HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton
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Hillary’s personal effort paid dividends for Bagley, Villarreal, Balderston, and America’s relationship with China. They had raised enough money at that point to ensure that America would be present at the fair, but the U.S. pavilion wouldn’t be completed until the last minute.
Two days before the May 1, 2010, opening of the fair, Chinese president Hu Jintao, vice premier Wang Qishan, and state councilor Dai Bingguo toured the U.S. Pavilion, taking in what Hillary and her team had accomplished in less than fifteen months—under half the time it might normally have taken to complete such a project.
“We were still working on the finishing touches even after the expo officially opened,” Villareal said. “Had it not been for her personal involvement in really lending her personal prestige, we just never would have been able to get it done.”
In late May 2010, Hillary came back to Shanghai for a third time to get her own firsthand look as one of 7.36 million people who visited the carbon-neutral U.S. pavilion over a six-month period. The reviews were fair but not good. John Pomfret of the Washington Post called it “one of the singular successes” of her first year and a half in office but noted that the pavilion looked more like “a convention center in a medium-size American city than a national showcase—a warren of dark rooms with movie screens that pales in comparison to the ambitious pavilions of, among others, Saudi Arabia, which features the world’s biggest IMAX screen, and Germany, festooned with hundreds of giant red balls.”
Villarreal acknowledged that “we could have done much better” with two or three years to put it together. “We made the most that we could, given the limitations,” he said. “At the end of the day, the question is ‘Did ordinary Chinese enjoy it?’ and the answer is ‘Absolutely.’ ”
“I’m just relieved,” Hillary said when she arrived, adding a lukewarm assessment of the pavilion itself: “It’s fine.”
Years later an iconic photograph of Hillary speaking in the rain at the construction site hung on the wall of the reception area outside Balderston’s office, a testament to the first major project of the State Department’s version of the Clinton Global Initiative. American and Chinese officials knew that it was a minor miracle that Hillary had been able to secure financing and build the pavilion in the first place, which was a major sign of respect for China. The Clinton family contact list had been invaluable for Bagley, Balderston, and Villarreal as they dialed angel donors directly. They “went to a lot of people in the network, the givers and funders network,” said a senior Hillary adviser.
A hint of the Clinton network’s central role was inscribed on the first page of Balderston’s copy of the world’s fair commemorative coffee table book: “As you would say, ‘We did it, buddy.’ ” The signature: Bill Clinton.
The expo episode revealed a fundamental truth about Hillary’s new job that she and her aides had to learn on their own: no matter how much planning and preparation they did, they would always be subject to the unpredictability of managing a world’s worth of relationships and crises, including those within the State Department and within official Washington. Wendy Sherman, a former aide to Madeleine Albright and the cochairwoman of Obama’s transition team at State, had tried to warn them before they took office. “The incoming is relentless,” she told Hillary. But Hillary and her closest aides, confident after two decades of surviving the brutality of being a target in national politics, didn’t quite get it.
“It’s a different kind of incoming,” explained one State Department official. “When you are running a campaign, you get up every day, and you have your schedule, and of course you have to respond to what your opponent’s doing. But when you are here, the whole world—the whole world—comes at you every single day.… It is unlike anything else.”
At one level, Hillary’s first six months in office were a testament to the soundness of her strategy of keeping her head down while building up morale within State, strengthening her own position and the department’s within the Obama administration, and beginning the process of repairing relationships with foreign governments. This building phase was familiar to anyone who had watched her closely in her early months in the Senate, when she kept as low a profile as possible and assiduously courted the chamber’s living legends, humbly seeking counsel on how to do her job from lions like Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy. She had shown her savvy in teeing up the Strategic & Economic Dialogue at a time, in early February, when most cabinet secretaries were still learning the names of their assistant secretaries; and in lashing herself to Gates, Petraeus, and other senior Pentagon officials.
On another level, though, that first half-year provided painful lessons in just how hard it would be for Hillary to meet the sky-high expectations for her tenure. She had to balance her own agenda with external demands, and it proved a tough act, in part because while she was adjusting to the role, national and international audiences were watching her every move. So even as Hillary was quietly gathering influence behind the scenes, the image of her among the Washington elite was one of a secretary struggling to find her place in Obama’s sphere and the world.
Hillaryland couldn’t quite shake the classic Clinton drama that had helped sink her 2008 campaign. Some of her aides had trouble adjusting both to the power and to the limitations of their new roles. They had inherited tremendous influence in a massive department, but were unaccustomed to the strict guidelines and decades-long protocol that helped keep American diplomacy on the rails. The upside was an ability to go around the bureaucracy or command it to move in a new direction. The downside was the risk that they were exercising power in areas they didn’t really understand.
One trip in particular to Geneva in March 2009, on her second voyage abroad as secretary of state, demonstrated the exclusivity of Hillary’s closed-off inner circle, its difficulty in adjusting to a bureaucracy, and its ongoing battle with Obama’s White House team over primacy in foreign policy.
Hillary came to Geneva intending to telegraph a message of renewal to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. One of the few policy issues on which Obama had distinguished himself during his brief Senate career was reducing the global stockpile of nuclear weapons and thereby limiting not only the risk of the United States or Russia launching strikes but also the danger of weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or troublemaking smaller nations. During the campaign, he had used that work to promote himself as a big-picture foreign policy thinker, and in his first term, he was determined to chalk up a victory on the issue by signing a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to replace the soon-to-expire pact. More broadly, he believed, a “dangerous drift” had pushed the two countries apart in recent years, preventing them from addressing a variety of common interests, from arms control to commerce and counterterrorism. From the outset of his administration Obama placed a high premium on bolstering the U.S. relationship with Russia, and Hillary’s trip was intended to kick-start that process.
Philippe Reines, a lover of both gimmickry and iconic imagery, had come up with a plan to show the world a symbol of the “reset” mantra. Hillary would give Lavrov a gift-wrapped button emblazoned with the English and Russian words for “reset.” It seemed like a clever way to draw attention to the message, one sure to be bounced across the globe on television and in newspaper pictures. But Reines had sidestepped the traditional protocol by not asking State’s team of translators to help with the project from the start. He later said he was unaware that such resources were available to him. He had asked NSC Russia director Mike McFaul for the word and both McFaul and State Russia expert Bill Burns had signed off on the spelling.
During a classic photo-op moment, as wire photographers’ cameras clicked, Clinton reached into a yellow box to hand the gift to Lavrov. It represents “what President Obama, Vice President Biden, and I have been saying,” she said, revealing the oversize button with the words reset and peregruzka on it. “And that is, we want to reset our relationship. So we will do it together,” she said, holding up the red bu
tton for the cameras.
Presenting the button to Lavrov, she asked for approval: “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Think we got it?”
“You got it wrong,” Lavrov replied.
“I got it wrong,” Clinton said, awkwardly echoing Lavrov’s accent.
Lavrov pointed out that peregruzka—printed not in Cyrillic but in Latin script—means “overcharge.”
Clinton let out one of her trademark laughs and slapped her hands together once. “Well, we won’t let you do that to us, I promise,” she countered.
Lavrov, smiling politely, promised to keep the button on his desk. But the moment caused some heartburn among career types back at the State Department and at the National Security Council, where, as one official put it, “I remember some moans and groans and slapping of the forehead.”
Reines tried to correct the error, asking Russia’s ambassador to Switzerland to give the gift back temporarily so that a new label—with the right word—could be printed and affixed to it.
“This is a gift from the United States. I don’t think I can give it to you,” the ambassador replied with a smile. “If I did, my minister would be very upset.”
“If your minister doesn’t give that back, my minister,” Reines said, referring to Hillary, “is going to send me to Siberia.”
Reines pleaded his case in good humor, even suggesting they bring a label-maker into the room so that the Russian ambassador didn’t have to let the gift—an emergency stop button that had been hastily pilfered from a swimming pool or Jacuzzi at the hotel—out of his sight. Nyet, the ambassador said.
Compounding the mistake, Reines then tried to pin the blame on McFaul, an Obama favorite, at a time when tension between the White House and State staffs was running high.
The gaffe overshadowed Clinton’s trip to Geneva, as journalists pointed out in their stories. One Russian newspaper, Kommersant, highlighted the goof on its front page, stating “Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton push the wrong button.” Reines would have liked a do-over, but he felt that the main purpose of the button had been served. It was an ice-breaker for the two diplomats. And instead of getting angry and calling for heads to roll, Hillary and Lavrov found the moment amusing enough that they later signed a copy of Time magazine featuring the reset button on its cover and gave it to Reines. “Philippe, the Russians are pushing your buttons! (which is only fair since you pushed theirs!) As ever, Hillary,” she wrote. But Senator John McCain, long considered a friend to Clinton, put a fine point on the public-relations goof. “If I gave him a reset button,” McCain cracked, “I’d find someone in the State Department who understands Russian.”
Reines’s translation misadventures served as another reminder of how the wide latitude Hillary gave to trusted loyalists came at a price: there was blowback for her when they rubbed White House officials the wrong way, flubbed in foreign policy, or found themselves the subject of headlines for the wrong reasons. None of that reflected well on her, but it was very rare for her to cast someone out—and rarer still for her to turn a cold shoulder to him. When P. J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, spoke critically of the government’s treatment of Wikileaker Bradley Manning in March 2011, Hillary accepted his resignation, but she also called him the day his departure was announced. Crowley fielded the call at a Washington Capitals hockey game, and Hillary thanked him for his service. When Crowley asked her to give his best regards to Bill, Hillary put her husband on the line to offer his own words of consolation.
In the first months of her tenure, small gaffes like the Russia reset button and the intermittent reports on infighting within the Obama administration often overshadowed the work Hillary was doing behind the scenes to bolster the State Department, advise Obama on foreign policy, and connect with the leaders and people of geopolitically important countries. By the first week of June, she had been to twenty countries, counting the Palestinian territories, and held innumerable meetings and phone calls with foreign leaders at the State Department. She backed up her rhetoric about engaging directly with the public in other countries to push for more cooperation from their governments by giving speeches at universities, sitting for interviews with reporters wherever she went, and conducting town hall meetings in Tokyo, Seoul, and Baghdad.
She also made sure to connect with Americans involved in diplomacy and development, meeting with embassy staff in various countries. Hillary was working all the time—around the clock, and around the world—but she didn’t have much to show for the brutal schedule, in part because diplomatic agreements take time to ripen and in part because Obama had empowered Biden and the White House national security team to take the lead on many hot-button issues. Folks in Washington began to wonder whether she could live up to the hype surrounding her selection. And then, in an instant, the insult was compounded by injury.
Shortly before five o’clock on a mid-June afternoon, as she walked from an elevator to her awaiting motorcade inside the basement garage at State, Hillary fell and landed squarely on her right elbow. She had been on her way to the White House with Holbrooke, where they were scheduled to talk to the president about a number of issues, including an imminent trip that Melanne Verveer, Hillary’s old chief of staff turned new ambassador for women’s issues at State, was planning to take to Afghanistan. The pain was so unbearable and excruciating that Hillary lay on the basement floor, wincing. Struggling to get back up, she asked Holbrooke to continue on to the White House and attend the meeting without her. “That’s an order,” Holbrooke recalled her telling him.
While Holbrooke would go on to meet with Obama, Hillary, her elbow throbbing, made her way back up to her seventh-floor office. She left a short time later for George Washington University Hospital, just down the street, where she underwent treatment for a fracture to her elbow. Later that evening, at around ten, now surrounded by Bill and Chelsea, who had flown into Washington immediately to be by her side, she fielded a check-up call from Obama.
Doctors told her that she would need surgery in the coming days, and Hillary—who rarely if ever took a sick day—holed up at her Embassy Row home. Unable to ever sit still, aides say, she spent her time reading briefing papers and making calls. During one briefing after the fall, State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley quipped that Hillary was figuring out “how well you can text with one arm in a sling.”
The joke hinted that she was fit to be tied. Hillary knows one gear: overdrive. That had been a source of concern to her friends early in her time at State, who saw that the nonstop international travel, late-night briefing-book readings, and lack of exercise were already taking more of a toll on her than had past jobs. She had never missed a step in two decades of high-profile public service in Washington, but she admitted privately that she was running herself into the ground.
At a 2009 event for Vital Voices, Hillary ran into Mo Elleithee, a traveling press aide from her 2008 campaign, backstage. “How are you liking the gig?” he asked.
Hillary smiled and paused. “I love it,” she said. “I absolutely love it. The work is great.”
Then she paused again.
“But I am working so much harder now than I ever have in my entire life.”
The remark was striking to Elleithee, who had watched her slog through a brutal primary campaign, moving at a dizzying speed and putting in “110 percent” without complaint.
Obama noticed, too. At a cabinet meeting, he decided to make an example of Hillary. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, he told her and the rest of his top advisers. “Hillary was pushing herself too far or too hard,” said one cabinet member, “and he basically said that she needed to maintain her stamina and her health, and he wanted to make sure everyone did the same.” Now the fall was going to set her back. Before undergoing a two-hour early morning surgery a couple of days after her spill, Hillary was forced to scrap her public schedule, including an event for World Refugee Day that she had been set to attend alongside actress Angelina Jolie.
The broken elbow became a metaphor for a gathering narrative that the boys in the West Wing were shoving her out of the foreign policy picture. It was clear that she still had a long way to go to prove herself to some of the folks in the White House, and the ongoing tension between Hillary’s team and Obama’s complicated her efforts to rebuild the State Department, the United States’ image abroad, and her own reputation at home, because she was not regarded publicly as the central player on Obama’s team.
The week after her fall, Ben Smith of Politico began working on a story headlined “Hillary Clinton Toils in the Shadows.” The thrust of the article was that her grind-it-out style and staff-level fights with the White House had kept her on the back burner. As an example of her limited influence, Smith planned to single out Denis McDonough’s victory over Cheryl Mills in the fight over who had the power to appoint ambassadors. Reines reached out to a new friend on the White House team, Tommy Vietor, for help in tamping down the story. Vietor, responding to Reines’s request, arranged interviews for Smith with McDonough and Tom Donilon, the president’s deputy national security adviser. McDonough told Smith that a report of him going “mano a mano” with Mills was “not accurate” and that “one of the many blessings of this job has been working with and getting to know Cheryl.”