Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s official portrait was unveiled Tuesday at the State Department, accompanied by glowing remarks from Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“The walk to the secretary’s office on the seventh floor is a little bit awe-inspiring … down that wood-paneled mahogany row, surrounded by portraits of our predecessors, most of them looking a little bit severe, many with some pretty imaginative facial hair, and all but three of them white men,” said Blinken in remarks before the unveiling.
“And now, beginning today, another secretary will join this esteemed group. A secretary who helped transform American diplomacy for the 21st century,” Blinken said, introducing Clinton.
Blinken lauded Clinton’s work on behalf of women, girls and the LGBTQ community, among other accomplishments during her tenure — and praised her for “calling out” Russian President Vladimir Putin “for who he really is, from the start.”
“Beyond any part of the world, the secretary saw that to be more effective, diplomacy needed to widen its aperture,” Blinken said.
Clinton served as secretary of State during the Obama administration. She is also a former first lady, as the wife of former President Bill Clinton, and became the first woman elected as a U.S. senator from New York — as well as the first first lady to win a federal office.
She ran for the White House in 2016 and won the Democratic nomination, becoming the first woman to secure a major party’s presidential nomination.
“Secretary Clinton, your leg of the race helped revitalize the power and the purpose of American diplomacy. It reminded the world of who America is and what we stand for, and helped us achieve our mission,” Blinken said.
In her own remarks before the portrait unveiling, Clinton underscored the importance of American commitment to diplomacy and development, and praised “the continuation of a lot of the values and priorities that we worked on” in the Biden administration.
“Expanding NATO, facing down Russian aggression, managing the challenges from China using creative diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific,” she listed — with an aside to Russia’s leader on the NATO point that “Vladimir, you brought it on yourself.”
She also quipped that it had been a while since she’d seen the official portrait, “between COVID, between not wanting to finish it during the prior administration,” prompting laughs with a jab toward former President Trump, whom she lost the 2016 presidential race to.