The Secretary

by Kim Ghattas

  * * *

  The package pulled up outside the main entrance of the State Department. Fred opened the car door for the secretary of state. The crowd erupted in cheers.

  “Hello, hello,” she said in her booming voice as she stepped out of the limousine. She held her hands above her head, clapping, smiling, and began to shake hands with the senior officials who stood on the red carpet to welcome her. Clinton walked the rope line, greeting her new staff, shaking hands with some of them. One man screamed “Yeah, Yeah!” as though he’d just won something. She shook hands with the two guards standing by the glass doors before walking into the Harry S. Truman building and being engulfed in a crowd of hundreds of State Department employees. Colin Powell, a deeply respected and personable former general, had been greeted with applause in the State Department lobby when he arrived in 2001, and even Condoleezza Rice had received an unexpectedly warm welcome in the midst of the Iraq debacle in 2005.

  But no one could pack a room almost half the size of a soccer field like Hillary. A polarizing, controversial politician, she was also a celebrity with the ability to elicit fervent support and admiration. The three-story-high lobby of the State Department echoed with rapturous applause, punctuated with cries of “We love you, Hillary!” Across the whole floor and the steps leading to the mezzanine on either side, dozens of people craned their necks, stood on their toes, or leaned over the glass-and-aluminum railing to catch a glimpse of her. People waved their cell phones to snap pictures, and camera crews beamed the event to television networks around the country and beyond. Hillary waded through the human mass pressed against thirty-foot-tall marble and granite columns. Three diplomatic security agents cleared the way in front of her, Fred and another agent following behind. Even a friendly crowd of overexcited Foreign Service officers could crush the secretary. She smiled, excited but poised, shook hands, paused to speak to those who didn’t let go quickly enough.

  In the State Department lobby, there were young women who had voted for her in the primaries and older women who’d always admired her as a trailblazer for women’s rights and a fighter who had defied the odds and overcome adversity in her personal life. There were those who always voted for a Democrat. And then there were all the others too—American diplomats and civil servants, men and women, who had felt sidelined during almost eight years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and were demoralized by the damage that the Bush administration’s high-handed foreign policy had inflicted upon America’s image. When Clinton made it to the landing of the steps leading to the mezzanine, Steve Kaskent, a representative of the Foreign Service union, introduced her to some of her twenty thousand new employees, joking that it looked like they were all crammed in the space below them. No one even tried to hide their relief that the country was moving on.

  “Both you and the president have decried the neglect that the Foreign Service and the State Department have suffered in recent years,” he said. “No one knows better than the people in this room and our colleagues around the world how true that is. We are thrilled to have you here.”

  In the crowd below, Lissa Muscatine looked around her and smiled, pleased to see her longtime friend bathed in affection and appreciation, a welcome change after almost two years of searing battles and disappointments. Muscatine had been Hillary’s speechwriter at the White House when she was First Lady, and she had once again agreed to craft Hillary’s speeches to the world.

  Clinton waved and bowed her head, smiling. Fred, with a long, serious face and round cheeks, stood guard behind her, his dark hair parted neatly to the side, his eyes darting around.

  “I believe with all my heart that this is a new era for America,” Clinton said into the microphone. In front of her, the northern glass wall of the lobby was lined with the flags of all the countries where the United States had an embassy and where she would deliver the Obama administration’s message of engagement with the world over the coming four years. She warned the crowd that it wasn’t going to be easy. She asked her new staff to think creatively about old problems. She said she welcomed debate, and she waved her right hand to emphasize each point. It sounded like a political stump speech, but this was a new campaign to lift the spirits of those who kept the American foreign policy machine running. She announced to wild cheers that President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden would be visiting the State Department, or as Clinton called it, “this organic, living creature called the Building.”

  “This is a team, and you are the members of that team. There isn’t anything that I can get done from the seventh floor or that the president can get done from the Oval Office, unless we make clear we are all on the American team. We are not any longer going to tolerate the kind of divisiveness that has paralyzed and undermined our ability to get things done for America.”

  Then it was time to get down to work. Hillary had been in the building many times before, as a First Lady during her husband’s presidency and, more recently, during the transition period between Bush and Obama. Like everybody else, she rode in one of the main elevators. But now, as secretary of state, she had access to a private, wood-paneled elevator that took her straight to the foyer of her quarters on the seventh floor. She walked down Mahogany Row, a carpeted hallway that was home to the top tier of State Department officials, one of the rare plush hallways in a building that otherwise reminded some of its occupants of a psychiatric institution, all stark white corridors, white fluorescent lights, and linoleum floors. Though it was her first day at work, it was a normal workday in the building and Hillary stopped in each office along the way, shaking hands and meeting her staff. Then she walked into her light-flooded outer office with its elegant living room furniture and fireplace, and stepped into her darker, smaller study. In a drawer of the desk, a welcome note awaited her. Signed “Condoleezza Rice,” it had almost been thrown out the day before by staffers clearing the office of all things Condi, saved at the last minute by a staffer who noticed the name on the envelope in the drawer. Neither Rice nor Clinton ever revealed what the note said.

  The two women had first met in August 1996, when Rice was provost of Stanford University. Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea, was deciding which university to attend, and Rice welcomed mother and daughter at the start of their tour of the university campus. The two women had spoken occasionally during the eight years and three weeks that Clinton spent in the Senate, but they were backing different teams. Clinton, like most Democrats, was a harsh critic of the Republican administration. Now Clinton found herself in Rice’s position, occupying her old office. There may have been a new president inside the White House who was all about change, but outside, it was the same unruly world that Rice had faced. Clinton had consulted all her living predecessors, but it was over a long dinner at Rice’s Watergate apartment in Washington a few weeks after the presidential election that she got the most up-to-date information about all the players on the international scene and the lowdown on every issue in her in-box. It would be the first of many conversations between the two women over the next four years.

  On the second floor of the Building, around the corner from the mezzanine, Fred settled into his professional quarters. His job guarding the secretary put him in charge of a large team of Diplomatic Security agents who would protect Clinton during every move she made, both in the United States and around the world. A thin-built, meticulous man with an aquiline nose, he looked more like a banker than a security official. He kept his surroundings uncluttered—on one wall, a world map; on another, a flat-screen television; on a table, his parting gift from Iraq, the flag that had flown over the Iraqi Republican palace that had housed America’s diplomats before the new embassy was inaugurated. The flag was now folded into a triangle, resting in a flag box with a plaque thanking him for his services.

  On the other side of the mezzanine, down a hallway with blue linoleum floors and a picture of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, the occupants of Room 2206 were eagerly awaiting their first conversation with the woman who was the
new subject of their reportage. Room 2206 housed the permanent State Department press corps: all of the major American newspapers, radio stations, and television networks had desks here (and a seat on the secretary of state’s Boeing 757). International news agencies like the Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and Agence France-Presse (AFP) were also part of the pack, telegraphing news from the American capital to the outside world. Thanks to its international reach, the BBC was admitted into this exclusive travel circle in 1993. The room was a large rectangular space overlooking a 1960s bronze sculpture—Man and the Expanding Universe—that presided over one of the department’s two inner courtyards. Cubicles lined the walls and occupied the center of the room. A couple of us were lucky enough to have windows. The rest typed away in semidarkness surrounded by gray walls and gray carpets. With only a few minutes’ notice on a drab, cold Tuesday morning, a few days after her grand entrance in the Building, the secretary arrived at our threshold, and we scurried out of our holes to shake her hand.

  We were all seasoned reporters—some of us had covered several secretaries of state—so no one applauded, though most of us couldn’t help feeling slightly starstruck, grinning widely and trying to think of something clever to say other than hello to make a lasting impression. But we were also wary, unsure about how the political machine Hillary had brought with her from the Senate and her campaign would coexist with the content and detail-obsessed world of foreign policy. The national media had clobbered Hillary during the primary race, ready to pounce on her at every corner. Americans loved her or hated her with equal passion. She said she’d felt like a piñata. Now, she slowly sized up her new press pack, about fifteen of us, probably wondering how we would treat her, whether we’d continue the battering. We introduced ourselves, and she repeated each of our names, shaking our hands, nodding mechanically with a semi-smile. She was guarded and seemed cold behind her smile, a politician on duty. She looked around at our grim quarters and said, with no trace of irony, “Your digs are better than those of the press at the White House.” Ouch. We had been hoping for an upgrade.

  Clinton sat down at the head of the large conference table on one end of the room in between two rows of cubicles and faced a torrent of questions.

  “Madame Secretary, what about North Korea?”

  “Madame Secretary, what about Iran?”

  “What about Middle East peace?”

  Everything was a priority, but one task mattered most to Clinton and Obama.

  “There’s a great exhalation of breath going on around the world as people express their appreciation for the new direction that’s being set,” Clinton said. “We have a lot of damage to repair.”

  This had been a key message of Obama’s campaign but hearing it from Clinton’s mouth at such proximity made it real, as if it could happen. But I also wondered how different things could actually be under a new administration.

  Obama’s campaign rhetoric made it sound like America had lost its way and would now return to the right path. But it wasn’t as though the United States had been a virtuous force for good or a perfect superpower for decades that had suddenly and inexplicably taken a turn for the worse during the Bush administration. The reality was more complex. The misgivings of America’s critics around the world had only been exacerbated by the hubris that the Bush administration had displayed. My own ambivalence about America had started well before the election of George W. Bush. I was a liberal, moderate secular Lebanese woman with a Dutch mother. In a country where many looked to Iran or Syria for guidance, I was more at home in the other half of the country, the pro-Western, pro-American camp. Yet I had often felt let down by the United States, whether the president was a Democrat or a Republican.

  As a young woman living in Beirut, I couldn’t quite explain why and I didn’t know where to look for the answers amid the uncertainty that seemed to permeate all aspects of life in the Arab world. Now, I enjoyed living in the United States away from that chaos, though I struggled to reconcile my positive impression of this country, its people, and its diplomats, with the confusion and frustration I often felt in the face of American foreign policy. After eight years of the Bush administration, with its two wars and its “You’re with us or against us” approach to the world, I wondered if the United States would ever understand the rest of the planet. I was ready to give up for good. “Maybe America should just stay home” was a common refrain around me.

  But I was willing to give the United States another chance and find out what the new president would bring to the world. And judging from the headlines around the world on November 7, 2008, and the parties celebrating his victory from France to Kenya, people everywhere expected Obama to deliver for them. Now Clinton was his envoy to the world.

  * * *

  An assembly line of problems was making its way through the Building, bursting into people’s offices at all hours of the day. Every issue was urgent, every crisis a priority, like triage in a hospital emergency room. There was also pressure of another kind. At the White House, when a new president moves in, he finds a mostly empty shell that he then fills with his team—advisors from the campaign, die-hard loyalists who yearn to serve, policy experts who share his vision. But at the State Department, when a secretary of state leaves, he or she takes only a couple hundred political appointees, leaving a steady cadre of twenty thousand career Foreign Service officers and civil servants at their desks in Foggy Bottom and at State Department offices across town. Inevitably, there is friction between the old and the new. With Clinton’s arrival, it was of a wholly different order.

  In the Building, most were willing to overlook Clinton’s faults, forget the acrimony of the campaign, and embrace her as a rock star because she was now the emissary of the president of change. But Clinton didn’t arrive alone. There was far less forgiveness for Hillaryland, Hillary’s often chaotic, chronically late, and occasionally dysfunctional political machine made up of fiercely loyal friends, campaign advisors, and Senate staffers, people like Huma, Lissa, or Philippe Reines, Hillary’s gatekeeper and media advisor. Their job was to serve her as Hillary the woman as much as the secretary of state, to make sure she had everything she needed to do her job, to make sure she looked good. But Hillary’s close aides were met with skepticism, suspicion, and occasional disdain. What do they really know about foreign policy, people thought. “Hillaryland” originated from Hillary’s days in the White House, the first time a First Lady occupied her own offices in the West Wing. The term described Hillary’s staff, and the name stuck, though the size and lay of the land had changed over the years. Once again Hillaryland would grow and morph into something new.

  When he gave her the job, Obama had agreed that Clinton could choose the political appointees who would fill the vacant seats in the Building to help her implement American foreign policy. The president’s team bristled at such latitude: no other cabinet member was being given such freedom in this administration. Why should a woman who had wrestled him for the Democratic nomination be allowed to reward her friends with plummy jobs? Presidential campaigns are divisive, all consuming, and emotional—and the fighting for the Democratic nomination had been drawn out, malicious, and messy. Obama too was surrounded by loyalists, and some were never able to lay the campaign mind-set aside. These key policy positions, they felt, should go to Obama supporters, to those who had sided with Obama and with change from the beginning, not to the woman who had challenged him.

  Although he had belittled her foreign policy experience during the campaign, Obama knew that only Clinton came with the built-in international stature and credibility that allowed her to instantly board a plane and stand in for him while he fixed the economy at home. He had decided to ask her to do the job well before the election of November 4. She had not expected the offer, but the call of public service was strong, and she agreed to support his mission to restore America’s lost face in the world. You don’t say no when the president asks you to serve, she kept telling her friends. There were al
so more narrow political considerations. Obama didn’t want to risk having her as a critic in the Senate, and she was uncertain how much more she could rise as a senator. Obama and Clinton decided to trust each other. It would take them some time to find their groove, but they saw themselves as teammates, even if their respective squads did not share this vision.

  Obama’s advisors formed a close bubble around him in the confines of the West Wing. The newcomers in the Building were quickly swallowed up by a massive, unwieldy bureaucracy. It was hard to maintain a coterie around Hillary when the political appointees she brought with her weren’t in the office next door but housed somewhere in the Building’s 4,975 rooms, down one of the eighty-four hallways, on one of the eight floors, connected by twelve elevators. Hillary and her team had always worked in small, agile offices where staffers devoted more time to substance than process. She had never worked in an office where she didn’t know everyone’s name, and now she was in charge of thousands. Every paper her team wrote, every memo they issued, seemed to zing around the building for hours, up and down the hallways and elevators to various floors, before it would finally be approved. The Building was a place, but it was also a massive operation that groaned under the weight of dated habits. Dozens of copies of the New York Post arrived every morning because this paper had been Colin Powell’s favorite, never mind that his last day on the job had been in January 2005. Clinton started her workday at 8:00 in the morning, but her special assistant, left over from the Rice era, had been showing up every day at the predawn hour of 4:30. That’s how it had worked under Rice, who showed up at work at 5:00 on most days. Working hours were promptly adjusted.