I don't feel passionately about politics, i'm not a political person. Is it easy for me to get fired up about someone's position on climate change? No, it's not. On most of these issues, I can see both sides.

[Dan Fried ]is a pillar of the U.S. State Department. He`s part of its institutional memory. He has been in the room for basically every important negotiation, every standoff, every big development, particularly between the United States and Russia for decades.

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a 'Public Safety Complex' around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith-esque fire station.

[Rex] Tillerson himself has no deputy, for example. Latest plans from the [Donald Trump's] administration call for a 37 percent cut to the agency`s budget, 37 percent.

Having a place out of the city is a shortcut toward the mental reset I need.

These are career non-partisan apolitical staffers with a combined 150 years of experience at the State Department gone, just like that right off the top [right after Secretary Rex Tillerson was sworn in].

I never thought when I was a kid that I would become an adult. I never thought of myself as having any sort of distant horizon. I have sort of leapt without a master plan.