The Secretary

by Kim Ghattas

  Matthew Lee, from the Associated Press, had started covering the beat under Secretary Madeleine Albright nine years ago. With blue slanting eyes and thinning light brown hair, he towered over the rest of us and represented a dying breed of reporter—he smoked, he drank, and he grilled officials ruthlessly and relentlessly before cracking jokes with them over a beer. Mark Landler, the diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, was a bespectacled, conscientious father of two, recently transplanted to Washington from Berlin. Glenn Kessler from the Washington Post had a round face and big dark eyes; like me, he had Dutch roots, but he had been on the secretary’s plane for nine years and had written a book about Condoleezza Rice. They all wore khaki trench coats. The news agencies were always present as well: the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters. Their wires were the first to grab people’s attention across the world whenever something important happened. Even in the age of twenty-four-hour television news and Twitter, the wires had correspondents everywhere. They were reliable and indispensable. Without them, trees could fall in forests and no one would hear about it. The celebrity correspondents of the American television networks had stopped traveling with Rice as the Bush administration entered its final year. But now, Andrea Mitchell from NBC, Martha Raddatz from ABC, as well as correspondents from CBS and CNN were all back for the Hillary-on-the-road show.

  Suitcases disappeared into the black vans, and we squeezed, laptops and handbags in hand, into the three rows of seats in each of the press vans in the back of the convoy. The officials in the staff vans led at the front, and we set off for the forty-minute drive to Andrews Air Force Base (AAFB) in Maryland. The base was home to Air Force One, the plane of the president of the United States, sometimes referred to as POTUS by people in D.C. Queens, presidents, and prime ministers flew into the United States through AAFB, and its runways were also used by the planes carrying American distinguished visitors, or DVs as the air force referred to them—the secretary of state, secretary of defense, the vice president, and members of Congress. They shared a fleet of four aging 757 Boeing planes that flew them on Special Air Missions (SAMs) around the world.

  While we waited for Clinton to arrive, we spread out in the VIP lounge off the tarmac and munched on the chewy chocolate chip cookies that were a staple of American air force bases. When the dogs were done sniffing our carry-on bags and suitcases, the belly of thirteen-year-old SAM started filling up with luggage, a large metal trunk carrying gifts from the secretary for her hosts, and dozens of black cases of security equipment.

  We used an empty white paper cup with the air force golden stamp for our lottery. This was a trip with no tickets, no boarding passes, and no assigned seating. It offered many luxuries: someone else sorted out your visas, you never had to go through passport control anywhere, your luggage was delivered straight to your hotel, and you mingled in a VIP lounge with top American officials who loved to talk. But the trip also had its downsides: the traveling press was squeezed in the back of the secretary’s reconfigured, no-frills plane. The section had eight comfortable business-size seats and twelve cramped coach seats. Some of the business seats went to Diplomatic Security agents and to Caroline, Ashley, and Nick. We got whatever seats were left. The lotteries took place only once, at the start of each trip, and they could get surprisingly emotional, especially when there were only six “good” seats and the handwritten 9 looked like a 6. On an eight-day trip with seven flights just like the one we were embarking on, drawing 13 felt like being dispatched for a root canal procedure.

  When it was time to board, we walked the short distance on the tarmac to the steps up the plane. A Raven, a member of specially trained U.S. Air Force Security Forces, who guard SAM at all times, checked our names off a list before we were allowed to settle into our little capsule. The litany of the roll call shouted over the deafening roar of the plane’s engines punctuated every departure at every stop.

  On our seats, we found red tin boxes with heart-shaped ginger crisps, “hand rolled with love” by Mrs. Hanes in her factory of Moravian cookies somewhere in North Carolina. The air force wanted to mark Hillary’s first trip with a special gesture. From my seat, I could see the activity farther up the plane, beyond the lavatory that marked the Line of Death—an imaginary barrier between us, mere mortal journalists, and the officials who had started to pore over the big white binders of documents that had traveled over from the vault on the seventh floor in one of the staff vans, intently guarded by the two young Foreign Service officers. The vault was known as the Line, once an actual physical line of desks where classified policy papers and statements were edited, improved, and passed up the chain until final approval. The Line now snaked through computers, into BlackBerries, and out of printers, but the line officers’ job remained unchanged—they produced all the background information documents, talking points, and briefing notes that the secretary and her team needed. For trips, it was all gathered into the trip Book, with a big, red “CLASSIFIED” stamp across the front, just above the seal of the secretary of state. The Book was the reason we were not allowed beyond the lavatory without explicit permission. Instead, we waited for visits back to our quarters on the plane.

  Hillary had emerged from her private cabin and was chatting to her staff in the front section, a conference-like area where four big leather seats, for her closest aides, faced each other on either side of the aisle. She then stopped in the middle section, with three rows of seats reserved for officials from the State Department, the NSC, and the Pentagon officials who accompanied her, and of course Fred and his agents. Then she crossed the Line of Death.

  “Hello, everyone, nice to see you,” Clinton began. She asked us if we were excited about the trip and then introduced Jake and Huma, who had walked down with her along with a few of her other aides. It was our first opportunity to meet the new team of the secretary, or “S,” the department’s abbreviation. I didn’t know what to make of Jake. On paper he was impressive: a Yale graduate, Rhodes scholar, Supreme Court clerk. But he just looked so young. Was he really helping to shape American foreign policy? Would the future of my home country, Lebanon, be affected by his thoughts and advice?

  Huma, Hillary’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department, had first worked for her as an intern in the White House in 1996. Over the years, Hillary had taken Huma under her wing. In the small Senate office and then on the grueling primary campaign trail, the two women had developed an increasingly tight bond. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to an Indian father and Pakistani mother, Huma had moved to Saudi Arabia with her family at the age of two and returned to the United States to attend George Washington University in D.C. During the campaign, as Hillary’s traveling chief of staff, Huma had an almost mythical reputation for her unflappable calm and endless energy, her cool manners and impeccably styled jet-black hair, and, perhaps most of all, for her wardrobe full of designer clothes, including those from her personal friend Oscar de la Renta.

  Huma was probably the coolest thing on the secretary’s plane, which lacked all the high-tech gadgetry and plush feel of Air Force One. The blue and gray leather seats were from another era, the walls had taken on a gray tinge, and the tiny overhead screens creaked loudly whenever they opened up for the start of in-flight entertainment. We did get toothpaste, mouthwash, shaving cream, combs, and antacids in the lavatory. But the plane was not modern or impressive enough to reflect American power. But at least the secretary of state had a plane at her disposal, which was more than most foreign ministers around the world could say.

  What mattered was that we were on the same plane as her, and this was worth the bill our news organizations had to foot to get us a seat on those trips. On presidential travels, only a handful of reporters fly on board Air Force One; the rest of the press follow in a separate plane and rarely see the president while on the road. We were, at all times, in a Bubble with Clinton, from the plane to the motorcade, to our hotel, to the next event or meeting, back to the motorcade, back onto S
AM. It limited our ability to connect with the countries we visited but it was priceless access to the heart of the U.S. foreign policy machine.

  And here was Clinton, standing in the aisle of our section. For twenty minutes, she answered our questions about the impact of the financial crisis on America’s relationship with Asia, questions about how she would address the human rights agenda in China, and questions about North Korea’s nuclear program. She said she wanted to listen more than talk, but mostly she wanted to make clear to us that the Obama administration was reaching out to the world, to Asia—not only to suit-wearing officials sitting in ministries but to people as well.

  “We do see Asia as part of America’s future,” Clinton told us. “We are both a transatlantic and a transpacific power. And part of what I hope we can do is better understand and create the kind of future that will benefit both Asians and Americans.”

  She spoke in a slow, deliberate tone, with little inflection, sounding like the briefing notes she must have been reading in preparation for the trip. There was no smiling; this was serious diplomacy. She seemed to be treading carefully (Jake was listening intently from behind her). She was dealing with a group of foreign policy junkies who were going to dissect her every word.

  For more than two decades, Hillary had had a checkered relationship with the American media. She had been hailed and demonized, scrutinized and lauded. She had never known what was coming and understandably kept her guard fairly high, encased in a protective shell. She related comfortably to individual reporters, and she could grow to trust a traveling press corps accompanying her on the campaign trail. She had once even phoned the partner of a reporter who was stuck on the road with her on Valentine’s Day to apologize. But she looked at us and saw a faceless group of hacks of indeterminate nature and unknown intentions.

  Finally, the grilling was over. Hillary walked up front to the conference area and relaxed, surrounded by people she knew were on her side. Rice, who was much warmer and gracious in person than she appeared on television, was still very reserved and had spent most of her time in her private cabin. But Hillary was curious about other human beings and enjoyed chitchat. She sat down in one of the empty seats as the air force flight attendants started to serve refreshments. From then on, the seat would be kept free for her on every trip and became known as the “Hillary seat.” Shocked staffers, who had been on S trips before, fidgeted nervously, uncertain about the protocol.

  “Why does she want to know my name?” one of them thought. She had never before had to explain to a secretary of state where she was from, whether she had a family, or what her career path had been like so far. The real shock came later, when Hillary remembered her name.

  Jake hungrily finished the lunch of spaghetti, meatballs, and salad, one of the few proper meals he’d had in weeks. Back at the State Department, he had been at his desk from eight in the morning until well past midnight every day, charting out the contours of his job and trying to work through the reams of paperwork that the bureaucracy of the department seemed to produce every second. Lunch and dinner were courtesy of the vending machine down the hall, a healthy combination of Cheetos and Doritos and Pop-Tarts, washed down with a Diet Dr. Pepper. He drove everyone in the Building slightly mad as he scrutinized every word on every single piece of paper, every policy talking point, every memo destined to reach Clinton, until he felt it was perfect. The already lengthy clearance process for documents became a few hours longer under Jake’s hand. Only months later would he come to accept that even in the capital of the world’s superpower, sometimes “good enough” had to suffice.

  But in those first few months and especially on this trip, everything still had to be perfect. This was Hillary Clinton’s debut on the world stage as secretary of state, her latest incarnation. All those papers were going into the trip Book, a version of which awaited the secretary in her private cabin. The Book contained an extra layer of classified documents about issues beyond the focus of the trip and copies of all the speeches and public statements she would be making. These statements were crafted by Lissa Muscatine, the speechwriter.

  Every evening in Washington, Clinton also received a daily Book, a cordovan leather binder with all the briefing material required to prepare for the following day.

  Preparing the first Book for Clinton, line officers had asked how she liked her information presented to her—some officials like oral reports; others preferred bullet-point briefings. Some needed it all condensed into the basics. Hillary wanted all the details, all the angles, all the background. She was a voracious reader and could extract what she needed from the tome and let the rest lie in the back of her mind to inform her general approach to a subject. Her instincts honed as a lawyer had also taught her to stay nimbly ahead of the brief—whatever question came her way, she wanted to have an answer. But mostly she wanted to have all the information in front of her so she could slowly learn to transform the pile of dry diplomatic statements into lively sentences that matched her personality and sounded like something she would actually say, something that her audience outside of government buildings would understand.

  For four years prior, the trip Book had contained the basics and sat mostly untouched on the narrow desk in the cabin during long overseas flights, next to the communications equipment that enabled the secretary to call the president or any world leader. Rice had come to the State Department from the NSC, where she had devised policy. She knew what the policy was, and she knew the talking points. She would react to her environment and change course accordingly, but she still followed a tight script. She didn’t need a binder.

  But on the long flight to Tokyo, Clinton’s cabin kept spitting out papers with annotations, requests for more information, questions about sites she was going to visit, and changes to the language used in speeches she would be making the following day. Sitting on the leather foldout couch in her cabin, a humidifier in one corner, a National Geographic map of the world on the wall behind, the new secretary of state had been reading the Book cover to cover. Armed with the office supplies in their black rolling cases, the line officers got to work. On every trip, there would be two of them—the plane team. And at each stop an advance line officer was preparing the ground for S’s arrival. They were among the brightest of the Foreign Service cadre and helped to keep the wheels of the foreign policy machine spinning. But on the trips they were interchangeable.

  * * *

  When we landed at Haneda Airport at eleven that night, twenty-two hours after walking out of our homes in Washington, Lissa the speechwriter realized her job was only just starting. In the coming months, she would often find herself rewriting speeches till five in the morning. When the departure for the day’s first event was only a couple of hours away, she would give up on sleep and just go to the gym. The Book had become a living thing. It was going to need feeding, day and night, throughout our trips.

  Hillary too was only getting started, but her energy was bubbling. She loved being back on the road. She had always enjoyed her overseas travel as First Lady; no matter how polarizing or vilified she was at home, the rest of the world was mostly fascinated by her and treated her with respect. As a senator, she had traveled abroad a dozen times with colleagues like Republican senator John McCain. She had enjoyed those trips, but now this was her show again. And she arrived in Asia not just as a former First Lady and senator, or the wife of Bill Clinton and a woman who had reinvented herself over the years. She now came in a new, even bigger role: as America’s chief diplomat, the emissary of Barack Obama, the new, promising face of America. She emerged from the plane with a wide smile and perfect hair, her eyes ever so slightly red from the journey. Huma followed with one of her designer handbags.

  * * *

  Inside the VIP terminal, the first group of excited fans waited at the rendezvous—a welcome committee of young athletes from the Special Olympics and Japanese women astronauts who had all just been to the United States. The camera crews were there to beam ou
t the images of her arrival, and for the traveling press this was the start of a long night. We were all on the phone, calling our editors with the news: she’s arrived, she’s landed, she’s here!

  We piled into the vans outside the VIP terminal, typing on our laptops, talking on the phone, the motorcade sirens wailing in the background of our live interviews with our radio and television stations. Late into the night, sitting in the filing center set up for the traveling press in the hotel, I continued broadcasting: She’s still here! She’s still saying the Obama administration is reaching out to Asia and the world! In the wee hours of the morning, on the various floors of the Okura hotel, with its dated 1960s decor, members of the State Department delegation, their work finally done, collapsed into bed one after the other. In her suite on the tenth floor, Hillary woke up at four thirty in the morning, feeling like she was in a vibrating bed and someone had accidentally just dropped in some quarters.2 Just another, minor Japanese earthquake.

  The dawn jolt didn’t stop Hillary from being out the door at eight in the morning for her first event—a display of respect for Japanese history and traditions. The Meiji Shrine, a religious Shinto shrine dedicated to Emperor Meiji, who ruled Japan for forty-five years, until 1912, was a large, green sanctuary amid the soaring towers and concrete blocks of Tokyo’s Shibuya business district. Clinton and her retinue walked on foot into a forest of one hundred thousand trees toward the shrines made of cypress and copper. The sound of the city faded. Fred, always two steps behind Clinton, found himself walking into an oasis that mirrored his internal oasis: no matter the traffic, noise, or danger around him and the chaos within the big Bubble, Fred’s mind and demeanor remained focused and calm. He savored this rare moment where his mind was at one with his environment. He and his team formed their own small, serene bubble around the secretary and helped her glide through her day.