Rick Stengel finally has a new job — with benefits.
Stengel stepped down as the top editor of Time magazine last summer because he was under consideration for a job in President Obama’s State Department. But the government shutdown last fall delayed the process for months.
Stengel actually started work as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in February, but the official swearing-in ceremony did not take place until Tuesday afternoon in the State Department’s Benjamin Franklin Room.
There, Secretary of State John Kerry joked that Stengel was back sharing an apartment with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, another former top editor of Time — and CNN — who now runs the Washington, DC-based think tank, the Aspen Institute.
In their salad days at Time Inc., Stengel and Isaacson shared a summer home in Sag Harbor with Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
A number of top Time magazine people, including Michael Crowley, Mark Halperin, Michael Scherer and Bobby Ghosh, were on hand for the ceremony as were NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and Ali Zelenko, a former senior VP of Communications at Time, now at NBC News.