Kerry buys chocolate in Geneva, where he is working on Syria

[karynnj]

10. I thought it excellent too

I had based a lot of what I wrote on a much less detailed Boston Globe article. What I didn't know was that Clinton was as completely reluctant as she was described here. The interesting speculation is who gave all that detail out. It could not have been Kerry, because he would not have seen the intra administration interactions - although he would have been well aware that she sat on the possibility for 18 months.

Like past articles, also in the NYT, there are the comments that suggest that unspecified people were concerned that Kerry was too diplomatically aggressive or something. Given how successful he has been, you wonder how much comes down to them being jealous and Kerry really believing in diplomacy and rejecting the neoliberal experts.

At the end of any administration, there will be jockeying for credit on all big deals ... and assigning blame for failures. President Obama will get credit for many really significant things in his time - and the two biggest foreign policy ones will be Iran and climate change. I think it will progressively be seen that both of these things would not have happened without John Kerry. (Obama gets credit for putting him in that position and giving him the latitude to make those things work.)

What last week -- and this article -- tell me is that Kerry's legacy is in very good shape. It was very clear from the comments of Ken Burns and Doug Brinkley, that both are very aware of his contributions over his entire life.