1. The president must have your back.
All presidents support their secretaries of state, but not all get the kind of support critical to success. Baker used to say that he was George H.W. Bush's man at the State Department, not the State Department's man at the White House. Those two were particularly close, and it gave Baker real authority, power, and street credibility. Kissinger and Richard Nixon, on the other hand, were more competitive, though each exploited the other's talent and authority to command and marshal respect and power.
If there's daylight between the two or if it's clear that the White House isn't really empowering the secretary to take on the important issues of the day, the latter's status is diminished. The president not only needs to tell the world that his secretary of state is a trusted confidante, but he also needs to demonstrate it. If a president doesn't charge the secretary with responsibility for tackling the biggest challenges, how does he or she become truly important?
2. Anatomy really is destiny.
Freud was talking about gender differences here. But the capacity to project a physical presence and persona is critical to success in politics and foreign policy. And that persona, F. Scott Fitzgerald held, flowed from an unbroken series of gestures. Effective presidents and secretaries of state are actors on a public stage; they require charm, flattery, toughness, and drama to make allies and adversaries take them seriously, particularly in a negotiation or crisis.
That means playing any number of roles, sometimes with high gestures of real or feigned anger, frustration, or disappointment. During the 1948 Senate hearings on the plan for European recovery that would bear his name, Marshall, whom columnist James Reston described that day as displaying legendary "moral grandeur," silenced an interrupting senator with a single glare. Kissinger threatened to walk out on Syria's Hafez al-Assad at least once; Baker did the same with Assad, the Palestinians, and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
3. The negotiator's mindset.
Beavers build dams, and teenagers talk on the phone and text. By definition, effective secretaries of state work negotiations, defuse crises, and tackle issues that normal human beings consider very hard. A coherent worldview is important too, but not as critical as the instinctive capacity to know how to make a deal, sense the opportunity, and then figure out how to close it.
Kissinger may have been the grand strategist, but both he and Baker had the negotiator's mindset, the ability to figure out how to assemble the pieces of the puzzle strewn on the living room floor and stay even when all the pieces didn't quite fit. Kissinger's Middle East diplomacy -- three disengagement agreements following the October 1973 war -- is a remarkable testament to those skills: The one between Israel and Syria still survives, while the other two, between Egypt and Israel, evolved into a peace treaty. There's no school at which to learn these kinds of things. Marshall was a military man; Kissinger an academic; Baker a lawyer. All possessed a natural ability to gauge how to move the pieces around on the board.
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