HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Though Ross and Cohen came up empty in the Congo, Hillary never stopped looking for ways to reduce corruption and sexual predation there. At home, she launched an annual conference on ending sexual violence in the region. Both the enduring spirit of the Congolese women she met, and her failure to find a fix, stayed with her for years.

  “She hears these stories, not just with her head and her intellect—stuff goes through her heart,” explained a close friend who also has visited Congo and shared insights with Hillary. “What we discussed is how resilient the Congolese women are. Hillary’s view is ‘It’s not difficult to go to the Congo. You are bearing witness, and you are giving them respect.’ The women in the Congo hang together and give each other courage, and I think Hillary recognized that.”

  For someone who was considered a Luddite as recently as 2008, Hillary builds her own personal networks in ways that strikingly resemble the modern construction of massive political movements. She often finds ways to connect with people on levels that appeal to them—like a microtargeting program that synthesizes a Web user’s friends, interests, and lifestyle, then markets back to them based on those preferences. To the extent that it is calculated, and a lot of it is, people tend to appreciate the effort. A lot of politicians are like that, but most of them aren’t as good at it. Bill wins people over with his charm, but Hillary has to work harder to find commonality and develop relationships. As such, Bill’s alliances have a more transient nature—his political friends come and go—while Hillary’s tend to be more lasting.

  One test of this may be the extent to which the new allies she made as secretary, from tech titans to Pentagon brass, stick with her if she runs for president. On the innovation front, her outreach to the top executives at big companies mirrored efforts she made to bring women leaders from around the world into State Department–backed initiatives to aid women and girls, as well as the public-private partnerships she created for the Shanghai Expo and an international “clean cookstoves” program.

  In January 2010, a couple of weeks before she delivered a major address on Internet freedom, Hillary invited executives from Twitter, Google, Cisco, and the like to a private dinner at the State Department. I don’t claim to be an expert on technology, she told them. I don’t claim to be the most familiar person with this, but I know what all of you are doing is important. And I’m in a position where I can sort of help amplify the impact that you guys are having.

  “Use me like an app,” she said, eliciting a round of laughter.

  The catchphrase helped Hillary communicate a nuanced message. She wasn’t going to write computer code in the wee hours, but she was all in on both innovation and business. She believed that a partnership between the government and American companies could help both the execution of foreign policy and the expansion of American business opportunities. Moreover, American commerce could be used as both a carrot and a stick in foreign policy; most countries like the idea of a new American plant coming to their country and abhor the idea that the United States would force its businesses to move out.

  A few months after the dinner at the State Department, Ross and Cohen led a delegation of five tech company executives to Syria. President Bashar al-Assad had raised the issue of American sanctions with Bill Burns, the undersecretary for political affairs, earlier that year. How could America talk about Internet freedom on the one hand, Assad said, while imposing sanctions that prevented countries like his from acquiring the technology that would allow for the free flow of information? If tech companies were granted waivers from sanctions, Assad figured, they would pour into his country and boost the economy.

  At the time, the trip was reported as an effort by the United States to lure Assad away from his alliance with Iran by showing him what the American tech companies could do for his country. But that was a smokescreen; the actual story showed a different, more aggressive play, using tech to show Assad who held all the cards. According to a source familiar with the trip, Ross and Cohen really brought the executives—from Microsoft, Cisco, and Dell, among others—to Damascus to disabuse Assad of the notion that their companies were itching to get into the small Syrian market.

  “The truth is they didn’t give a shit,” the source said. “What was really going on was the companies communicating to Assad that Syria was no more important to them than Rhode Island. That they were fully supportive of the policies keeping them from doing commercial transactions in Syria.” The companies would take their cues from the U.S. government about whether to push for waivers.

  Then U.S. officials floated a bigger threat. “What we said, which enraged them,” the source said, “is if you don’t put in place a certain set of human rights reforms in your country, then not only are we going to deny sanctions waivers for these companies, but we are going to get sanctions waivers for other companies, which, oh, by the way, you don’t want in your country.”

  In the end, after Assad failed to meet a ninety-day deadline for real human rights reforms, the United States quietly gave waivers to some of those companies, including Skype, in an effort to wreak havoc on Assad.

  While he was there, Cohen tweeted that he had just enjoyed a world-beater of a Frappuccino at a Syrian university. Cohen, an international adventurer who had once sneaked into Iran, wanted young Syrians to know that the U.S. government was on the ground and interested in them. Senior State Department officials, most notably Steinberg, were furious. America was gently trying to get back in the business of engaging Syria directly, and Cohen’s tweet didn’t serve that purpose. Ross and Cohen could hear the executioners sharpening their swords again.

  But a few days later, after they returned, Hillary sent a strong message to her own staff and the White House about where Ross and Cohen stood in her mind. During a speech to the U.S.-Russia Civil Society Partnership Program, she went off script to talk about her tech force. “I saw Jared Cohen when I came in. I don’t know if Alec Ross is here or not. But who else—anyone else here from your team, Jared?” she asked from the podium at the Renaissance Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington. “We have a great team of really dedicated young people—primarily young people—who care deeply about connecting people up.”

  In case the message hadn’t been received, Hillary crystallized it a moment later. “I’m very proud of the work they’re doing. They have been everywhere from Mexico to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Syria to Russia and every place in between.”

  One of the lessons Hillary has drawn from decades on the public stage, for better and for worse, is that public criticism is not, in and of itself, a reason to stop pursuing a policy. Her newfound interest in the power of technology abroad and at home, as well as her reliance on aides who came from outside her inner circle, is a testament to her survivor’s willingness to set a new strategy in the aftermath of failure. But they then became a sign of her commitment to following through on the new course, despite bumps in the road.

  In four years, she was unwavering in her support of the 21st Century Statecraft concept. She demonstrated fidelity not only to the philosophy but to the people who implemented it, even when that meant pushing back on the White House or on her own inner circle at State. For Hillary, loyalty is a two-way street, and her defense of her innovation team bred the kind of loyalty that can’t be purchased from a political consulting firm, and that will follow her out of State. She now has scores of loyalists who are poised to convert their expertise with data, social networking, mobile technology, and movement building into political work. Some of them joined her when she turned to philanthropic work in the spring of 2013. And some of the hundred-plus State employees who became the 21st Century Statecraft crew are certain to provide the building blocks for a next-generation presidential campaign, one that some aides suggest could make Obama’s 2012 effort look archaic, if she runs again.

  “She had people very, very close to her that are ready to go, as you can imagine,” said a close Clinton friend who worked at State. “Those people that are supporte
rs, and people like that, would actually put together a twenty-first-century campaign unlike the 2008 campaign. There’s this new cohort of early-twenties to maybe thirty-five-year-old people, and they are just intellectually different than the people that ran [past] campaigns.”

  As secretary of state, Hillary, like an incumbent president, was able to flex political muscles under the cover of acting in America’s interests. She couldn’t attend campaign rallies or raise money for Democratic candidates, but the State Department offered countless ways to keep her friends involved, address deficiencies in her operation, and reach out to powerful forces in the business, government, and nonprofit worlds. In addition to the donor contacts for the Shanghai Expo and her focus on closing her own digital divide, Hillary built public-private partnerships around empowering women and girls; she sent corporate leaders around the world to act as ad hoc diplomats and seek new avenues for commerce; and she kept up her relationships with politicians of both parties in advancing State’s interests on Capitol Hill. In those ways, she tended to the Clinton political machine.

  NINE

  Obama Girl

  When Obama’s top lieutenants met in the Cabinet Room of the West Wing of the White House on September 10, 2009, they came armed with concerns about the president’s health care push. Tea Party Summer was in full bloom. Across the country, lawmakers had been under assault at town hall meetings during their August recess, and the rest of the agenda was getting subsumed into the maelstrom. Was it worth all that sacrifice? Not for much of the cabinet. As they settled into nameplated leather chairs around the oval mahogany conference table donated by Richard Nixon, one secretary after another complained that his or her priorities were getting crowded out by a health care debate that was also taking its toll on the Democratic Party’s standing.

  Hillary watched with concern from her seat directly to the president’s right. She had lost her own battle to reform the country’s health insurance system in 1994. As secretary of state, she had stayed away from weighing in on the president’s domestic agenda with anyone other than Obama and a handful of his closest aides. Even many White House health care staffers weren’t aware that she was giving back-channel advice to chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, particularly on how to deal with members of Congress. She knew them, and the political complexities of their districts and states, as well as anyone in the West Wing.

  “A member or two may have stopped and asked me what I thought,” Hillary said. “And I thought, ‘You need to work with the president and try to get this done.’ ”

  In small-group meetings, and sometimes in her weekly one-on-one sessions with Obama, Hillary played cheerleader. “I’m with you. I’m behind you,” she told the president. But she generally was reticent. Any public whiff of engagement on her part could hurt the cause and throw into question whether she was crossing a traditional boundary that kept secretaries of state out of domestic politics. It was Bill Clinton who weighed in publicly on domestic policies. “The president’s doing the right thing,” he had said in an Esquire magazine interview that week. “It is both morally and politically right.”

  Now, at a critical juncture for Obama, with opposition to his plan playing out on national news broadcasts every night and some Democrats concerned that the issue would doom his presidency, the last thing he needed was petty infighting from his cabinet. Hillary knew this drill: it wasn’t just Republicans who had killed her proposal—fellow Democrats had also left their fingerprints at the scene of the crime. With her party in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House for the first time since her health care push, she knew just how much was at stake in keeping Democrats, including the president’s cabinet, focused on the task. “She used an anecdote or some sort of flashback to when she was first lady” to set up the thrust of her message, said one Obama aide who was present.

  Then taking command of the room, she told her colleagues, as her husband had told Esquire, that it was the right thing to do. “This is the time to do it,” she said. “We’re all in it. Everyone in the room knows how important this is.” The bitching and moaning ceased. It was a pivotal, if underappreciated, moment in the health care reform effort.

  At the end of the meeting, Obama spoke briefly to reporters. “The time is right, and we are going to move aggressively to get this done,” he said. “And every member of this cabinet is invested.” That hadn’t been true at the start of the meeting, but Hillary’s sales job had been just what Obama needed to assuage the doubters.

  “I thought, Look, the president had more support in Congress than my husband did back in ’93, ’94, so he could put together a majority,” Hillary said. “If the Republicans stonewalled, which they were beginning to show they would, despite his best efforts, he could still put a package on the floor and get it passed in both houses, which doesn’t come along every first term of a president.”

  “I believed strongly,” she said, “that the president needed to forge ahead.”

  Her private efforts on behalf of the health care law—working with Emanuel and Messina behind the scenes, encouraging Obama and advising him on strategy, and now speaking up on his behalf at a key cabinet meeting—helped strengthen her bond with Obama. For all of his aides’ suspicions, she was proving to be a loyal ally during the tumultuous first year of the Obama administration.

  But Hillary felt that in some instances, the White House wasn’t reciprocating on her priorities. In a rare break, she chided the president in the summer of 2009 for failing to move forward on a nominee to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, which fell under State. “The clearance and vetting process is a nightmare,” she said at a town hall meeting with USAID staff. “It is frustrating beyond words. I pushed very hard last week when I knew I was coming here to get permission from the White House to be able to tell you that help is on the way and someone will be nominated shortly, and I was unable—it just was—the message that came back: ‘We’re not ready.’ ” Still, in general terms, the tension over personnel dissipated as jobs were filled, reducing the number of available flashpoints between Hillary’s circle and Obama’s.

  Bill complemented her efforts by putting his shoulder into the health care reform push, both in his public comments and behind closed doors. In November, while Hillary was on a thirteen-day trip to Europe and Asia, he showed up at a private lunch meeting of Senate Democrats to urge them to put their differences aside and help Obama win on the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. As he chatted with reporters afterward, his cell phone rang. “It’s my secretary of state calling,” he said, offering a reminder of who he was acting as a surrogate for on his trip to Capitol Hill. A few hours later Obama finally announced the nominee to run USAID, giving Hillary what she had been seeking for months.

  The first time she saw Obama after Congress passed the health care law months later, it was in the Situation Room. She told him she was proud of him, and she was uniquely positioned to affirm him. As first lady, as senator, as a candidate for president, and then as a shadow domestic policy adviser to the president and his aides, Hillary had poured so much of herself and her reputation into trying to provide access to health insurance for all Americans. It was the domestic issue with which she was most identified, and it was Obama who had muscled it across the finish line. They threw their arms around each other, and a photographer snapped a shot of the embrace. The image held such symbolic appeal in the White House that officials hung the framed picture on a wall near the Oval Office. Though such photos are routinely rotated every few weeks, the picture stayed in its spot for months.

  It might have been a bittersweet conclusion for Hillary. After all, she’d put a lot of her mind, heart, and soul into health care reform but hadn’t been part of the domestic policy team that put it into law. Still, Obama’s victory, using a model that looked like her proposal from the 2008 primary campaign, left her satisfied if perhaps a touch wistful. “His political position in the Congress was stronger than the
one that Bill had after he was elected,” she said. “We—and Bill—had already put so much on the table with the deficit reduction, which passed with not a single Republican vote in either house, that was a huge lift. And then he also put a lot on them for the crime bill, and many members lost their seats because of the NRA. So, he didn’t have the numbers. And he’d also really pushed them hard already. The stars aligned for President Obama and he took advantage of that. So I was thrilled about it.”

  Health care drew Obama and Hillary closer, but the big moment in their relationship, according to sources on both sides, came in December 2009, when they traveled to a UN-sponsored international climate summit in Copenhagen. The basic goal of the summit was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, with special attention to making sure that “developed” countries agreed to specific limitations on their emissions and that “developing” countries could restrict emissions without hurting economic growth.

  On the rare international trips they took together, Hillary made every effort to stand in his shadow, mirroring the deferential posture she struck at home. Despite her international celebrity, she played the role of the ideal staffer—well briefed enough to answer his questions, and well disciplined enough to take his directions. Humility may have been an acquired trait for Hillary, but she wore it well as Obama’s diplomat. “In the first year, she was self-consciously deferential and wanted to debunk all the skepticism and doubt that she could be a team player,” said a senior career official at State.