HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Smith didn’t buy it, personally, but dutifully reported the quotes. The White House and State had worked hard enough to dilute the story that for a few weeks other major news outlets declined to follow his smart lead. By the time Obama negotiated with Russian leaders in Moscow in early July, though, it became hard to deny the obvious contrast that Hillary was on the sidelines in a sling.

  Her support network reacted as if her fall were somehow part of an Obama plan to marginalize her. “It’s time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa,” Tina Brown wrote in a provocative article for the Daily Beast on July 13. “You could say that Obama is lucky to have such a great foreign-policy wife. Those who voted for Hillary wonder how long she’ll be content with an office wifehood of the Saudi variety.”

  It wasn’t just Hillary’s cheerleading section that saw the White House diminishing her. Reines and Vietor may have delayed a pile-on after Smith’s Politico story, but the narrative was taking hold nonetheless. A few days later, timed to Hillary’s first major address to the salon of intellectual elites at the Council on Foreign Relations, the diplomatic correspondents for the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all wrote stories that cast her as struggling to regain lost influence.

  Together the articles painted a secretary of state who chafed at being circumscribed by other powerful forces in the administration, led by Obama himself. One pointed to her special envoys, Holbrooke and Mitchell, as players whose portfolios took her out of the game on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East, as well as Biden’s prominent role as Obama’s point man on Iraq. Another noted that Hillary’s senior adviser on Iran, Dennis Ross, had just been reassigned to the White House; her pick to head the U.S. Agency for International Development was hamstrung in the White House vetting process; and Obama had selected a big-time contributor to become ambassador to Japan over her choice, smart-power advocate Joseph Nye.

  Whether the stories were the result of Hillary supporters’ frustration with the Obama team, a White House campaign to undermine her, or simply careful observation by reporters, private friction between the State Department and the West Wing had sparked into full public view. Within the State Department, some senior-level foreign policy experts strongly believed at the time—and still do, years later—that Obama’s White House aides were a bunch of piker neophytes whose desire to keep a tight leash on foreign policy wasn’t nearly as limited as their real-world experience. “These are not your Kissingers or Brzezinskis,” one still-miffed former State Department official said.

  In turn, many of the White House aides saw the Clinton network as part of a bipartisan Washington foreign policy establishment that kept getting it wrong, particularly in backing George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Some of the exhibits in the case of Hillary’s diminished influence were misguided, while others were more convincing. For example, Ross’s move to the White House staff ultimately served as an end run around Mitchell, who resigned in disgust because he had been effectively boxed out of Middle East negotiations.

  But the notion that the special envoys were a challenge to Hillary’s power was off base. They had been her idea, she had picked them, and she continued to believe that the strategy of giving high-profile portfolios to the likes of Holbrooke, Mitchell, and others strengthened her hand. Reporters also missed the nuance between a “special envoy,” the title given to Holbrooke and Mitchell, and a “special adviser,” which was Ross’s role at State. The envoys were expected to get into the muck of diplomacy and reported both to Hillary and Obama. Ross was basically Hillary’s top counselor on Iran.

  Moreover, the president always has more power than the secretary of state in setting foreign policy—and in most cases, so do his White House aides. It is a rare secretary of state—Henry Kissinger—who essentially runs foreign policy. Still, in this case, the gap between the story line and the reality threatened to damage the administration’s efforts all around. Hillary’s close associates say she is particularly well attuned to the effect that perception has on power, and halfway through her first year, the growing perception in Washington was that she didn’t have much power. That was a dangerous counternarrative for a diplomat who relied to some extent on her celebrity—a status conferred by public perception—to do her job.

  If the rest of the world were to think she had little or no influence with Obama, her star wouldn’t shine as brightly when she reached out to foreign counterparts. The same was true at home, where she wouldn’t have as much influence with colleagues in government if they perceived her to be weak. It might not have been apparent to everyone on Obama’s staff, but Hillary’s stature was important to the execution of the president’s foreign policy. Some of the White House message men understood that dynamic, which helps explain why they put the president’s top foreign policy aides on the record with Politico. “Once we’re all in government together,” said one White House official, “a story that is negative on Hillary is bad for the White House.”

  Hillary and Obama may have made an odd couple, but what Tina Brown didn’t pick up on or didn’t write—and what the White House aides might have lost sight of at times—was that Obama was better off with an empowered Clinton at his side. She provided a tremendous amount of political cover for him, and her successes were his successes. Her public blessings on his policy, which she conveyed without reservation, conferred added gravitas to his views. If she split from him on policy—or resigned—a good bit of his own party would second-guess every decision he made on the international stage. She was the rare Cabinet secretary with her own substantial national political following.

  Six months in, it wasn’t just Hillary who was hearing questions about her influence. Obama, too, was learning that a bar set high is hard to clear. He had promised other countries during his inaugural address that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” But even with the groundwork being laid for a new START treaty, there had been no breakthrough in the first half of 2009.

  Huma later confided to Wendy Sherman that the incoming fire had been more than Hillary’s staff had anticipated. “You never told us how relentless it was,” Huma said.

  “Yes, I did,” Sherman replied. “But you didn’t believe me.”

  Sherman’s point about handling the barrage of daily crises was so poignant because Hillary didn’t have the luxury of choosing in which order she built her influence, promoted her agenda, and responded to challenges thrown at her from the White House and the world. And while other officials are required to pull off similar balancing acts—the president and the defense secretary, among them—secretary of state is high on the list of tightrope performers. Even as the media portrayed Hillary as a secondary player on Obama’s national security team in those first six months, she continued to gather capital behind the scenes, not just within the administration but, importantly, within the State Department.

  Any good politician knows that local politics are as important as geopolitics, and Hillary immersed herself in the issues that affected both the foreign service and the civil service, from setting long-term strategies to empower diplomats abroad, to fixing small quality-of-life problems that annoyed the folks at the department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters.

  She had walked into the State Department with a reputation for running a high-drama operation in which loyalty was rewarded over competence. The fact that Obama had given her nearly free rein to choose political appointees threatened to exacerbate fears that she would ignore the permanent structure of the department. Her unprecedented control over political jobs made it hard for her to counter the notion—and the reality—that most decisions would be made by an inner circle of longtime advisers whose ranks were almost impossible to crack. Those appointees, who generally came in and left with the secretary, were layered on top of the foreign service and civil service and given both formal and informal power within the bureaucracy.

  In every agency, there’s tension betwe
en the relatively small political set, which holds outsize influence with the secretary, and the much larger career staff. That natural clash between the two classes, combined with the dysfunction of Hillary’s campaign, was cause for concern at the department, even among the small group of political appointees who didn’t come from Hillary’s own circle. “If you didn’t work on the campaign, it was pretty clear where you stood,” said one appointee who was outside Hillary’s circle. “Game Change had come to the State Department.”

  That’s why Hillary’s emphasis on daily-life issues held a symbolic power as forceful as the substantive changes she made. She had to win “the building”—to get the career State Department folks on her side—and to do that, she knew it was smart to focus on the little things that made their lives better. If she was going to rebuild State’s influence in the federal government and America’s reputation abroad, she needed to invest in her people so that they would trust her and follow her. “She was clearly making a very authentic and really real effort in a very difficult circumstance because it’s a huge bureaucracy, and it’s very complicated to reach out to people and be part of the family,” said one midlevel State official.

  Just after she took office, Hillary ordered a review of same-sex partner benefits for members of the foreign service, a follow-up to Obama’s direction that federal agencies look at ways to promote equality within their ranks. At best, disparate treatment of same-sex spouses amounted to extra inconveniences in traveling and living overseas for gay and lesbian foreign service officers. At worst, it meant that a State Department employee’s same-sex partner could be left in a war zone during an evacuation in which the federal government took care of the families of foreign service officers in opposite-sex marriages.

  “I view this as an issue of workplace fairness, employee retention, and the safety and effectiveness of our embassy communities worldwide,” Hillary said on February 4, 2009, promising to determine what she had the power to change and to move forward on rewriting policy quickly. In May the New York Times reported on an internal memo detailing an emergent new policy for the equal treatment of same-sex partners of foreign service officers. The plan was formalized the following month, when new rights were codified in the State Department’s manual. They included benefits such as medical treatment and housing expenses for same-sex partners and the children of same-sex couples.

  Many of Hillary’s new charges were surprised to find just how much thought and energy she put into empowering them. They also learned that they were dealing with a relentless campaigner who never failed to plot or execute a strategy for lack of personal effort. Her travel schedule, of course, became legendary, a function both of her commitment to backing up Obama’s promise of a new American diplomacy, and of a public relations team that made sure the statistics were easy to track. The front page of the State Department website was turned into an interactive living history of her travels, which eventually covered 956,733 miles and 112 countries. Previous secretaries’ aides had kept logs of their whereabouts but not with the zeal of Hillary’s image-conscious PR team. It was an essential part of her narrative as secretary that she outhustled everyone. But within the State Department, both political aides and career officials were far more impressed with her diligence in drilling deep into arcane policy issues.

  Dating back to her time in the Senate, Hillary started her day with a large packet of news clips that an aide began gathering at four a.m., in an informal competition with the staffer who did the same job for Bill Clinton. Hillary had been jealous of her husband’s stack of news stories, and she instructed her staff to prepare a similar briefing each morning. At State, they included major news articles and stories about her husband and daughter.

  Her day ended with a massive briefing book, as well as funny cat clips inserted by an aide. Rob Russo, who had sent out her thank-you notes following the 2008 primary, was responsible for making sure the book was in good shape each day. It included her schedule for the following day, memos on each meeting on the agenda, speeches and talking points for public events, and short biographies on people she would be meeting. The tabs upon tabs of information were sent in by staff around the building and compiled by two career officials. Often enough, aides were working on it as late as midnight.

  While there’s nothing unusual about a department head or member of Congress taking a briefing book home at night—most do—Hillary’s command of each day’s homework shocked her advisers. “She really read the memos,” said one senior aide. “I worked on her Senate confirmation and also the first set of budget hearings that we had. I’d give her these big three-hundred-page things that I assumed would never be read, at least not the bottom fifty pages. And she’d take them home over the weekend, and on Monday she’d come back with them, page two hundred fifty folded over, highlighted with a note in the margin like ‘This doesn’t make sense’ or ‘Explain this to me.’ ” She gave the same attention to the stacks of personal notes that went out with her signature, often returning drafts with typos circled or small notes to add a recipient’s nickname or fix some other detail.

  Hillary’s discipline and attentiveness were two of the ways in which she contrasted with her husband, who is famous for arriving late and multitasking. For those who know both of them, her style is as respectful as his is disrespectful. “Standing at the desk of the president of the United States while you’re briefing him for a major meeting,” Albright said, “and he’s doing a crossword puzzle, and you feel like saying ‘God damn it, listen to me,’ and you never know, and then he’d say everything that you’d briefed him on, so you always knew that he had actually absorbed it. She, being a Wellesley girl, takes notes.”

  Even one of the most embarrassing episodes of Hillary’s young life, when she failed the Washington, D.C., bar exam, didn’t appear to result from a lack of discipline. She enrolled in a bar study class with a professor, Joseph Nacrelli, who had a reputation for knowing every nook and cranny of the D.C. test. But in 1973 the exam was in its second year of including a multistate portion that tested more generally on American law rather than just city-specific questions. Hearing the professor lecture on a topic they knew well, some of the students in the class determined that portions of the material he was teaching were wrong. Those students panicked because the bar would test them on subjects they hadn’t taken in law school. So they began to study those subjects independently, in addition to continuing the class, and they passed. It’s hard to know whether Hillary failed because she studied the wrong information—some of those who relied solely on the class made the grade. She was a great student but didn’t have the vision to see the trouble some of her peers identified and adjusted for.

  In her first weeks in office, Hillary set in motion a major initiative that spoke to her interest in building the institution and her penchant for preparation and planning, even as it alienated some of her in-house constituents. It was a project that she hoped would modernize the State Department at all levels, enhance its chances of securing big budgets, and ensure that diplomats were seen as the face of America in host countries. She invited several of her top aides to dinner on the eighth floor, where American treasures such as Thomas Jefferson’s desk are housed in a matrix of marble columns, hardwood floors, and balcony that provides a stunning panorama of the city.

  As she sat down to eat and plot with Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, policy planning aide Derek Chollet, and Rich Verma, the department’s lobbyist on Capitol Hill, Hillary began to talk about how effectively the Pentagon persuaded Congress each year to fund its massive budget requests, which had grown to more than $650 billion including supplemental spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  As a member of the Armed Services Committee, she explained, she had watched how the Pentagon brass had been equipped not just with the power of their special mission to defend the nation but also with planning documents that bolstered their case for funding increases. Every four years the Pentagon developed a report, called the Quadren
nial Defense Review (QDR), that assessed longer-term strategy and priorities, including needs for weapons, personnel, and vehicles. Its basic function was to make sure that there was a directed, if sometimes vaguely stated, national defense strategy. But it also served as a reference point for military leaders who came to Capitol Hill with colorful presentations aimed at getting Congress to keep funding an old weapons system or to put out the seed money for a new one. The new ask could always be shoehorned into a strategy articulated in the last QDR.

  But what the QDR gave the Pentagon, more than anything else, was a sense of long-range mission and purpose that integrated the needs of the department with the strategic vision of its civilian leadership. “I don’t know why we don’t do that here,” Hillary told her aides. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  State didn’t “have a big-picture compelling strategic rationale why a given program is not only important in its own right but critical to the bigger-picture vision,” said a government official familiar with the thinking behind Hillary’s push. “It’s not just the document that’s valuable. I think it’s more the process of articulating clear priorities.”

  Hillary listened attentively to her advisers’ input, scribbling notes to herself. Then she wrote down the words Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. She already had given a lot of thought to the QDDR by that point—she had discussed it with Jim Steinberg before she was confirmed—and the dinner was just a way of unveiling it to a wider circle of aides.

  It turned out to be a long and painful process, nearly two years in the making, and many officials complained bitterly about the extra workload. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Office and the lead official on the QDDR, later wrote a piece for The Atlantic about the impossible demands on her time at State, headlined “Why Women Can’t Have It All.” Richard Fontaine, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, which was originally cofounded by one of Hillary’s assistant secretaries, noted that “even for those questions the QDDR does answer, implementation will be difficult.” Even Hillary’s top aides declined to sugarcoat the way the QDDR was received. “I assure you people hated it as they were going through it,” one of them said. “But it was a really effective exercise.”