Remarks
at Swearing-in Ceremony
John
Kerry
Secretary
of State
Ben
Franklin Room
Washington,
DC
February
6, 2013
Thank
you. Mr. Vice President, thank you for an unbelievably generous, warm Oath of
Office and your comments before them. I want to share with all of you that as a
recovering politician – (laughter) – I’ve grown used to being sworn at; it’s
really nice to be sworn in. (Laughter and applause.)
I
will say more about the Vice President in a moment, but I want to say thank you
to my colleagues from the Senate, past and present, who are here today. I am so
honored by their presence. Senator Lugar, who was my chairman and ranking
member for so long and kept that committee rolling, thank you, sir, for your
service. (Applause.)
John
McCain, who was a part of a very special journey to try to make peace with
Vietnam, which we did, and it’s such an honor to travel with him and be part of
his life. And I appreciate it very much. (Applause.)
And
Tom Harkin and John Breaux and Barbara Boxer; Max Cleland, my brother-in-arms
who’s traveled with me on many parts of this journey; Bob Corker; Sheldon
Whitehouse; Jeanne Shaheen; Chris Coons; Rob Portman, whom I’ve grown to really
get to know pretty well in the Senate, and he’s a man who dares to cross the
aisle and make things happen. I’m grateful for that. And Tim Kaine and
Elizabeth Warren, two people I won’t get to serve with as a senator, but I’m so
happy you’re on the committee and you’re part of the team in that sense.
And
I want to likewise welcome my colleagues from the House. I’m particularly
grateful for Bill Delahunt, a longtime friend, for being here, and Ed Markey,
Bill Keating, and Joe Kennedy III, and you honor me by being here. Thank you.
I
also want to thank my friend Tom Donilon for being here. He’s a great steward
of our foreign policy. And together with Tony Blinken, his new deputy, these
are people I have had the privilege of working with before, and I am so
confident about where we’re heading in this partnership, and I’m grateful to
you for coming over here and being part of this.
And
a bunch of former staffers who are all working at the White House now –
(laughter) – for a fellow called the President of the United States. But I’m
truly proud of them and grateful for their enduring friendship.
Over
the last few days – oh, one other person I wanted to mention. I didn’t know for
sure he was going to be here. We were on the same soccer team, hockey team,
lacrosse team. He was a captain of a bunch of them and incredible athlete, a
United States Marine Corps veteran, decorated from Vietnam. And he has served
with such incredible distinction as the head of the FBI. And Bobby, thank you.
Bobby Mueller, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. (Applause.) He used to kick
my butt in all three sports. (Laughter.)
Over
the last few days, I’ve had the privilege of meeting with a number of Thomas
Jefferson’s successors: Secretary Clinton, who has been so generous in
welcoming me here and helping to create a seamless transition; Secretary Rice;
Secretary Powell; Secretary Baker, who visited with me here yesterday;
Secretary Shultz, who I had a great luncheon with on Saturday; and Secretary
Kissinger, who has spent a number of hours with me and who wrote a note today.
He’s away, out of country. But I’m delighted to have their counsel, and I’ve
learned quickly how available and ready they all are to help to continue to
steer the ship of State. It’s a wonderful thing about this particular office
and this place.
And
I’m so honored that my friend, former Secretary Madeleine Albright, is able to
be here today. Will you join me in welcoming her and saying thank you to all of
the Secretaries of State? Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you.
And
I’m very, very grateful to deputy secretaries of this Department: Bill Burns,
one of our great veterans of diplomacy; and Deputy Secretary Tom Nides, who’s
done an extraordinary job. Together they’ve been one heck of a team. And I want
to thank them for their warm welcome to this Department, their wise counsel.
And I thank the many under secretaries and assistant secretaries who are here
and who’ve been part of my early meetings. I think we’ve had three days now of
some terrific meetings, and I want you to know I consider myself lucky to be on
your team. Thank you for all that you do. (Applause.)
Also,
last, I just – I want to welcome some of my crew members who are here, the guys
who served on boats with me in Vietnam. These are men who lived and know the
truth of our service, and they honor me today with their presence just as they
did with their patriotism four decades ago. I’m grateful, wherever they are.
(Applause.)
Finally
– and finally, I want to thank my family. They have been the enduring
supporters of an extraordinary journey. All of them – brothers, sisters,
cousins, there are a lot of them here, and it’s only a small percentage that
are here. (Laughter.) And my incredible wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who –
(applause).
Now,
I said the other day, in the hearings a few weeks ago, I said that my approach
to the role of Secretary of State would be deeply informed by my 28 years-plus
that I spent on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the only committee that
I was on from the day I got to the Senate till the day I left. I spent most of
the time sitting a few seats down from the then-chairman, Biden, learning from
him the full benefits of seniority. (Laughter.) And in fact, Chris Dodd is
here, and Chris will tell you that it was Biden, Sarbanes, Dodd, and Kerry, and
Chris and I used to nudge each other and say, “We’re never going to be chairmen
of this committee.” (Laughter.) And then boom, all of the sudden, things
change.
Six
years ago, Joe Biden, Vice President Biden and I found ourselves sitting on the
same committee with a young senator by the name of Barack Obama and another
fellow by the name of Chuck Hagel. So for all of you senators from the Foreign
Relations Committee here today, stay right where you are. (Laughter.) All the
good spots are taken.
Mr.
Vice President, I really am glad that you’re here. I’m proud that you’re here.
I’m grateful that you’re here to swear me in. And Dr. Jill Biden, thank you for
coming with him. It is special to have you and to have Hunter here, your son,
who’s a good friend of our family. I know you just landed a few hours ago from
your trip to Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. I welcome you home, and I
hope you left me with a full tank. (Laughter.)
As
the Vice President mentioned a few minutes ago, he got to the Senate ahead of
me. The pundits that year that you referred to, Mr. Vice President, were
predicting that I would win and you would lose. And it was exactly the other
way around, so once again the pundits were zero-for-two, folks, which is not
unusual. But I got – when I finally got to the Senate, I got to see our Vice
President as a legislator. And I saw him with the prescience, the vision that
he had, to be way ahead of everybody on the subject of the genocide in Kosovo,
way ahead of everybody on crime in America and exerting leadership, put police
in our streets and change that curve. I saw the respect that he commanded from
our colleagues. And now as our Vice President, Joe Biden has written a new
chapter as the President’s closest advisor, and I think proving a new kind of
partnership in president and vice president in the conduct of our foreign
policy.
The
Vice President lives by a very old-fashioned code of loyalty. He talked about
it a little bit in introducing me: You always tell the truth, you never forget
where you came from, and your word is your bond. And I can’t tell you how many
times in the Senate when I was listening to Joe negotiate or we were working on
something he would say, “I give you my word as a Biden.” And you knew you had a
very special commitment.
We
still joke about a trip that we took with Chuck Hagel to Afghanistan and we
went up to a forward operating base up in Kunar province. And our helicopter,
on the way back, got caught in a snow squall in the mountains. And our pilot,
literally, everything went blind and suddenly we were banking and heading down
and braced for an emergency landing on this snow-covered road high in the
mountains near Bagram Airbase. And the Vice President turned to Hagel and me
and he offered an alternative. He said, “Maybe we could keep the helicopter
aloft if the three of us just started to give a speech.” (Laughter.)
So
I want to thank President Obama for the faith that he has placed in me and for
the leadership that he has offered the world. I will tell you, my friends, and
I think the Vice President hears this too, President Obama has restored
America’s place and our reputation in the world, and we are grateful for that.
(Applause.)
I
want to thank Secretary Clinton for the unbelievably high standard of energy,
commitment, and vision that she set in her terrific stewardship of the State
Department. I am proud not only as her successor but as a citizen to have been
represented by her, as I think all of you are, and the way that she traveled
the world and carried America’s banner. We thank her for a job superbly done.
(Applause.)
I
thank you, all of you, for being here to celebrate this moment together. I
thank you for your faith and your friendship, for being part of this incredible
gathering in this magnificent room named for Ben Franklin, who incidentally was
not only the father of the American Foreign Service but he was America’s
greatest expert on electricity, and they could have used him at the Super Bowl
last weekend. (Laughter.)
But
a serious note: This room – I think Secretary Albright was saying to me in the
room back there before we came out - how you sort of approach this building and
you have no idea, it’s a 1950s kind of block building, and you come into this
unbelievable room and these diplomatic surroundings. This room and the
treasures that decorate it are a tribute to the names and the legacies that are
embedded in our national memory. We stand here surrounded by the letters penned
by Franklin’s hand, the architect table on which our first Secretary of State
Thomas Jefferson drafted the blueprints of a democracy, the antique silver
shaped for John Adams by his Massachusetts neighbor Paul Revere.
These
statesmen did not know their experiment would succeed, but they were the kind
of people who took risks. And ultimately their creativity and their courage,
their persistence left the world vastly different and far better than they
found it. That is the work that we continue here today, to keep the promise of
our democracy for the next generation and for all the world, in quiet corners
of the globe, from Tahrir Square to South Sudan, where people aspire to be what
we are, to be free, and to shape their own futures.
And
in the work that is our cause, we must always remember from our own national
experience that hard work is required to realize freedom. And as we rededicate
ourselves to that purpose for our own nation and our neighbors, it’s important
we remember that. It’s well known that my experience in war shaped my understanding
of the human costs of failed diplomacy and the cost of conflict itself. Vice
President and Dr. Biden know the cost in a personal way because they have
focused on military families and spent an enormous amount of time reaching out
to them. And they understand that sacrifice and they are also a military family
themselves, having seen their son Beau, the Attorney General of the state of
Delaware, leave his home and deploy for a long year in Iraq. Moreover, at Dover
Air Force Base in the state the Vice President represented for 36 years, when
our fallen come home, we are all further reminded of what it means to be a
nation at war.
I
am proud to take on this job because I want to work for peace – (applause) –
and because the values and the ideals of our nation are really what represents
the best of the possibilities of life here on Earth. But I make clear today to
those listening, while my preference is for a peaceful resolution to conflict,
my journey has also taught me that when remedies are exhausted, we must be
prepared to defend our cause and do what is necessary to stand up to extremism,
terrorism, chaos and evil, and we will continue to do so. (Applause.)
But
the beauty of this place – and I do mean beauty of this place – is that before
we have to make that choice, we have a lot of other choices in front of us. We
can help people to help themselves. We can protect children as we did in
Africa, where PEPFAR has saved millions of lives. We can keep students learning
even after an earthquake destroys their schools, as we did in Pakistan. We can
help young girls pursue their dreams of education, as we did in Afghanistan and
other places in the world. That is what the Department of State can do.
(Applause.)
Today,
we tread on very new terrain – the Vice President referred to it in his
comments. We’re in a world of unparalleled technology, unprecedented growth in
the number of young people, of unleashed sectarian strife and religious
extremism. And I believe, and I know the President and Vice President share this
deeply, unless we stay vigilant, these forces threaten to unravel whole
nation-states and create greater pockets of instability than we have seen in
recent times. This is our challenge. I believe the United States has to join
with other nations to pool our resources, our talents, our thinking, and to
create order where there is none, and to fix, or try to fix, what is broken.
All of us need to do better at inviting people to embrace the values that have
always inspired us.
Now,
some would rather say that America ought to turn inward because of budget
choices, that we have to say no to the world. Well, I think we recognize our
responsibility and our role. We know that America is exceptional not because we
say we are, not because it’s a birthright that will happen automatically, but
because America does exceptional things and we must continue to do those
things. The world depends on us. (Applause.)
This
is not a time for America to retreat. This is a time for us to continue to
lead. Even in changing times, our constant will continue to be the character of
the loyal men and women of the civil service, the Foreign Service, USAID, the
Marines, the men and women of the Diplomatic Security Service who stand guard,
and the locally engaged staff in many parts of the world, all of whom are
America’s extraordinary diplomatic team. I am as honored by their confidence as
I am humbled by their company and by our journey ahead.
We
are all honored today here by the legacy of the names that mark each of these
rooms: Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams. And three of
our founders – Franklin, Jefferson, and John Adams – whose effects, as I
mentioned, are preserved here at the State Department, were charged on July
4th, 1776, by the Continental Congress 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 this room right there. That’s the
seal.
And
this room* is named for Harry Truman. It was 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. As the historian David McCullough wrote, “Truman
meant the shift in the eagle’s gaze to be seen as symbolic of a nation both on
the march and dedicated to peace.”
So,
my friends, today as I take this symbolic Oath of Office to publicly reinforce
the private one I took last Friday, I say to the Vice President, to my family,
to my friends, to my colleagues old and new, we are still marching forward. We
still believe in peace. Even as the ground beneath us shifts, we know how to
find our way, and we will do so with firm footing. And in the end, our imprint
on the world is one that we alone can still seal for ourselves. Let’s get to
work. Thank you. (Applause.)
