Читать книгу Information Wars - Richard Stengel - Страница 22

At the time of my nomination, there were already dozens of nominees who had not been scheduled for a vote and dozens more who had gotten through various committees and were waiting for a vote from the Senate. Almost all nominations were voted on by what the Senate called “UC”—unanimous consent. The Senate had to confirm hundreds of political nominees every year, and if it took up each one individually for debate and a vote, it probably wouldn’t have time to get to any other business. “UC” simply meant that if no one objected to or put a hold on your nomination, it would go through via voice vote.

From the moment I was officially nominated, I was assigned a ground-floor office at the State Department. Just beyond the main elevators there are a couple of corridors with nondescript offices reserved for nominees. The idea is that the Senate wouldn’t look kindly on a nominee using her official office before she was confirmed, so you’re meant to make do with a temporary one. Mine was a small, dingy office with a tiny window that overlooked an alley. I wasn’t allowed to see my official office, and I had to be escorted anywhere I needed to go in the Building.

Pretty quickly, I began to suss out the idiosyncrasies of the State Department. I was besieged with emails, memorandums, and reports, and basically every one—every one—was way too long. I don’t mean an extra paragraph or page; I mean 3 to 5 to 10 times too long. There seemed to be some reward mechanism for writing long memos. It was as if people at State were paid by the word. There was also a process for everything, no matter how big or small, that always had to be followed. There was a process for nominees to meet the department, and there was a process for how I had to be escorted to my office. Oftentimes this process wasn’t written down anywhere but was part of a tradition known only by the foreign service.

The main way the department got you ready for confirmation hearings was by holding what were known as “murder boards.” Murder boards are practice runs for the hearing. You are put in a room like the hearing room, seated at a table up front, while a range of State Department officers pretend they are Senators and pepper you with possible questions and then critique your answers. In preparation for my murder board, I was given about a dozen comically large notebooks (we’re talking over 700 pages each) that covered everything from the origins of the Public Affairs Department to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1962.

It was like learning a new language. I’ve already mentioned that every bureau has an initial, but then every regional bureau also has an acronym: there’s EUR (European and Eurasian Affairs), NEA (Near Eastern Affairs), EAP (East Asian and Pacific Affairs), and SCA (South and Central Asian Affairs). On top of that, every functional bureau had an abbreviation: ECA (Educational and Cultural Affairs), INL (International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs), DRL (Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor), and on and on. And then individual programs had acronyms: IVLP (International Visitors Leadership Program), YALI (Young African Leadership Initiative), EUSIR (Fulbright European Union Scholar-in-Residence). People have entire conversations in acronyms, except for the occasional verb to connect the initials.

I struggled with what you might call governmentspeak, or Washingtonese. I had spent most of my life speaking like a journalist. It didn’t occur to me that I would have trouble transitioning to speak like someone in government. (Later I would joke that when I was a journalist, I didn’t know a whole lot and tried to make as much controversy as possible, but now that I’m in government, I know a lot more and try to make as little controversy as possible.) In fact, Washingtonese is a kind of anti-controversy speech. It’s full of euphemisms and indirection and the passive voice. My fallback was always, “Senator, I welcome that question, but I will have to get back to you on that.”

My guidance from H was useful: The hearing is pass/fail; you’re not graded on every question. The key is to give a “perception of readiness.” When you’re on safe ground—benefits to the taxpayer, jobs, prosperity, the flag—don’t hold back. And don’t be afraid to be dull—this is not the time to wheel out your bold proposal on income redistribution. You can use notes—but not too many! And remember the 80-20 rule—let the Senators speak for 80 percent of the time. And absolutely no joking.

I had to learn the structure and history of public diplomacy and the intricacies of the public diplomacy budget; the difference between 0.7 funding and ECE funds (don’t ask). There were 3,540 public diplomacy (PD) and public affairs (PA) positions. There were 189 public affairs offices abroad. Some 50,000 people participated in education-exchange programs in more than 160 countries. About 800,000 international students contributed almost $23 billion to the U.S. economy. And I had to always refer to foreign audiences, because the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (known as Smith-Mundt) still governed how public diplomacy operated, and it prohibited the distribution of State Department–produced material in the physical United States. The law was not only pre-internet; it was pre–color TV.

Each nominee had the option of reading an opening statement, and everyone does so. I worked on mine for a few weeks. I talked about why I cared about public service; mentioned my father, who would have been very proud; and talked a little about my work with Nelson Mandela. When I was happy with my draft, I was instructed to share it with State and H, which would then offer comments and suggestions. This was my first experience of the State “clearance process” and the group culture of the foreign service. H and L (the legal department) had a few factual suggestions. But what I was taken aback by was that foreign service officers I did not know blithely deleted whole paragraphs and added new ones—in my own voice—without even informing me.

By the time the hearing came around, I felt ready. I won’t bore you with my entire written statement, except to note that the theme that I talked about at the top was the theme that would be the overwhelming focus of what I did during my three years at State. And that was the rise of disinformation, how that was facilitated by social media, and what we needed to do about it:

Every day all over the world, there is a great global debate going on. It is about the nature of freedom and fairness, democracy and justice. It is happening in all the traditional ways, in coffee shops and on street corners, but it is also taking place on the new platforms of social media. The reach, the scale, the speed of that debate are like nothing before in history. I have been in that debate all of my life. America has to be in that debate. We need to lead it. And we cannot rest on our laurels. Every minute, there are attacks and misstatements about America and American foreign policy that cannot be left to stand. Social media is a tool that can be used for good or ill. It is a powerful medium for truth, but it is an equally powerful medium for falsehood. My Senator from long ago, the great Pat Moynihan, used to say, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.” Well, today, more and more, people feel entitled to their own facts. They choose the facts that conform with their point of view. Even though it is easier than any time in human history to find information to rebut lies, less of that seems to be happening than ever. We cannot resign ourselves to this; we need to fight it.²

The actual hearing was an anticlimax. It was a busy day in the Senate, and this was far from the most important thing going on. I don’t think there were ever more than five Senators in the room at one time, and often there was only one. My principal questioner was Marco Rubio. He began by saying that some people around the world look at all the debate in our society as evidence of how fractured and polarized we are, but he sees it as a source of strength. I agreed with him wholeheartedly and said that my whole career as a journalist was to highlight this debate and that it made our democracy richer and stronger. Thank you, Senator Rubio. And then it was over.

H was hoping for a pre-Thanksgiving unanimous-consent vote in the Senate. We’d been told that November 22 was the day. But something a little more momentous happened in the Senate that day. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, frustrated with Republican intransigence on nominees, invoked the so-called nuclear option, the most fundamental change in the Senate’s rules in more than a generation. By a simple majority vote, the Democratic Party changed the longtime rules of the Senate that required 60 votes for confirmations. Now all nominations, except those to the Supreme Court, would need only a simple majority to be confirmed.

In theory, this should have made things easier. But the Republicans responded by blocking unanimous-consent votes on nominees and forcing every nomination to the floor. That meant that every nominee would now take between 8 and 30 hours of debate to get confirmed. There were 87 nominations pending—and I was one of them.

In fact, the Senate adjourned on December 21 without voting on any of the 28 State nominees. It had already been five months, and now the wait got longer.

It was not until February that they held another vote. In the end, I was confirmed 92–8. All the nays were Republicans. It was good to be in, and good to have some opposition, but not too much. (A vote of 100–0 means you never made any enemies.) It had been a year since Secretary Kerry had clapped me on the shoulder in his office.