Before anybody senior testifies on Capitol Hill, somebody in their own building puts them in a conference room with a stack of paper and a group of colleagues whose entire job for the next few hours is to ask the worst possible version of every question, in the rudest order, until the person in the chair has stopped being surprised by any of them - the infamous Murder Board.
In the fall of 2012 I was Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Legislative Affairs at the State Department, which is the bureau that handles Congress. We had been gearing up for an ordinary slate of legislation in the closing session of the 112th Congress, and then came the attacks in Benghazi that September, and Washington turned on its ears.
What arrived after that was mostly paper. Requests for meetings with personnel who had been injured in the attack. Requests for briefings, for documents, for timelines. I spent an inordinate amount of time checking in and out a classified briefing book that had been done and was tightly controlled. There were numerous letters demanding the Secretary resign. My job was to keep order in the chaos and determine what my boss saw and in what order.
Secretary Clinton’s first public hearing on Benghazi was two weeks after the attacks. The last one was on the 25th of January. Somewhere in there my workload tripled, because Secretary-designate Kerry also had to be got ready for his confirmation hearings, and January turned into back-to-back hearings - Clinton on Benghazi, then Kerry on his nomination. Two insanely large briefing books that require special binder sizes and twice as many murder boards. Five hundred Questions for the Record, which are the written questions congressional members send over once a hearing is finished, each one needing an answer that every office with a stake in it has signed off on. All five hundred answered inside a week - a feat I can’t even begin to tell you how hard it is to accomplish.
Before a murder board, the senior team sits down with bureau leadership and builds out an extensive list of everything the Secretary could conceivably be asked, and then work out which office in the building is best placed to answer each one, and task it out across the whole Department. That list is the murder board. The answers are the easy part. Anyone can learn an answer. What you are hunting for is the question nobody has thought of yet, because that is the one that gets asked, and the cost of hearing it for the first time on camera is enormous and it is permanent. So you pay people to be unkind to you in private. You put the sharpest and least deferential person you can find at the far end of the table and you tell them not to be polite, and when they finally find the hole, everybody exhales, because finding it in your own conference room is the cheapest fix there is ever going to be. Nobody enjoys being on the receiving end of one.
The rest of that job was unglamorous in a way I have come to miss. Congressional notifications. Determinations. Reports with statutory deadlines nobody outside the building has ever heard of. Speeches and talking points for my boss. We were still physically carrying paper files around the building to get them cleared, so I moved the entire bureau onto an electronic clearance system, which sounds like nothing but was probably the most useful thing I did that tour.
I wrote at the time that most of this work would never be apparent to anybody, and that I was proud of it anyway. My rater that year called me “the gatekeeper who orchestrates this frenzy.”
I expected to miss the policy and I really do. I did not expect to miss the apparatus around it, and it turns out I miss that just as much. There’s a lot to be said for an exercise that prepares you to answer anything from the mundane to the serious.
The institution was ruthless about exactly one thing and I miss it. Nobody there was allowed to be surprised in public. Somebody else always got there first, on purpose, in a closed room, with no audience and nothing riding on it.
I wrote down the honest version of the first year out of government for the people coming behind me, and it’s free. Get the Field Guide
And if you want the longer and much messier version of all of this, Nina and I are on it every other Tuesday on Next Chapter, Anywhere.
—Cynthia