Three months ago, when he was just about reconstituting his Cabinet after his re-election, President Barack Obama faced quizzical looks from one of his core support groups: Women. Hillary Clinton was leaving after a four-year stint as Secretary of State, so was another woman, labour Secretary Hilda Solis. But his picks for the top three Cabinet positions were all men — John Kerry, Jack lew and Chuck Hagel — with no women replacements for Clinton and Solis. “Obama’s Cabinet shaping up to be a boys club,” blared one headline. Even the friendly New York Times noted: “Obama’s re-made inner circle has an all-male look, so far.” As the paper’s columnist Maureen Dowd put it at the time, “It’s passing strange that Obama, carried to a second term by women, blacks and latinos, chooses to give away the plummiest Cabinet and White House jobs to white dudes.”
Well, Obama has since gone the extra mile to convince his large women following that his heart is in the right place. He has nominated a woman, Sally Jewel, to be the next Interior Secretary, and another woman, Gina McCarthy, to head the Environment Protection Agency, a Cabinet-rank position.
Also, last week, he appointed another woman, Julia Pierson, to a position that has all along been regarded as a male preserve: Chief of the US Secret Service. And now the talk is that he, in yet another first, might well be naming yet another woman, lisa Monaco, to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) when incumbent director Robert Mueller leaves in September after a 12-year stint.
It is these two top posts in the Secret Service and the FBI that are getting all the attention. “A woman in a high position carrying a gun is a big deal. The director of the US Marshals Service and the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration are women, but the Secret Service is much more visible as the agency that protects the president — and as the agency Hollywood loves to depict in the movies,” wrote Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson.
Although a 30-year veteran at the Secret Service and rising to be its Chief of Staff, no one thought Obama would name her for the top leadership position of an organisation with more than 150 offices across the US and abroad. “Well, listen, I have to say that Julia’s reputation within the Service is extraordinary. She’s come up through the ranks. She’s done just about every job there is to do at the Secret Service,” said Obama.
The appointment of Pierson is also being viewed as Obama’s image-correcting exercise for an otherwise top agency that came to be rocked by a prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, last year while making preparations for a presidential visit.
The news of the scandal broke during Obama’s trip, causing much embarrassment to the American delegation. Heads began to roll and 13 Secret Service staffers were reported involved in the sordid happenings that came to light after one agent refused to pay a prostitute and the two were locked in a public altercation over the issue. Eight agents were sacked from the agency and three were cleared of serious misconduct, but the episode had clearly tarnished the agency’s reputation.
After Pierson, the focus is now on whether Monaco will make it to the prestigious post of FBI director. She is regarded as a front-runner among nearly half-a-dozen names doing the rounds. Monaco has just moved into another key slot in the White House as President Obama’s top counter-terrorism advisor, succeeding John Brennan after he was appointed CIA director.
Interestingly, Monaco has served as Chief of Staff to Mueller, the outgoing director. A career federal prosecutor, she had initially joined FBI on detail from the US Attorney’s Office for Washington, DC. She made her mark as a prosecutor on the Enron Task Force, winning the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service.
Once Obama’s female pick for the Department of Interior takes over after her Senate confirmation, there will be four women in the 15-member Cabinet, the other three being Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebellius and Acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank. Additionally, holders of four of the seven Cabinet-rank positions will all be women, including Sylvia Mathews Burwell, President of Walmart Foundation, who will be the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget. It also includes Susan Rice, the envoy to the United Nations, who was thought to be Obama’s first choice to succeed Clinton in the State Department till a band of top Republican Senators made it clear they would block her nomination over her misleading comments on the Benghazi tragedy that killed US Ambassador Chris Stevens.
Rice may have lost out in that race, but she is being mentioned as a front-runner to succeed Tom Donilon as US National Security Advisor later this year.