Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knows how to play to a crowd.

The public figure, who has received the brunt of the scrutiny tied to the release of the WikiLeaks cables, joked about the situation during a State Department reception she hosted Saturday night for honorees of the 33rd annual Kennedy Center Honors.

Clinton spoke highly of meeting the night's recipients who include Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey and followed up by saying, "I am writing a cable about it, which I'm sure you'll find soon on your closest website."

The joke reflects a change in Clinton's public handling of the Wikileaks situation.

Earlier on Saturday, Clinton turned the tables on WikiLeaks, using the media assault on her staff's activities to highlight their productivity.

"The work of diplomacy is on display," Clinton told reporters. "It was not our intention for it to be released this way -- usually it takes years before such matters are. But I think there's a lot to be said about what it shows about the foreign policy of the United States."

Whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks began its gradual release of more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables just a week ago. Only a small fraction of the cables, which have caused great embarrassment for the U.S., have been made available for download so far.

In the fallout, Clinton said she's been focused on regaining the trust of other countries.

"Everybody has a right to have us talk to them, and have any questions that they have answered, but at the end of the day -- as a couple of analysts and writers are now writing -- what you see are diplomats doing the work of diplomacy," she said.

New documents released Thursday revealed it was the CIA, not the State Department, who ordered the information "wishlist" of data to be gathered on high ranking members of the United Nations.

The claws had come out against Clinton who was accused of having an interest in wiretapping that rivaled Nixon's.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Time magazine in a Skype interview on Tuesday, "She should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that."

In the interview, Time's Managing Editor Richard Stengel said Clinton was looking like "the fall guy."

Clinton has been at the forefront of the U.S. response to WikiLeaks, insisting it's an "attack on the international community."

In her visit to Bahrain on Friday, Clinton said that in addition to not running for president in 2012, her position as secretary of state would be her "last public position." 

Concluding that her statement was influenced by the recent heat she's taken for the WikiLeaks cables, Nile Gardiner of The Telegraph notes, "This was a big step back for a hugely ambitious politician with potentially another two decades of public life ahead."

He continues, "She has become the public face of the Wikileaks fiasco on the world stage, and will likely remain so, as the official ultimately responsible for America’s vast diplomatic corps. And the White House has been happy to keep it that way. The president has strikingly avoided making any comment on this latest leak, the third this year, and kept his distance from what is a huge embarrassment for his administration. In fact, over Wikileaks, Barack Obama has proved as elusive as the Scarlet Pimpernel."

But it looks like the secretary of state has turned a corner and is now making the best of it.

In "From WikiLemons, Clinton Tries To Make Lemonade," Mark Landler of the New York Times writes, "When American diplomats get together these days, there is lots of dark talk about the fallout from the sensational disclosure of secret diplomatic cables. Will angry foreign governments kick out ambassadors? Will spooked locals stop talking to their embassy contacts? Behind all the public hand-wringing, however, there is another, more muted reaction: pride."

Why? Because the cables are smart, well written and hilarious at times.

Landler writes, "[T]hey have showcased the many roles of the Foreign Service officer in the field: part intelligence analyst, part schmoozer, part spy — and to judge by these often artful cables, part foreign correspondent...Cables about Kazakhstan’s high-living leaders are written in a satirical tone worthy of Borat, the fictional (and wild) Kazakh played in the movie by Sacha Baron Cohen."

Clinton has pointed to analysts and reporters who have noted the deft skill of the cable writers.

Case and point: Tatiana Gfoeller, U.S. ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, who wrote the cable about Britain's Prince Andrew's interaction with diplomats in Bishkek.

McClatchy Newspapers' Mark Seibel writes, "[I]t isn't just the prince's indiscretions that make Gfoeller's account so worthy of notice…Rather, it's the rollicking way Gfoeller tells the tale, filled with verbatim quotes, witty observations and attention to setting the scene. So detailed is the account that a blogger at a website called Disappeared News suggested that she must have been wearing a wire."

Ever the diplomat, Clinton has found a graceful way to tout her patriotism.  

“It was a DoD system, and a DoD obviously military intel guy,” she said. “But we’re part of one government, and we’re part of one country, and we have to work together, and that’s what we’re doing.”

To reach editor-in-chief Callie Schweitzer, click here.
To follow her on Twitter: @cschweitz
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