HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Hillary had a lot of personal capital riding on the Copenhagen summit because she had urged Obama to attend. But it was quickly turning into a disaster. It was poorly organized, and there didn’t seem to be much hope for achieving a real deal among the key nations. At one point, American officials became aware that China was holding a secret multilateral meeting on the sidelines with Brazil, South Africa, and India—a meeting to which Obama had not been invited. He wanted to crash the party.

  “Four against one,” one official warned the president.

  “No problem,” he said, telling Clinton, “We’re going in now.”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  With Hillary as his wingman, Obama barged into the meeting, demanding to talk to the leaders of the four countries. Each of the countries had been dodging the United States at all levels—from Obama and Clinton on down—and this was a chance to address them all at once. The uninvited U.S. delegation of two caused quite a stir when they busted in.

  “The Chinese diplomatic officer, he’s really losing his shit in Chinese,” said one Hillary aide who was briefed afterward.

  “I don’t know what he’s saying, but I don’t think it’s ‘Glad to see you guys,’ ” Obama joked to Hillary.

  Ultimately they hammered out a watered-down, nonbinding agreement that was not adopted by the full conference. The Americans proclaimed victory, but they knew they hadn’t won much. What Obama and Hillary had gained, however, was a common appreciation for the difficulties of the nitty-gritty of diplomacy and the sense that they might actually enjoy each other’s company. “We had fun in Copenhagen because we stormed the secret meeting,” Hillary said.

  “It was the two of them all day, improvising together, meeting to meeting,” said a senior White House official. “That was the first time we saw them have to—no staff—just figure out ‘What are we doing? What’s our play? What are you going to say to X leader? What do I say here?’ And they just had to improvise together for a full day in the most kind of chaotic environment possible, and that’s when I started to see them kind of click in terms of just working more naturally together, so it wasn’t this kind of formal relationship.” Or as another White House aide put it, “They were real buddies after that.”

  One of Hillary’s closest aides agreed that Copenhagen was a turning point. “They both basically walked out of that experience the same way, like ‘You know what, this is really hard because there’s a lot of voices out there in the world with their own ideas, and American leadership is herding cats. It’s tough. It’s a tough slog,’ ” the aide said. “They both had the same kind of sensibility about what it was going to take for us to succeed on the foreign policy front coming out of that experience. And I think it made a big difference in terms of the nature of their conversation from that point on.”

  They had already been working together for months on the hard question of committing more troops in Afghanistan and, in reaching a policy both could live with, had grown closer.

  Just before Copenhagen, the Clarus Research Group released a poll of voters who described themselves as “news watchers.” It found that 51 percent approved of the job Obama was doing, while Hillary’s rating was 75 percent. Not only were her numbers with independents (65 percent) and Republicans (57 percent) better than Obama’s, but so was her standing among Democrats (96 percent approval to Obama’s 93 percent). It wasn’t the first poll to show Hillary’s numbers above Obama’s but the contrast was stark, particularly at a time when Washington elites had concluded she had been pushed to the sidelines. After the heady days of his transition and inaugural celebration, Obama had been dragged back to earth by a series of controversial public fights over his stimulus, health care, and climate change plans, while any work Hillary did on domestic issues was completely behind the curtain. Gallup, which pegged Obama’s approval at 49 percent among a broader set of Americans in the same time window as Clarus, had assessed it at 68 percent when he took office eleven months earlier. It didn’t take a high-priced political consultant to figure out that by the end of their first year in office, Hillary Clinton’s brand had become considerably stronger than Obama’s.

  Toward the end of 2009, she had begun to telegraph that she didn’t expect to serve in Obama’s administration for eight years if he won a second term. “Please,” she had said when Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post asked her about it. “I will be so old.” In January 2010 she told Tavis Smiley that “the whole eight” would “be very challenging” and, beginning to laugh, added, “I will be very happy to pass it on to someone else.” She also told Smiley that she was “absolutely not interested” in running for president again.

  But her approval ratings—and the fact that she didn’t see herself as an Obama lifer—contributed to speculation in late 2009 and early 2010 that she might run a primary against the sitting president. Conservatives in particular liked to raise the prospect, since its mere discussion contributed to the idea that Obama was weak. Though it was fodder for political junkies and twenty-four-hour cable news programs, there was never any evidence that Hillary gave a thought to running against Obama.

  It was really the second year of the Obama presidency in which Hillary’s loyalty mattered. In the first year, she had just lost an election to him, and his star was bigger than hers. But by the beginning of the second year, they had essentially traded places in terms of public esteem. If anyone was familiar with the mercurial nature of public opinion and with the difficulty a president can have in keeping his lieutenants lined up behind his agenda when he’s losing popularity, it was Hillary. She had watched Bill grapple with the same vagaries. Over the course of 2010, she and her staff threw themselves into delivering on Obama’s agenda on a series of complex issues, from Haiti to the New START nuclear-arms-reduction treaty with Russia to the imposition of sanctions aimed at bringing Iran to heel.

  While Obama and Hillary had grown closer in Copenhagen, their two staffs—along with Bill Clinton—forged stronger bonds in January 2010, when an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale ripped through the heart of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, killing 316,000 people, injuring 300,000 more, and displacing 1.3 million. Cheryl Mills was the State Department’s point person on Haiti and took charge of the recovery and relief effort, and the innovation team devised a text donation program for the Red Cross that raised $40 million in ten-dollar increments. It was a big moment for the fledgling 21st Century Statecraft crew because it demonstrated for Hillary and Mills the transformational power of technology for the poorer, less attended parts of the world that they cared so much about. “There was this kind of emotional connection to the work,” said one State Department official.

  Mills was on the phone around the clock, working with Haitian officials on every detail. To this day, she remembers which flights carried which orphans to adoptive parents in the United States, a product of poring over lists to figure out how to expedite paperwork for kids whose records had been destroyed or lost in the rubble along with their orphanages and Haitian government facilities. She and McDonough made sure that all the players on the president’s national security team were on the same page in terms of search and recovery, military flights, and disaster aid.

  In addition to directing the overall federal response, Obama summoned presidents Clinton and George W. Bush to the White House to announce a relief organization modeled after the fund established by Clinton and George H. W. Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. As Clinton and George W. Bush waited for Obama in the Cabinet Room, they joked about being like brothers. After all, Clinton and Bush are about the same age, and they grew much closer as a result of Clinton’s partnership with the elder Bush.

  Even their wives, who were not present for this meeting, had grown closer through a shared interest in two issues: empowering women and girls around the world and pressuring the Burmese military junta into adopting democratic reforms. The two former first ladies spoke privately with each other about Burma on more than one occasion
, and as a courtesy, Hillary dispatched Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for the region, to give Laura Bush periodic briefings on developments in the Southeast Asian nation. The Bush and Clinton clans had found their comfort zone, a fact underscored by the demonstration of bonhomie by George W. Bush and Bill in the Cabinet Room, but Bill and Obama still hadn’t hit that sweet spot.

  The atmosphere changed when Obama walked into the room. Here was the new president, with his two immediate predecessors, one of whom he had trashed as the architect of a savaged economy on a daily basis and the other who had campaigned against him for months. It was clear, according to one observer, that while the Clinton-Obama relationship was getting better publicly, it was still awkward behind closed doors. “It was friendly but slightly stiff,” the source said.

  The Hall of Famer and the Rookie of the Year were still sizing each other up, trying to strike a delicate balance in which each man gained the most and lost the least from partnering on politics and policy. Sometimes their interests and beliefs brought the two presidents together; at other times, they drove them apart. More than any past president in memory, Bill remained wholly invested in electoral politics, a dynamic that surely owed both to the possibility that Hillary would run again and to Bill’s own love of the game. Though he had two stents inserted at New York Presbyterian Hospital after feeling chest pain a few days before Valentine’s Day, Bill went back to work within a week. He was eager to show that he was in fighting shape, and by April, with the midterm elections looming and analysts predicting that Republicans had a shot at taking control of the House and Senate, he began filling his political calendar. He cut radio ads to help Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas fend off a primary challenge from Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter; showed up in western Pennsylvania to campaign for Mark Critz in a special election to fill the late representative Jack Murtha’s seat; and even auctioned off a little bit of his time to help cut into Hillary’s debt. At that point, she had whittled it down below $1 million, but its presence still bothered her.

  At times Bill went head-to-head with Obama, proving that there were still defined Clinton and Obama wings of the Democratic Party. In Colorado, Bill backed Andrew Romanoff, a state legislator who had been loyal to Hillary, against Obama’s candidate, Senator Michael Bennet, who had been appointed to succeed Interior Secretary Ken Salazar the year before. Obama’s aides had tried and failed to push Romanoff out of the race with the offer of a low-level administration job, much like an effort they had undertaken—through Bill—to get Joe Sestak to bail in Pennsylvania. Obama recorded a message for Bennet, and Romanoff appealed to Clinton to counter it. Guy Cecil, a senior aide on Hillary’s campaign who had become Bennet’s chief of staff, didn’t find out that the former president was going to weigh in until an hour before Colorado voters started getting phone calls with Bill’s recorded voice on the other end. Obama won the proxy war, a fact that Cecil, who enjoys a strong relationship with the Clintons, wouldn’t let Bill forget. “Your record’s not perfect anymore,” Cecil teased when Bill came out to do a general-election event for Bennet.

  But with the 2010 primary season ending, Obama’s political team was eager to get Bill out on the hustings for Democratic candidates. Patrick Gaspard, the head of Obama’s office of political affairs, asked Doug Band to meet in midsummer to map out a strategy for using Bill to assist Democrats, particularly in highly competitive states and districts where an Obama visit might backfire. The magic of Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, according to both Clinton and Obama loyalists, is that he can “go anywhere.” While Obama had done just fine with Democratic voters, he couldn’t do much to help junior House Democrats who needed independents and some Republicans to win their districts. Bill had the capacity to sway middle-of-the-road voters and rally the party base.

  Though it might have bruised their egos a little bit to admit the truth, each man was stronger when partnered with the other. For both, the pull of self-preservation was strong. Bill had inflicted enormous damage on himself during the 2008 primary, and joining forces with Obama was the best and fastest way to heal his image. As for Obama, the remainder of his first-term agenda depended on maintaining majorities in the House and the Senate. To the extent that Bill could help with that goal, it was worth bringing him back into the fold. They still weren’t buddies, not in the way that Obama and Hillary were becoming closer personally, but mutual interest served as an adherent. And the budding friendship between Hillary and Obama couldn’t help but reinforce Bill’s relationship with Obama. The same dynamic replicated down the ranks at the White House and State, with aides reflecting the warmer rapport enjoyed by their bosses.

  Most dead-end loyalists never achieved a full rapprochement, but by the second year of the Obama presidency, petty infighting about suspected leaks to the press and personnel matters diminished significantly. Obama himself drove part of that dynamic. After he fired the top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for comments made in a Rolling Stone article called “The Runaway General,” Obama gathered his national security team in the Oval Office for a lecture. On the same day, the New York Times had reported the story of the cable, written by national security adviser Jim Jones and shared with a wide circle, suggesting that Holbrooke would soon be out of a job—a missive that, along with other slights, like efforts to exclude him from important meetings, undercut Holbrooke’s standing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  “The president said he didn’t want to see pettiness, that this was not about personalities or reputations. It’s about our men and women in uniform and about serving our country,” a source told Lloyd Grove of the Daily Beast. Holbrooke remained a point of contention between the White House and State, but as the rest of the respective staffs began to see threats as common—from international crises to news stories about the state of the Obama-Hillary relationship—Obama’s aides and Hillary’s developed respect for each other’s abilities. “You are in the same foxhole,” explained one of Obama’s aides. “You build a bond with people that way, you just do.”

  The most surprising integration of the two camps came in the form of Capricia Marshall. It didn’t take her long to become part of the furniture in the administration. “I’ve never been more wrong about anyone in my life,” Dan Pfeiffer, who had tried to block her nomination, later told her. At a White House state dinner in the spring of 2010, Marshall led the Obamas out the door of the north portico to meet the Mexican president. As the first couple walked down a red carpet, Marshall, clad in a formfitting pink dress, gracefully peeled off onto a white marble landing.

  As she reached the top of a small flight of stairs, her skinny Manolo heel caught. “Oh my God,” she thought, “I’m going down!” The P90X routine paid off, however, keeping her core balanced. Rather than falling flat on her face, she bounced onto her backside and quickly got back to her feet, like an Olympic gymnast who had missed her dismount.

  “Don’t take that picture,” the first lady admonished nearby photographers. “Don’t take that picture,” the president repeated, waving his finger, as the cameras audibly snapped in the background.

  Michelle Obama made a last-ditch appeal for Marshall: “Don’t print that picture.”

  It was too late. The pictures—and a full video—were captured for posterity and YouTube.

  Marshall flashed a double thumbs-up, a fitting symbol of her rebound from the day Obama’s aides had all put their thumbs down on her nomination.

  At the next state dinner, the president teased Marshall as she waited to lead the Obamas out to meet a foreign leader. Standing directly behind her and adopting the hushed tone of a golf announcer, the president offered up a play-by-play.

  “We are getting close,” he said playfully. “Will she stay up or will she go down?”

  Marshall had made it far enough into Obama’s circle that he felt comfortable giving her a hard time. Still, the routine didn’t impress Michelle Obama much.

  “Oh, shut up, Barack! Stop it,” she
said. “Stop teasing her.”

  While Michelle Obama was defending Capricia Marshall from the president’s gentle ribbing, Hillary Clinton was going to bat for Barack Obama on Capitol Hill. In June she invited Howard Berman and Chris Dodd up to a conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department to discuss a pending bill intended to punish Iran by sanctioning foreign companies that did business in the petroleum and banking sectors there. The basic concept was to force other countries to pull out of Iran and thus cripple its economy, which might persuade the Iranians to negotiate an end to their pursuit of nuclear weapons in exchange for the removal of sanctions.

  Berman, a bespectacled veteran House Democrat with half a head’s worth of curly white hair, was the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and as good a friend of the pro-Israel lobby as anyone on Capitol Hill. Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, had written a book about the letters that his father, Thomas Dodd, had written home when he prosecuted Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg after World War II. There was no question where they stood on Israel’s mortal enemy, Iran. Each man had passed a version of a bill called the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions and Divestment Act, or CISADA, through his respective chamber with little or no opposition. Berman and Dodd had written slightly different bills, and they had had to convene a conference committee of House and Senate members to sort out their differences and send the bill to the president for his signature or veto. But in reality, the work of the conference committee was now being done by Hillary, Berman, and Dodd on the seventh floor because the White House had serious concerns about the consequences of the congressional approach; and with Democrats in control of both chambers and the presidency, Berman and Dodd wanted to find a path that would avoid an ugly showdown between the White House and Congress.

  For the most part, members of Congress always wanted to hit Iran with the biggest hammer available. Over the years, the United States had imposed every unilateral sanction imaginable on the Iranians—to little effect. Now the idea was to punish them further by sanctioning foreign entities if they did business with the regime. If all went well, the Iranian economy would plunge, and that could bring about the demise of the existing government or at least bring the Iranians to the table.