This Town

by Mark Leibovich

  Holbrooke underwent twenty hours of surgery, an intricate last-resort procedure from which he would not awaken. Reports now characterized his condition as “grave,” which is a surefire signal to get the obits ready (no one comes back from “grave”). Hillary Clinton spent hours at the hospital, silently holding Kati’s hand. On the night of December 13, President Obama attended a holiday reception at the State Department—an annual event for the chiefs of diplomatic missions to the United States. Obama and Secretary Clinton both spoke and paid tribute to Holbrooke, and they also met privately with Holbrooke’s family while Christmas carolers regaled the partygoers. Later that night, Holbrooke died.

  • • •

  The news, while expected, still sent Russert-esque shock through This Town. A hugely present figure was suddenly absent. It resonated through a book party for David Eisenhower (who had written something about his grandfather) at Al Hunt and Judy Woodruff’s house, from which Andrea Mitchell would head immediately to cover the breaking news. Politico editor John Harris hailed Holbrooke as “a bucking stallion of ego” who did “not simply want to understand history, he wanted to gallop across its stage.”

  Packs of bucking-stallion senators, diplomats, journalists, and protégés galloped over to GW for a final homage. Hillary Clinton went into chief comforter mode, herding Holbrooke’s staff down the street to the Ritz-Carlton bar for an impromptu “Irish wake.” They took over a corner of the bar and shared hours of Richard stories, Clinton staying until the end. Similar gatherings would break out in the next few days.

  The big daddy of all Holbrooke send-offs took place, naturally, at This Town’s secular church, the Kennedy Center, where Richard and Kati had just attended the Kennedy Center Honors a week before his death. The grand venue’s full and proper name is: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. No mention of God here: the Performing Arts are deity at the red-walled opera house, down the hall from where Tim Russert was mourned and celebrated two and a half years earlier. Here, we would assess performances. The acclaimed American soprano Renée Fleming sang “Ave Maria” (beautifully) in tribute to Holbrooke, whose parents were Jewish but who was never observant himself. Fake palm trees adorned the stage, part of the set of South Pacific, Holbrooke’s favorite musical, which happened to be in mid-run at the Kennedy Center. Instead of a cross at center stage, there loomed a massive screen flashing a photo montage of Richard.

  This was just the Pan-Cake makeup cluster that he would have orchestrated with great care: the guest list, the eulogists, the seating (some reserved, some not), the parking of the Town Cars, and the blueberry scones and salmon at the rooftop reception. “A testament to the know-everything, know-everyone machine of a man who was Richard C. Holbrooke,” said the next day’s account in the Washington Post.

  Holbrooke’s Kennedy Center finale merited two presidents (Clinton and Obama), the VP, secretaries of state, foreign leaders, ambassadors, and network anchors. They were just the dignitaries Holbrooke would be looking for over your head if he happened to be stuck talking to you. The “D.C. scalp stare,” as it is known.

  As a military quartet in red-and-blue uniforms played somber tunes in the lobby, Colin Powell was pulled aside at the metal detectors. Extra wanding. Raised his arms, spread his feet, the whole rigmarole. Arriving late was Madeleine Albright, the second Clinton-era secretary of state (succeeding Warren Christopher). She was the one who was given Holbrooke’s coveted State job in 1996 after Hillary lobbied her husband for a woman to get the position. Holbrooke held no grudge against Hillary, and fully expected that she would be the Democratic nominee in either 2004 or 2008. In the late nineties, Holbrooke began “honoring” Hillary at annual holiday parties at his and Kati’s Manhattan apartment, a tradition that continued through her time in the Senate. Matt Damon and Glenn Close and Robert De Niro would sing carols with the Henry Kissinger types whom Holbrooke liked to be around.

  Holbrooke offered lavish toasts to the guest of honor. It went without saying that still-in-government Hillary could be more helpful to Holbrooke than her postpresidential husband. She had a favorite story about Holbrooke’s attempts to impress. She once made a passing remark to Holbrooke about her admiration for the Salvation Army—so passing that she did not remember saying it. But Holbrooke did, and at a future holiday party, to his great delight, the Salvation Army band came marching in to serenade her.

  These stories were recounted after Richard’s death in the endearing vein of someone who lacked a basic embarrassment gene—or shame gene. During night flights for diplomatic missions, Holbrooke would change out of his suit and into bright yellow pajamas—“my sleeping suit”—which he often wore while briefing the press. The stories were told in the spirit of “You can’t help but love the guy,” even if some people very much could.

  • • •

  Hillary Clinton told friends she felt badly that her loss to Obama in 2008 almost assuredly cost Holbrooke a chance at a bigger job (though appointing him secretary of state was hardly the sure thing some believed). She always had a weakness for Big Personality men—typically older, narcissistic, and often prone to self-destructiveness. Her late father, Hugh Rodham, a my-way-or-the-highway conservative with whom she would often clash in her youth, fit this category. And so did her husband, at least in key ways (narcissistic, prone to self-destructiveness). These were not No Drama men. And it was hardly surprising that Holbrooke was a bad fit with Obama and his staff. His “Richard being Richard” antics could be exhausting, even to Secretary Clinton, who confided in his final months that she was expending way too much time and energy dealing with Richard-related (or Richard-exclusive) matters.

  The Obama team had much contempt for what they called the “I Told You So” crowd. These were Democrats—often Clintonites, if not Bill himself—who complained that people like Holbrooke were not being deployed properly. If only this administration was more savvy, they complained, like the Clintons were. In the foreign policy establishment, a chief annoyance to the Obama people was Leslie Gelb, a State Department official in the Carter years who went on to have a distinguished career as a national security correspondent and editor at the New York Times. Gelb had a knack for complaining on television or in the press that the Obama team was ignoring all the vast knowledge available to them. Whenever Gelb or one of his fellow I Told You So’s went off, I would receive “There they go again” e-mails from someone in the White House like this one: “Remember how I told you that this guy Les Gelb craps on us and has told people that he does so because we don’t call him? I would have thought he wouldn’t say that on the record, but he basically did in this article. Nice window into the assholeishness of the foreign policy establishment in this city.” Included in the e-mail was a clip from National Journal in which Gelb was quoted saying, “I don’t get the sense that the Obama White House is reaching out. I rarely hear of them calling anybody on the outside.” Or certain people on the inside, Gelb was also saying privately. Holbrooke was one of his closest friends.

  As Obama’s approvals sank in late 2010 and early 2011—and he had just been “shellacked” in the midterms—the I Told You So’s were emboldened. Holbrooke’s death became a flashpoint. “What in God’s name would make you not make full use of Dick Holbrooke?” Gelb said in Newsweek.

  Kati Marton herself had been a vocal critic of the Obama administration, especially over how she believed her husband had been treated. She viewed so many people in the White House as small-minded, easily threatened, and not mature enough to fully utilize the towering talent in their midst. “Richard knew his place in history was assured,” Marton told me. “And when he came up against the likes of [Jim] Jones, he would say to me, ‘Kati, this is all going to come out when history is written.’”

  Fifteen eulogists performed (fifteen!) at the Kennedy Center, most of them no stranger to motorcades. They included Presidents Clinton and Obama, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, Chairman of the Joint C
hiefs Mike Mullen, and of course Hillary. Gelb delivered a marquee performance, quite hilarious and without bitterness. Illustrating Holbrooke’s competitiveness, he told a story of how Holbrooke would devote hours to mastering Donkey Kong, the old video game. He cursed the machine at one point, Gelb said, “accusing the Donkey Kong company of war crimes.” The lineup offered a grand proxy for that particular moment in the Democratic power structure: the Obama administration was beaten down and the I Told You So’s were engaging in a funereal end-zone dance on Richard’s behalf.

  “I loved the guy, because he could do,” said Bill Clinton, the I Told You So in Chief, as Gelb nodded hard onstage behind him, and so did Hillary. Implicit in this statement was a question: What had the current president “done,” peace-wise, in AfPak?

  The service went on for nearly two hours. Obama was forced to sit through all of it. He sat to the left of Hillary, fidgeted, and stole “Get me out of here” glances backstage. Obama hated sitting through other people’s speeches. Early in his presidency, he complained a great deal about having to hear Biden introduce every dignitary in the room while he waited behind him to speak. The president dispatched Jarrett to relay his displeasure to Biden’s office, and from then on, Obama usually spoke first and left.

  Even worse about this Holbrooke ordeal was Obama’s lack of enthusiasm for the departed. He paid tribute to Holbrooke’s career but didn’t bother pretending he had any relationship with the guy. “We come together to celebrate an extraordinary life,” Obama began, then launched into twelve boilerplate minutes of résumé recital and nods to someone who “made a difference,” “spoke truth to power,” and so forth.

  After he was finished, Obama returned to his seat and was subjected to more verbiage, some of it veiled criticism of him. And some of it barely veiled at all. In this, no one topped the penultimate speaker, Bill Clinton.

  “I could never understand the people who didn’t appreciate him,” Clinton said of Holbrooke. “Most of the people who didn’t were not nearly as good at doing.”

  Clinton, like Holbrooke, was a ferociously social animal. Like Holbrooke, Clinton could also be desperately insecure and vulnerable. This had great drawbacks, but it also allowed him to identify with the neediness of others—recognizing, for instance, that late-night phone calls to Newt Gingrich, whose neediness rivaled his own, could go a long way.

  Obama is impressively self-contained. That is a strength, but it can also exacerbate the isolation of his job and make him impatient with the fragile egos of the city. Larry Summers, a Treasury secretary under Clinton who later became one of Obama’s top economic advisers, would express surprise to colleagues about Obama’s tendency to eat lunch by himself in the Oval Office on many days. Marton said Henry Kissinger called to console her a few days after Holbrooke died. In the conversation, he compared Obama to Nixon. Both were loners, Kissinger said. “But the key difference is that Nixon liked to have big personalities around him,” he said. “Obama does not.”

  The slumping president-of-the-moment never seemed more alone than when he sat on the crowded stage of eulogists. While Obama stared straight ahead, Bill Clinton finished by cuing up the final speaker, his wife.

  “Hillary and I were asked to end the program, and we are appearing according to Holbrooke protocol,” Bill Clinton said. “The one with the real power speaks last.”

  • • •

  Though Barack Obama won the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton won Obama’s first term.

  As she rose to cap off the Holbrooke pageant, Clinton did so as the most popular political figure in Washington. She achieved this status by leaving town. As secretary of state, she could avoid the cesspool that Obama had vowed to purify in 2008. The Clinton campaign’s big argument in 2008 was that Hillary knew the game. She knew Washington. How it worked. She was tough enough to play here and savvy enough to prevail. Obama’s argument was that he would change the game. Voters opted for the game change. And Hillary, with a bright, tight smile, said, “Fine, I’m out of here,” until Obama enticed her back to run the State Department.

  Putting Clinton at State looked like a smart, even Machiavellian move, the kind of gritty political play that led skeptics to think maybe Obama did have the gonads to operate in This Town. (That skepticism was articulated by James Carville, who joked that “if Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama, he’d have two.” He had said this publicly a few times and Hillary asked him to please stop.)

  While the president fidgeted and fumed onstage, the secretary of state strode with squared shoulders to the lectern. It had been thirty months since she and Bill had walked into the Kennedy Center for Tim Russert’s memorial, laid low by the Obama dynamo. But the Big Dogs don’t die. They can be disgraced, impeached, defeated. The Clintons come back, particularly Hillary, who frequently invokes a mantra she attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: women in politics, she said, “need to develop skin as tough as a rhinoceros hide.”

  “I joke that I have the scars to show from my experiences,” then candidate Clinton told me in an interview a few months before Russert died in 2008. “But you know, our scars are part of us, and they are a reminder of the experiences we’ve gone through, and our history. I am constantly making sure that the rhinoceros skin still breathes. And that’s a challenge that all of us face. But again, not all of us have to live it out in public.”

  Hillary was, per trademark, the exemplar of that first political virtue: survival. She hung around, waited out the others, and stayed alive. Funerals and memorial services were crowning forums for her magnificent survival play. Like Bill, Hillary gave great eulogy. That’s where she performed best, with perfectly maternal command and stoicism.

  “I had a front-row seat for Richard being Richard,” Hillary Clinton said, calling Holbrooke’s sudden departure “a loss personally” and “a loss for our country.” She hailed Holbrooke as “a genius at friendship,” which was a classic construction of This Town, Clintonian vintage or otherwise. Friendship as craft, demanding “expertise,” or “genius.” The elite practitioners collected the biggest, shiniest friends and then exhibited them at grand pageants such as this. If Holbrooke was a genius at friendship, the Clintons were grand masters. “Friends of the Clintons’” (FOBs, FOHs) became their own subcommittees of the political class.

  She is ever guarded, a fundamentally “private person” despite her global superfame. She has always been easier for people to follow than truly know. Her admirers speak of her in tones of distant awe, suggesting that they are more acolytes than real friends. “Hillary is a person who feels herself very vulnerable, and her response is to make herself bulletproof,” said Nancy Pietrafesa, a classmate of Clinton’s at Wellesley College and one of her closest friends in young adulthood.

  But moments of grief offered her entrée into the rituals of mass comfort at which she and her husband thrived. They have honed public mourning to a raw perfection. Even semi-private mourning: a Democratic press aide I know was with Clinton in 2002 when the news broke that Paul Wellstone, then her Senate colleague, had been killed in a plane crash in his home state of Minnesota. Upon hearing the news, in a holding room in suburban Philadelphia where she was attending a campaign event for Representative Joe Hoeffel, Clinton burst into tears. Her personal assistant, Huma Abedin, asked my friend, the press aide, to leave the room. When she was allowed to return five minutes later, Hillary was again stoic and stone-faced, made no mention of anything being wrong, and gave her speech.

  Hillary Clinton told friends she was “devastated” by Richard Holbrooke’s death. “He lived enough for ten lives, so while we mourn, we have reason for joy,” Clinton said of the man she called wholly unique in the world. She closed the marathon with a solemn “God bless you, my friend,” and big applause from the home crowd.

  Hillary was asking about possible replacements immediately. She called Kati periodically to check in, but This Town will always move on. That’s the col
dest part of any Washington ride, no matter how exhilarating. In March, Kati received a postcard in the mail addressed to “Richard C. Holbrooke” from the Democratic National Committee. “Your membership has expired.”

  • • •

  Inevitably, people started asking Clinton if she was running for president again in 2016. No way, she said, and after she repeated this a few times, her husband and Terry McAuliffe urged her not to be so definitive. She laughed. In addition to everything else, there’s no better point of seduction in politics than being reluctant, or acting it.

  As 2011 hit spring, Washington was consumed by the head-slapping stalemate of debt-ceiling negotiations, threats of government shutdowns, and persistently high unemployment numbers. Hillary—off somewhere on the planet being Queen of the World—looked so much better than the small silliness of This Town. She told friends how little she missed the city when she was away. She expressed quiet relief that she did not have to worry about things like rehearsing a speech for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, because, well, she didn’t win the presidency, so she did not have to speak, let alone show up at all (and she did not).

  I was sitting in the office of Robert Gibbs in the final days of his tenure as White House press secretary in early 2011. The officers of the White House Correspondents’ Association were nervous because the British royal family had just announced that the wedding of Prince William would occur on April 29, the same weekend of the Correspondents’ Association dinner. If the president traveled across the pond for the royal wedding, would he miss “the Prom”? Gibbs had to assure the president of the Correspondents’ Association that the “other” president (Obama) would not be attending the royal wedding. And This Town exhaled.

  As it turned out, the president’s involvement was nearly messed up anyway by the U.S. raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. A few days before the mission, on April 28, the tiny group of high-level national security principals who knew about the operation was discussing the timing of it in the White House Situation Room. While the raid ultimately happened on Sunday night, Saturday night was first raised as a possibility. But someone pointed out that Obama was scheduled to be at the Correspondents’ Association dinner that night and his absence (and that of other top administration officials) could tip off the journalist-filled room that something was up.