Foreign trips were my favorite part of the job. You got to immerse yourself in a different place for a period of time—its politics, how it fit into U.S. foreign policy, what its people cared about. Strange things happened—in Russia, I came back to my room from the staff office to find a cleaning woman standing next to the bed and three men in suits going through my things; they put everything down and walked out without a word. You saw the impact Obama had on certain audiences—in Ghana, it seemed every television channel was playing a documentary about his life, and the radio was filled with
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