“Her first priority, above all else, that she talked about in every single meeting, was how do we restore America’s standing in the world? What’s it going to take? And how do I reach not only to governments but to people to be able to convey the message about our vision for the future, about President Obama’s and my commitment to the values that people appreciate about America?” said a source who was in the transition meetings. “That was, above and beyond, her biggest thing.”
For Hillary to play effectively on the global plane and within the American government, she would need her house to be in order at State. Even as she discussed a partnership with Steinberg, Hillary began circumscribing him. Steinberg was a gifted thinker in the public and foreign policy arenas but less talented as a day-to-day manager. Rather than handling all of the duties of the deputy secretary of state, Hillary told him, his job would be split into two. Congress had approved a second deputy slot at the end of the Clinton administration, but Bush hadn’t made use of it. Now Hillary planned to bring in a Wall Street banker who had served as the cabinet-level director of Bill Clinton’s White House budget office: Jack Lew. An Orthodox Jew with a zealot’s devotion to public service, Lew would become Steinberg’s equal if Hillary could lure him away from a lucrative job at Citigroup. Steinberg would be the deputy for foreign policy, and Lew would be the deputy for management and budget.
Lew wasn’t Hillary’s first choice for the new post. She had offered it to Wendy Sherman, who had been Albright’s right hand at State. But Sherman declined. For his part, Lew had hoped to land a spot as chairman of Obama’s National Economic Council. But when Tim Geithner was picked for treasury secretary, former Clinton treasury secretary Larry Summers slid into the NEC role. Geithner brought Lew in to discuss the deputy secretary slot at Treasury, and when Lew returned to his office, he had a message from Hillary, who wanted to hire him at State. Rahm Emanuel objected to Lew being hired at Treasury, not out of personal animus but because he worried that it wouldn’t look good to put a Citigroup executive in that job in the midst of a Wall Street bailout. About a week after talking to Geithner and Hillary about their respective deputy secretary openings, Lew accepted Hillary’s offer.
Between Sullivan’s role in the formulation of foreign policy as a deputy chief of staff and Lew’s control over the budget, the deputy secretary slot Steinberg got had been sliced into a much smaller fiefdom. Hillary told Steinberg that Holbrooke would be brought in as the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a post that technically reported directly to both Hillary and Obama. The main global hot spot, then, would be in Holbrooke’s hands, at least as far as State’s influence went in formulating so-called Af/Pak policy.
She also wanted George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, to become a special envoy to the Middle East to deal with the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, and Dennis Ross, a longtime Washington hand, would become a senior adviser to her on Iran. If Steinberg felt threatened by the A-team Hillary assembled before his eyes, he didn’t mention it. Years later he insisted that he welcomed the news of Lew coming in to handle the budget, calling it the best personnel decision Hillary made at State. Her closest advisers maintain that Hillary welcomed Steinberg and had no intention of carving up his new job and parceling out choice pieces to favored lieutenants. But the proof was in the outcome—a much smaller domain for her new deputy—according to other aides who watched the process play out.
“It is fair to say that it had that effect. But I don’t think that was the intent—to diminish Jim’s authority. Jim and Jack got on well, as did Jim and Jake,” said one high-ranking State official. “But Jake was clearly Hillary’s guy, and Jim clearly was not. Hillary wanted her own people, and as they came in, Jim’s turf was smaller.”
Ultimately, whether they worked with him, went around him, or fought with him openly, senior State officials found that Steinberg could be marginalized, said another aide to Hillary.
“Even though Jack was principally focused on budget and management, he was also the lead deputy on Af-Pak and Iraq. He had the development agenda, which is typically a place where [Steinberg would have been] involved,” said one senior State official. “Jake’s role ensured that Jim was not the last policy official to talk to HRC, and it kept policy speeches mostly away from Jim.”
Hillary made another major change to the deputy position that spoke more to the insularity of her inner circle than an effort to sideline Steinberg, but still had the same effect. In the Bush administration, the deputy secretary had authority over the S-class, a set of nearly a dozen offices under the secretary. But when Hillary came in, she removed her new deputies from the chain of command, meaning veteran loyalists who were appointed to run those offices, including Capricia Marshall and Melanne Verveer, did not report to anyone but her.
The use of special envoys, special representatives, and senior advisers was nothing new, but Hillary seemed to have a better understanding than her predecessors of how deploying them could circumvent the stodginess of the institution she was about to inherit. With direct access to the secretary and her explicit imprimatur, these aides were empowered to put policies on a fast track through a department in which change often became mired in bureaucratic inertia. These jobs, like those on Hillary’s personal staff, didn’t require Senate confirmation, but they carried a downside risk of Hillary failing to get credit if one of her lieutenants reached a breakthrough peace agreement. Still, the big-name diplomats offered Hillary a degree of insulation, too: if Holbrooke and Mitchell failed to solve a conflict, it would be more on them and less on her than if she had picked anonymous newcomers.
In group meetings with her top staff, including Steinberg, Mills, Sullivan, and incoming congressional liaison Rich Verma, Hillary pounded on the theme of finding ways to restore America’s brand. It was clear that she knew, even in those early days, that her stature and confidence were chief assets in building a team at State, interacting with her peers in Obama’s cabinet, and most important, repositioning America in the world.
“No other secretary of state could have convinced Richard Holbrooke and probably George Mitchell to come work for them,” said one senior State Department official. The same was true of Lew, who was moving down from the last post he held, as a cabinet-rank official, but felt intense loyalty to the Clintons and knew he could be a player from a senior post at State.
The construction of a top-notch staff mattered a lot in Hillary’s case for several reasons. First, the mission of acting as the face of America abroad meant that she would be traveling almost continuously and had to delegate day-to-day management of most activities to trusted advisers. Each former secretary had fallen victim to pitfalls that Hillary was determined to avoid. Albright’s failure to win over the career officials at State meant she had had to fight the bureaucracy rather than mobilizing it in support of her goals, and Condoleezza Rice had gotten bogged down in the details of a handful of crises at the expense of other issues that also needed attention. “We had necessarily spent the past eight years very focused on threats, and focusing on threats would always have to be a part of our foreign policy, but it couldn’t be our foreign policy,” said one top official who was involved in the transition planning.
Second, the heavy hitters—Lew in particular—gave State a leg up in its relations with the White House and other agencies, which strengthened Hillary’s hand not only in the policy-making process but also in showing her new rank-and-file employees that her arrival signaled the return of influence to the State Department. Third, her operational model, in which information is highly compartmentalized and the lines of authority often run through informal channels rather than the official bureaucracy, requires competence among the true powers to function. She needed people close to her who could execute her will.
During the sessions in the Manhattan apartment, Hillary took notes on a long legal pad, which would become a trademark accessory during her four years at State. But even as she was starting
to put together a staff in her mind, the details of Obama’s agreement to let her do the hiring at State were already a sticking point with the president-elect’s aides—and, at times, a convenient out for her. When she talked with Bob Hormats, a Goldman Sachs executive and longtime friend of the Clintons, Hillary told him that she couldn’t yet offer him the undersecretary job she planned to give him. “I have to work out each of these jobs with the White House,” she said, “because these are presidential appointees.”
Hillary already had begun to scout the talent she was inheriting. Following the tradition for incoming secretaries, she and her team worked out of a transition space on the ground floor, where current State officials could visit her rather than risk the awkwardness of the outgoing secretary’s successor wandering around executive offices. She brought Sullivan with her to a December 9 orientation visit there, where she met with Bill Burns and Pat Kennedy, among others.
Burns, the undersecretary for political affairs, was the highest-ranking foreign service officer, and he gave her the first briefing. An expert on the Middle East and Russia, where he had served as an ambassador during the Bush administration, Burns had white whiskers that stood out in the decidedly clean-shaven foreign service. Using notes scribbled on a three-by-five card, he gave Hillary a two-hour tour of world affairs and found himself impressed. She reminded him of former secretary of state James Baker in terms of her preparation and the grasp she already had of the material he covered. Mostly Burns hoped to help connect dots for her among various parts of the world and emphasize the importance of prioritizing in a job in which new crises hit every day.
In addition to foreign policy, Hillary pressed Burns about the institution and its people—a line of inquiry that demonstrated her political savvy. “It’s a group of people both in the foreign service and the civil service who have a lot of energy and a lot of experience,” he told her. “A little bit of attention goes a long way in terms of reaching out to people and doing an early town hall and going around to meet with more junior officers and things like that.” He would come to be pleasantly surprised by the degree to which she not only followed the advice but sustained her effort to win hearts and minds in the building.
Hillary was impressed with Burns, too. “I gotta keep this guy,” she told Sullivan.
The same went for Pat Kennedy, the undersecretary for management, whose penchant for micromanagement and bureaucratic maneuvering made him one of the most powerful figures in the foreign service. If a State Department employee wanted a BlackBerry or transfer papers for an assignment on the National Security Staff, Kennedy had to sign off on it. Often his management style infuriated subordinates, but everyone needed something from Kennedy, and he had doled out a lot of favors over the years. Hillary remembered Kennedy from her husband’s administration. By keeping Burns and Kennedy, respectively the most beloved and the most parochial institutions within the institution, Hillary sent a message to the career staff at the State Department that their views would be taken into account, even as she appointed a remarkably insular and loyal team of personal and political aides to exert power behind the scenes.
While Hillary was building her team and getting ready for her Senate confirmation hearing, Bill was reorganizing his life to accommodate hers. Doug Band helped negotiate a five-page memorandum of understanding between Bill and Obama’s transition team that limited the former president’s international activities. Dated December 12 and signed four days later by longtime Clinton lawyer Bruce Lindsey and Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, the document dictated that Bill would publish the names of donors to the Clinton Foundation, separate the Clinton Global Initiative from the foundation, remove himself from an official fiduciary role in CGI, stop soliciting money for CGI, and prohibit CGI from accepting money from foreign governments during his wife’s tenure at State. In addition, the White House and State Department would have to review his speaking schedule. Some Clinton aides chafed at the standards to which the former first couple were being held, feeling that they had been forced to go above and beyond the bar that would have been set for anyone else.
In the days before her confirmation hearing, Hillary met with vice president–elect Joe Biden, the former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to get his advice, and she made sure she spoke to every living secretary of state, from Henry Kissinger to Condi Rice. When rumors had first surfaced that Obama might pick Clinton, some in Rice’s inner circle wrote them off, but Rice herself intuitively knew it was true. She placed a congratulatory call to Hillary as soon as the official announcement of her selection was made. After eight years as national security adviser and secretary of state, Rice was eager to hand over the playbook to her successor and get back to academic life at Stanford. She reached Hillary in New York and issued an invitation to a private dinner in one of the most famous of all of Washington’s political landmarks, the Watergate.
Hillary knew the confirmation process had much less to do with her public profile than with her ability to connect with her old colleagues on a personal level. She made sure to touch base with each member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a banal ringkissing exercise that was valuable in winning votes and softening any potential opposition. In a sign of respect—and because it had far greater concern about other nominees—the White House largely left Hillary alone to run her own confirmation effort, though Obama national security advisers Ben Rhodes and Denis McDonough attended her last prep session.
“The first thing you have to do are these courtesy meetings where you suck up and you call the senators and you say, ‘Can I come to your office so you can lecture me on foreign policy and the prerogatives of the Senate for forty-five minutes?’ And you have a lot of people who say, ‘I’m above that. I know these senators individually,’ ” one White House official involved in confirmations said of a common pitfall. “She was absolutely charming on that front. She handled it like a complete pro.… I think that she did everything right so early on that we were like, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ We were tracking it, but we weren’t going to go office to office with her as we would with other cabinet secretary nominees.”
In the end, Clinton, who aides said was entering a phase marked by the “reemergence of the nonpolitical Hillary,” needed only to persuade her colleagues that she was qualified and competent in a Foreign Relations Committee hearing. While it wasn’t expected to be as grueling as the firing line that awaited attorney general–designate Eric Holder, she spent the better part of several weeks huddled with close aides to prepare for the big moment in the Senate spotlight. She had two main objectives, one Clinton insider said. “One is how to frame the message of what kind of secretary of state you’re going to be and how you’re going to tackle the problems. And then there was how to deal with the Q and As. What sort of tough questions that would come up about money and the foundation.”
No one can predict the future, and promises in Washington have a way of vanishing into the humid air, but to a remarkable degree, throughout her tenure at State, Hillary would stick to the philosophy and agenda she outlined in her confirmation hearing. Whether that’s a sign of a sound strategy or stubbornness, the continuity is undeniable.
In her opening remarks, with Chelsea sitting dutifully behind her and Bill watching at home with Hillary’s mother, Clinton laid out the framework for Obama’s foreign policy approach. Rather than creating an Obama Doctrine, he would be nondoctrinaire in his dealings with foreign powers, she said. “The president-elect and I believe that foreign policy must be based on a marriage of principles and pragmatism, not rigid ideology,” she said. “I believe that American leadership has been wanting but is still wanted. We must use what has been called ‘smart power,’ the full range of tools at our disposal—diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural—picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of our foreign policy.”
She also laid out the theory of the case for i
ntegrating diplomacy with military power and development, particularly in the most dangerous parts of the world. In particular, she said, it was imperative that the United States work to better the lives of Pakistanis and Afghans to help lay the groundwork for rooting out Al Qaeda and the Taliban. She toured the globe rhetorically, enunciating how the president would approach relations with Russia, China, Japan, African nations, and old European allies.
Hidden in her remarks was a hint of the emphasis that she would put on the State Department understanding and affecting actions by nonstate actors—terrorist organizations, political movements, and social groups—that presented new partnership opportunities and potential calamities. By the time “globalization” became a catchword, she said, “we were already living in a profoundly interdependent world in which old rules and boundaries no longer held fast—a world in which both the promise and the peril of the twenty-first century could not be contained by national borders or vast distances.”
For the question-and-answer period, which might be hostile, her team had had to anticipate which senators would be antagonists and decide how she would respond to a variety of questions both about foreign policy and about Bill’s international dealings. This last point was the X factor for Hillary’s prep team, though there were other messy kinks to work out, too. They had to square her hawkish worldview with Obama’s more nuanced policy prescriptions. “She can’t show up the president. She can’t appear like she’s trying to formulate her own foreign policy,” one aide told Politico at the time. The New York Times editorial page, never fond of Hillary in any of her roles, stoked the fires of doubt on the Sunday before her hearing. While expressing support for her confirmation, the Times begged the committee to examine “the awkward intersection between Mrs. Clinton’s new post and the charitable and business activities of her husband.”
She fielded six hours of mostly cordial questions on tough foreign policy matters, from Israel to Iran. “I don’t get up every morning thinking only about the threats and dangers we face,” Clinton told the committee. “In spite of all the adversity and complexity, there are so many opportunities for America out there.” The line sounded like pure Rice, who famously noted that the Chinese word for crisis consists of the characters that mean “danger” and “opportunity.” David Vitter, the Louisiana Republican best known as a client of the D.C. Madam, accused Bill of presenting a “multimillion-dollar minefield of conflicts of interest” and said he wouldn’t vote for that. In the end, Vitter stood alone. The committee voted 16–1 to recommend Senate confirmation of her nomination, leaving just a perfunctory floor vote between Hillary and the Cabinet Room at the White House.
HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton Page 9