Biography | Bernadette Meehan — The State Department Hall Where Sherman Swore Her In

People treat an ambassadorship as a title that appears on a Senate roll call.

The oath that made Bernadette Meehan Ambassador to Chile was taken in this building.

On 29 August 2022 Wendy R. Sherman, then deputy secretary of state, officiated the swearing-in at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C.

A State Department photographer, Freddie Everett, recorded the room that morning.

The caption places the ceremony inside the Harry S Truman Building at 2201 C Street NW.

The Senate had confirmed Meehan on 20 July 2022 by a vote of 51 to 44.

President Joe Biden had sent the nomination more than a year earlier, on 9 July 2021.

A hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was held on 15 March 2022.

The building itself is the department's headquarters, completed in 1941 and named for Truman in 2000.

It sits in Foggy Bottom, west of the National Mall, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Meehan had already spent a career in these corridors.

She entered the Foreign Service in March 2004 after seven years in private banking.

Her first post was as a consular officer in Bogotá.

Later assignments took her to Baghdad, to Arabic training, and to the consulate in Dubai.

She worked as a special assistant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and, from 2014 into 2015, as spokesperson for the National Security Council.

The 2022 oath did not invent that record. It put a country name on it.

The ceremony photo is a U.S. government work and is in the public domain.

The Truman Building is a working federal office. Visitors see the C Street facade, not the inner rooms used that August morning.

Photo: Freddie Everett, U.S. Department of State, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons