HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Hillary devised a way to keep faith with the policy and at the same time satisfy Corker and Isakson. “We’re going to have to give them something. We just can’t say no, no, no,” she told State Department lawyers and other aides involved in the process. “Go back and write a detailed summary of the points that they’re most interested in that comes from the negotiating record. It can be a memo from me, or it can just be a summary of the negotiating record, and we’re going to send it up there to the Senate classified space, and they can sit there and read it.”

  Corker and Isakson went to a secured space in the Capitol to review the summary. As she often did in international negotiations, Hillary had found a way to remove a major barrier with a small gesture. “This was personally a Hillary Clinton idea and solution,” one of the aides said.

  When the committee voted in September, Isakson, Corker, and Lugar joined Democrats in clearing the treaty to go to the floor. They weren’t necessary for a majority vote, but their support sent a signal of bipartisanship that would be crucial to attaining a two-thirds majority of the full Senate. Still, the treaty was far from a done deal. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) wasn’t about to spend precious floor time on a treaty that might not be adopted. Worse for the administration, Republicans were going to pick up seats in the November election, and that meant an even tougher path for ratification—perhaps an impossible one—if it waited until the new year. If Democrats kept control of the Senate, a passel of new Republicans could still make it harder to reach a two-thirds majority; if Republicans captured the majority, the treaty was certain to die.

  Arizona senator Jon Kyl, the lead conservative on nuclear arms issues, mounted objection after objection, and neither the White House nor the State Department ever got the feeling before the midterm election that there were enough votes. On November 2 the calculus shifted, but not as much as Kyl would have liked. Republicans delivered a powerful blow to Obama and the Democrats, picking up half a dozen Senate seats and more than five dozen House seats. Democrats had lost the House but narrowly held on to the Senate.

  Kyl released a statement two weeks later saying the treaty was dead for the year.

  But Obama was getting pressure from Russian president Dmitri Medvedev to finish the deal, an issue the Russian brought up when they met in Japan. Given Obama’s stated commitment to renewing the relationship between the U.S. and Russia, prestige was on the line, both around the world and in domestic politics. With Republican opponents smelling blood in the water, the lame-duck session was his last chance to salvage a victory. Denis McDonough, who had been appointed deputy national security adviser, issued clear instructions to other administration officials: get it done before the end of the year.

  Clinton met with members of the Foreign Relations Committee on November 17, the day after Kyl had pronounced a time of death on the treaty, and in a rare Capitol Hill press conference headlined by a cabinet secretary, she spoke to reporters along with John Kerry and Lugar. The lame-duck session was a time for the two parties to come together, she said. America needed to have inspectors on the ground in Russia. Moreover, she argued, “this is also a treaty that is critical to our bilateral relationship with Russia. We have enhanced our cooperation to the benefit of our country on Iran, on Afghanistan, on nonproliferation, on counterterrorism, and on counternarcotics.” If America didn’t consummate the New START Treaty, how could the Russians be expected to continue to support those efforts?

  Hillary told associates that she thought the meeting with senators and the ensuing press conference created a major turning point in driving momentum toward a vote. Ellen Tauscher, Hillary’s longtime friend and the undersecretary for arms control, had been hospitalized with esophageal cancer. She wished she could be in the mix on Capitol Hill, lobbying senators. Surely many Republicans hoped they wouldn’t have to make the choice between helping Obama and voting against a deal that would reduce Russia’s nuclear stockpile. If it went to the floor and they were forced to pick, Tauscher thought, votes would materialize from Republicans who had refused to say yes to Democratic vote counters. She could barely breathe, but she strained her voice to give well-wishers—including Hillary, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Kerry—her strategic advice: “Make them vote!”

  Meanwhile Hillary had made contact with more than half the senators, perhaps as many as two-thirds of them, according to a source familiar with her calls and visits. Biden, the former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, rushed to the Hill to help salvage the treaty. He called or visited half the members of the Senate in November and December. He and Hillary knew the worst outcome would be to put it on the floor and lose. Reid was still hesitant, unsure of the votes. But he finally scheduled a roll call for the week of Christmas. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he would oppose the treaty. Worried White House officials held a conference call to discuss their next move. “We’ve got the votes,” Biden said. “Period.”

  The truth is they didn’t know how many. The evidence: in the moments leading up to the vote, Biden and Clinton huddled with Kerry in the ornate ceremonial Foreign Relations Office, just off the Senate floor, trying to seal the support of a few senators. “When we went to the floor, we didn’t know how many votes we were going to get,” said the source who had Hillary’s contact list.

  In the end, they got seventy-one—four more than the minimum. It was a full-scale effort by the administration on an issue that most Americans hadn’t heard of, but that carried significant implications for Russian assistance in the war in Afghanistan and in isolating Iran. It was Obama’s day—and Biden’s, according to contemporaneous press accounts that hardly mentioned Clinton. But in the months-long full-court press on Capitol Hill, Hillary had applied steady pressure, snatched the ball, and delivered a no-look pass to the White House for the emphatic dunk. She had even managed to let Obama and Biden take public credit for the win.

  Her diligent work on arcane matters like the New START Treaty and Iran sanctions, where failure would have gotten far more attention than success did, demonstrated Hillary’s professionalism and dedication to Obama’s policies. He liked that he could rely on her to do her job with little instruction necessary. “If he doesn’t have to worry about you and the job that you’re doing, that’s the highest compliment he can ever pay you,” explained one of Obama’s closest advisers. “That was Hillary.”

  Her behind-the-scenes work on behalf of Obama that fall stood in stark contrast to her husband’s turn in the spotlight. By late October, Bill had done more than one hundred political events in the 2010 cycle, most of them for candidates who had backed Hillary, and he kept her fresh in Democratic voters’ minds. “I have to tell you, it’s no secret that I did what I could to defeat President Obama, and I still like my secretary of state,” he told voters in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he was stumping on behalf of freshman representative Mark Schauer.

  He also handled a little bit of party dirty work for Obama, making national headlines when he tried to persuade Representative Kendrick Meek, a longtime family ally, to drop out of the Florida Senate race. Sunshine State Democrats were divided between Meek and Governor Charlie Crist, a Republican who was running as an independent. If Meek stepped aside, Crist might be able to take out Marco Rubio, a rising Republican star, who was seen as a GOP version of Obama—a young, attractive minority candidate who could stoke the party base without alienating its moderates. Crist had called Band, and Band had called Meek, and finally Bill thought he had gotten Meek to end the campaign early. But Meek changed his mind—or didn’t interpret their conversation the same way Bill did—and Rubio cruised to victory over both Meek and Crist.

  As the results rolled in on election night in 2010, it was clear that Obama and Bill would have at least one major parallel in the first two years of their presidencies: they had lost control of the House in their first midterm election. While Obama acknowledged that Democrats had suffered a “shellacking” at the polls, the same could almost be said
for the state of his presidency. While he had passed health care reform, the economy was still in the toilet. His approval rating cratered in the mid-forties. And it was time to start thinking more intensely about his reelection. The Clinton brand, well polished over the two-plus years since the 2008 primary, was a good one for Obama to affix himself to.

  Two years earlier it would have been virtually inconceivable for Obama to call on Bill Clinton for help publicly. Throughout the first term, aides say, Obama had talked to Clinton repeatedly but privately to pick his brain. On December 10, just a little more than a month after the election, Obama invited Bill Clinton to an Oval Office meeting. Obama, who had just struck a tax deal with Republicans that had the markings of a Clintonian move to the middle, thought it would be a good idea if Clinton would “share some of his thoughts” on the economy with the public.

  He brought Clinton out to the White House press briefing room and told reporters that the former president would “speak very briefly.” But “briefly” turned into a thirty-minute show from Clinton, who settled in at the podium and fielded questions from reporters he knew by name.

  For most of the time, Bill was up there alone. Obama had told the press corps he had to run to meet Michelle Obama, who was waiting in the residence to attend a holiday party. “I don’t want to make her mad,” Clinton responded to Obama. “Please go.”

  And for the next half hour, it was as if the Clinton presidency had never ended. A reporter for the New York Times wrote that it looked as though Obama had “outsourced his presidency to Bill Clinton.”

  While Bill enjoyed his return to the spotlight in the wake of Obama’s disastrous midterm, Hillary quietly tended to the wounds of friends who had fallen from office. Some of the recipients of her calls and notes, like representatives Dina Titus (D-Nev.) and Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.), lost in the 2010 midterm but would then make a political comeback two years later, positioned to help her if she ran for president again. These were people whose names remained in the virtual Rolodex of Hillary’s friends and supporters.

  “That’s kind of an untold story,” said one State Department official. “She made a lot of phone calls to people just to say ‘thanks for your service.’ It was a really interesting thing, just because she appreciated what they had done and probably knew it was a tough time for them.” Of course, in politics, especially Clinton politics, “thanks for your service” is just another show of loyalty—delivered now and expected later.

  The postelection period was an incredibly difficult time for Hillary, too. A few hours before Bill took the podium at the White House, Hillary had met in her office with Richard Holbrooke, his deputy Frank Ruggiero, and Jake Sullivan to handle the prospect of a negotiated settlement with the Taliban as the United States drew down its forces in Afghanistan, per Obama’s decision to end the surge and transfer power to the Karzai government. Holbrooke still hoped that a deal could be cut with the Taliban, and he gave a spirited argument that the United States should pursue an agreement in which the Taliban broke with Al Qaeda, renounced violence, and abided by the Afghan constitution. For much of the rest of the administration, those outcomes were preconditions for even sitting down with the Taliban.

  As he pressed his case with Hillary, Holbrooke heaved and then turned an unusual shade of red. Collecting himself, he told Hillary he was fine to continue.

  “You’ve got to get to the hospital right away,” Hillary said. “You’ve got to see a doctor.”

  Sullivan and Ruggiero helped him to the private elevator across the hall from her office, where other staffers arrived to assist him on his way to the State Department’s medical office, while an ambulance made its way to the building. Holbrooke collapsed in the elevator. He’d had a heart attack—a ruptured aorta—and was rushed to George Washington University Hospital. Hillary had spent a lot of time over two years with Holbrooke’s team; he had insisted on bringing everyone to his meetings with her, even though the department usually let senior officials bring only one or two assistants along.

  Now, as doctors performed marathon surgical work on Holbrooke, Hillary embraced his tight-knit team again, appearing at the hospital repeatedly during their three-day vigil. On one of the nights, she took them to dinner, walking with them through Washington Circle, past the bronze statue of the nation’s first president at the Battle of Princeton, to Mei Wah, a Chinese restaurant where signed pictures of politicians, including both Clintons, adorn the walls. It had long been Bill’s favorite spot for takeout, and Clintonites have turned it into a lunchtime conference room over the years.

  When Hillary received word that Holbrooke had died, she left Obama at a State Department reception and rushed to the hospital. Half a dozen members of Holbrooke’s team congregated in the lobby.

  Hillary found them there, crying. One by one, she hugged his aides.

  “Let’s go to the bar and have an Irish wake for Richard,” she said.

  The death of Richard Holbrooke turned into an opportunity for his advocates and critics to slug it out over his legacy in obituaries and at the numerous memorial services held in his honor. Much was made in Washington of the contrast between the Clintons’ efforts to canonize him and the dry, impersonal eulogy that Obama delivered at Washington’s National Cathedral. But on another level, Holbrooke’s passing removed one of the final remaining points of tension between Obama’s White House and Hillary’s State Department. He was a reflection of the differences in their operations, a brilliant player with a flair for drama.

  White House aides had soured on Holbrooke early on. Beyond his threats from the campaign trail, they had become convinced that he was the source of damaging leaks about sensitive negotiations regarding the future of Afghanistan and its president, Hamid Karzai, and then lied about it. “Those discussions can only work if they happen quietly and they don’t get leaked, and he was leaking all the time,” said one White House aide. “He would tell people at the White House to their face, ‘I haven’t talked to a reporter in a year.’ And the reporter would tell us, ‘Holbrooke won’t stop calling me.’ And you go to his memorial and reporters were giving testimonials about how they had heard from him every day. It’s not that people had any lack of respect for his intellect or his ability.… It’s that he didn’t tell the truth. And when someone lies to your face, that’s frustrating.”

  With Bill emerging as an important validator for the president and Holbrooke no longer a flashpoint, the White House had little remaining reason to question Hillary’s loyalty. Instead, after two years of working together, the prevailing view of Hillary at the White House was that she could be trusted.

  PART

  III

  TEN

  Promise and Peril

  The Situation Room fell quiet on February 1, 2011, as President Barack Obama and the members of his National Security Council paused to look at a television screen on the far wall. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was speaking, and like millions of ordinary citizens around the world, America’s highest-ranking officials wondered whether he was ready to give up power. Mubarak, whose government had clashed with prodemocracy protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, still clung to power, and the men and women in the Situation Room hung on his every word, because they had no better intelligence than the average viewer about what he would say.

  For most of a week, the veteran foreign policy hands on Obama’s National Security Council, including Hillary, Vice President Joe Biden, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, had argued that the United States should give Mubarak as much operating room as possible. Hillary told reporters that Mubarak’s regime was “stable” on January 25, and two days before Mubarak’s speech to the Egyptian people, when she finally called for an “orderly, peaceful transition to real democracy” on Meet the Press, she didn’t offer a timetable for starting that process. The old guard had personal ties to Mubarak, who was a rare ally in a tumultuous region and who had kept peace with Israel for more than thirty years. They also worried about the message it would send to ot
her leaders in the region if the United States abandoned a longtime friend in his moment of crisis. Most important, they feared the unknown. There was no telling whether Mubarak’s successor would be a friend or foe of the United States. But from the National Security Staff’s perspective, indeed in Obama’s own mind, those factors were outweighed by the simple truth that the United States couldn’t do anything to save Mubarak, and it was better to get on the right side of the revolution as soon as possible.

  Rather than stepping aside, Mubarak dug in. While he would not seek reelection, he said, he did plan to remain in power until the next election—certainly long enough for protesters to worry that he could rig the outcome or simply back down from his promise to move toward democratic reform. He cast his political opponents as thugs and criminals, commanding “censorship authorities and legislative authorities to carry out immediately every measure to pursue those who are corrupt and have been responsible for what has happened in all the destructive acts and looting and fires that have taken place in Egypt.”

  Inside the Situation Room, Obama knew that Mubarak’s message would only inflame the revolutionary spirit in Cairo. The legendary New York congressman Charles Rangel has a saying, “I’ll be with you as long as I can,” meaning that he will stick with an ally up until the point that it becomes politically untenable. Obama had reached that moment with Mubarak. He called the Egyptian president to push for a swift exit.

  Ben Rhodes, an adviser and speechwriter for the president on foreign policy matters, drafted a response statement for Obama to deliver from the White House that night. Because an NSC meeting had been under way when Mubarak spoke, the principals were all still gathered at the White House, and Rhodes circulated it on the spot, turning the normally complex process of formulating U.S. policy toward another major nation into an on-the-fly cram session.