HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  “What do I call you? Do I call you Senator?” DeGeneres asked.

  “Just call me HRC,” Hillary replied.

  Sullivan was never initialized—just Jake—but Hillary trusted his judgment and discretion. He gained influence during the primary, and later at State, because his policy and political instincts mirrored Hillary’s. Whether that was a function of natural affinity or of highly attuned mimicry is a matter of disagreement among Hillary’s advisers, but no one doubts that she appreciated his ability to understand her thinking and follow through on it with little instruction necessary.

  Indeed, Sullivan had done such a remarkable job preparing Hillary for the marathon of primary debates with Obama in 2007 and 2008 that the Obama campaign brought him in to help get the nominee ready for matchups with John McCain that fall. In those sessions, where bigger personalities dominated the training, Sullivan quietly typed up answers to possible debate questions, absorbing almost anonymously into Obama’s operation. At State, he ultimately landed a job equivalent in rank to Abedin’s as deputy chief of staff for policy, from which he later took over the department’s in-house think tank, the Policy Planning Office, and often briefed reporters on policy matters too complex for her press team to handle.

  “Jake did everything for her,” explained one of Obama’s senior aides. “You could go to Jake with a personnel issue, a policy issue, a communications issue. Jake is a utility player, and in Washington that’s kind of an indispensable person to be able to go to.” Not only did Sullivan handle a wide variety of tasks, he spoke for Hillary. “You knew if you were talking to Jake, he had her full confidence,” the White House aide said. “Whatever was the front-burner issue of the day, you could go to Jake.”

  These posts, which didn’t require a presidential appointment or Senate confirmation, were the top subset in a group of roughly two hundred political appointments at State, almost all of which were given to Hillary by virtue of Obama’s promise. Veteran Hillarylanders tend to describe her operation—whether in government, a political campaign, or philanthropy—as consisting of concentric circles of trust. Only Hillary has a full view of every aspect of her formal and informal networks of friends, family, staff, and outside advisers, many of whom have a direct line to her over e-mail. Information is highly compartmentalized and tends to flow on a need-to-know basis, leaving most of her advisers with only a limited window of insight into her strategy and activities.

  Informal power, gained through Hillary’s favor, is far more important than the formal power of a particular title. Because Hillary had been in Washington for nearly two decades, it was nearly impossible for newcomers to earn the kind of trust that veteran Clinton warriors had built up over the years. Sullivan was an exception to that rule, having come on the scene for the 2008 campaign. But the people closest to Hillary at State were generally very familiar faces who could be trusted with the most sensitive information and political assignments. That’s true for most secretaries, but Hillary’s predecessors had much smaller universes of loyalists and less discretion to enlist them en masse. A new secretary can expect to bring in half a dozen to a dozen people. Because of Obama’s personnel promise, Hillary tallied the power to appoint political aides by the score.

  Reines, the Senate office spokesman who had been shunted to the side by Doyle during the campaign and ended up traveling with Chelsea Clinton, was named senior adviser and retained informal control over Hillary’s interaction with the media. In addition, Hillary brought in Melanne Verveer, her chief of staff at the White House, as an ambassador for global women’s issues, an office given the designation “S” to indicate it was under the secretary’s direct purview and budget. Likewise, Hillary tapped hit list architect Kris Balderston to be the force behind a new global partnerships office—a State Department mirror of the Clinton Global Initiative that sought to bring together money and expertise from inside and outside government to address international problems.

  Hillary would take criticism, both internally and externally, for her use of “S”-class offices to appoint special ambassadors, envoys, and representatives, as well as senior advisers, who exercised tremendous power to circumvent the department bureaucracy on various issues of concern to Hillary. But this same model, also used by some of her predecessors at State, has become standard operating procedure for the White House, which has built up economic and national security teams with hundreds of people who are loyal to the president and occupy jobs that do not require Senate confirmation.

  The construction of Hillary’s staff reflected lessons learned from the campaign trail, especially when it came to those who had caused difficulty or embarrassment. For a variety of reasons, the ambitious, highly combustible advisers who made her campaign war room so contentious—Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson, and Phil Singer among them—didn’t accompany Hillary to State. During the course of her campaign postmortems in the summer and fall of 2008, Hillary had shaken out a number of aides like Penn even before she made the decision to go to Foggy Bottom. While a certain number of dependable, close-knit advisers—including Senate chief of staff Tamera Luzzatto and campaign manager Maggie Williams—chose not to follow Hillary to State, she brought with her those who had served her well in the Senate and during the campaign.

  Loyal, but wiser, Hillary engaged some of her old friends off the books to draw on their intellect and information while keeping them out of her decision-making structure. “She has a group of people around her that have been incredibly strong, smart, and loyal,” said one longtime Hillarylander who did not take a job at State. “Sometimes we have to figure out ‘Does that person go into that slot or does that person go into this slot?’ You have to make tough choices, and I think that prepared her to make tough choices in the State Department—and it certainly prepared her to make tough choices going forward if she decided to do anything.”

  Yet the difficulty of making personal staff decisions paled in comparison to that of the myriad challenges she found in transitioning into official State Department business. In short order, she needed to put together a leadership roster that mixed Democratic Party stalwarts with veterans of the nonpartisan foreign service, get up to speed on nuances of foreign policy, devise a plan to implement Obama’s vision for the world, and start building relationships with key players on the president’s national security team who would be valuable allies in bolstering State.

  Hillary walked into the transition facing four major interdependent challenges. First, the president had picked her, he said, because he believed she was the best person to represent the United States abroad as it tried to regain its standing in the international community. President George W. Bush’s pursuit of the Iraq War, his policies on the treatment of detainees, and his polarizing rhetoric had turned international sympathy for America in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist assault on the United States into resentment. Bush’s numbers were pathetic in parts of the Arab and Muslim worlds: in Pakistan, a crucial partner in pursuing Al Qaeda, confidence in Bush’s foreign policy leadership stood at 7 percent during his last year in office and was just as bad throughout the Middle East, at 11 percent in Egypt, 7 percent in Jordan, and 2 percent in Turkey. The story wasn’t much better among America’s long-standing European allies: Bush stood at 16 percent in Great Britain and 13 percent in France.

  Second, she had to rebuild the State Department’s influence within the American government, a project that required buy-in not only from the president but from the military and the CIA, which had taken big bites out of State’s portfolio during the Bush years, from diplomacy to development (which means distributing American aid). Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell had barely been on speaking terms, and Rumsfeld’s relationship with Condoleezza Rice wasn’t much better. With the leaders of the two agencies at odds, there had been no incentive for the rank-and-file workers at the State Department and the Pentagon to fight the natural tension between diplomats and soldiers.

  Third,
she had to win the confidence and rebuild the morale of the roughly seventy thousand people at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, many of whom felt beleaguered after years of playing second fiddle in the national security realm. Past secretaries had found it much easier to implement their agendas when the bureaucracy embraced them and much harder when the permanent class of foreign service and civil service officers rejected them. Hillary needed allegiance from the career folks to execute her plans.

  Fourth, and most important should she choose to run for president in 2016, she had to fortify her own brand within the United States, a task that depended on her ability to execute the first three. Some of her aides vehemently dispute the idea that Hillary’s brand needed any burnishing at the time—her numbers had been on the rise since the end of the Democratic primary—but public opinion polls are fickle, and the ground she gained by endorsing Obama and joining his team could easily be lost if Americans decided she wasn’t up to the task of serving as America’s top diplomat.

  One of her first moves in the transition was to court General David Petraeus, the architect of the successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq who was moving into a new role as the head of Central Command, the Pentagon’s unit overseeing both Iraq and the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. In that post, Petraeus would have significant say over American policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Hillary’s trusted lieutenant Richard Holbrooke would represent the State Department’s interests. Though they had enjoyed a good relationship during most of her time in the Senate—and Petraeus was a protégé of Hillary’s best uniformed pal, General Jack Keane—Hillary had rattled their friendship during an Armed Services Committee hearing on Iraq in late 2007, just as the presidential campaign was heating up. She believed that Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker had delivered to the committee an overly rosy assessment of the success of the surge in Iraq. “I think the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief,” she said. Hillary and Petraeus had sporadic contact over the next year, but the relationship had grown cold.

  Hillary made rekindling that connection a high priority. Petraeus was stationed in Florida, but while he was in Washington at the end of 2008, in late November or early December, she invited him to the house on Whitehaven Street. Petraeus understood what was going on, that Hillary wanted to make a gesture of reconciliation because she would need his help. But regardless of the calculation involved, he was grateful that she reached out to him. They sipped glasses of wine by her fireplace, and Hillary invited him to come back the next night, where he found Holbrooke, the veteran diplomat who had negotiated the Dayton Accords ending the war in the Balkans during Bill’s presidency. The two men didn’t know each other, but as Petraeus found out that night, they would soon be working closely. Petraeus, the highly educated soldier, and Holbrooke, the classic diplomat, were more alike than it might seem on first glance. They were both ideas men. And while they didn’t see eye to eye on everything, they quickly developed a high regard for each other’s intellectual firepower.

  Hillary opened another bottle of wine, and the three of them sat down by the fireplace. It was mostly a social drink, a getting-to-know-you moment for Petraeus and Holbrooke, whom Hillary had picked to be the presidentially appointed special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In that role, he would partner with Petraeus to develop civil-military plans for the region and meet with officials from the two countries, as well as American leaders, to implement those ideas.

  Hillary’s courtship of Petraeus would pay dividends, both on policy and personally. In mid-February 2010 she found herself stranded in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, because of mechanical problems with her jet. Petraeus, who had been in nearby Riyadh, redirected his own plane to pick Hillary up and bring her back to the United States. On the plane, Hillary picked Petraeus’s brain on the region monitored by U.S. Central Command, an area encompassing twenty countries that spans from Egypt in the west to Pakistan in the east, and from Kazakhstan in the north to the waters off Somalia’s coast in the south. During their conversation, it became clear that both Hillary and Petraeus were exhausted from their respective trips. So Petraeus, playing the part of an officer and a gentleman, offered Hillary his bed in the compartment at the back of the plane. As Hillary settled into Petraeus’s bed, he stretched out on the floor outside the door to the compartment. She had won him back.

  Initially, Holbrooke had hoped to become the deputy secretary of state, but the Obama camp couldn’t forgive him for threatening messages he had delivered to foreign policy experts during the campaign, vowing to deny them jobs in a Hillary administration if they signed on with Obama. Instead, Obama picked Jim Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration who had counseled Obama during the general election. Steinberg, then the dean of the University of Texas’s public policy school, was with his daughter at a birthday party in November when Obama called to offer him the job. Disappointed that he wouldn’t become Obama’s national security adviser, Steinberg asked for one concession from the president: Give me a permanent seat at National Security Council meetings. That would ensure that he couldn’t be shut out of the top level of the policy-making process. It’s okay with me, if it’s okay with Hillary, Obama said. Hillary liked that idea because Steinberg’s presence would mean State had two seats at the national security table, and Steinberg was an acceptable number two because of his long-standing ties to trusted Clintonites.

  Hillary sat down with Steinberg in early December in an apartment on Central Park South, overlooking the lush rectangle of gardens, fountains, and playgrounds that stretches from the northern reach of midtown Manhattan to the southern edge of Harlem. She used the apartment for a series of one-on-one sessions with advisers and potential hires that fall and winter. The location allowed her to meet with them discreetly, lowering the risk that reporters would find out who was up for a job at State, and in an environment cozy enough to promote comfort and informality. Once visitors stepped out of the elevator on the appropriate floor, Hillary’s Secret Service detail—a perk of her status as a former first lady—guided them to the right door. Inside, Hillary played hostess, boiling pot after pot of green tea as she planned her execution of Obama’s foreign policy vision. The apartment was dotted with pictures of the Clinton family, and Hillary seemed so at home in the dining alcove with the view of the snow-glazed park that, years later, Steinberg thought the apartment belonged to the Clintons. It didn’t. It belonged to Doug Band.

  For three hours, as afternoon turned to evening, they had what Steinberg recalled as a “lovely, long conversation where we talked about the excitement of getting these new jobs and the opportunities and what kinds of people we wanted to work with and bring into the department, and how we wanted to use our time, and how we would conceive our mutual roles.” Hillary still didn’t know exactly which jobs she could offer to which candidates, but she had a pretty firm idea of who she wanted at the top, what her agenda would look like, and what strengths she brought to the position.

  Two main “meta” objectives informed everything she wanted to do at State: restore America’s standing in the world, and infuse the theory of “smart power” into America’s foreign policy. The term, coined by Clinton administration Pentagon official Joseph Nye, is shorthand for an approach to influencing other countries that combines traditional “hard power” such as military force and economic sanctions with the “soft power” of inducing foreign nations to change their behavior by offering carrots such as political or economic assistance. “Smart power is neither hard nor soft,” Nye wrote in 2004. “It is both.” A cultural shift toward smart power—and using both hard- and soft-power tools together to influence a single country—would take time. The more subtle and comprehensive approach to relationships with other countries often meant waiting for results. For the knee-jerk hard-power devotees, it looked weak in the short term. There was always someone in Congress screaming for the White House to take m
ore aggressive action toward a rival, even if the hard-power route was likely to backfire.

  More immediately, Hillary consumed herself with the question of how to reverse the damage Bush had done to America’s reputation. “There was a lot of question globally about how was the United States using its power and how it was perceived in the world,” Steinberg said, “and I think that strong sense of being able to project a different America and a different America abroad was her paramount objective. I think she recognized because of who she was and her own experience that she was particularly well suited to be the carrier of that message, of a different kind of America, an America that was going to protect its interests but could take into account the concerns and perspectives of others as well.”

  In that way, the objectives of using a smart-power approach and rebuilding America’s standing meshed perfectly. America would increase its influence in the world by taking advantage of opportunities to engage other countries in trade, investment, philanthropic partnerships, and military coalitions. In particular, Hillary told aides in those early days, she believed it was vital to engage other countries at all levels, from top to bottom. Political leaders are responsive to their people, so engaging the public at the grassroots level could bolster America’s ability to influence foreign nations.