Secretary of State John Kerry has been diving into difficult issues ever since he took up the office at Foggy Bottom. He's managed tough negotiations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai over a future, limited role for U.S. troops there. He's re-launched Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, reached a deal with Russia to rid Syria of chemical weapons and is now making headway with Iran to roll back that country's nuclear program. This is a man clearly looking for legacy.

Kerry has something else that makes him unusual in Washington—something that sets him distinctly apart from his immediate predecessor, and that serves him well as secretary of state: an indifference to his own political standing. Political calculations may have constrained the risks Hillary Clinton was willing to take. Kerry, in contrast, no longer needs to heed political consultants. Nor does he need to worry too much about what his detractors say. . . .One can understand how being freed from constant fund-raising and politicking would be liberating. Beyond that, though, his aides say that becoming secretary of state has allowed him to be himself in a way that being an electoral politician didn’t. As a presidential candidate, he had to downplay his obsession with foreign policy and his fluency in foreign languages, for fear that such things would play badly with voters; as secretary of state, he can freely leverage those qualities.
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But for all his blue-blooded superciliousness in public, Kerry can be engaging and down-to-earth in private. He drinks beer, loves the Boston Bruins, and plays ice hockey himself. (In a mark of his regular-guy bona fides, Kerry broke his nose a couple of years ago in a pickup game with friends; in a mark against those bona fides, the game was at one of his vacation homes, in Ketchum, Idaho, with the actor Tom Hanks and members of the Kennedy family.) On overseas flights, he dresses in jeans and an orange hoodie. When off the record, in relaxed settings, he is refreshingly direct, profane, and insightful, speaking bluntly about the limits of American power and caustically lamenting Washington’s growing paralysis and partisanship. He finishes sentences with phrases such as something like that or that’s about it or thanks, man. Toes tapping, head bobbing back and forth, he speaks with fervor and candor. His tenacity is palpable.. .

Current and former State Department officials praise Clinton personally—hailing her intelligence, work ethic, charisma, and voluminous reading—but some say that her inner circle of fiercely loyal aides isolated her within the department, and carefully managed her image. Richard Armitage, who served as Powell’s deputy secretary of state, praises Clinton but says she was poorly served by her aides. “My view is that she was pretty sheltered,” he told me. “They were not interpersonally pleasant, and they were very protective of her. You can get into a cocoon.” . . .Members of Clinton’s inner circle dispute this characterization, but some well-positioned observers believe that the possibility of a future presidential campaign caused Hillary to steer clear of playing the role of Middle East peace broker. . .
In the end, what cemented Kerry’s bond with Obama was less his diplomatic achievements than his ability to impersonate another tall, wealthy Massachusetts politician with good hair: Kerry served as Mitt Romney’s surrogate during weeks of preparation for the 2012 presidential debates. During mock debates, Kerry channeled Romney so effectively that, aides to both men say, he got under Obama’s skin. “I don’t think I missed one argument Romney made,” Kerry told me. By the end of debate season, Kerry had developed a new rapport with the president, according to their aides. Jen Psaki, having worked as a spokesperson for both men, says that despite their divergent backgrounds, Obama and Kerry share certain key traits: they eschew retail politics; they rely on a small coterie of aides; and they are fundamentally private people. Psaki says that while both men can turn on the charm when they need to work a crowd, they would “prefer to be in the Situation Room.” They derive more enjoyment, she says, from “grappling with tough global issues than political fund-raising or litigating yet another partisan fight on the Senate floor.”

Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton was being lauded as an exemplary secretary of state. After four years and nearly a million miles logged as America’s top diplomat, she stepped down to a torrent of praise. “The most consequential secretary of state since Dean Acheson,” enthused Google’s Eric Schmidt. “Stellar,” pronounced Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson. Even Republican Sen. John McCain, while criticizing her response to the killing of U.S. officials in Benghazi, went out of his way to compliment her “outstanding” State Department tenure. . .That was then.

When the Atlantic published an admiring 10,000-word profile of Secretary of State John Kerry the other day, the surprise was not so much that the author, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Rohde, found himself impressed by the headlong diplomatic forays of the peripatetic Kerry, but the downbeat assessment of Kerry’s much more reserved predecessor. The headline? “How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton.” A few days later, the New York Times chimed in with an article on the “tough comparisons with Kerry” Clinton is now facing, summing up the debate as one over whether she was anything more than a “pantsuit-wearing globe-trotter” in her years as secretary. . . .All of which yields the question: Was Hillary Clinton in fact a good secretary of state, and will her record as a diplomat matter if, as expected, she runs for president in 2016?

As Bill Clinton might have said, it depends on what the meaning of good is. Certainly, even many of her most ardent defenders recognize Hillary Clinton had no signal accomplishment at the State Department to her name, no indelible peace sealed with her handshake, no war averted, no nuclear crisis defused. There are few Eric Schmidts out there still willing to make the case for her as an enormously consequential figure in the history of Foggy Bottom.

Where the debate tends to rage is over why that is so, especially now that Kerry is taking on diplomatic challenges that Clinton either couldn’t or wouldn’t—from negotiating a potentially historic nuclear deal with Iran to seeking a revived Mideast peace process—and political rivals in both parties return to thinking of Clinton in the hypercharged American political context and not so much as the tireless, Blackberry-wielding face of global glad-handing.