Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Hillary Hits the Stands (Again!) This Time in Condé Nast Traveller

What a delightful surprise this morning to tune into MSNBC's "Morning Joe" and find a whole segment devoted to Kevin Doyle's excellent article in the September issue of  Condé Nast Traveller logging the secretary of state's trip through Asia in May.  Personable and enthusiastic, Doyle was a great guest and spoke highly of our lovely Mme. Secretary.  The issue hits the stands next Tuesday, August 21.  I will be buying my keepsake copy, for sure!  Meanwhile, here is the e-copy in advance with a great slideshow by Kevin's colleague Mark Seliger.  Great job, guys!  Thanks!

Nine Days with the Most Traveled Secretary of State in History

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the tomb of Humayun, a sixteenth-century Mogul emperor, in New Delhi, India. “In the modern world, we’re all interdependent, we’re all interconnected. You just can’t say that you’re only going to deal with your own kind of person, or you’re only going to meet your own kind of person, or you’re only going to listen to your own kind of person. That’s not the way the world is going to work. And we’ll either figure out how to be more integrated, or we will disintegrate.”
One could be forgiven for thinking that there’s little left to reveal about Hillary Rodham Clinton. Since she first moved into the White House and onto the world stage nearly twenty years ago, her every public utterance and action (and supposedly many private ones), along with details of her life ranging from the excruciatingly intimate to the numbingly mundane, have been recorded, disseminated, dissected, debated, fictionalized, and dramatized on celluloid. But even after living under the klieg-light scorch of media scrutiny as First Lady (eight years), senator (eight years), and now the sixty-seventh secretary of state (three years and counting), there’s one very intimate detail that most people still don’t know about Hillary Clinton, and which I shall divulge: She does not sweat. Literally. She does not even glow. No matter how high the heat, not a drop nor a drip nor a bead nor so much as the faintest glisten can be detected anywhere about her person.
It’s an improbable physical anomaly that was cited more than once (along with superhuman stamina, uncommon thoughtfulness, and a steel-trap mind) by longtime aides and members of the press corps whom I joined this spring on a nine-day, nineteen-thousand-mile breakneck trip following Clinton—the most traveled secretary of state in history—to China, Bangladesh, and India. It is also a trait that translates directly to metaphor, and which serves her powerfully in her duties as America’s chief diplomat. This was abundantly clear to anyone who witnessed the trademark sangfroid she displayed in Beijing this past May, as she met with leading Chinese officials during one of the tensest diplomatic crises between the United States and China in memory.
(I would love yo use this photo for the header here, but it belongs to Condé Nast Traveller,  alas!)