"It’s the buzz from Boston to the Beltway: What the heck is going on with Secretary of State John Kerry’s face??? The former senator’s usually craggy puss is now smooth, puffy and showing no sign of the laugh lines, crow’s feet or deep forehead creases that were evident in his 2004 official Senate portrait."
-- Boston Herald, September 20th, 2013
ALL the international diplomacy fashion blogs were abuzz about it. It was on the tip of the tongue of every diplomat, fashionista, and designer in and around Foggy Bottom. Vladmir Putin blogged about it. Bashir Assad wondered about it in cabinet meetings. David Cameron and Francois Hollande gossiped about it ENDLESSLY.
The topic of conversation?
Was John Kerry pretty enough to bring about world peace?
Sure, his friends always reminded him how beautiful he looked in an ascot, or wearing a collared shirt with a few buttons tastefully undone. But a Secretary of State can grow jaded about these kind of compliments. I mean, it's one thing to have your friends say this kind of thing, but it's another to have a European foreign minister undress you with her eyes in front of everyone at the Palace of Versailles.
The problem is that everyone in the diplomatic community over-glamorizes physical beauty. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat received endless fan mail from teenage girls after the Oslo Accords. Neville Chamberlain couldn't get Tiger Beat to leave him alone after his peace agreement with Hitler. Screaming Parisian girls constantly disrupted the Paris Peace Accords whenever Henry Kissinger would appear outside for a smoke break. Warren Christopher received so many marriage proposals after the Dayton Accords that he shaved his head and refused to appear in public without a disguise for six months.
Despite all the compliments about his soft skin...Despite the comparison of his eyes to the color of a patrician's private lake...Deep inside, John Kerry didn't really believe he was beautiful. Many wonder if his diplomatic skills would have completely collapsed if Simon Cowell and Bruce Jenner hadn't taken him aside and shown him that there was another way...a shortcut to beauty, and therefore, diplomatic excellence.
The procedure didn't take long. But the effects were lasting. America's status in the world has skyrocketed. John Kerry has been hailed as perhaps the prettiest Secretary of State since George Schultz.
Dreams really do come true.
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