Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  In the years to come, I wouldn’t always agree with the President and other members of his team; some of those times you’ll read about in this book, but others will remain private to honor the cone of confidentiality that should exist between a President and his Secretary of State, especially while he is still in office. But he and I developed a strong professional relationship and, over time, forged the personal friendship he had predicted and that I came to value deeply. Not too many weeks into the new administration, on a mild April afternoon, the President suggested we finish one of our weekly meetings at the picnic table outside the Oval Office on the South Lawn, right next to Malia and Sasha’s new playground. That suited me perfectly. The press called it our “picnic table strategy session.” I’d call it “Two folks having a good conversation.”

  On Monday, December 1, President-elect Obama announced me as his choice to serve as the sixty-seventh Secretary of State. As I stood next to him, he reiterated publicly what he had told me privately: “Hillary’s appointment is a sign to friend and foe of the seriousness of my commitment to renew American diplomacy.”

  The next month, on January 20, 2009, I watched with my husband in the biting cold as Barack Obama took the oath of office. Our rivalry, once fierce, was over. Now we were partners.

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  Foggy Bottom: Smart Power

  The first Secretary of State I ever met was Dean Acheson. He had served President Harry Truman at the beginning of the Cold War and was the embodiment of an imposing, old-school diplomat. I was a nervous college student about to deliver the first important public speech of my young life. It was the spring of 1969, and my Wellesley classmate and friend Eldie Acheson, the former Secretary’s granddaughter, had decided our class needed its own speaker at graduation. After our college president approved the idea, my classmates asked me to speak about our tumultuous four years at Wellesley and provide a proper send-off into our unknown futures.

  The night before graduation, with the speech still unfinished, I ran into Eldie and her family. She introduced me to her grandfather as “the girl who’s going to speak tomorrow.” The seventy-six-year-old had just completed his memoirs, Present at the Creation, which would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Secretary Acheson smiled and shook my hand. “I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say,” he said. In a panic, I hurried back to my dorm to pull one last all-nighter.

  I never imagined that forty years later I would follow in Acheson’s footsteps at the State Department, affectionately known as “Foggy Bottom,” after its D.C. neighborhood. Even my childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut would have seemed more realistic. Yet after I became Secretary of State, I often thought of the gray-haired elder statesman I met that night at Wellesley. Beneath his formal exterior, he was a highly imaginative diplomat, breaking protocol when he thought it was best for his country and his President.

  America’s leadership in the world resembles a relay race. A Secretary, a President, a generation are all handed the baton and asked to run a leg of the race as well as we can, and then we hand off the baton to our successors. Just as I benefited from actions taken by and lessons learned from my predecessors, initiatives begun during my years at the State Department have borne fruit since my departure, when I passed the baton to Secretary John Kerry.

  I quickly learned that being Secretary of State is really three jobs in one: the country’s chief diplomat, the President’s principal advisor on foreign policy, and the CEO of a sprawling Department. From the start I had to balance my time and energy between competing imperatives. I had to lead our public and private diplomacy to repair strained alliances and build new partnerships. But I also had to conduct a fair amount of diplomacy within our own government, especially in the policy process at the White House and with Congress. And there was the work inside the Department itself, to get the most out of our talented people, improve morale, increase efficiency, and develop the capacities needed to meet new challenges.

  A former Secretary called me with this advice: “Don’t try to do everything at once.” I heard the same thing from other Department veterans. “You can try to fix the policies, or you can try to fix the bureaucracy, but you can’t do both.”

  Another piece of advice I heard frequently was: Pick a few big issues and own them. Neither admonition squared with the increasingly complex international landscape waiting for us. Perhaps there was a time when a Secretary of State could focus exclusively on a few priorities and let deputies and assistants handle the Department and the rest of the world. But those days were over. We’d learned the hard way (for example, in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989) that neglecting regions and threats could have painful consequences. I would need to pay attention to the whole chessboard.

  In the years since 9/11, America’s foreign policy understandably had become focused on the biggest threats. And of course, we had to stay vigilant. But I also thought we should be doing more to seize the greatest opportunities, especially in the Asia-Pacific.

  I wanted to deal with a range of emerging challenges that were going to require high-level attention and creative strategies, such as how to manage competition for undersea energy resources from the Arctic to the Pacific, whether to stand up to economic bullying by powerful state-owned enterprises, and how to connect with young people around the world newly empowered by social media, to name just a few. I knew there would be traditionalists in the foreign policy establishment who would question whether it was worth a Secretary of State’s time to think about the impact of Twitter, or start programs for women entrepreneurs, or advocate on behalf of American businesses abroad. But I saw it all as part of the job of a 21st-century diplomat.

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  The newly chosen members of the incoming Obama Administration’s national security team met for six hours in Chicago on December 15. It was our first discussion since the announcement of our nominations two weeks earlier. We quickly dove into some of the thorniest policy dilemmas we would face, including the status of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the prospects for peace in the Middle East. We also discussed at length a problem that has proven very difficult to solve: how to fulfill the President-elect’s promise to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which remains open all these years later.

  I came to the Obama Administration with my own ideas about both American leadership and foreign policy, as well as about the teamwork any President should expect from the members of his National Security Council. I intended to be a vigorous advocate for my positions within the administration. But as I knew from history and my own experience, the sign on Harry Truman’s desk in the Oval Office was correct: the buck did stop with the President. And because of the long primary battle, I also knew the press would be looking—even hoping—for any signs of discord between me and the White House. I intended to deprive them of that story.

  I was impressed by the people the President-elect had chosen for his team. Vice President–elect Joe Biden brought a wealth of international experience from his leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His warmth and humor would be very welcome during long hours in the White House Situation Room. Every week, Joe and I tried to meet for a private breakfast at the Naval Observatory, his official residence, which is near my home. Always the gentleman, he would meet me at the car and walk me to a sunny nook off the porch, where we would eat and talk. Sometimes we agreed, sometimes we disagreed, but I always appreciated our frank and confidential conversations.

  I had known Rahm Emanuel for years. He started with my husband early in the 1992 campaign, served in the White House, and then went home to Chicago and ran for Congress. He was a rising star in the House and led the campaign that produced a new Democratic majority in 2006, but gave up his seat when President Obama asked him to be White House Chief of Staff. Later he would be elected Mayor of Chicago. Rahm was famous for his forceful personality and vivid lang
uage (that’s putting it politely), but he was also a creative thinker, an expert in the legislative process, and a great asset to the President. During the hard-fought primary campaign, Rahm had stayed neutral because of his strong ties to both me and then-Senator Obama, telling his hometown Chicago Tribune, “I’m hiding under the desk.” Now that we were all serving together, Rahm would provide some of the initial glue holding this “team of rivals” together. He offered a friendly ear and an open door in the West Wing, and we talked frequently.

  The new National Security Advisor was retired Marine General James Jones, whom I had gotten to know from my time on the Senate Armed Services Committee, when he served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe. He was a dignified, levelheaded, fair broker, with a sense of humor, all important qualities in a National Security Advisor.

  General Jones’s Deputy and eventual successor was Tom Donilon, whom I had known since the Carter Administration. Tom had served as Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s Chief of Staff, so he understood and valued the State Department. He also shared my enthusiasm for increasing our engagement in the Asia-Pacific. Tom became a valued colleague who oversaw the difficult interagency policy process that analyzed options and teed up decisions for the President. He had a knack for asking hard questions that forced us to think even more rigorously about important policy decisions.

  The President’s choice for UN Ambassador was Susan Rice, who had served on the National Security Council staff and then as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during the 1990s. During the primaries Susan was an active surrogate for the Obama campaign and often went on TV to attack me. I knew it was part of her job, and we put the past behind us and worked together closely—for example, to round up votes at the UN for new sanctions against Iran and North Korea and to authorize the mission to protect civilians in Libya.

  In a surprise to many, the President kept on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who had a distinguished career serving eight Presidents of both parties at the CIA and National Security Council, before President George W. Bush lured him from Texas A&M in 2006 to replace Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. I had seen Bob in action from my seat on Armed Services and thought he would provide continuity and a steady hand as we dealt with two inherited wars. He was also a convincing advocate for giving diplomacy and development more resources and a bigger role in our foreign policy. You’ll rarely hear any official in turf-conscious Washington suggest that some other agency should get a more generous share of funding. But Bob, looking at the larger strategic picture after many years in which U.S. foreign policy was dominated by the military, believed it was time for more balance among what I was calling the 3 Ds of defense, diplomacy, and development.

  The easiest place to see the imbalance was in the budget. Despite the popular belief that foreign aid accounted for at least a quarter of the federal budget, the truth was that for every dollar spent by the federal government, just one penny went to diplomacy and development. In a 2007 speech, Bob said that the foreign affairs budget was “disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military.” As he often pointed out, there were as many Americans serving in military marching bands as in the entire diplomatic corps.

  We became allies from the start, tag-teaming Congress for a smarter national security budget and finding ourselves on the same side of many internal administration policy debates. We avoided the traditional infighting between State and Defense that in many previous administrations had come to resemble the Sharks and the Jets from West Side Story. We held joint meetings with Defense and Foreign Ministers, and sat together for interviews to present a united front on the foreign policy issues of the day.

  In October 2009, we did a joint town hall event at George Washington University, broadcast and moderated by CNN. We were asked what it was like to work together. “Most of my career, the Secretaries of State and Defense weren’t speaking to one another,” Bob replied, drawing laughter. “It could get pretty ugly, actually. So it’s terrific to have the kind of relationship where we can talk together. . . . We get along, we work together well. I think it starts with, frankly, based on my experience as Secretary of Defense being willing to acknowledge that the Secretary of State is the principal spokesperson for United States foreign policy. And once you get over that hurdle, the rest of it kind of falls into place.”

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  Our team inherited a daunting list of challenges at a time of diminished expectations at home and abroad about America’s ability to lead the world.

  If you picked up a newspaper in those days or stopped by a Washington think tank, you were likely to hear that America was in decline. Soon after the Presidential election in 2008, the National Intelligence Council, a group of analysts and experts appointed by the Director of National Intelligence, published an alarming report titled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. It offered a bleak forecast of declining American influence, rising global competition, dwindling resources, and widespread instability. The intelligence analysts predicted that America’s relative economic and military strength would decrease over the coming years and that the international system we had helped build and defend since World War II would be undermined by the growing influence of emerging economic powers like China, oil-rich nations like Russia and Iran, and nonstate actors like al Qaeda. In unusually stark terms they called it “an historic transfer of relative wealth and economic power from West to East.”

  Shortly before President Obama’s inauguration, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal under the headline “American Power Is on the Wane.” Articulating a critique heard frequently in 2008 and 2009, Professor Kennedy blamed declining U.S. power on mounting debt, the severe economic impact of the Great Recession, and the “imperial overstretch” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He offered an evocative analogy to explain how he saw America losing its place as undisputed global leader: “A strong person, balanced and muscular, can carry an impressively heavy backpack uphill for a long while. But if that person is losing strength (economic problems), and the weight of the burden remains heavy or even increases (the Bush Doctrine), and the terrain becomes more difficult (rise of new Great Powers, international terrorism, failed states), then the once-strong hiker begins to slow and stumble. That is precisely when nimbler, less heavily burdened walkers get closer, draw abreast, and perhaps move ahead.”

  Nonetheless I remained fundamentally optimistic about America’s future. My confidence was rooted in a lifetime of studying and experiencing the ups and downs of American history and a clear-eyed assessment of our comparative advantages relative to the rest of the world. Nations’ fortunes rise and fall, and there will always be people predicting catastrophe just around the corner. But it’s never smart to bet against the United States. Every time we’ve faced a challenge, whether war or depression or global competition, Americans have risen to meet it, with hard work and creativity.

  I thought these pessimistic analyses undervalued many of America’s strengths, including our capacity for resilience and reinvention. Our military was by far the most powerful in the world, our economy was still the biggest, our diplomatic influence was unrivaled, our universities set the global standard, and our values of freedom, equality, and opportunity still drew people from everywhere to our shores. When we needed to solve a problem anywhere in the world, we could call on dozens of friends and allies.

  I believed that what happened to America was still largely up to Americans, as had always been the case. We just needed to sharpen our tools and put them to their best use. But all this talk of decline did underscore the scope of the challenges we faced. It reconfirmed my determination to take a page from Steve Jobs and “think different” about the role of the State Department in the 21st century.

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  Secretaries come and go every few years, but most of the people at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) s
tay far longer. Together those agencies employ about seventy thousand people around the world, the vast majority of whom are career professionals who serve continuously over several administrations. That’s far fewer than the more than 3 million working for the Defense Department, but it’s still a sizable number. When I became Secretary, the career professionals at State and USAID had been facing shrinking budgets and growing demands, and they were eager for leadership that championed the important work they did. I wanted to be that leader. To do so, I would need a senior team that shared my values and was relentlessly focused on getting results.

  I recruited Cheryl Mills to be my Counselor and Chief of Staff. We had become friends when Cheryl served as Deputy Counsel in the White House during the 1990s. She talked fast and thought even faster; her intellect was like a sharp blade, slicing and dicing every problem she encountered. She also had a huge heart, boundless loyalty, rock-solid integrity, and a deep commitment to social justice. After the White House, Cheryl went on to hold distinguished legal and managerial positions in the private sector and at New York University, where she was serving as senior vice president. She told me she would help with my transition to State but did not want to leave NYU for a permanent role in the government. Thankfully, she changed her mind about that.

  She helped me manage “the Building,” which is what everyone at State calls the bureaucracy, and directly oversaw some of my key priorities, including food security, global health policy, LGBT rights, and Haiti. She also acted as my principal liaison to the White House on sensitive matters, including personnel issues. Despite the President’s pledge that I could pick my own team, there were some heated debates early on with his advisors as I tried to recruit the best possible talent.