008. Throughout her tenure as secretary of state, Washington wondered over the extent of Clinton’s actual influence in foreign policy decision-making (“she’s really the principal implementer,” Obama adviser Denis McDonough told me, when I asked about the division of labor between Obama’s White House and Clinton’s State Department for a Foreign Policy article last year). And it was by all accounts Obama himself who was reluctant to take on some of the challenges, like Middle East peace talks or a more activist stance toward the civil war unfolding in Syria, that Clinton is now dinged for avoiding.That was the argument from Dennis Ross, and he is certainly well positioned to know: Ross worked as the top White House aide on Iran and the Middle East on Obama’s National Security Council before leaving last year. The new conventional wisdom on Politically Cautious Hillary is “misguided,” he says. “She was operating in a different world and with an administration at a different place.” And those White House realities very much shaped what she could and couldn’t do. To start, Ross notes, Clinton was “in a place where she felt the need to prove her loyalty to the president and demonstrate she was a member of the team,” and besides, Obama himself was very personally engaged in his various diplomatic initiatives. By later in Obama’s first term, deciding what to do about dumping America’s longtime ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt (she was wary) and whether to intervene more actively in Syria (she pushed to do so) became “issues where I think she was not in the same place as the president and was thus less able to shape what we did.”Timing, fate and the White House may have all conspired in it, but the truth is that Hillary Clinton never did find a way to turn Foggy Bottom into her ticket to history.Steve Sestanovich, a professor at Columbia University and veteran of Bill Clinton’s State Department, thinks the blame lies in part with another White House—George W. Bush’s. Hillary Clinton, Sestanovich concedes, “ was reluctant to over-invest in high-visibility initiatives that didn’t have much chance of success.” But, he says, that’s because “the top priority of the president—and hers too—was to deal with inherited difficulties and wind them down,” whether the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or restoring luster to an American global reputation tarred by the aggressive decade-long prosecution of its “war on terror.” Sestanovich adds: “It’s true that her record as secretary included few accomplishments if you mean by that peace agreements solving some big problem. If you measure her tenure by success in rebuilding America’s power position, it looks a lot better. She wasn’t just foisting better cookstoves on African women.”In some ways, though, that is exactly the argument I encountered from her most passionate defender among those I surveyed. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Clinton’s first policy-planning chief at the State Department and now head of the New America Foundation, is still an unwavering believer in the cookstoves and all of Clinton’s other untraditional causes, many of which focused on global advocacy for women and girls. “I continue to think that people will look back and see that she was the first secretary of state really to grasp the ways global politics and hence foreign policy have changed in the 21st century,” Slaughter says.Her case for Clinton, in fact, is explicitly about politics—and Clinton’s willingness to integrate them into the traditionally stodgy, big man-to-big man diplomacy long favored at the State Department (and arguably now being resurrected by Kerry). “Foreign policy has always been the furthest thing from retail politics; she brought them much closer together and institutionalized as much of her approach as possible in the very bones of the State Department. … Hillary took diplomacy directly to the people in ways that cannot produce a treaty or negotiated agreement, but that are essential to advancing America’s interests over the longer term,” Slaughter argues. “What she should be remembered for in a 2016 campaign is proving that she could represent the American people day in and day out in the long, hard slog of regular politics, in between the rare shining moments of success. She was and is beloved around the world, as an inspiration, as an example of an America in which a woman could run for president, nearly win her party’s primary, lose with grace and then prove that adversaries can work together for the sake of their country.”***Near the end of her tenure, I traveled with Clinton to China in the midst of what turned out to be a frenetic several days of negotiations over the fate of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who had taken refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at exactly the moment Clinton was arriving for a summit. In the end, Clinton walked away with a deal that allowed Chen to fly to the United States a few weeks later. It was, I wrote at the time, “the most intense high-stakes diplomacy of her tenure as secretary of state.”“Can this really be true? Was the Chen negotiation as good as it will get for Clinton?” asked Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “I fear the answer is yes.” At the time, he dinged Clinton for not finding “a way to get more done in her role as the president’s diplomatic emissary, broker, and fixer.” And never mind all the hundreds of thousands of miles logged, the endless “townterviews” and back-stage arm-twisting—it remains a pretty fair critique. Timing, fate and the White House may have all conspired in it, but the truth is that Hillary Clinton never did find a way to turn Foggy Bottom into her ticket to history.And perhaps that’s exactly the reason why American politicians tend to become secretary of state after they’ve run for president and lost; it just might be a better consolation prize than it is steppingstone to higher office.Susan B. Glasser is editor of Politico Magazine.Rescuing George Shultz, the Best Secretary of State You’ve Never Heard OfBY WILL INBODENWhat if America had a remarkably effective secretary of state, yet almost 95 percent of international relations professors didn’t know it?That may sound like the lead-in to a bad joke, or an academic perversion of the “what if a tree falls in a forest but no one hears it” puzzle — and I wish that’s all it were. But instead it is a depressing revelation from a new survey of 1,615 international relations (IR) scholars from 1,375 American colleges and universities. The annual Ivory Tower survey of the Teaching, Research, and International Politics (TRIP) project, in partnership with Foreign Policy, is a comprehensive and useful assessment of the views of American IR scholars on a range of topics in the field, including the leading programs, the most influential scholars, and the most serious problems facing the world. (I was one of the 1,615 respondents).One of the survey questions is “Who was the most effective U.S. Secretary of State of the last 50 years?” Henry Kissinger handily took the top spot, with 32.21 percent. This is a plausible but debatable choice, especially since Kissinger was arguably more effective during his time as National Security Advisor than as secretary of state. Kissinger didn’t take over at Foggy Bottom until September 1973, after many notable achievements such as the opening to China, the Paris Peace Accords, and the SALT negotiations. I suspect that part of the reason for Kissinger’s runaway win stems from his high visibility and prolific writing in the almost 40 years since he left office, which can be mentally conflated with an assessment of his time as secretary of State. And the survey answer that has generated some headlines is that poor John Kerry finished dead last with only 0.31 percent (yes, you read that decimal point right). While I agree that thus far Kerry has been ineffective, it strikes me as unfair and methodologically unsound to have included him in the survey because his time in office is ongoing and we don’t yet know how effective he will be in his remaining two years.But the stunning — and appalling — result is that only 5.65 percent picked George Shultz, ranking him barely ahead of Dean Rusk, and far behind Madeline Albright (8.7 percent), Hillary Clinton (8.7 percent), and “I Don’t Know” (18.32 percent — itself a troubling figure when you consider that the respondents are scholars who study this stuff for a living, yet almost one fifth of them can’t render a verdict on secretaries of state).*Shultz’s relatively low ranking is baffling. Many foreign policy practitioners and diplomatic historians regard Shultz in the same pantheon as Acheson and Marshall, a giant in the annals of 20th century American diplomacy whose seven years at Foggy Bottom played an indispensable role in negotiating a peaceful end to the Cold War. Foreign Service Officers (FSO) who served under Shultz almost uniformly believe him to be the greatest secretary of state of the last 50 years. During my time working at the State Department, a standard question I would ask almost every senior FSO I worked with is “who is the best secretary you ever worked under,” and invariably the answer would be George Shultz – regardless of whether the FSO was a Democrat or Republican. Shultz’s broad acclaim among those who worked for him and those who have studied him comes from his rare ability to master two vital yet often conflicting tasks: the management of the department and the conduct of statecraft. Some secretaries excel at the former (e.g., Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton), others excel at the latter (e.g., Henry Kissinger and James Baker), but Shultz is singular in having excelled at both. [Disclosure: Shultz is one of five current or former cabinet secretaries on the Statecraft Board of Reference for the Clements Center at the University of Texas, where I serve as Executive Director.]Now I imagine that some of my academic colleagues reading this who filled out the TRIP survey and didn’t pick Shultz are thinking “Enough whining, Inboden — I picked [insert another secretary of state name here] because in my expertise I think he/she is just better than Shultz.” While each of these individual choices may have their justifications, taken together Shultz’s paltry ranking seems to reveal a “collective ignorance” problem in academia. In the aggregate, IR scholars just don’t seem capable of rendering credible judgments on what makes an effective secretary of state.So how is it that policy professionals and diplomatic historians hold Shultz in such high regard, yet IR scholars — who are overwhelmingly political scientists — would be so unaware of Shultz’s excellence?I don’t have a definitive answer, but would speculate there are three possible reasons, perhaps overlapping. The first is that younger IR scholars are not being taught diplomatic history in graduate school. It is commonplace now for political science doctoral students to take numerous math and statistics classes, but not a single class on American diplomatic history or the Cold War. With this lack of historical awareness, someone like George Shultz appears as distant and unknown as Robert Lansing, and he can’t fit into a regression analysis of a large n data set (for a thoughtful reflection on this malady, see this essay by Frank Gavin). The second reason I suspect is ideological bias against the Reagan administration. Older IR scholars may have taken history classes in graduate school, and having lived through the Reagan years know who Shultz is, but they are overwhelmingly left of center and probably share academia’s general disdain for the Reagan administration. (Though as I noted here, some scholars are beginning to assess Reagan’s national security legacy much more positively. And this particular survey result doesn’t evince an anti-Republican bias, since the top two names are Kissinger and Baker — probably illustrating the large cohort of realists among IR scholars). The third possible reason, perhaps represented by the 18.32 percent of “I Don’t Knows,” is that IR theory emphasizes structural factors over individual leadership and policymaking. In this view, secretaries of state matter little in the shadow of the tectonic plates of the international system.But for those scholars who believe that individual leaders do matter — and I am one of them — Shultz’s remarkable statecraft deserves a closer look, and a higher ranking.*Yes, I was one of the 5.65 percent who picked Shultz.”