insisted on using his personal computer to conduct State Department business, he set up an office in one of the few places in Embassy Nairobi authorized for an unsecured network–a bathroom.

It’s a strange ending for someone who entered the national stage as one of the first big foreign policy names to endorse Obama, and later became a close friend of the president’s. When Obama entered office, Gration had his choice of high-level positions–and, reportedly, the commander-in-chief’s ear. Rumors placed Gration’s aspirations high in a second-term Obama administration–as Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, even.

Gration, the son of missionaries, spent much of his childhood in Kenya and speaks fluent Swahili. He joined the Air Force in 1974, where he became an F-16 fighter pilot instructor before retiring in 2006. Thatyear, he traveled Africa extensively with a senator, Barack Obama, who so awed Gration that the longtime Republican became a Democrat. (Writing for The New Yorker in 2008, Nicholas Lemann called Gration “The most mystical believer in Obamaism whom I met.” He was also known to compare the senator to Nelson Mandela.) Gration endorsed Obama–he was one of the campaign’s earliest, most high-profile foreign policy ‘gets’–and became a national security adviser to his 2008 presidential campaign, as well as one of its most enthusiastic surrogates. After the election, speculation saw Gration in a number of impressive roles, like head of NASA. In March of 2009, Obama named him Special Envoy to Sudan.

Gration’s appointment was greeted with widespread optimism that Obama was getting tough on Sudan. But in that