Alum Mohammad Javad Zarif is Iran's Foreign Minister

FORBES LIFE -- U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry doesn’t often spend five days in a row in any one place — including his own office and his house. But sometimes brinkmanship in world affairs demands it, so it was with a certain gritty, dead-level calm that Secretary Kerry turned on a dime and stayed in Vienna to drill down with his counterpart in the nuclear power negotiations, Iran’s foreign minister and easily the San Francisco State alumnus with the most unexpected curriculum vita going, Mohammed Javad Zarif. The two boys and their European and Chinese diplomatic counterparts — alongside the attendant 500 baying hounds of the international press — bunkered down in one of Vienna’s most luxe, fitting venues for such a grinding, 11th-hour debate, namely, the blindingly white, columned Palais Coburg Hotel Residenz perched atop the medieval city walls on the eponymous Coburg Bastei, just off the Ringstraße.