 "All the President’s Men: Obama’s cabinet has an all-male look")
New York: President Barack Obama’s boring, all-male, all-white appointments for top jobs in his second-term cabinet has Americans in an uproar. Where are the women? asked the US media searchingly, while pointing out that for the first time in decades, there will be no woman serving in any of the top four national security slots — secretary of state, CIA director, secretary of defense, or even national security adviser.
The title of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s 1974 book, All the President’s Men, is now being used derisively in America to describe Obama’s classic white male cabinet.
After the departure of Hillary Clinton, the sole women allowed into the clubhouse, Obama has populated the top ranks of the national security and foreign policy establishment with white men. Clinton, who was secretary of state until last week, worked hard to transform US diplomacy on the nuts-and-coffee level and her signature initiative as America’s top diplomat was the administration’s “pivot to Asia.” It was Clinton who persuaded a jittery Obama to carry out the Abbottabad strike to kill Osama bin Laden, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Miniter’s book, “Leading From Behind.”
With Clinton retired, other than UN Ambassador Susan Rice, there will be no woman close to Obama’s ear to weigh in on foreign and defense matters.
“In his cabinet choice so far, President Obama has even managed to take a step backwards from his first term,” Rosa Brooks, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, said in a column in Foreign Policy.
“For defense secretary, he inexplicably selected former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel over Michèle Flournoy, the universally respected former undersecretary of defense for policy,” wrote Brooks, who once served as a counselor to Flournoy in the Defense Department.
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View All“President Obama missed a historic opportunity to be the president who appoints the first female secretary of defense,” she added.
Brooks told The New York Times that Obama had “surrounded himself by mostly male advisers and has shown no particular interest in focusing on making the White House a more friendly workplace for women.”
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