HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Regardless of the philosophical questions, Hillary earned high marks for her response to the attacks. David Petraeus had fought a tug-of-war with State over the Benghazi talking points, but he said Hillary’s response demonstrated her leadership skills. “Like a lot of great leaders, her most impressive qualities were most visible during tough times. In the wake of the Benghazi attacks, for example, I thought she was extraordinarily resolute, determined, and controlled,” he said. “And her speech at Andrews Air Force Base, when the flag-draped caskets brought home those killed in Benghazi, conveyed those qualities, as did various other actions that she took and directed.”

  If the Benghazi investigation had proved anything, it was that Hillary, the putative front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, was no longer above the partisan fray that Hillary, the secretary of state, had so deftly avoided for most of four years. In the context of presidential politics, the relationships she had built up with Republicans during her tenure held less meaning. Less than a week after she testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2013, Lindsey Graham, the on-again, off-again moderate Republican who was entering a reelection cycle in ultraconservative South Carolina, said on Fox News that Hillary “got away with murder.”

  The old RNC Benghazi ad, the one the Romney campaign chose not to use in the final weeks of the campaign, was distributed just as House Republican investigations were heating up in the spring. The script had flipped sometime in December, when Republicans shifted their focus from Obama to Hillary. Hillary, in turn, had put up her political defenses. If she wanted to run for president, she would be dealing with the likes of Darrell Issa, Jason Chaffetz, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, and any number of other Republican antagonists for the next four years—and if she was lucky, for the four years after that. It was clear by the spring of 2013 that she would hear about Benghazi time and again. Sean Spicer, RNC spokesman, put it bluntly: “If she runs, she might as well get used to seeing that ad.”

  NINETEEN

  “Out of Politics”—For Now

  Even though Hillary hadn’t picked a formal end date, which would depend on when the Senate confirmed her successor, she gave indications to her friends and aides that she was more than ready to move on from State. In addition to her joke about filling her time with “beaches and speeches,” one of her longtime advisers observed that she had dropped one of the hallmarks of her industriousness even before her fall.

  “I noticed she’s no longer taking notes,” the aide said shortly before she left. “She walks into those meetings now, it’s like ‘Tell me what’s going on?’ No more follow-up. ‘I’m coasting out of here.’ ”

  When she fell in December, aides had been in the process of planning at least one more trip across the Atlantic. But at a follow-up examination later that month, doctors discovered that a blood clot had formed inside her skull, in a sinus cavity behind her ear. The clot could have killed her, or caused severe brain damage, if it had gone untreated. Hillary was immediately admitted to New York Presbyterian Hospital. She was placed on blood thinners and remained at the hospital for several days, so doctors could keep an eye on her. Those close to her say Hillary, hardly accustomed to standing still, had a bad case of cabin fever as the New Year approached. It wasn’t the first time she had suffered from a blood clot. In her memoir, Living History, she wrote of the clot she developed in her leg and the blood-thinning medication she had taken for several months after its discovery. It had been caused by “non-stop flying around the country,” she wrote. Now her doctors advised her to stay on the ground while she recuperated. Flying around the globe, with very little sleep, would interfere with her ability to recover.

  To the great disappointment of some of her closest aides, Hillary was finished traveling. Reines and Sullivan had a running competition over which of them would make it to the most countries during her tenure (Sullivan won by one—Reines had missed Hungary). Others “were relieved” because, before the fall, stops kept getting added to her final planned trips, according to one adviser, who termed the process of scheduling her victory lap “ridiculous.”

  While Hillary was recovering from her illness and concussion, her successor was chosen. On December 13, Susan Rice, who had poisoned the well with senators first through her Benghazi talking points, and later in a round of one-on-one sessions meant to smooth her path to confirmation, withdrew from consideration for Hillary’s job. Speculation in Washington quickly centered on John Kerry, who had taken on sensitive diplomatic assignments for Obama during the first term, and on December 21, Obama announced that he would appoint Kerry. Hillary’s exact end date wasn’t yet clear, but there was little doubt that Kerry, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, would sail through the confirmation process. Suddenly the length of her tenure could be measured not in years or months but in weeks.

  The notebooks and the odometer were no longer necessary, but Hillary’s staff thought she would need one piece of essential equipment to get through her final month at State. On January 6, the day she returned to work, Clinton showed up for a 9:15 a.m. assistant secretaries meeting, resplendent in a hot pink blazer, the new hipster glasses, and a freshly trimmed and highlighted coif. State Department spokeswoman Toria Nuland declared Hillary was “in the pink.”

  More than seventy people, from deputy secretaries to special envoys, had packed into a conference room to greet Hillary. When she walked in, they stood and applauded. For weeks, over the holiday season, her friends and advisers, frightened by the fall, the concussion, and the blood clot, had traded e-mails and texts on the latest on her condition. They knew she hadn’t fully recovered. She was, after all, still on blood thinners. But seeing her walk in the room smiling brought some comfort. “I was relieved,” said a top aide who attended the meeting. “You never know who’s giving you the right information, even in our world. And she looked like she had taken three weeks off, which she did, whether she liked it or not.”

  After Hillary took her seat at the head of the table behind her “S” placard that Monday morning, Deputy Secretary Tom Nides presented her with a box. “As you know, Washington is a contact sport,” he told her, handing the box to her. He added that while it can be “dangerous” at the State Department, “it can also be dangerous at home.”

  Clinton opened the box to find a football helmet with the State Department seal as well as a football jersey that read CLINTON on the back. The number 112, representing the number of countries she had visited, was on the front. Hillary let out one of her classic hearty laughs. She held up the helmet and the jersey as her all-smiling staff applauded.

  A moment later it was back to business. Aides in the room say she was particularly focused on Afghan president Karzai’s trip later that week and that she wanted the ARB recommendations implemented, to the degree possible, before Kerry arrived to take over. When she quizzed her staff about what was going on in various parts of the world, they all began by saying how good it was to see her back at the table.

  Later that day, during the daily briefing for reporters at the State Department, Nuland was asked if the secretary was back to her normal routine. “She’s planning to work as hard as she always does?” the question came.

  “I would guess, judging by the way she was this morning, yes,” Nuland replied.

  For Hillary’s admirers, her relentless travel schedule had not just been a sign of her drive to outwork everyone else; it had represented a genuine belief that she should use her platform as both secretary and an international icon to spread positive messages about the United States as far and wide as possible, and to as many different audiences as she could. The statistics on miles traveled and countries visited were the most quantifiable way of measuring her dedication to achieving that goal. Politicians who enter public office often talk about “deliverables,” the successes they can point to at the end of their term to recommend them for higher office. The very nature of her job tended to militate against “deliverables.” Mu
ch of what she did as a diplomat was to head off emerging crises before they exploded and to manage them when they did. The same was true of her role as an adviser to Obama on national security matters. To the extent that he had foreign policy successes, including the killing of Osama bin Laden, she was one player on a large team, and he was the quarterback. Had there been a major peace deal during her tenure, she would doubtless have had to share the glory with—or more likely, give it up entirely to—Obama. The story of Libya continues to unfold, and the murders of four Americans in Benghazi may end up being either a sign that chaos will reign there or a tragic exception to a successful transition from repressive autocracy to inclusive democracy. In either case, Hillary proved her ability to focus a fractious international coalition on a singular objective. In Burma, she demonstrated that a smart-power approach can work.

  But even her most ardent admirers discuss her legacy as a stateswoman in terms of less visible deliverables than, say, a lasting Middle East peace accord. Nides, an ardent defender, framed her work to integrate the national security agencies as a major accomplishment. “The legacy of Hillary Clinton at the State Department will, in fact, be in the dramatically better relationships between the State Department and Department of Defense,” he said. Before she arrived, “the personalities were such that the buildings wouldn’t talk to each other because everyone thought the DOD was basically trying to take over the legislative authority of the State Department. And the whole thing turned totally on its head when Hillary Clinton came in.… We have more joint programs now in DOD and State than we’ve ever had in the past, where we use their money but we use our authority.”

  One of her undersecretaries pointed to Hillary’s work to rebuild America’s brand abroad as a key to opening foreign markets to American businesses; her insistence on talking about women’s issues as a game changer in getting foreign leaders to elevate women in their societies; her focus on smart power as a key to transforming Burma’s government; and her emphasis on using technical training as a tool of development, rather than just money, to strengthen civil society in other countries, thereby reducing the chance that they would become threats to American national security. That undersecretary boiled it all down to this: “Secretary Clinton reintroduced America to the world, and they liked what they saw. They wanted to be a part of it.”

  There’s certainly evidence to suggest that the world approved more of American leadership during Clinton’s tenure than it did in the years before she took over at State. How much of that is attributable to her, how much to Obama, and how much to other factors is hard to know. But in the last two years of the Bush administration, Gallup measured world approval of American leadership at about one-third, a figure that trailed well behind Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and China. In 2009 and 2010, the American rating leaped to the head of the pack, spiking to one-half in 2009, then settling back to 47 percent in 2010, seven points higher than any other country. In 2011 America fell into a tie for first place with Germany at 41 percent.

  But in January, as the inevitable legacy stories began to appear in newspapers and foreign policy journals, Hillary faced criticism from a variety of outside experts who portrayed her as a strong advocate for the United States but one who fell short of piling up major accomplishments. “Even an admirer, such as myself, must acknowledge that few big problems were solved on her watch; few victories achieved,” the centrist scholar Michael O’Hanlon wrote, concluding that her term was “more solid than spectacular.”

  Indeed, some critics even took aim at her work ethic as more self-glorifying than effectual. In a column entitled “Hillary Clinton’s Ego Trips,” Michael Kinsley of Bloomberg wrote, “Clinton looks awful and has looked worse for years. I don’t mean to be ungallant. It’s just that she clearly has been working herself to death in her current job as well as in her past two, as senator and first lady. And for what? Despite all the admiration she deserves for her dedication and long hours, there is also a vanity of long hours and (in her current job) long miles of travel.”

  Yet Obama left little question about how valuable he found Hillary’s efforts. In the fall, he told Ben Rhodes he wanted to do something special for her, to show how much he appreciated her work on his behalf. Rhodes, in turn, began discussing with Hillary’s aides various options for the president to give an interview to a major newsmagazine.

  “The original idea was Time magazine, a wrap-up piece on her that he would very much cooperate with,” said one of Hillary’s aides. The conversation was put on pause when Hillary was sick around the holidays. But when she recovered and headed back to the State Department in the new year, the discussion picked back up.

  And soon the idea shifted to one with even greater visibility. Reines, who prefers the imagery of television to print, thought the idea of having the two sit together for a magazine or newspaper interview seemed lame. “We were like, ‘If we’re gonna do it, do it right, let’s put them on TV together,’ ” said a senior State official. “The image of them together is what would be powerful.”

  Rhodes and Reines brainstormed what show would be best. They ruled out the morning shows and the evening news because they would only get five to seven minutes of airtime. Likewise, they thought the Sunday shows wouldn’t be the best way to illustrate their relationship because the shows, while an obsession in Washington, were “silly,” the senior State official said. They settled on 60 Minutes because it has “no peer in terms of ratings,” the aide added.

  In a joint White House prep session before the interview with 60 Minutes’s Steve Kroft, Rhodes broached the topic of Obama’s personal relationship with Hillary. “They’re going to ask a lot about what it took for you two to get past disliking each other,” he said.

  “I never had that problem with Hillary,” Obama said.

  “I think a lot of this was staff,” Hillary said.

  “Yeah, I think that maybe it took some of the staff longer to get over the primary,” Obama said, looking directly toward Reines as he spoke. Reines, always quick with a one-liner, made everyone in the room laugh with a self-conscious joke.

  Obama made one further effort to make sure it was clear there was no ill will toward either Hillary or her staff. When State Department colleagues held a going-away party for Cheryl Mills, Obama dispatched his chief of staff, Jack Lew, to deliver a note saying that his team of rivals had become an “unrivaled team.”

  In the actual 60 Minutes interview, Obama told Kroft why he had decided to give her the parting gift of a joint television appearance.

  “Hillary’s been, you know, one of the most important advisers that I’ve had on a whole range of issues,” Obama said. “Hillary’s capacity to travel around the world, to lay the groundwork for a new way of doing things, to establish a sense of engagement, that our foreign policy was not going to be defined solely by Iraq, that we were going to be vigilant about terrorism, but we were going to make sure that we deployed all elements of American power, diplomacy, our economic and cultural and social capital, in order to bring about the kinds of international solutions that we wanted to see.”

  When asked whether Obama’s endorsement of Hillary’s work as secretary would carry over to a 2016 presidential run, they both dodged. “I was literally inaugurated four days ago, and you’re talking about elections four years from now,” he said. And Hillary, less than a week from leaving office, wasn’t ready to give up the political cover provided by her job. “I’m out of politics,” she said, “and I’m forbidden from even hearing these questions.”

  The exaggeration spoke to an obvious fact: it wasn’t in her interests to talk about politics. Moreover, she needed a rest from policy, too. Even those closest to her knew that the rigors of the job had taken more of a toll on her than past posts had. She had redefined the job of first lady as an active participant in government, only to watch successors Laura Bush and Michelle Obama take on more traditional and less visible roles in their husbands’ administrations. Michelle Obama’s war on chi
ldhood obesity wasn’t quite the same as taking a health system overhaul up to Capitol Hill.

  “I won’t lie to you. I’m tired,” Hillary told Kim Ghattas, a BBC reporter who wrote a book about her travels with Hillary. “My friends call and e-mail and say ‘Oh my gosh, I saw you on television. You look so tired!’ To which I reply, ‘Gee, thanks a lot!’ ”