HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Hillary’s command of the levers of power, and her ability to seize unclaimed turf and resources, proved invaluable as she made the most out of the limited federal money available to State. As she had done with Geithner, she used her informal power as the first among equals in Obama’s cabinet to assert herself and her department, maneuvering around her colleagues, straight through them, and preferably in coordination with them, to get what she wanted.

  In the informal cabinet pecking order, the defense secretary is typically at the top because he controls an annual budget the size of all the other departments combined, commands American military forces, and comes from a massive agency that’s been around a long time. But it is the secretary of state, because of the seniority of her department, who sits closest in line to the presidency and who is given the first chance to make her case to the president in meetings.

  Other than Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who had served eight presidents, Hillary was by far the most experienced presidential adviser on the National Security Council by dint of the eight years she had spent informally counseling her husband. Her seat, either directly to the president’s left or one seat down, depending on the list of attendees, spoke to the prominence of her post. Gates sat across the table from her, and the two made for an imposing pair for other members of the national security apparatus.

  Even Tom Donilon, a longtime party operator who served as the president’s deputy national security adviser and later as his national security adviser, was visibly unnerved by her presence. Donilon had a foot in each camp, having worked in political roles at the State Department during the Clinton administration and having helped Obama prepare for debates against John McCain and by serving as a cochair of Obama’s State Department transition team. Along with fellow Clinton administration veteran Rahm Emanuel, Donilon was an important ally for Hillary, particularly early on in the administration when her connections in Obama’s inner circle were limited.

  Donilon had a little bit of a crush on Hillary—one he confessed to her and others privately. They were friends, but the intimidation factor went beyond the weak knees of a love-struck schoolboy. He described to others the way she would call on a Saturday morning at 7 a.m. and run through as many as ten different issues in taskmaster-like fashion. “Tom Donilon is scared shitless of her,” said one official who worked on the National Security Council staff. “People would debate a certain issue, and he would kind of poke at them or probe them further or disagree, but he never did it with her because he was scared to death of her.”

  Donilon and Obama’s first national security adviser, Jim Jones, ran Situation Room meetings from the same end of the table at which Gates and Clinton sat. From there, power dissipated quickly from seat to seat. “The national security adviser is there. Hillary is there. Gates is there. And then there’s like all the other schmucks,” said one aide who sat in from time to time. “Everyone else is like they’re not there.”

  Depending on the president and the occupant of the office, the secretary of state can be a big-time player or an afterthought. Her budget is small, but she has a voice in the president’s war council. That voice can be amplified if she makes sound arguments and has allies in the room.

  But it can be easily diminished by the ever-growing National Security Staff, which is often mistakenly referred to as the National Security Council—a telling misconception because it points to the power that the legion of staff advisers have gained over the years. Technically, the national security adviser and his or her staff exist to coordinate policy among the various agencies and present the president with options for major decisions. In reality, they often guide the process and at times have even become policy makers on their own. “The National Security [Staff] has the gates to the kingdom in terms of getting information to the president,” said former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who worked on the National Security Staff during the Carter administration.*

  Albright counseled Hillary about how to work the NSC process. “If you see it from the perspective of the secretary of state, you have to make sure that your voice is heard along with the others.” That requires “finding allies and then making sure that the president gets your views, because what happens is the national security adviser is the one that puts the final memo on top and says ‘This is what State says, this is what Defense says, this is what Treasury says, this is what I think,’ ” Albright said. “I did tell her that it was very important to have a strong relationship with the secretary of defense.”

  Indeed, Gates was really the only player on Obama’s National Security Council who had more experience than Hillary in Washington’s power game. Hillary pursued a much different strategy for dealing with him, cultivating an alliance that made it hard for either of them to be pushed around by the National Security Staff. Like Hillary, Gates had been an active Republican at a time of major liberal social upheaval in the mid-1960s—she as a “Goldwater Girl” in high school, and he as a member of the College of William and Mary Young Republicans. A career intelligence officer, Gates first made his way into the White House as a member of the National Security Council staff in 1974 and worked all the way up the ranks of the nation’s spy community to the post of CIA director under President George H. W. Bush. President George W. Bush recruited him back into government to succeed Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, and Obama asked him to stay on. Hillary and Gates were the two people on Obama’s national security team who didn’t need a map to get around the West Wing. Unlike Hillary, who had been at least one step removed from the national security process as first lady, Gates had a lot of experience inside the Situation Room. “The next time you’re in a situation with Gates, just think in your mind, ‘How many seats did he sit in?’ ” one of Hillary’s advisers recalls Albright saying. “He knows what everybody’s going to say.”

  Between their common cultural roots, their proximity in age (Gates is four years older), and their status as the wise old hands on Obama’s National Security Council, it was easy for Hillary and Gates to develop a certain kinship. They became so close so fast that there’s a common misperception in Washington that they had been friends before, either when she was on the Armed Services Committee or perhaps during the Clinton administration. Several senior State and Defense Department sources offered up versions of the birth of their friendship along those lines. One had a more perceptive take: Hillary had made friends with a number of high-level flag officers—three- and four-star generals and admirals—during her time on Armed Services, and Gates had taken note from afar. Her reputation as a serious thinker on military issues preceded her. The Pentagon brass respected this Democrat who, to their surprise, was not only an ardent advocate of a strong military but also a careful student of their plans, their programs, and the way they went about securing funding. It wasn’t just political positioning. She believed in all forms of American power, including force, even though those views had hurt her badly in the Democratic primary in 2008, when Obama invigorated the antiwar left by contrasting his opposition to the Iraq War with Hillary’s vote for it.

  The truth is Gates and Clinton had barely met before Obama introduced them as part of his national security team in early December 2008. More than fifteen years earlier, they had shaken hands in CIA director Jim Woolsey’s office at a memorial service for officers killed in an attack on CIA headquarters in suburban Langley, Virginia. They didn’t have a conversation then, and Gates didn’t see Hillary face-to-face again until the Chicago press conference.

  During the transition, they found that their policy instincts were similar. Gates, a moderate Republican, and Hillary, a hawkish Democrat, both saw the value of using all of the tools in America’s foreign policy kit. Sometimes that meant a missive and sometimes it meant a missile. In a speech at Kansas State University in November 2007, Gates had embraced the smart-power approach favored by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party’s national security apparatus.

  There was also a strategic imperative to their allian
ce. Hillary needed the defense secretary to ensure State’s voice was heard on matters of war, diplomacy, and development and to reinforce her budget and policy requests. The purpose of the State Department is to conduct diplomacy and execute the president’s foreign policy. Ideally, America’s international footprint looks more like the sole of a wingtip than a combat boot. But during the Bush administration, the ever-growing Pentagon had taken over for State in global hot spots, most notably Iraq and Afghanistan. Both Gates and Hillary believed that the Pentagon was playing too much of a role in providing civilian aid, which both usurped the diplomatic role in foreign policy and distracted the military from its core defense mission.

  When he had to make a case to a roomful of Democrats, the Republican Gates benefited from having Hillary on his side. “She was an influential voice in the administration,” one Gates insider said of why Hillary was valuable to the Pentagon. “She had enormous political capital.” Moreover, they liked each other, and they were outsiders at Obama’s national security meetings, which were full of newcomers who had helped the president win election by promising to rock the status quo. In order to survive and thrive, they needed to function as a bloc as often as possible. “I think there was some strategy to it. When you have a secretary of defense and a secretary of state going into the interagency process united or going into the Oval Office together on an issue, they go in a much stronger position,” said a high-ranking Pentagon source. “They often compared notes or coordinated in advance of some of those meetings to find common ground to allow them to influence or drive the direction of policy on a given issue.”

  Once or twice a month, Gates and Hillary ate lunch together, alternating between her office at State and his at the Pentagon. They also had a standing weekly lunch with the national security adviser in the West Wing. Most important, they kept an informal channel open to compare notes. “It was not uncommon for them to pick up the phone or have a pull-aside before or after a meeting they were both attending. They checked in with each other,” the Pentagon source said. “In the cases where they disagreed, that was also useful to know early or to alert them where this was an area of disagreement.” Major disagreements would come later, when Obama wanted to strike Osama bin Laden and when he weighed whether to intervene in Libya’s civil war. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, Hillary and Gates were on the same side in the Situation Room. “She and Gates were a pretty powerful tandem,” said a former senior government official.

  In October 2009 the unlikely pair sought to highlight their odd-couple status, appearing onstage together as part of a conversation series and rare joint interview at George Washington University. During the session with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and GWU’s Frank Sesno, both cabinet secretaries spoke about their mutual admiration and drew contrasts between their relationship and that of their predecessors.

  It was clear that they were not just being polite and politically correct. They had forged a kinship and a bond so tight that when they wrapped the hour-long interview that night, they went and grabbed dinner at the Blue Duck Tavern, a pricey Washington restaurant near Georgetown. “It was a good example of how they enjoyed each other’s company,” said one mutual acquaintance. “They wanted to go to dinner.”

  When he returned to the Pentagon the next day, Gates told aides he’d had “fun”—a term he didn’t use a lot—at the CNN forum. That might have been in part because he came off a bit more relaxed and witty than his celebrity counterpart. But sources in both camps say their genuine affinity for each other strengthened a potent strategic alliance and sent a message to rank-and-file State and Defense employees that their bosses expected them to play well together. “He was always cognizant of how unusual it was that they got along so well,” a senior Defense official said.

  Clinton won the respect of Gates and the small circle of Bush holdovers at the Pentagon. Some of Obama’s advisers—awed by her presence but still feeling the reverberations of the campaign—went through the same kind of progression, developing first respect and then warm feelings for Hillary. Shortly after she broke her arm in the summer of 2009, Tommy Vietor, one of Obama’s fiery and loyal young press aides during the presidential campaign, ran into Hillary in a hallway at the White House. Vietor, who had recently dislocated his shoulder, noticed that Hillary’s sling had a State Department seal on it.

  “Oh, you’re in a sling, too,” said Hillary, who was accompanied by the ever-present Huma. “What did you do?”

  “I hurt it playing basketball,” replied Vietor, who was still scared of Hillary after having attacked her foreign policy chops on the record during the campaign. “Your sling is a lot cooler than mine.”

  Two days later, sitting inside the press office at the White House, Vietor received a white box from the State Department. Inside he found a sling with the logo. The gesture melted any lingering animus from the campaign days.

  But because their suspicion of Hillary ran much deeper, some others in Obama’s world, including Plouffe and Gibbs, never really warmed to her. With them, she didn’t help her cause by lining up with Gates or backing Richard Holbrooke, whom the president could hardly stand.

  While Hillary cleverly built power by working with, and sometimes around, the other luminaries in Washington, her unstinting loyalty to Holbrooke came at a price to her standing within the administration. It was a classic example of her belief in her people, and their wisdom, taking precedence over other concerns, for better or for worse.

  Holbrooke was an innovator, a persistent operator, and a constant source of frustration for a White House that prized a kind of control that it couldn’t exert over him. For his part, Holbrooke was obsessed with gaining access to Obama and his inner circle, and complained loudly and often about the president’s national security team trying to freeze him out. He tried everything to get in, including hanging out at the Hay-Adams hotel because he knew White House aides were denizens of the bar there.

  In particular, he sought out David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser. In the book This Town, author Mark Leibovich tells the story of Holbrooke standing next to a young Axelrod aide at a White House urinal to try to book an appointment.

  “He wanted access and he wanted to talk through what his concerns were,” said one West Wing aide. “He was vocally frustrated about his access to Obama. He was trying to ingratiate himself within the White House and he knew David was part of that.”

  Axelrod was a route around the people Holbrooke typically dealt with at the White House, and he worked Axelrod hard.

  “He was very big about massaging people’s egos,” the aide said.

  While Axelrod could certainly provide access to Obama, there was another reason to work the veteran operative: Holbrooke believed that the major impediment to his plan to use a surge of forces in Afghanistan to force the Taliban to the negotiating table was the fear of Obama’s political team that a quagmire could damage the president’s hopes of winning re-election in 2012. If he could demonstrate to Axelrod that a peace deal was better than a drawdown of U.S. forces without one, perhaps he could turn the president’s thinking.

  The biggest fight within Obama’s National Security Council in the first term erupted over the Afghanistan “surge,” a process that took until December 2009 to resolve. The president made an initial commitment of 21,000 more troops early in the year, a force that could hold back Taliban fighters until a bigger decision about whether to send as many as 40,000 more could be made later in the year. The debate over the number of troops and overall American strategy was so clamorous and acrimonious that Bob Woodward was able to write an entire book on the deliberations, called Obama’s Wars.

  The Gates-Clinton alliance was a threat to the power wielded by Obama’s White House aides in the early years of the administration, particularly as a narrative began to take hold that they, along with Central Command chief David Petraeus and other military leaders, were pushing the president into a surge in Afghanistan that he didn’t want to order.
It’s hard for presidential aides to steamroll the top two cabinet secretaries if they are in lockstep. If they are divided, however, each can be pushed around. In this case, Hillary left no daylight between herself and Gates. “The core objective was really to ensure that Afghanistan did not once again become a sanctuary for Al Qaeda or other transnational extremists as it was when the 9/11 attacks were planned there and the initial training was conducted there,” said a former senior government official. Hillary “recognized that the only way to achieve that objective was to enable Afghans to secure themselves and govern themselves adequately, adequately being a key phrase there. And the only way to do that was through a comprehensive civil-military campaign that halted the momentum that the Taliban had achieved.”

  Fans of the twin titans of the Obama cabinet say they prevented the new team from steering American foreign policy off course. Obama was just coming off an election in which he had promised to end two wars and open direct diplomacy with Iran and Cuba, and the fear in the centrist Washington foreign policy establishment was that he might immediately pursue those objectives to the detriment of American interests.

  Certainly the president’s team sought to shrink America’s footprint in the region. Vice President Joe Biden wanted to ramp down in Afghanistan rather than deepening U.S. commitment, as did Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Axelrod and the set of advisers who had worked on the Obama campaign. They distrusted the phalanx formed by the Pentagon’s leaders and Hillary, though it was military leaders, not Hillary, whom they blamed for leaking frequently, making unhelpful public statements, and presenting unreasonable alternative options for the president in an effort to box him in on the surge. Still, Hillary’s alliance with the pro-surge Pentagon camp did not help her standing with some of Obama’s old campaign hands.