HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Would you reconsider? Obama asked, perhaps stay another year?

  No, Hillary said. It was time for her to leave public office.

  Even though he had refused repeatedly to take no for an answer in getting her to take the job in the first place, Obama pressed just once more, lightly, asking if she might stay just a little longer.

  That didn’t suit her, either. Obama gave up.

  Hillary hadn’t been able to turn down a call to serve in 2008, but after four years in the job—and with the 2016 election looming—her calculus had changed. Part of that was Obama’s understanding that she had done her duty.

  “He didn’t put the screws to her,” said one source who was briefed on the conversation. “If he put the screws to her, she’d still be there.”

  When Obama had asked her to be his secretary of state back in 2008, his top advisers wondered aloud how such an arrangement could possibly work, given the acrimony of their primary campaign against each other and the suspicion they held about her ability to faithfully execute his directives. Now, four years later, Hillary was as close to indispensable as any member of the president’s cabinet, and she was in the midst of a ten-day trip in which she would showcase both her skills as a smart-power strategist in bringing about democratic reforms in Burma and her willingness to dive into a crisis as a Middle East peace negotiator.

  During this swing through Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia, on their last trip together as the president and secretary of state, Obama and his team were feeling a deep nostalgia for their onetime rival. As a sign of gratitude, Obama’s aides even made sure to manifest time on Air Force One for Hillary’s staff. Hillary wasn’t the only one at State who got an offer to remain in office during that trip to Southeast Asia. By the end of four years, it was almost unthinkable that Obama’s aides had nearly blackballed Capricia Marshall’s nomination to be the nation’s chief protocol officer. Over time the Hillarylander had become an honorary member of Obama’s foreign policy clique, developing a strong bond with the boys on Air Force One through her hard work, charm, and sense of humor.

  On one trip, Marshall and Obama’s younger, mostly male foreign policy aides had settled in to the staff section of the plane, farther back from Obama’s cabin, to watch the 2011 movie The Sitter. With Ben Rhodes next to her and Tommy Vietor across the aisle, Marshall’s jaw dropped as the film opened with a scene in which actor Jonah Hill performs oral sex on the actress Ari Graynor. Marshall, who shares Hillary’s sometimes-bawdy sense of humor, seemed to be both amused and a bit mortified. Just as the scene ended, Obama emerged from his cabin and walked through the staff portion of the plane. Marshall shared a knowing glance with his aides, who had become two of her strongest advocates. “Fuck,” one of the aides thought. “Thank God he didn’t see that.” Marshall didn’t say a word.

  While Obama remained unaware of what was happening around him on the plane at that moment, he was very aware of the work Marshall had done to prepare the White House for visits of foreign dignitaries and to make sure things ran smoothly when he traveled abroad. He tasked Valerie Jarrett, his closest personal friend among his team of White House advisers, to approach Marshall about extending her tour of duty.

  “The president would like you to stay,” Jarrett told Marshall one day on the trip.

  “Yes,” Marshall replied, without hesitating.

  Obama and Clinton spent the entire hour-long flight from Rangoon to Phnom Penh holed up in the cabin, looking back at their time together and discussing an emergency trip Hillary was about to make to the Middle East to negotiate a cease-fire between the Israelis and Palestinians.

  A few days before she met up with Obama in Thailand, at the front end of his three-day trip to Southeast Asia, Hillary had been in Australia, where she heard the news that Israel was planning to launch a counteroffensive into Gaza to respond to rocket fire from Palestinians. The Israelis and Palestinians had broken off direct peace talks two years earlier, after an Israeli moratorium on building new settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem expired in September 2010. The Palestinians had conditioned a peace deal on Israel ceding land, including areas in which the settlements were being built. For all the internal wrangling in the early days of the administration over who would be the lead U.S. negotiator in the Middle East—George Mitchell, Dennis Ross, Joe Biden, or any number of other players who wanted to solve foreign policy’s Gordian knot—the situation had been stagnant for most of Obama’s first term because the United States couldn’t forge a lasting peace in the Middle East if the Israelis and Palestinians refused to negotiate with each other.

  But now, rather than standing still or moving toward peace, the two sides were falling back into a familiar routine of Palestinians firing missiles into Israel and Israel responding militarily. Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, called Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who was attending a conference in Perth with Hillary and other senior administration officials, to give him a heads-up that Israel planned to strike the Palestinians. The phone line went dead before Barak could finish delivering his message, and when he called back, he reached Panetta’s chief of staff, Jeremy Bash. Wanting to make sure there was no confusion, Bash took careful note of the additional details. He then found Panetta, who was with Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Hillary.

  Panetta and Hillary, allies on the Bin Laden raid, had lately been squabbling again in National Security Council sessions. The first ugly clash came in the summer of 2011, when Hillary backed up U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter’s demand that he get a heads-up in advance of American drone strikes in Pakistan. “No, Hillary,” Panetta fired back, “it’s you who are flat wrong.” Even toward the very end of Obama’s first term, they fought like they were jockeying for position at the dining room table. Several days before they arrived in Australia, Iran fired a missile at a U.S. drone. Inside the Situation Room, in a meeting that Obama did not attend, Panetta pressed the other heads of national security agencies to agree to issue a robust statement to send a message to Iran that the United States didn’t take the act of aggression lightly.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Hillary, who had recently sparred with Panetta on another matter by videoconference. “Why would we do that? It’s unnecessary.”

  The two of them yelled back and forth at each other for a few minutes, creating a palpable tension in the room. Then Hillary broke the moment.

  “Wow, Leon, this is really nice to be yelling at you again,” she said. “Last time you were on the screen, and it was just not as fun as yelling at you to your face.” The whole room, including Panetta, burst into laughter.

  Now, a few days later, they were standing together with Dempsey when Bash delivered Barak’s message. Israel was planning to hit back with an operation targeting militants in Gaza, called Pillar of Defense, Bash told them.

  “We’ve gotta support Israel one hundred and ten percent here,” Hillary said. “They’re in the right, and they have a right to defend themselves.”

  At first, Israel responded with limited air strikes, but in the ensuing days, it became clear that the Jewish state was considering sending thousands of ground troops across the border into Gaza, a move that Obama hoped to prevent. “An Israeli ground incursion in Gaza could have set everything on fire in the region, in terms of Egypt, in terms of Palestinians, in terms of blowback on us,” a senior White House official explained.

  Hillary, who had already been traveling for a week, met up with Obama in Thailand on November 18 for a series of meetings with Thai officials and a dinner at the government palace in Bangkok. That night their two staffs began discussing whether it would be wise to send Hillary to the Middle East to see if she could broker a cease-fire. Typically, a secretary of state would be dispatched in such a situation only if there was sufficient reason to believe a breakthrough was in the offing; otherwise the secretary, and by extension the president and the American government, risked looking ineffectual.

  On that S
unday night, there was no sense yet among State Department officials or their White House counterparts that a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians was imminent. “Even then,” said a White House official, “the potential for the situation to go off the rails was such that we might need her to go anyway, even if there wasn’t a possibility of succeeding.” Jake Sullivan, who so often spoke for Hillary, was adamant that she should go, even if the effort fell through, but others at the State Department and the White House felt that her very presence could cause more harm than good.

  “It was a really tough call because you don’t want to go at the wrong time, and there’s a very legitimate point of view that says ‘If we go in here, it will set back the cause of the cease-fire because they’ll be posturing around us in a different way,’ ” said a source who was traveling with Hillary. “She and her husband both have this saying they like, which is ‘Better to be caught trying.’ … Her instinct is ‘I’m going to step into it.’ ”

  Obama told his aides that he was leaning toward sending her, but he wanted to see if the Palestinians and Israelis could get closer to a deal before he chanced embarrassment by sending his secretary of state into the mix. We’ll give it another twenty-four hours or so before making a final decision, he told his aides. So by the end of that night, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, there was still no decision on whether she should break off from the president and gamble on mediating a cease-fire.

  On Monday morning, Obama and Hillary flew to Burma, where Hillary had tallied her clearest success as an advocate of smart power, using both hard and soft power to coax the military regime into adopting democratic reforms.

  For four years, Hillary had used Burma like a lab to demonstrate that America could pull different levers to affect the thinking of leaders in other countries. “Clearly,” she had said during a February 2009 trip to Southeast Asia, “the path we’ve taken in imposing sanctions hasn’t influenced the Burmese junta.” Instead, she mixed carrots with the sanctions stick: if Burma made reforms, sanctions on its military regime could be lifted or eased, and American companies could begin doing business in Burma.

  The promise of removing sanctions—and of opening up a commercial relationship between Burma and the United States—proved influential in persuading Burmese dictators to change their behavior. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, was released from house arrest in late 2010, and President Thein Sein signaled his desire to restore diplomatic ties with the United States by releasing other prisoners, decensoring certain Internet sites, and calling for new elections. The Obama administration responded by easing American sanctions, and Hillary visited both Suu Kyi and Sein in late 2011 during the first trip of a secretary of state to Burma in more than half a century.

  The unfolding success story infuriated China, which had long been the dominant outside force in Burmese politics. “They think we’re trying to pull Burma away from China, that it’s all a plot basically to contain and isolate China and keep China down,” said a senior American official in the region.

  By January 2012, when Hillary discussed Burma with her top deputies as part of outlining her final-year agenda, Suu Kyi was thinking about a run for president, and the United States was on the verge of announcing it would restore full diplomatic ties with Burma.

  Suu Kyi traveled to the United States in September 2012, just after the Benghazi attack, to collect a congressional gold medal and to lobby American leaders to lift the remaining sanctions against her country. On the morning of the ceremony, Suu Kyi met with Laura Bush one-on-one, in a private suite at the Ritz-Carlton on the cusp of Georgetown. Bush and Suu Kyi talked for nearly an hour, but Suu Kyi delivered the thrust of her message to American leaders in just three words.

  “The sanctions worked,” she told Laura Bush, according to a source familiar with their discussion. From the Obama administration’s perspective, the sanctions had indeed worked—but only because lifting them was mixed with the possibility of opening up a commercial relationship between the two countries. And the White House was happy to pat Hillary and her State Department team on the back for a job well done.

  “There were absolutely times when she brought something to the president, like Burma, and said ‘We really think there’s an opening here,’ ” said a White House national security aide. “They deserve a lot of credit for that.”

  That week NBC’s Ann Curry asked Suu Kyi if she would rule out running for president of her country, and Suu Kyi responded with an answer that could have served as an insight into Hillary’s thinking.

  “No,” she said. “If you’re a politician, you never rule out such a possibility.”

  In terms of Hillary’s legacy, Burmese democracy was an issue that she had identified early, worked on methodically for several years, and then brought gift-wrapped to Obama. When her Libya narrative fell apart in Benghazi, Burma was the backup testament to smart power. “It’s just a symbol of things going right. It’s an important demonstration of [how] working together and political pressure can cause change without having to drop a bomb, and it’s a good news story,” said a senior official who remained at the State Department after Hillary left. “It’s a great example for the rest of the world.”

  While Hillary loyalists see the victory there as a validation of her theories on foreign policy and as a model for how she would approach democracy building if she were president, critics view the notion that Burma was Hillary’s tour de force as evidence that she had an unremarkable tenure as secretary of state. Brit Hume of Fox News said in January 2013 that successes like Burma “add up to a case for her competence” as secretary. “They do not add up to a case for greatness.”

  Likewise, Republican operatives scoff at Hillary’s “deliverables.” “Burma?” one laughed. “Really?”

  Once they arrived in Burma, Obama and Hillary went to the government palace, a famous Buddhist pagoda, and finally to Aung San Suu Kyi’s house, where she had been held prisoner for so many years. Hillary lingered in the limousine as Obama greeted Suu Kyi with a small bow and a handshake. They both turned back toward the limo to see Hillary emerging. Hillary had visited Suu Kyi nearly a year earlier, and the two women hugged and held hands as they walked toward the house.

  In his remarks following the meeting with Suu Kyi, Obama credited Hillary with her work in Burma.

  “I could not be more grateful, not only for your service, Hillary, but also for the powerful message that you and Aung San Suu Kyi send about the importance of women and men everywhere embracing and promoting democratic values and human rights,” he said. Then he and Hillary boarded Air Force One for the flight to Cambodia and the long one-on-one in his cabin in which they discussed her decision to leave office and the prospect of her jetting into the escalating crisis in the Middle East.

  All the while, Obama’s aides and Hillary’s aides had been in discussions among themselves and with Anne Patterson and Dan Shapiro, the American ambassadors to Egypt and Israel, respectively. The Egyptians, who talked directly with the leadership of Hamas in Gaza, were key intermediaries in the cease-fire negotiations.

  That night Obama excused himself early from a dinner in Phnom Penh to call Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. Obama began to get the sense that a deal could be struck and urged Morsi to get back to him with any developments. “You can call me back as late as you want,” Obama told him, “if you think there’s information you need to let me know about.”

  A few hours later, around one a.m. in Cambodia, Ben Rhodes roused a slumbering Obama in his hotel room. Morsi was on the line. The outlines of an agreement were coming together. Obama told Morsi that he was considering sending Hillary to the Middle East because he thought she could help bring Israel toward a cease-fire. But, he said, he was only willing to do that if Morsi vowed to meet with her personally. He couldn’t send her there to get a cold shoulder. Much of statecraft is stagecraft, and Obama wanted to make sure Hillary had a solid script in hand before she left. Between the two calls with Morsi, Obama h
ad spoken with Hillary, and he was increasingly leaning in the direction of sending her.

  By the next morning, he was sure. In a holding space at the Phnom Penh convention center, where they were attending an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, Obama huddled with Hillary, Jake Sullivan, and White House national security aides Rhodes and Tom Donilon.

  “Let’s definitely do this,” Obama said.

  For all her strategic planning, Hillary is often at her best and most decisive when faced with an emerging crisis. Like a veteran hitter who remains even-keeled under pressure, her steadiness is born of her experience. She’s been through a lot of situations where it seemed like the world was crashing in on her. The plan, heading into Obama’s Asia trip, had been for Hillary to get credit for an impressive bit of long-term diplomacy in Burma. But it was the worsening conflict in Gaza and Israel that quickly became the focal point of her last major overseas voyage.

  Part of the reason Hillary made sense as the intermediary in the first place is that she had a good relationship with the Israelis, certainly better than Obama had. “Of everybody in his shop, she’s the right one to be there,” Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida Republican who ran the Foreign Affairs Committee, said at the time. “I’m sure the Israelis feel like I do that she was a better senator in terms of pro-Israel feelings than a secretary of state. But you know, you work for your boss.”

  On the flight from Cambodia to Israel, though, Sullivan began having second thoughts about the wisdom of the mission. He had been a strong advocate for making the trip, but there had been a difference of opinion among Hillary’s advisers. The risk that she would fail to get a cease-fire—or worse, that a full-scale war would break out while she was on the ground in the Middle East—was real enough that Sullivan couldn’t shake from his mind images of Israeli soldiers pouring across the Gaza border.