HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  “I do think she may have been hurt by the actions of some of her colleagues and friends in the Senate during the campaign,” said an adviser who talked to her a few days after she conceded. “Those who endorsed Obama, those who just sat on the sidelines, and particularly those who were in the shadows.”

  Veteran Hillarylanders insist that Hillary was excited about diving back into her Senate work, eager to get back to business as soon as possible. The people of New York hadn’t elected her to take a two- or three-month self-pity break. “From the moment she walked in, it was very much like she wanted to go back to business as usual,” said an aide who stayed with her for years after the campaign. “She was going to go back to her committee life.”

  But her return was awkward for everyone on Capitol Hill, including one former aide who encountered her at a park near her Russell Building office.

  “How are you?” Hillary asked from behind gigantic sunglasses.

  “Senator, how are you?” the young woman replied, before adding, “Is it good to be back?”

  Hillary’s stone-faced response oozed contempt for a question with such an obvious answer, and she quickly excused herself from the conversation.

  Outside the Capitol that June and July, a rising young executive assistant, Rob Russo, methodically completed a Herculean political task for Hillary. Russo, who had recently graduated from George Washington University and worked as an intern for campaign manager Maggie Williams, was put in charge of delivering 16,054 thank-you notes to an elite class of Hillary supporters, from top donors and volunteers to fellow politicians. The naughty-and-nice list that Balderston and Elrod assembled covered just a small corner of a political world full of people who had helped or harmed Hillary. Russo was responsible for making sure that folks categorized as particularly generous got a final “touch.”

  Presidential campaigns, often the last big run for a given politician, usually dissolved without top backers getting a last personal note from the candidate. Hillary determined that that wouldn’t be the case with her operation. It was more than just a polite demonstration of gratitude from an old-fashioned midwestern girl, as her aides suggest. Just like the methodical autopsy she conducted on the campaign that summer, the massive get-out-the-notes operation hinted that Hillary still had electoral politics on her mind. It was a way for her to show extra love and attention to the very people she would call on for help if she sought the presidency again.

  Most of the people on Russo’s list received an e-mail message. But for almost two full months, the impeccably dressed young aide with black-framed hipster glasses delivered to Hillary batches of thank-you notes, state by state. During downtime in the Senate, she read the sixteen thousand typed notes, often making hand edits, and signed those that were ready to be sent. Russo went on to handle Hillary’s correspondence at the State Department and in the Hillary Rodham Clinton Office that she set up after she stepped down from the Obama administration, ensuring continuity in her efforts to keep up with friends and supporters. The list of political and personal contacts, transferred from job to job, expanded her network every day.

  With the Senate in recess and the thank-you project wrapped up, Hillary took most of August for herself before arriving in Denver at the end of the month for the Democratic National Convention, where she had once expected to be nominated for president. Instead, she’d be giving an endorsement speech on Tuesday night and for the second time that summer, the behind-the-scenes fight over the substance and style of a speech would help define Hillary’s persona going forward.

  For decades, as first lady of Arkansas and first lady of the United States, and even as a senator from New York, Hillary had been defined in large part by her relationship to Bill Clinton, perhaps the most charismatic man in the country. Even when she ran for president in her own right, the nature of Bill’s role was a question that had to be dealt with not only by her rivals and the media but within her own campaign. But now, with Bill having embarrassed himself at times in his zeal to get her elected, Hillary’s future political fortunes would depend less on him than they had at any time before. If she was to have a political future, she would have to take control of her own story—and not wrestle publicly with the role of her former-president husband in her career as she had during the campaign.

  The Clinton team set up its war room that week at the Brown Palace, a posh hotel about a mile from the convention’s security perimeter. The speech had been written over the course of a few weeks. Lissa Muscatine, now the co-owner of Washington’s premier political bookstore, Politics and Prose, had taken over the lead from Hillary’s younger speechwriters and set up shop with other staffers in a conference room with a long narrow table.

  Late Monday night, less than twenty-four hours before her big moment onstage, Hillary met with several women in her inner circle, including Muscatine, Maggie Williams, Cheryl Mills, and Melanne Verveer, to discuss the text. It was good, Hillary thought, but it wasn’t quite there. She left it to the group of women to spruce up the draft. Muscatine went back to work, sequestering herself in a corner of the hotel conference room to polish the speech while colleagues worked on other assignments at the table. By Tuesday morning, it was about 80 percent right—in good enough shape for Hillary to feel confident about the substance. At that point, the concern was mostly about style. How, for example, should she build the drama in a passage about Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad conductor? She was close to finished—or so she thought. She rode to the convention center to practice on a mock stage.

  But that afternoon, when Hillary returned to the Brown Palace conference room for another run-through with a TelePrompTer, there was a new problem with the speech. As she started to read it aloud, she stopped short. The text had changed.

  “What is this?” she asked, looking askance at her speechwriters and communications advisers in the room. She often expresses her displeasure with the scolding tone of a mother, and here it was unmistakable.

  While she had been on the mock stage at the convention center, Bill had delivered edits. He had ripped up the structure and added some of his own poetic flourishes. Clinton aides, many of whom have worked for both Bill and Hillary, still referred to him as “The President.” They had simply done what they had been ordered to do.

  But Hillary was having none of it. Bill and the set of advisers she had hired from his 1996 campaign had proved disastrous at developing her message and strategy for the campaign. She was the one in the hot seat now. It was her make-or-break moment as a loyal Democrat and time for her to take control of the message.

  “It’s my speech,” she declared as she left to find “The President.”

  When she was safely out of the room, Hattaway advised the other Clinton aides to put it back the way it was. Keep the president’s one-of-a-kind turns of phrase—“the poetry”—he instructed, but reassemble the original structure of the speech. With just hours left to go until she took the stage, Clinton aides rushed to piece it back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  They moved paragraphs around and made last-minute tweaks to the words. Throughout the commotion, with the clock ticking toward the zero hour for the speech, Hillary was dressed casually. She still had to put on her evening wear, a bright orange suit that would stand out against the Democratic-blue backdrop of the convention floor. Hattaway’s phone blew up: Obama team vetters kept calling to get a copy of the speech. It’ll be there, he tried to reassure them. But everyone was anxious. Despite the photo-op in Unity, the Obamans didn’t fully trust the Clintonites. The relationship had remained testy during the course of the summer as Hillary’s team tried to extract promises that Obama would help retire Hillary’s debt every time his high command asked the Clintons to appear as surrogates. And the drama of Clintonworld grated on the disciplined Obama campaign.

  When Hillary and her speech were finally ready to go at about eight p.m. in Denver, a copy was e-mailed to the Obama team. Jon Lovett, a young Clinton speechwriter who would go on to work with
Hurwitz in the Obama White House, clambered into a van with his laptop and a thumb drive with a copy of the speech in tow. He called ahead to advise that Hillary would soon be at the Pepsi Center, the site of the convention. Soon there was a mad dash through the warrens of the building to get the thumb drive to the folks running the TelePrompTer. “Never a dull moment with the Clintons,” Jim Margolis, an Obama ad man, quipped when they arrived.

  After final touch-ups to her hair and makeup, Hillary and her team walked through Obama’s staff room in the arena, on the way to the stage. She stopped to say hi to a few top Obama aides, including Anita Dunn and Dan Pfeiffer. As she processed the speech in her mind, “she’s feeling all this pressure,” one confidante recalled.

  A rump group of her delegates had shown up at the convention hell-bent on forcing the issue of Obama’s nomination; they weren’t listening to her appeals to just get on board. No matter how hard she tried to stop them, she couldn’t. And she knew that she would take the blame if they disrupted the convention. That added to her tension as she prepared to take the stage. But for once, this would be a dramatic Clinton moment with plenty for Obama’s team to love. It was the third time in less than three months that she would stand before a national audience to offer her testament. For its tenor and its timing, just before John McCain picked another woman, Sarah Palin, as his running mate, it would be the most pivotal of her endorsements.

  When she finally emerged before a raucous crowd, with about twenty minutes to go before the end of prime time on the East Coast, it was to chants of “Hill-a-ry, Hill-a-ry” and a thumping ovation. Clinton and Obama supporters alike waved white signs bearing her signature emblazoned in blue and underlined with a red streak. A television camera captured Bill Clinton mouthing “I love you” from his skybox.

  After opening with a little riff on her pride—as a mother, a New York senator, a Democrat, and an American—she hit the punch line, calling herself “a proud supporter of Barack Obama.” No one would have been surprised if the Obama team backstage had been prepared to count the minutes before she said his name. But it was out in a matter of seconds. There it was, for the world to hear. In the skybox they shared, Joe Biden and Michelle Obama leaped to their feet.

  Then for the first time, Hillary dropped the gloves and threw roundhouses at McCain, the Senate traveling buddy with whom she had once done vodka shots in Estonia. “My friends,” she said, echoing—perhaps gently mocking—the Republican nominee’s favorite rhetorical tic, “it is time to take back the country we love.”

  She continued, “I haven’t spent the past thirty-five years in the trenches advocating for children, campaigning for universal health care, helping parents balance work and family, and fighting for women’s rights at home and around the world … to see another Republican in the White House squander the promise of our country and the hopes of our people.… No way. No how. No McCain.”

  But the heart and soul of the speech was a final section on finding the faith to persevere in the face of hardship. Extending the arc she had first drawn in her concession speech of a shared struggle for women and African Americans, Hillary used the heroism of a second black woman to drive home her point.

  “On that path to freedom, Harriet Tubman had one piece of advice: ‘If you hear the dogs, keep going,’ ” Hillary said. “ ‘If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.’ … But remember, before we can keep going, we’ve got to get going by electing Barack Obama president.”

  The crowd exploded in applause one more time as Hillary concluded. Bill and Chelsea beamed. Biden whispered his approval to Michelle Obama. He had been an ally of Bill’s White House on Capitol Hill and later a good friend of Hillary’s in the Senate and on the campaign trail. At times during the early presidential debates, when he was still a candidate for the nomination, Biden had seemed a lot closer to Hillary than to Obama, and Hillary was clearly much more fond of Biden than Obama. “Even when they were opponents in the primary, anytime someone would mention his name around her, she would get this little smile,” one of her top aides said. “She really likes him. He really likes her.”

  Having heard her emphatic endorsement, Biden raced deep into the arena to Hillary’s holding room. Finding her, he dropped to his knees and clasped his hands in a dramatic gesture of praise.

  After the convention, Hillary turned most of her attention back to the upper chamber. Steeped in grandeur, tradition, and sloth, the Senate had never seemed like a perfect match for the former first lady, who had to learn to control her natural impatience.

  “I don’t know if I can take this,” she had told an aide as they walked back to her office from a vote in the Capitol in her first year. “I don’t know if I could stay in this job and just go back and forth and vote and go to committee hearings.”

  But over eight years, she had come to find rewarding aspects of her job. She’d fought hard to get this seat that was once held by Robert F. Kennedy, and she had used it as a power base far beyond the walls of the Senate. And while she had first won her seat in the shadow of the end of the Clinton presidency, she had soon begun to prove that she was a political force in her own right as a senator. She liked completing tasks, and the Senate afforded her a platform to make laws, have a voice in the national debate, and even attack issues from outside the legislative process. In a system designed, with checks and balances, to effect change slowly, Hillary constantly looked for ways to use both her official power as an officeholder and her celebrity to jump-start action on policy issues. Many of the projects she took pride in involved what she called the “power to convene”—her unique ability to bring together stakeholders from government, the private sector, and academia to solve problems. Few said no to a meeting request from Hillary Clinton.

  Just as she would later creatively use her power to launch public-private initiatives at the State Department, Hillary established herself as a resourceful player in the Senate. All members of Congress introduce bills, vote, and help constituents navigate the federal bureaucracy when they have trouble getting veterans benefits and Social Security checks. But Hillary saw the job as a platform for connecting institutions in different parts of society to achieve goals. She persuaded Cornell University to link upstate New York farmers with markets in the city that were buying produce from New Jersey, and she played a helpful role in bringing about a settlement between the New York Power Authority and the Buffalo area to redevelop the city’s waterfront.

  Back in the Senate full-time after Labor Day, Hillary was excited about the prospect of working in a Democratic-led Congress with a Democratic president, which seemed to augur well for a new push to reform the nation’s health care system. From the outside, she looked weakened by the primary loss. But inside the Senate, her allies were adamant that majority leader Harry Reid find a way to elevate her. That was particularly true among the women, and not just the group of them who endorsed her. A strong feeling had taken root that Hillary should be embraced, a sentiment of which Hillary was almost certainly aware.

  The smallest senator in stature, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, may have been the biggest Hillary booster behind the scenes. Mikulski, who had served twenty-two years in the Senate, and who had endorsed Hillary in the primary, prodded party leaders to find an enhanced role for her. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana was also among those who led the charge. The drawling daughter of former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu had regrets about the primary campaign. She counted herself among Bill Clinton’s biggest supporters and among Hillary’s greatest admirers. But when Obama came calling, armed with the fact that Landrieu was running for reelection and would need a big black turnout in New Orleans and across the state, she had privately committed to vote for him at the convention. Now Landrieu wanted to make things right. At one point, she pleaded with Reid to take care of Hillary. Reid responded by half-jokingly telling the oft-troublesome Landrieu that Clinton could
have her spot as chairman of the Small Business Committee.

  Reid ultimately blocked Hillary at every turn. He and Schumer weren’t going to irritate other Democratic colleagues by giving Hillary a leg up. There was an inherent risk in giving her a more prominent role in the Senate, particularly on health care: she’d have a better spot from which to challenge Obama. If any Democrat was going to be the face of health care reform in the Senate, it was going to be the dying Ted Kennedy, whose endorsement of Obama was one of the most pivotal moments of the primary and one of the most stinging rebukes of Clinton. If it wasn’t Kennedy, it would be his best friend in the Senate, Chris Dodd, the red-cheeked, white-haired son of a senator who had been Kennedy’s carousing buddy in their salad days on Capitol Hill. Clinton asked Kennedy to give her control of a health care subcommittee, but he turned her down cold. Instead, he offered her a runner-up trophy as chair of a special task force on insurance industry issues—the very industry that had strangled her health reform effort in the White House.

  Yet, while Reid ran the Senate, Hillary’s advocates, including some surprising sources of goodwill, turned to Obama, the nation’s new top Democrat, for help. Even Claire McCaskill privately made the case to Obama’s aides that he should help find a position of prominence for Hillary, whether in the Senate or in his administration. “Her message was that Hillary and Hillary’s camp needs to continue to be engaged by the Obama folks,” said a source familiar with the discussion. “She had to be included. She needed some seat at the table.”

  THREE

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