HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  But few of them had seen anything like Hillary Clinton’s arrival at the State Department. “It was like a fucking rock concert,” said one member of the civil service, who couldn’t find an open spot on the jam-packed floor. He raced through the press briefing area and made his way to a narrow ledge above the landing where Hillary was set to make her remarks. He wasn’t the only one with that idea: when he got there, the ledge was full. Government officials were almost literally hanging from the rafters, and finally diplomatic security officers prevented more people from cramming onto the ledge. The eager civil servant and the rest of the overflow crowd had to watch the speech on BNET, the State Department’s closed-circuit television system.

  Navigating through a buttoned-down sea of Brooks Brothers and Talbots as she made her way to the podium, Hillary was surrounded by applause, and by groupielike bureaucrats waving camera-phones. It was a historic moment, at least in the world of State. She smiled broadly and waved to familiar faces. When she spoke, she proclaimed a “new era for America” and said she planned to reassert the State Department’s role in foreign policy.

  Just behind her stood Bill Burns, the top-ranking foreign service officer who would spend much of the next four years within arm’s length of Hillary. His presence signaled to the rest of the foreign service that they would have a voice in Hillary’s State Department—music to the ears of a beleaguered corps of diplomats and policy analysts whose insights had often been ignored during the Bush administration.

  If her debut was a rock concert, Hillary was Bono—a bona fide international celebrity, with credibility as a crusader for the disadvantaged. In that regard, she was one of a kind. She wasn’t the first prominent political figure to reign at State. Six of the first fifteen U.S. presidents had been secretaries first. Leading members of Congress, including Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, also had held the post, as had two Supreme Court justices, John Marshall and Charles Evans Hughes. But it had been many decades since an elected official had become a heavy hitter at State, and never before had America’s top diplomat been so instantly recognizable to, and admired by, so many people around the world. Her new army of apparatchiks at State didn’t yet know what to expect from her leadership style, but they could be sure she would attract a crowd wherever she went.

  Hillary’s command of her troops that day obscured the fact that her last management job—as head of a dysfunctional campaign—had been a failure, and that she had never before run an organization anywhere near the size of the seventy-thousand-person foreign policy apparatus comprising State and the U.S. Agency for International Development. She was inheriting a department that had lost influence to the Pentagon and other national security agencies and whose diplomats had had to deal, on a day-to-day basis, with the fallout of a Bush foreign policy that had turned America into an international punching bag. It was hard to tell which was lower: the world’s esteem for America, State’s standing in the national security realm, or the morale of the folks at Foggy Bottom. With the Pentagon taking the lead in the major foreign policy issues of the day, most notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomats were relegated to defending America’s actions to their counterparts in other countries.

  As first lady and later as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hillary had met a lot of world leaders and thought about foreign policy on a macro level, but she had not spent much time on the details. “She was a bit of a novice at foreign policy. Even though she knew a lot of the personalities, there was a learning curve,” one of her top deputies acknowledged. “This was somebody, much of whose passion was directed at domestic issues—at health care, and women’s and children’s issues domestically, veterans’ issues. In our first year, we had to put a lot of time into the normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia. That’s not something she had spent a lot of time thinking about.”

  In addition, the centrist school of thought she subscribed to had evolved between Bill Clinton’s last days in office and Barack Obama’s election. She had become a devotee of the smart-power approach to foreign policy. But she still had to learn the intricacies of each country’s interests to apply that mix of tools.

  More important, Hillary had to deal with her new boss and all the anxieties around the most consequential shotgun wedding in Democratic politics since John F. Kennedy asked the reviled but politically indispensable Lyndon Johnson to be his running mate. Hillary is fond of saying “bloom where you’re planted,” an expression distilled from a story in the book of Jeremiah about the Jews, including Queen Esther’s family, thriving in exile. Hillary has long cited Esther as one of her favorite characters in the Bible; not only is she one of the strongest women in Scripture, but her story of saving the Jews from annihilation by the Persians dovetails well with Hillary’s own Middle East politics.

  A big part of “blooming” at State would mean fully winning over Obama and his White House. The president was guarded in early interactions with Hillary, according to insiders who watched them. They might have developed a grudging mutual respect on the campaign trail, but they were hardly friends. Their new partnership was professional and polite but lacked depth. “They didn’t have a close relationship in the first year,” an Obama national security aide said. “At the beginning, it was perfectly correct,” said a Hillary confidant. “Always very positive, even warm, but you know, just so. Not a lot of affection, not a lot of free-flowing conversation.”

  The relationship between Obama’s staff and Hillary’s, particularly those who worked on the campaigns, was anything but correct. Every disagreement was exacerbated by the aftertaste of the hard-fought primary, a dynamic that magnified petty fights and informed a series of clashes between Mills and McDonough, the senior national security aide who was very close to the president. “Stupid staff stuff like who’s going to get credit for something. It was dumb, in retrospect, but we fought a primary campaign against them,” the Obama aide said. “The first year you’re not sure what the angle is. What are these guys up to? I’m sure they thought the same thing about us.”

  When Obama took office, he brought with him a cadre of rambunctious and cocky late-twenty-somethings and early-thirty-somethings who had just come off the campaign of their lives. A number of early news accounts portrayed this group of mostly men as seemingly a bit too big for their britches; as they filled the desks and offices in the West Wing, reporters and other outsiders labeled it a frat house. Among the most aggressively anti-Hillary pledges moving into the White House was Pfeiffer, the snarky, fast-talking communications aide. (One Clinton aide referred to Pfeiffer as a “zero” who had ended up in the White House by happenstance and loyalty to Obama.) There was also the gum-chomping deputy press secretary, Bill Burton, son-in-law of Clinton backstabber Lois Capps, who relished being disliked and had dreams of taking over as press secretary once Robert Gibbs vacated the role.

  The White House aides couldn’t understand why Hillary’s team still carried an air of superiority—after all, they had lost. In personnel fights, Mills kept laying down her trump card: Obama’s promise to let Hillary hire. She never gave an inch. Reines liked to mock people to their faces, and, more often, over e-mail. And neither of them had risen—or wanted to rise—to embrace the high profile that Huma did. She once appeared on the cover of Vogue, violating the old Washington rule that staff ink stinks.

  While their aides retained the nasty spirit of the campaign, Obama and Hillary tried to set a better example from the top. After one early television interview in the Oval Office, as the president talked with his communications team, including Gibbs and Vietor, one of his aides made a crack about Hillary, prompting the president to snap back, “Knock it off. None of that.”

  Obama made it clear from the moment he offered Hillary the job that he expected his team to put aside any sore feelings and treat her with the utmost dignity and respect, one of his top advisers said.

  Similarly, in May 2009 Hillary reprimanded an adviser for speaking ill of Obama behind his
back. At the White House earlier that day, the president had asked Hillary to take on a minor task.

  “Does he have nothing better to do?” the aide asked.

  “Don’t do that,” Hillary said. “Don’t ever do that. He’s the president.”

  Hillary meticulously telegraphed proper deference to the president, both in public and in private. “She worked very hard at establishing, showing, that she was the secretary of state, not the president,” said a former senior government official.

  But the mutual distrust at the highest ranks below Obama and Hillary was poisonous enough in the first few months that an intermediary organized a dinner at Washington’s exclusive Cosmos Club to try to defuse tension between Hillary’s brass at the State Department and the high-dollar Obama donors who had been rewarded with ambassadorships over Hillary’s picks for their jobs. “The Obama ambassadors to big countries were being shunned by senior State Department people,” said a source familiar with the dinner, which featured a dozen of Hillary’s top aides and a dozen Obama ambassadors. Among the ambassadors were Matthew Barzun, who would later factor prominently in the retirement of Hillary’s campaign debt, and Don Beyer, a car dealer and former lieutenant governor of Virginia. “That dinner ended up being really important” in mending fences, the source said. “It was easy for these guys not to like each other in the abstract.”

  Unlike the scores of campaign loyalists who had landed jobs in the administration, Hillary was there not because Obama loved her or owed her anything. She was there because it all added up. By enlisting Hillary and Bush defense secretary Robert Gates, Obama backed up his lofty campaign-trail talk of creating a team of rivals. The Republican and the hawkish Democrat gave ballast to a fresh-thinking but wet-behind-the-ears National Security Staff at the White House.

  Moreover, while Obama had put Hillary in a position in which she would have only as much influence as he wanted, he had also deprived her of a perch from which she could challenge him on the Senate floor, and he had made it next to impossible for her to run a primary campaign in 2012. Some, including longtime Clinton family strategist Mark Penn, could foresee Hillary mounting another run against Obama. Having her at State acted as an insurance policy against that.

  For a new president who abhorred drama, there was a lot riding on their union. By the time she walked through the glass doors of the State Department’s main lobby entrance that first day, Hillary already had shown Obama that she was a loyalist. Her ability to put aside her differences with him was now part of her own narrative as a politician willing to sacrifice her glory for a team. For his part, Obama put his faith in her to execute his policy.

  The development of foreign policy within any administration is a complicated process in which various agencies have a strong hand. Depending on the president, one agency may win out over the others on a regular basis. The real power in the last half-century, though, has been the president’s National Security Staff, which was originally formed as a statutory response to President Franklin Roosevelt’s messy decision-making process. Over the years, that staff, responsible for coordinating the national security agencies—Defense, State, Justice, Homeland Security, the CIA, and others—has grown to a size of roughly three hundred people. Its leadership, the national security adviser and his or her deputies, is typically closer to the president, both in proximity and in personal relationship, than the cabinet secretaries. The old joke in Washington is that the only time the national security adviser and the secretary of state ever got along was when Henry Kissinger held both jobs.

  Obama had to keep Hillary happy. On the off chance that she used her stature to fight him publicly—or worse, resigned in disgust—she could weaken his re-election effort. By appointing her special envoys and giving her free rein within the State Department, Obama allowed her some room to maneuver. But not a lot. It was Vice President Joe Biden who was given the Iraq portfolio, and the National Security Staff was at the forefront on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East. She had a seat at the table, but would have to find her own way into backroom discussions.

  On that first day in her new job, shortly after Hillary spoke in the lobby, Obama and Biden visited the ornate Benjamin Franklin Room, on the eighth floor of the State Department, for the ceremony at which Holbrooke was sworn in as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and George Mitchell was sworn in as special envoy for the Middle East.

  Obama framed Hillary’s appointment in self-referential and almost terse terms. “It is my privilege to come here and pay tribute to all of you, the talented men and women of the State Department,” Obama said. “I’ve given you an early gift, Hillary Clinton.” That was it. His personal remarks about Holbrooke were also very limited. Ominously, Holbrooke drew a parallel between Vietnam and Afghanistan in his own comments, a comparison that annoyed Obama.

  The brief remarks embodied the careful detachment with which he at first treated Hillary. He was respectful but not warm, willing to let Hillary have her department, her envoys, and her entourage without showing her much affection. Theirs was a professional relationship, limited to office hours. Bill and Hillary Clinton had lived at the White House for eight years, and as secretary of state, she would be there several times a week for meetings of the president’s National Security Council and various other events. She had even made him promise to have a weekly lunch with her as a condition of taking the job. But it would be all work, and no play. The Obamas didn’t invite the Clintons over for dinner; they didn’t have them to the White House movie theater; and up to that point, Obama didn’t ask Bill to join him on the golf course.

  The Clintons had a full agenda anyway. While Hillary settled in at State, Bill was left to tend to the family business, especially the operation of the vast Clinton political apparatus. Hillary had several compelling reasons to limit her political activity as secretary. First and foremost, the law restricts what high-ranking administration officials can do in the electoral sphere. But just as important, it was helpful to Hillary to appear to be above the fray. On the campaign trail, she had been polarizing; but as America’s secretary of state, she was popular. The prior February, during the heat of the Democratic primary, her approval rating had stood at 48 percent. As she battled Obama through that spring, it rose to 54 percent but jumped from there to 65 percent after she accepted the offer to become secretary. “The second she becomes political and partisan,” one of her 2008 campaign advisers said, “she becomes a little bit more radioactive.”

  That was reason enough for her to focus on her rebuilding effort at State: to quietly and steadily reinforce her standing with the American public. It also meant that the burden of maintaining relationships and settling scores from the primary fell disproportionately to Bill. “He has to do all the politics for the entire family now,” a source close to Bill said, while Hillary was at State. As part of the State deal, Bill had agreed to restrict his overseas activities with the Clinton Global Initiative. That left him more time to pepper his schedule with political events, some of which were helpful to Obama’s cause while others were at odds with it. All of them were good for Team Clinton.

  Bill was eager to get back to politics. Around Thanksgiving, he had stared down Jason Altmire at the Luke Ravenstahl fund-raising reception in Pittsburgh. But the time for retribution would come later. He focused first on repaying debts to tried-and-true friends like Terry McAuliffe, whose closeness to the Clintons obviated the need to keep track of the many ways in which he had helped them over the years.

  Known as “the Macker” in Clintonworld, McAuliffe got his start chasing money as a fourteen-year-old in Syracuse, New York, where he created a driveway-sealing business. He ultimately became a big-time party moneyman and wrote in his own memoir of leaving his newborn child and wife in a car so that he could duck into a fundraiser on the way home from the hospital. Over the years, his job titles included finance director for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, Democratic National Committee chairman, and cochairman of
Hillary’s 2008 campaign. But McAuliffe, who could sell a yacht to a camel, is mostly the Clintons’ chief money guy. He even guaranteed a $1.3 million loan so that they could buy their home in Chappaqua.

  Sometimes Bill’s loyalty meant putting himself out there for someone who was destined to lose, and no one deserved that kind of support more than McAuliffe. Back in August 2008, during the Democratic National Convention, McAuliffe had approached Bill and Hillary to tell them he was thinking of running for governor of Virginia. He brought with him clips of local stories about a possible bid. “Do it,” they said. Months later, as Hillary was interviewing job candidates at the posh apartment on Central Park South, Bill summoned McAuliffe to Harlem to talk shop. I’m a former governor, I know about the sets of issues that governors deal with, so why don’t you bring your people up here? Bill had said. McAuliffe arrived in Harlem with half a dozen advisers. “Bill Clinton was fired up, and Terry was diligently taking notes,” a McAuliffe aide said. The old Arkansas governor began rattling off policy prescriptions, supplementing McAuliffe’s knowledge of campaign operations with substance. He was talking “nitty-gritty policy stuff, like turning chicken waste into alternative energy,” the source said. After getting locked out of the early stages of Hillary’s run, Bill was getting in on the ground floor of McAuliffe’s race. The former president relished the roles of political consultant, fund-raiser, and campaign-trail surrogate. In February he headlined the state Democratic Party’s annual fund-raising dinner, even though Virginia Democrats had given their primary vote to Obama. He barnstormed through the state, campaigning for McAuliffe in Richmond, Norfolk, and Roanoke through the spring.