HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  They discussed every conceivable contingency, including the possibility that the Pakistani military might intercede in the middle of the raid. In the end, Hillary thought McRaven’s planning was impeccable.

  Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, two of the most powerful voices in the small set of presidential advisers, disagreed. Biden wasn’t at all convinced that Bin Laden was at the compound. Gates worried about the wisdom of a raid. He remembered Operation Eagle Claw, the colossal 1980 disaster that had killed American servicemen who were trying to rescue Iranian hostages, and the Black Hawk Down loss of a chopper and American troops in Somalia during the Clinton administration.

  That made Hillary’s support all the more critical. Obama might go against the counsel of his vice president and his defense secretary, but all three of the highest-ranking members of his cabinet? If all three advised him not to do it and then he failed, it could irreversibly damage his credibility on national security matters heading into his reelection campaign.

  The final meeting on the matter, held on April 28, was a “no plus-ones” gathering, meaning the national security principals were not allowed to bring aides with them. It has been reported that when it was Hillary’s turn to speak, she did what top officials do in the Situation Room: she laid out the upside and the risk from her department’s point of view, including the possibility of damage to the American relationship with Pakistan. But everyone knew where she stood. She would stand with Obama on this, come hell, high water, or political attack. She voted yes on the raid.

  For the second consecutive time, following the decision to launch an assault on Muammar Qaddafi, Hillary broke with Gates—the defense secretary with whom she now had less of a strategic imperative to align—recommending again that Obama take military action. Her hawkishness also contrasted again with the dovish tendencies of Biden, who had argued against the Afghanistan surge, the Libya mission, and now the Bin Laden raid. In all three cases, Hillary and Obama were in agreement.

  People in Clinton’s inner circle say it was the president’s call all along and that while Hillary was on the side that prevailed, her role was one of support for the view that he took. “When you’re the president and you’ve got your senior military person [saying] that they are not comfortable, that makes it a pretty tough call,” said one of Hillary’s closest advisers. “And I think her being on the side of ‘Let’s do it, let’s do it this way’ helped Obama and others in the room. I don’t think the president needed her per se, but I do know other people in the room were either swayed or comforted by her confidence and her certainty.”

  That Thursday NSC meeting broke without a decision from Obama. The next day Gates called Tom Donilon with a message for the president. Two senior Pentagon officials involved in the planning, Mike Vickers and Michèle Flournoy, had helped persuade him that the raid was strategically sound. Tell the president I’m with him, Gates said. Obama had already given the order to go, Donilon told him. The raid was planned for Saturday, the day of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

  Obama’s aides gathered in the Oval Office that Saturday evening, April 30, to go over his jokes one last time before the gala. They had to wait because he was on the phone with a general in Afghanistan. They didn’t know that it was McRaven, the special operations commander who had been planning the Bin Laden raid, and that Obama was calling to wish him luck. When he hung up, Obama told his aides he wanted to revise his remarks.

  “I think Bin Laden’s played out and we don’t need to talk about him,” Obama said, referring to a line in the speech that joked about his potential 2012 rivals, including “Tim ‘Osama bin’ Pawlenty.” Jon Favreau, Obama’s top wordsmith, thought little of changing Pawlenty’s nickname to “Hosni.”

  Obama asked him to add a “God bless the troops” line.

  Hillary, who had made clear her assessment of the value of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner during the discussion of the raid, skipped the gala to attend the wedding of one of Chelsea’s close friends. There, over casual dinner table discussion and in the company of familiar faces, a coincidental question was raised. “Do you think we’ll ever get Bin Laden?” one guest asked her. At that moment, Clinton knew what was soon to take place halfway around the world. She knew that Obama had already delivered the order to attack Bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan and that the SEAL team was preparing to execute it. She looked at the guest, smiled softly, and said, “I don’t know, I have no way of knowing, but I can tell you this, we’ll keep trying.” She crossed her fingers behind her back, as she later told NBC. The next day, Hillary reported to the Situation Room to monitor the raid with Obama and his team.

  “Those were thirty-eight of the most intense moments,” Hillary later said of the raid. She had been photographed during the operation with her hand over her mouth but declined to say whether the picture was snapped when a helicopter went down in the midst of the raid. “I have no idea what any of us were looking at at that particular millisecond. When the picture was taken, I’m somewhat sheepishly concerned that it was my preventing one of my early spring allergic coughs. So it may have no great meaning whatsoever.”

  The truth is, she was awestruck. “We’re all crowded in the little Sit Room,” she said. “I’m sitting, holding my breath.”

  After the operation, Obama called Bill, who was at home in Chappaqua. “Hillary probably told you,” the president started, according to a Hillary aide.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bill replied. Hillary hadn’t mentioned it.

  TWELVE

  Hillary’s Politics

  Hillary’s campaign fix kicked in, if ever so briefly, on May 25, just a few weeks after the Bin Laden raid. It was early morning in London, and she had just been to a state dinner at Buckingham Palace, where she sat at the head table with Obama and Queen Elizabeth. The rest of the room was dotted with celebrities, including Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Hollywood actors Tom Hanks and Kevin Spacey. Despite having spent much of her adult life in the salons of world power, there were still moments, like this one, that wowed Hillary. With footmen tending to her, and sleeping in a room near the royal family’s famous balcony, Hillary felt like a princess, she later told her staff.

  As night turned to morning, Hillary’s attention shifted away from the bluebloods and movie stars at Buckingham Palace to Erie County, New York, and a Buffalo-born county clerk whom she just had to call. Kathy Hochul had run a surprisingly competitive race in the special election to succeed Representative Chris Lee in a solidly Republican district in upstate New York. The only reason a Democrat had a chance was that Lee, who was married, had abruptly resigned after having sent a shirtless picture of himself to a woman he met on the Internet. Scandal, as it often does, had presented a political opportunity.

  The campaign quickly became a referendum on Obamacare and House GOP plans to cut Medicare. Hochul’s success or failure would influence how Democrats, all the way up to Obama, handled the issue of health care in their 2012 campaigns. But Hillary had more than just a basic partisan rooting interest in seeing Hochul win. As county clerk, Hochul had endorsed Hillary in 2008. And on the eve of the March 24 special election, Bill Clinton had returned that favor by recording a robocall for Hochul in which he reinforced her health care attack on the GOP. “You can count on Kathy to say no to partisan politics that would end Medicare as we know it to pay for more tax cuts for multimillionaires,” Bill said in a message that was dialed out across the district to some Republicans and independents as well as Democrats. With a lift from onetime Democratic congressional hopeful Jack Davis, who was running as a Tea Party candidate—and took more than ten thousand votes—Hochul defeated Republican Jane Corwin by 5,526 votes, likely less than the number that Davis siphoned from Corwin.

  After celebrating her victory in upstate New York, Hochul checked her messages and heard Hillary’s unmistakable voice. “I’m in London with the president,” she said. “We are watching the resu
lts of your race, and we are so excited. I look forward to working with you.”

  It was a small gesture, one of thousands of similar calls, cards, and tokens of affection that friends and acquaintances of Hillary and Bill Clinton receive every year. That extra touch was the most glaring difference between the Clintons and Obama, who seemed cold and indifferent even to some of his biggest supporters. The Clintons know how to work a rope line, how to soften adversaries, and how much a personal contact means to a friend. They connect.

  “I saved it. I treasured it,” Hochul said of Hillary’s voicemail. “Here she is with the president of the United States in London, obviously conducting business, and she takes the time to call me in Buffalo very late at night. She didn’t have to do that. It wasn’t expected. She made the extra effort, and it meant the world to me.”

  The Clintons go much further for the small circle of aides and friends closest to them. One aide after another can recount emotional stories of one of the Clintons intervening to help them during times of trouble, whether to arrange medical care, check in on a sick relative, or even attend a funeral.

  So in June 2011, when a pregnant Huma Abedin found herself on the cover of all the tabloids because of her sext-prone husband, Anthony Weiner, the Clintons—especially Hillary—grew ultraprotective of her. Hillary, who had logged her own share of sleepless nights during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, counseled Huma and provided hugs and words of wisdom while the Weiner imbroglio metastasized.

  More broadly, the Clintons are exceptional retail politicians, and Obama needed help with his common touch, particularly if he hoped to paint his likely 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, as a mansion-bound elitist. The Clintons had survived and thrived in the wake of Hillary’s 2008 defeat. Her approval rating was at 66 percent, and Bill’s had moved back above the 60 percent mark a year earlier. Obama, stuck around 50 percent that spring, very much stood to benefit from standing next to the most popular power couple in Democratic politics.

  Hillary’s draw was so strong that she was rumored, throughout her four years at State, to be on the short list for a series of high-profile jobs, from Supreme Court justice to defense secretary to World Bank president. By the time Obama named Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank in March 2012, many months after the rumor first surfaced in print, Hillary press aide Nick Merrill forwarded the Politico breaking-news alert to Philippe Reines, adding a prank sentence indicating that Kim would serve in the job only until January 2013, which Merrill expected Reines to read as an inside joke about the prospect of having to knock down a new set of Hillary-to-World-Bank stories in just a few months’ time. Instead, a credulous Reines told Mills, who relayed to Hillary that Kim would be in the job only for several months, and Hillary mentioned it to the president in the Oval Office that day, touching off momentary confusion over Kim’s intentions. “Who was the genius who did it to you?” Huma e-mailed Reines.

  Some Democrats thought Obama would ice his reelection campaign with a switcheroo that put Vice President Joe Biden at State and Hillary on Obama’s ticket. The Obama campaign even polled to see how she would fare, determining the numbers weren’t good enough to pursue a change. Time and again the speculation was dismissed. But there was one post that Hillary’s aides insist she was actually in the mix for, and though it was reported several months later, the rumor never seemed to have legs in the media, perhaps because other officials denied that it ever happened.

  A Hillary aide, who cited the Washington Post’s reporting on the matter as gospel, told the story this way: In the summer of 2011, Bill Daley, then the White House chief of staff, visited Hillary at State to gauge her interest in taking over as treasury secretary. Tim Geithner, who held the job at the time, had put Hillary at the top of his list of potential successors, and the White House was taking the recommendation seriously enough to feel Hillary out about it.

  She politely declined. It was “a nonstarter,” one of her aides said.

  But Daley said the reported incident never happened. “I never did that. That’s bullshit!” he said while attending a Clinton Global Initiative event in Chicago in June 2013. “Not true. I never talked to her about it.”

  The whole story was overhyped, according to a source close to Geithner. Hillary’s name appeared on a list that Geithner provided to the White House, but she wasn’t his sole recommendation, the source said.

  Surely, adding bona fides in the financial sector through a job at the World Bank or the Treasury Department to her work at State would have rounded out Hillary’s résumé for a second presidential run, but the Treasury post would have carried the risk of a second economic collapse. Either way, Hillary never planned to remain in the administration for more than four years, according to her aides, and there was still a lot left for her to do at State.

  At the time, Hillary was well aware of just how well she was polling, and at least one close friend warned her that her approval ratings were a function of voters seeing her as above politics, a perception that would be hard to maintain if she jumped back into the fray right after leaving State. In mid-September 2011, longtime friend Ellen Tauscher, the undersecretary for arms control, hitched a ride with Hillary from the Waldorf-Astoria to the UN building in Manhattan during a General Assembly meeting. Bloomberg News had just published a poll showing that 64 percent of Americans viewed Hillary favorably, and Tauscher had heard the news on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The same poll also showed that 34 percent of Americans believed the country would be better off if Hillary, not Obama, were president, 47 percent believed things would be the same, and 13 percent thought the country would be worse off with Hillary at the helm. Major media outlets were reporting the news as a sign of voters’ “buyer’s remorse” over electing Obama and not Hillary. When Tauscher got in the car, Hillary was sitting in the back smiling, and Tauscher assumed it was because of the big numbers.

  The stretch of streets between the Waldorf and the United Nations had been blocked off so that officials could move freely during the General Assembly, giving midtown an eerily empty feel as Tauscher cautioned Hillary to husband her popularity carefully. “What worries me is the reason that you have [high favorables] is that people have marked to market that you are out of politics and they can accept you now,” Tauscher said. “If I have one more Republican tell me that they wish you were president, I’ll just want to backhand them.”

  Hillary, who had been listening quietly, laughed at the backhand remark. But Tauscher still needed to make a serious point. She wanted Hillary to make sure her public standing remained strong after she left State. “You have to know what the downside of this is,” Tauscher, the former congresswoman, said. “The moment you move back into politics, you go from sixty-six to forty-six to twenty-six faster than a split second. There is real political capital here. It’s not conventional political capital, but it’s real. How do you manage that in a post–State Department world?”

  Of course, it was impossible for Hillary to completely escape politics, especially while her husband was settling three-year-old scores for her on the electoral battlefield. In August, Bill endorsed Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat from Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, for reelection. Sherman had been a loyal Hillary supporter until the very end, even cheering for her from the audience during her Building Museum concession speech. That Bill got behind Sherman would have merited little attention, except for the fact that the state’s independent redistricting commission was expected to redraw Los Angeles–area political boundaries in a way that could induce Sherman and Representative Howard Berman, the thirty-year House veteran who led Democrats on the Foreign Affairs Committee, to run against each other in a primary. Berman was one of the most widely respected Democrats in Washington, and he had worked closely with Hillary on any number of thorny foreign policy issues, including Iran sanctions and aid to Pakistan. Sherman, on the other hand, would have had a hard time finding anyone in Washington, outside the people who worked for him, who thought he was a better congressman t
han Berman. But the district lines favored Sherman, and the calculus for Bill was clear: Sherman had endorsed Hillary early, and Berman had endorsed Obama.

  Berman went into damage control mode, pushing every button he could to try to get Bill to stop at the endorsement and not campaign, or raise money, for Sherman. He dialed up Mickey Kantor, who had been Bill Clinton’s trade representative, for help. He asked DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to intervene. He leaned on friends at the State Department to make his case to Hillary. Berman heard back from the intermediaries that Bill understood which lawmaker was the better congressman but wasn’t going to retract the statement he had given in support of Sherman. Moreover, the Clinton camp declined to say whether Bill would or would not do more for Sherman.

  On one policy issue, in particular, Berman felt that maybe Bill Clinton owed him something. In the early 1990s, Berman had been a leading congressional advocate for Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement, despite the political cost with labor unions that opposed the pact. Berman even hoped at one point that Bill might take the wind out of the Sherman endorsement by releasing a statement praising Berman for his advocacy on trade issues. In October 2011, as Hillary lobbied Democrats to vote for three Obama-backed free-trade agreements, Berman pressed her personally on Bill’s support for Sherman.

  “I pointed out the irony that she was asking me to vote for the free-trade agreements and alienate a significant base in my district while her husband was supporting my opponent,” Berman recalled. “She gave that funny nervous laugh and said she wasn’t involved in politics.”

  As Bill spent political capital rewarding Hillary’s 2008 supporters, he also drew down on it in service of Barack Obama. But this was a calculated investment. If Obama won—and if Bill and Hillary, by extension, helped—the victory would enhance the Clintons’ standing both within the Democratic Party and outside it. Back in 2008, as Obama began his steady march to the White House, his top campaign aides were hesitant to bring Bill Clinton into the fold for the final push, fearing that a halfhearted Clinton would show up on the trail and simply run through the motions with little feeling. And even as Clinton agreed to campaign that fall for Obama in key swing states—including must-win Florida—the decision to use him was met with some internal skepticism, aides confessed.