HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

The Clintons were out for a Sunday stroll in a wooded preserve in the scenic Hudson Valley, not far from their Dutch Colonial home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua, New York, when Bill’s phone rang. It was November 9, five days after the election, and the president-elect was calling for the last Democratic president. But Bill wasn’t getting good reception on his cell phone, and he asked if he could call back when he got home. When they finally had a sound connection, from the Clinton house, Obama explained that he was busy filling in the roster for his new administration, a project that former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta had been running behind the scenes for months, and he wanted Bill’s thoughts on a couple of personnel moves. Before they hung up, Obama asked Bill to tell Hillary that he would soon want to speak to her as well.

  A small set of Obama’s top advisers knew the reason: she was his pick for secretary of state. Political insiders had started hearing whispers about Hillary at State almost immediately after the election. The day after Obama’s victory, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News asked Philippe Reines, Hillary’s senior adviser and spokesman, whether Hillary would land at State. He gave the same answer he would have delivered had he been asked whether Hillary would sign on as dog catcher: anything’s possible.

  Aggressive, with intense brown eyes, the Upper West Side native had earned his place in Clinton’s inner circle with fierce loyalty and a sharp instinct for how to build and protect his boss’s narrative, often in insult-laden e-mail exchanges with reporters. Reines relished petty put-downs like using the wrong first name for a junior congressman to indicate the lawmaker wasn’t famous enough to merit being remembered, and he once described himself as a hockey goalie defending the Hillary net against the flying pucks of the press. Now he, too, wanted to know if the roller-coaster ride of the 2008 election was going to end at a new height—at the State Department.

  On November 7, in an e-mail chain with several of Hillary’s top advisers, including Maggie Williams, Cheryl Mills, and Capricia Marshall, Reines asked his boss whether she would end up at State.

  He’s going to offer you the job, Reines wrote.

  “Ain’t gonna happen for a million reasons,” Hillary replied to the group. She thought it was ridiculous, even absurd. She told him she couldn’t fathom where the rumor was coming from. But it couldn’t be true, she wrote.

  The call from Obama that Sunday night added to the intrigue for Hillary and her staff.

  Longtime Obama scheduler Alyssa Mastromonaco then reached out to Huma Abedin, who handled Hillary’s most sensitive personal and political tasks, and they plotted a trip for Hillary to Obama’s transition headquarters in Chicago. Hillary was getting a lot of attention right after the election for someone who didn’t think she was going to be asked to join the administration, but she still wasn’t nearly as convinced as some of her aides that a job offer was forthcoming.

  Inside Hillary’s Senate office on the fourth floor of the august Russell Building, a century-old Beaux Arts mix of marble slabs and Doric columns where the squeaking shoes of generals and admirals can be heard as they come to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee, aides were still wrestling with the question of how Hillary could continue to make her mark from Capitol Hill. After a summer of discontent, there was suddenly a buzz of excitement over the surprising possibility that Hillaryland might find a new home in the Obama administration.

  On the other side, there had been deep misgivings among some of Obama’s high-profile aides, including David Axelrod and Jim Messina, who had discussed the choice with the president-elect in late October, shortly before the election. As early as the summer of 2008, Obama had been pondering what a Hillary-run State Department would mean for his presidency.

  Axelrod had been dumbstruck when Obama first said he wanted Hillary for the job. “How can this work?” Axelrod asked. “We just had this very vigorous campaign.”

  “She was my friend before she was my opponent,” Obama replied. “She’s smart, she’s tough, she has a status in the world. I’m sure she’ll be a loyal member of the team. I have no concerns about it.”

  While she wouldn’t be answering the infamous three a.m. calls she had discussed during her campaign, she would have a major role in dealing with them if she landed in the job. During their grueling primary fight, Obama had mocked her for overstating her foreign policy portfolio. Worldliness wasn’t just about “what world leader I went and talked to in the ambassador’s house, who I had tea with,” he’d said. But as the primary battle wore on, Obama aides said, he became impressed with her persistence, her desire, as one put it, to “bust through a brick wall.” And in the months after he defeated her, he admired her fierce loyalty to the cause in the general election.

  Valerie Jarrett, the president-elect’s closest adviser and friend, ultimately embraced the idea. The campaign had been painful for her because she had a relationship with the Clintons that went back many years and was developed through her cousin, Ann Jordan, the wife of Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan. Jarrett had always admired and respected both Clintons and was relieved by the prospect of mending fences.

  Obama wanted Hillary on his team, and in making the case to his own aides, he knocked down the argument he had made on the trail that her experience was limited to tea parties. As important, having Hillary on the inside would let Obama keep control over perhaps the nation’s most potent political force other than himself.

  In a series of meetings in Chicago beginning two days after the election, Obama had gathered his brain trust, including Joe Biden, Podesta, Messina, and Rahm Emanuel, to pick the top officials in his Cabinet. Because the economy was in free fall, the first decision was to ask Tim Geithner to take the reins at the Treasury Department. Secretary of state was second on the agenda. By that point, Obama had made clear to his campaign team why he wanted Hillary. Biden spoke up in favor of that decision, according to Ted Kaufman, his longtime Senate chief of staff, who was also in the room.

  Biden had sought Bill Clinton’s advice before entering the 2008 race, and, as a longtime friend of both Clintons, never endorsed Obama in the latter stages of the primary. Instead, he had offered his counsel to both Obama and Hillary as they battled it out across the country.

  “The president was looking for what the vice president was going to say,” Kaufman recalled. “The vice president was a strong supporter of Hillary.”

  When Obama went around the room to count the yeas and nays—his personal choice evident already—the decision was unanimous.

  On November 13, four days after Obama’s call to the Clintons, Mitchell reported that Hillary had been spotted on a flight bound for Chicago. Later that day reporters staking out the Obama transition office at a federal building downtown caught sight of a motorcade that didn’t belong to the president-elect, raising the question of which other dignitary was visiting. Still, the two camps weren’t talking about it publicly. The operation was so hush-hush that when Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau ran into Abedin at the office that day, he assumed Huma was being interviewed for a job in the administration; the thought that Hillary was in the office listening to Obama’s sales pitch never crossed his mind.

  Obama and Clinton huddled in a bland conference room, face-to-face without any aides.

  Obama said he wanted her for the job.

  “I’m really flattered, Mr. President-elect,” Hillary replied, “but I’m going to go back to the Senate. That’s what I really want to do. You’ve got great people to choose from to be secretary of state.”

  She offered up two names: veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke and retired general Jim Jones, a former commandant of the Marine Corps.

  “I can help you in the Senate, because it’s going to be challenging to get your agenda through,” she told Obama. “You’ve got the economic crisis to deal with.”

  But Obama had given it a lot of thought, he told her, and she was the woman for the job. While he was tied down in Washington with the financial collapse, he needed a star-power diplomat to repr
esent him across the globe.

  Hillary said no again.

  Go home and give it some thought, Obama instructed her, as only a newly elected president could. He wasn’t taking no for an answer. They could talk about it later, he said.

  Hillary had plenty of reasons to reject Obama’s first entreaty. She was coming to grips with returning to the Senate; she didn’t want to run an agency full of Obama appointees; her husband’s international dealings could become an unwanted distraction for Obama; and she wouldn’t be able to pay off the $6.4 million debt that her campaign still owed to vendors if she held a post in the executive branch. Besides, why would she want to work for the upstart who beat her and look at his portrait every day in her office? And—never stated but obvious to anyone in politics—playing coy with Obama gave her leverage to extract a better deal if she ended up accepting. It all added up to a demurral.

  Until their face-to-face meeting, all but a few insiders in each camp had been kept in the dark. But the Huffington Post reported the next day that Obama had offered her the job, citing two Democratic officials. Suddenly it felt more real. It was a lifeline for Hillarylanders who had once imagined themselves in the West Wing only to snap back toward Capitol Hill. The State Department represented a soft landing in between.

  As Hillary began researching the job and soliciting opinions, she soon found out that her closest friends and advisers were divided on whether she should take it.

  Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, was driving in heavy traffic on M Street in Washington when Hillary called to get her thoughts. A dozen years earlier Hillary had urged Bill to make Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, his second-term secretary of state. The two women had traveled abroad together during the Clinton administration, and their bond was enhanced by the common experience of a Wellesley education. Not only was Albright a friend of Hillary’s, she was the only Democratic woman ever to serve as secretary of state and thus was uniquely positioned to offer counsel both about what the job entailed and about whether Hillary should take it. Albright pulled off onto a side street in Georgetown for what she correctly suspected would be a long conversation.

  “She knew I’d liked the job,” Albright said. “We talked about what the job was about, what you could do with it, how much travel there was, what the building was like.”

  What her friend was really driving at, Albright knew, was whether Hillary would enjoy being at State. “I told her obviously that I thought the job was terrific, that she’d be wonderful at it, and that it was something that she could take great pride in doing,” Albright recalled. “Often people think foreign policy has nothing to do with domestic policy, and they’re part of the same spectrum. So I just knew she would be good at it.”

  Mark Penn’s knee-jerk reaction was that she shouldn’t go to work for Obama. But ultimately he had a clear-eyed view of what was best for Hillary—especially when it involved plotting for a second presidential run. He came to see the political benefits that could accrue to Hillary if she took the job. Among them, it would bolster her credibility as a foreign policy expert; it would prove again that she was a good Democrat, not an out-for-herself freelancer; it would once and for all liberate her from Bill’s shadow; and it would please the Democratic primary voters who wanted to see her and Obama join forces.

  Penn had been so iced out of Hillaryland by that point, according to longtime Clinton hands, that his advice probably didn’t matter much. But his personal ambivalence exemplified the divide within Hillaryland. “Our office was kind of split because a lot of people didn’t want her to do it,” said one of Hillary’s Senate aides. “A lot of people wanted to retain their jobs—they were kind of negative about Obama and bitter. Then there were others who thought this was a good opportunity for her.”

  Obama put on the full-court press. Working on his behalf, a long list of high-profile Democratic players urged her to take the post, and it became clear that Bill was willing to do anything to ease that path, including adjusting the nature of his charitable work and sharing his donor list with the new White House team. But he was sensitive to the criticism he had received during her campaign. While he made clear that he thought she should take it, he didn’t pressure her.

  Podesta became the key go-between for Obama and Hillary. He had suggested Hillary for the job during meetings in the summer of 2008 only to find that Obama had already given it thought. Podesta urged Hillary to take the gig and advised Obama on the strategy and tactics of getting her to yes.

  For a week, news reports went back and forth on the question of whether she had actually been offered the job and whether she would take it. Behind the scenes, some Clinton and Obama aides worked hard to make a match. Reines and Andrew Shapiro, an adviser on national security matters, came up with a gambit for lobbying Hillary indirectly. Joe Biden’s birthday was coming up in a few days, and they urged her to call the vice president–elect a couple of days early, knowing that once they were on the phone, Biden would apply friendly pressure. He did his part. Emanuel made his own appeal to Hillary.

  But while the Clinton allies within Obama’s high command worked back channels to persuade her, much of the rest of his team was unsettled by the prospect of trying to assimilate the Clinton universe into the Obama world.

  “The majority of people, and I mean this not at the top echelons, but up and down the campaign, would not have suggested that she and her people become part of” the administration, one Obama insider said. “The majority of people who I knew were not for it.”

  As these subterranean fights played out between those who wanted Hillary at State and those who didn’t, the calculus flipped. At first it looked like Obama was on the verge of scoring a coup by getting Hillary to join a “team of rivals” cabinet. But with the public latched on to that story line, it became clear it would be an equally jarring embarrassment for Obama if she turned him down. That meant her own reputation was suddenly on the line, too—there could be a backlash if fellow Democrats read a rejection as a deliberate attempt to sabotage her former rival.

  Hillary had been concerned about those optics from the moment she left Obama’s transition headquarters. She instructed aides not to talk publicly about the offer, so that if she turned Obama down it wouldn’t reflect badly on either one of them.

  For several days, Hillary remained unsold. She was just getting used to the idea that her next act would be in the Senate, where a player with extraordinary contacts and political muscle could make a career as a serious legislator, even after a failed presidential campaign. Ironically, the model was Ted Kennedy. The cultural differences between Obama’s camp and Hillary’s raised serious doubts about whether they could all get along, and the candidates themselves had clashed some on foreign policy approaches during the campaign. While they had more in common than not, the contrast between them was real. During the primary, Obama had repeatedly knocked Clinton for voting to authorize the war in Iraq. Clinton had portrayed Obama as a naïf who would wilt in the face of troublemaker nations like Iran.

  As the days crawled by, Hillary kept leaning no. Several of the women closest to her, including Williams and Mills, urged her to reject the offer, according to one adviser familiar with the discussion at the time.

  But there was also a committed cadre who pushed her to get to yes throughout the weeklong flirtation. Reines pushed every button he could to get her to reconsider, and then asked others to do the same. “If you think she should be secretary of state, you better send an e-mail to her right now, because she is saying no,” he told one colleague late one night.

  Ellen Tauscher, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, was among those who reached out to Hillary in the final days before the decision. A Wall Street wunderkind who wandered into Democratic fund-raising after moving to California with her then husband, Tauscher had chaired Senator Dianne Feinstein’s first two campaigns for the Senate. Running as a Clinton-style centrist, she then edged out a Republican incu
mbent to win a Bay Area House seat, as Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996.

  She was tall and warm—and as tough as a Trident missile. Tauscher had befriended the first lady, and Hillary had helped talk her through a tough divorce from a husband who had admitted to extramarital activity at the same time Bill Clinton was on trial over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. After Hillary won the Senate seat, the two women grew closer when they worked together on military issues as members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

  Tauscher believed that Obama, who had limited foreign policy experience, needed gravitas on his national security team. She had urged Defense Secretary Robert Gates to hold over from the Bush administration to help Obama sort out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and she considered Jim Jones, the incoming national security adviser, a close personal friend. As chairwoman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Tauscher not only liked the idea of having three allies in the Situation Room, she thought Hillary’s skills, expertise, and relationships around the world could help restore America’s battered reputation and focus attention on serious policy issues that the Bush administration had neglected. And Hillary wouldn’t have to spend much time getting up to speed.

  Tauscher got her on the phone. “You’ve got to do this,” she said. Hillary laughed her familiar chortle and stammered a bit in protest. But then she started listening. Tauscher explained that Hillary would add value to Obama’s national security team immediately, using a Rolodex matched only by her husband’s to create a sense not just of push but of pull. The Bush administration had been almost hostile to the rest of the world, including longtime allies and potential strategic partners. In particular, Tauscher noted, the START treaty was expiring and America would need a superstar to repair its tattered relationship with Russia. “We’ve got to get this done,” she said of the nuclear pact.

  In all, it was a thirty-five-minute pitch, and it was one Tauscher would hear repeated back a few months later, nearly word for word, when Hillary asked her to leave Congress to become undersecretary for arms control and international security affairs.