The Secretary

by Kim Ghattas

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  The packed schedule demonstrated the combined power of America and of Hillary. A one-two punch. Unlike most foreign ministers who travel to meet fellow foreign ministers, an American secretary of state is rarely restricted by protocol to rank: presidents fling open the doors of their palaces and kings grant them audiences. Clinton had a business lunch with foreign minister Hirofumi Nakasone, but the two were old friends, so they reminisced over a picture of the two of them meeting eighteen years ago, when he was a member of parliament delighted to meet an up-and-coming Arkansas governor named Bill. Hillary was also afforded the rare honor of tea with the imperial couple. Emperor Akihito and his wife, Michiko, emerged from their cloistered palace to greet her, and the seventy-four-year-old empress, in a cream-colored skirt suit, embraced Hillary like an old friend. They held hands and posed for photographs. Hillary and Bill had hosted the imperial couple at the White House in 1994 for the Clinton presidency’s first state dinner. At the time, President Clinton had declared that the “ties that bind our two nations have never been stronger.” And in Tokyo, at the prime minister’s office, Clinton invited Taro Aso to be the first foreign leader to visit President Obama in Washington.

  The mood was buoyant and the ceremonies elegant. But even close friends have disagreements. Japan had been home to ten American military bases for more than six decades. These bases were one of the many building blocks for America’s surging world power in the aftermath of World War II and a continued source of influence in Asia. They were both a testament to the alliance that developed between the two countries after Japan surrendered to the Allies and also a reminder of that same surrender. Over time, the bases grated increasingly on the proud Japanese, who wanted to strike a more independent course and felt America was always dictating the terms of the friendship. Incidents like the rape of a twelve-year-old Japanese girl by three American marines in 1995 fed the resentment and the debate about the U.S. military presence in Japan. One of the bases in particular, the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, was a constant source of friction. It sat in the middle of Ginowan city on the island of Okinawa, surrounded by stunning coral reefs. Washington and Tokyo had signed an agreement to relocate the noisy base away from population centers. But islanders wanted it off Okinawa completely. Sure, Japan worried about the eccentric, unpredictable leader of nearby North Korea, was anxious about China’s rise, and fretted it might no longer be America’s best friend in Asia. But every now and then, the Japanese people rebelled and their leaders protested. After all, America was a superpower, and it could take a bit of poking.

  Prime Minister Aso was sinking in the polls and would be defeated in the upcoming general elections in September of that year. So although she had invited Aso to visit Obama, Clinton broke protocol rules in a different way and sought to make contact with the leader of the opposition, Ichiro Ozawa, from the Democratic Party of Japan. Ozawa thought the Futenma base should be exiled to a disused airport on a distant island at the very southern tip of the Japanese archipelago. His office said the meeting with Clinton couldn’t be scheduled. Ozawa hemmed and hawed and kept everybody waiting, his way of showing he didn’t kowtow to America. But he eventually agreed to a meeting. On his way out, he offered his terse views on the U.S.-Japan relationship. “Both sides must be on an equal footing, and one should not be subordinated to the other.”

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  Hillary also encountered resentment toward America in Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy. Outside the presidential palace, protestors greeted her with placards reading “America is a rubbish civilization” and “America is the real terrorist.”

  The world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia once held the United States in high esteem. In 2000, 75 percent of Indonesians had a positive view of America. But in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, the Bush administration’s war on terror and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq looked like a war against Islam to many Muslims around the world. Superpowers are never universally loved, of course, but under George W. Bush anti-Americanism only increased. By 2007, only 29 percent3 of Indonesians liked America. But like many countries around the world, Indonesia had cheered the election of President Obama, who had spent four years of his childhood in Jakarta. The Obama administration saw an opportunity to work with Indonesia and reach out to the Muslim world.

  Clinton was also here for a serving of alphabet soup. The State Department had its own love affair with acronyms. This was an EAP trip—East Asia Pacific region. We had an EAP-AS (assistant secretary) with us on the plane, but the EAP-DAS (deputy assistant secretary) had stayed in Washington. Looking after the journalists were the overworked officers from the PA—Public Affairs office. The new S team was absorbing all this as quickly as it could. Now Clinton was going to visit ASEAN to sign a TAC, which she’d never heard of before, but which would help with the United States’ accession to the EAS.

  Once again delighted shrieks greeted Hillary as she entered the Secretariat of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Jakarta. She was the first American secretary of state ever to visit the headquarters. It was a symbolic gesture of support for an organization that had received virtually no attention from the Bush administration, which spent as little time as possible on the seemingly inconsequential acronyms. But this symbolism went a long way toward showing countries in the region that when the Obama administration looked at Asia on a map, it didn’t just see China and the Pacific Ocean. It was all thrilling to Surin Pitsuwan, the ASEAN secretary-general, who offered Clinton effusive compliments and thirty-two perfect yellow roses. The number stood for the thirty-two years of cooperation between the United States and ASEAN, while the yellow symbolized a new beginning under the Obama administration. Standing next to Clinton, Pitsuwan told her, “Your visit shows the seriousness of the United States to end its diplomatic absenteeism in the region.”

  ASEAN countries had long tried to cajole the United States into signing the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) a feel-good agreement with no binding obligations that promoted peace and cooperation between its signatories. It was a necessary step if the United States wanted to be part of the more important East Asia Summit (EAS), a regional political and economic forum that included ASEAN and all the key Pacific countries, from India to Australia. All countries, that is, except the United States and Russia. Almost every day on the trip, Clinton had said the United States was not just a transatlantic power but also a transpacific power. To prove it, she announced that the United States would sign the treaty.

  Trailing behind Clinton, across time zones, in and out of motorcades, I had a hard time getting excited about all these treaties and diplomatic hooplas. It all sounded tedious—death by acronyms. I would eventually come to understand the careful thinking that had gone into this.

  The Obama administration believed that power through military might alone was too expensive and no longer sufficient to remain relevant in a world that was changing so quickly. Rising countries, big and small alike, all wanted their say on the global podium. These countries were testing the limits and possibilities of their power. America had to be needed. It had to draw others close and sit at the center of a vast diplomatic web, an essential connector. For the proponents of smart power, this was another, essential way in which the United States could maintain its edge as a superpower in the twenty-first century. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton University professor, had developed much of the thinking about this edge. Clinton hired her to run the Building’s policy planning department to develop the blueprint of this style of diplomacy. The big multilateral organizations like the United Nations were important but also stood as relics of a previous era. The United States was going to latch on to what was already there and create new initiatives and treaties everywhere—a large sticky web of diplomacy. TAC was just the beginning.4

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  From Indonesia, we retraced our steps and flew due north again for just over six hours. This time we turned left instead of righ
t, and on Friday morning, we woke up in snowy Seoul. Once an American-backed dictatorship, South Korea was now a democracy and a steadfast ally of the United States.

  The highlight of this stop was the seventh event of the day—a town hall at the Ewha Womans university. Founded in 1886 by the American Methodist Episcopal missionary Mary Scranton, the university was the sister college of Wellesley, where Hillary had studied.

  Inside a massive auditorium with a futuristic concrete exterior, the audience waited for Hillary to come onstage while listening to the Christian hymn “Amazing Grace.” Huge banners hung all around the stage welcoming “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton” and large television screens were on the walls to beam Hillary’s performance to the back of the room. On our large press passes, a picture of a younger Hillary dwarfed the written details of the time and place of the event. In the audience, a woman was proudly showing her friends a picture of herself with Hillary and Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

  The secretary was running late. Everything on this trip had run late, every day, all day. If it was a hallmark of the Clinton administration to be an hour late, this was the Hillary-at-the-State-Department version. The tardiness was deeply frustrating for everybody, the traveling press corps who had to hurry up and wait and then miss their deadlines, the State Department staffers running the show, the local officials trying to keep to their own schedules, the local journalists who had to show up early for events to be screened for security and then wait and wait some more for Hillary to actually arrive.

  But Hillary was in a back room meeting the university’s president and some of its alumni. As she always did, she gave the people she was talking to her full attention and listened closely to their stories, head tilted, eyes focused. She didn’t rush, didn’t cut anyone off. She made them feel like she had traveled all the way from Washington just for them. The crowds could wait. And when she finally walked onto the stage, the two thousand women in the audience leapt to their feet, clapping excitedly like groupies. And when she told them, speaking into a microphone from behind a lectern, how delighted she was to be with them, they felt so special that they forgave her instantly for being late. In her red jacket and black trousers, Clinton began by saying that women’s rights weren’t just a “moral issue” but a “security issue.”

  “[No democracy] can exist without women’s full participation,” she told the crowd. “No economy can be truly a free market without women involved.” That’s why she was putting women’s rights at the center of her agenda. The women listened intently as she moved on to discuss North Korea, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and climate change. And then it was time for questions.

  When the line officers had been told to organize the town hall, they asked how free-flowing the secretary liked the exchange to be. The answer had been: “Very.” Looking for raised hands in the dark auditorium, she picked at random, acting as her own master of ceremonies, walking up and down the stage and trying to be equitable between the different sides of the auditorium.

  “Do you have a microphone? Here, I’ll take one over there. Okay. Oh, too many hands. Too many hands,” she said laughing.

  How did she balance work and marriage?

  Be true to yourself and make your own choices.

  What was it like being at Wellesley College?

  She loved it.

  How did you know Bill was the one for you?

  “I’m very lucky because my husband is my best friend, and he and I have been together for a very long time, longer than most of you have been alive. We are—we have an endless conversation. We never get bored. We get deeply involved in all of the work that we do, and we talk about it constantly. And I just feel very fortunate that I have a relationship that has been so meaningful to me over my adult life.”

  How special is Chelsea to you?

  We could be here forever, she replied.

  She answered each question with enthusiasm and candor, as though she were sitting in a café with friends having a cup of coffee. She told them she felt right at home and drew rousing applause. She spoke about the discipline of gratitude—the need to be grateful about at least one thing a day, regardless of how difficult your problems were. I suddenly thought that Ewha sounded rather like Iowa, and that this felt and sounded like the primary campaign trail where voters wanted to know what the candidate was really all about—only here, unlike in Iowa, there was no sniping.

  Hillary’s autobiography had been a huge best seller in South Korea; the audience had clearly read it and wanted to dig deeper. She obliged graciously. It was hard to tell where Hillary Rodham Clinton—wife of Bill, former First Lady, political icon, and best-selling author—ended and where the American secretary of state began. The women in the audience looked at her and saw America.

  The crowd listened intently. The seats were filled with politicians, movie stars, designers, the crème de la crème of Korean society, and they were all floored. No official of theirs had ever spoken to them with such candor or made herself so accessible and human. And in a deeply patriarchal society, with still-formal notions of how a senior official should behave, a woman with Hillary’s power, speaking in such a manner, was nothing short of extraordinary.

  “I feel more like an advice columnist than secretary of state today,” Clinton said with a giggle. She answered questions until her anxious staff signaled she was running over schedule again. It was hard to imagine any other secretary of state responding to an audience’s expectations with such passion.

  This was part of the grand experiment to find Hillary’s new public persona as secretary of state. For eight years, she had watched Bill Clinton execute American foreign policy; she had been his eyes and ears when he wasn’t in the room. She had met countless heads of state, sat next to them and their wives for hours at dinners and lunches. She had held her own meetings, attended summits, and delivered speeches in various capitals. She had been on the Senate Armed Services committee. She knew the world and all the issues, even if she didn’t yet know all the details and nuances. She was as comfortable on the world stage as in her own dining room, and here she was, redefining the job at the same time as she was redefining herself. Every day, every meeting, and every public event was an opportunity to test and learn. But Clinton didn’t just use her plain talk to discuss her personal life. She also made news—real, unexpected news.

  * * *

  After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had split up Korea between the two of them. The two Koreas forged very different destinies. The North was ruled repressively for decades by Kim Il Sung. When he died in 1994, his son Kim Jong Il took over and ruled with the same principles: starve the people, build up the army and a nuclear program. Kim Jong Il was now sixty-eight years old, frail and sick, and Seoul and Beijing worried about what would happen when he died. Would the country collapse? What would happen to the nuclear weapons? Would millions of refugees flood South Korea and China?

  No one said a word in public. The Chinese even refused to discuss contingency planning in private with American officials for fear it would end up on the front page of the New York Times. American officials, respectful of their allies’ sensitivities, did not discuss the succession in public either. Erratic Kim Jong Il could go into one of his missile-firing fits just to prove he was strong and going nowhere.

  During a briefing given to the traveling press, Clinton broke the diplomatic taboo. She not only mentioned the word “succession,” but she also discussed South Korea’s concerns about the day after Kim Jong Il. Her words ricocheted from Seoul to Beijing, to Pyongyang, Washington, and back as Asia experts and Asian officials gasped.

  Standing next to Clinton at a press conference, the South Korean foreign minister was asked for his reaction to her comment. He ventured only that his country had an eye on the situation. Clinton seemed amused. She may have sounded bookish at the start of her trip, but she had quickly translated diplomatic facts into her own language.

  “I think that to
worry about saying something that is so obvious is an impediment to clear thinking,” she said when we asked her what she thought of the reaction to her very public reference to Kim Jong Il’s frail health. “And I don’t think it should be viewed as particularly extraordinary that someone in my position would say what’s obvious … The open press is filled with such conversations. This is not some kind of a classified matter that is not being discussed in many circles.”

  Kim Jong Il’s life expectancy was not the only obvious conversation to Clinton. The global economic crisis had left the United States and the world reeling. China held more than a trillion dollars in U.S. Treasury bills, and its economy was still growing at the astounding rate of 8 percent a year. For years, American officials had been forceful in their public criticism of China’s human rights records. In 2008, a State Department report had listed China as one of the world’s worst abusers of human rights, and Hillary herself had urged the Bush administration to boycott the opening of the Beijing Olympics in the authoritarian state. Talking to the traveling press ahead of the flight to Beijing, she indicated that human rights had to be part of the whole range of issues on the agenda, not a focus of the talks. The economic crisis had to be the heart of the conversation.

  “We pretty much know what they’re going to say. We know that we’re going to press them to reconsider their position about Tibetan religious and cultural freedom and autonomy for the Tibetans and some kind of recognition or acknowledgment of the Dalai Lama. And we know what they’re going to say, because I’ve had those conversations for more than a decade with Chinese leaders.”

  The secretary of state sounded as though she didn’t want to harangue America’s banker, and the reaction was vociferous. Headlines on front pages everywhere in the United States and Europe screamed treason—the Obama administration was going soft on Chinese human rights, cowering in the face of the rising Asian giant. American congressmen accused Clinton of pandering to Beijing. Human rights organizations called on her to make clear human rights in China were a priority for the Obama administration.