“You got it wrong,” Clinton’s Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, said.
Hillary could only counter, “I got it wrong.” She was humiliated.
Reines tried to blame someone close to Obama, Michael McFaul, who’d go on to serve as President Obama’s ambassador to Russia. Fortunately for Hillary, the press went a little easy on her. “Lost in Translation: A U.S. Gift to Russia,” the New York Times declared, playing down the embarrassing gaffe.4
But once again, it was a sign of Hillary’s being ill-served by people who were too close to her to allow for accurate judgments of their work and character.
“Clinton put a team in place to make sure that her hair was in place, her lighting was good, and she was seen with major leaders,” says a former ambassador.
For the first time in modern State Department history, reporters who covered Hillary recall, the secretary of state had her own spokesman on the government payroll for issues that didn’t concern American foreign policy but only concerned the secretary herself. The crusty Reines would deal with all press questions that related to Hillary Clinton the public figure. Questions concerning politics and her personal life would go through him. He would answer to varying degrees, depending on whether he liked you (which was unlikely, considering his hatred of reporters) or thought you were useful.
The most essential person running Clinton’s political operation was, of course, her choice of chief of staff. All powerful leaders need a loyal alter ego who sits at their right hand, offering sage advice, executing sensitive orders, and managing underlings whose loyalties may or may not lie with their leader. Don Corleone had Tom Hagen. Bill Gates had Steve Ballmer. For Hillary Clinton, the consigliere is Cheryl Mills.
In the battle to turn the tide against Barack Obama’s primary victories, Mills was candidate Clinton’s de facto campaign manager. At Foggy Bottom, she was Secretary Clinton’s chief counsel and chief of staff. And if the Clintons make it back to the White House, Cheryl Mills will be the second most powerful woman in the world. She will be Hillary’s Hagen.
The daughter of a lieutenant colonel, Mills grew up on army bases across Europe, in Belgium and West Germany, and like many in the military, her loyalties run more toward people than toward ideologies. Just two years out of Stanford Law, Mills left her high-paying job at one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms, moved to Little Rock, and joined the transition team planning the opening phases of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The campaign against George Bush and Ross Perot wasn’t even finished, but Clinton led in the polls. Mills was willing to bet on the Clintons, and when victory came, the impressed Clintons were willing to bet on Mills.
The twenty-seven-year-old was appointed associate counsel to the president, and four years later, she became deputy White House counsel. Her most important job was handling the parade of scandals and investigations that culminated in impeachment. Mills’s allies would say she had a talent for protecting the Clintons from out-of-control investigators with political agendas. Her enemies say she was simply good at covering up illegality.
Mills’s approach was to play hardball with enemies, investigators, and inquiring journalists. If there was a way to avoid sharing requested documents, she found it, never backing down or giving up ground in what she treated as a prolonged trench war for the Clintons’ legal and political survival. Everything from her screen saver (“It’s the lioness that hunts . . .”) to the slogan hanging above her desk (“Don’t Go There”) reflected the attitude she brought to her defense of Bill and Hillary Clinton.5
According to a congressional committee, when it began investigating allegations that the administration had used government workers on government time to create a government database of potential donors that was sent to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton reelection campaign—a relatively minor scandal by Clinton standards—Mills withheld documents. Then, when testifying before the committee, her veracity was challenged.
According to the Congressional Record, this matter was referred to the Department of Justice for investigation of possible perjury and obstruction of the investigation. No charges were ever brought against Mills.
Similarly, after a technical glitch allegedly caused the White House to withhold more than 1.8 million emails from investigators, Congress, and outside groups, Mills was asked to look into the problem. She didn’t. In a sharply worded judicial opinion, a federal judge said Mills’s response to news that the White House was in possession of a huge amount of documents it was legally required to disclose was “totally inadequate,” a “critical error,” and “loathsome.”6 (The most notable exception to her instinct for withholding documents occurred when she recommended releasing government records and private communications by Kathleen Willey, in an attempt to discredit the woman who accused Bill Clinton of groping her in the White House.)
From her first day in the White House, Mills demonstrated the quality that had first impressed the Clintons in Little Rock: her loyalty to them. “She is incredibly loyal to the president,” an anonymous White House aide told a reporter. “If something’s on the other side of a brick wall and the Clintons need it, she’ll find a way to get to it: over, around, or through.” After the House of Representatives impeached Clinton, Mills had a public outlet for her loyalty to the president. On the second day of presentations by Clinton’s lawyers, Mills spoke in Clinton’s defense. With her proud parents looking down from the Senate gallery—the thirty-three-year-old was only the third or fourth African American in history to speak from the Senate floor—Mills said she was “very proud to have had the opportunity to serve our country and this president.” In response to accusations that Clinton lied to thwart Paula Jones’s civil rights case, Mills assured the Senate that Bill Clinton loved civil rights. His “grandfather owned a store” that “catered primarily to African Americans,” and “the president has taken his grandfather’s teachings to heart.” After all, he had hired Cheryl Mills: “I stand here before you today because others before me decided to take a stand,” and “I stand here before you today because President Bill Clinton believed I could stand here for him.”
Her peroration capped a speech that North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan called “one of the most remarkable that I’ve heard in the Senate or in my political career.”7 Summing up the case for Bill Clinton, she repeated the phrase “I am not worried” four times—building to her punch line: “I am not worried about civil rights because this president’s record on civil rights, on women’s rights—on all of our rights—is unimpeachable.” What any of that had to do with lying under oath and obstructing justice was irrelevant—Mills and the rest of the Clinton team had successfully helped to “OJ” the Clinton impeachment trial. It was somehow about race.
After her virtuoso performance—and Bill Clinton’s acquittal—Mills could have had almost any legal job in Washington. The president even offered her the position of White House counsel. But Mills was burned out. She moved to New York in 1999 to become a vice president at Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Media, and after two years, she took a job as general counsel at New York University—leaving far behind her more than six years of subpoenas, congressional investigations, independent counsels, and investigative reporters. She may have been one of the few lawyers in history who moved to Manhattan for a taste of tranquility.
Mills’s quiet life away from politics lasted for eight years—until Hillary Clinton announced her campaign for the presidency. Mills came on board as a counselor, and when Hillary fired her campaign manager after a string of primary defeats, the trusted, combative, and indefatigable Mills took the reins de facto. “Sometimes on campaigns,” said traveling press secretary Jay Carson to a reporter, “you can end up in a situation where there’s not a clear single person, no clear leader, no clear power center. When Cheryl is in charge, that’s never a problem.”8
Others were not only impressed but also terrified of her. “I really like Cheryl,” says an aide who worked with her on the 200
8 campaign. “She’d kill me if she knew I were talking to you.” The aide adds, “I never, ever saw the, like, the crazy Cheryl moments that I’ve heard about. But I’ve definitely heard about them. I know they exist.”
After Hillary Clinton’s defeat and move from the Senate to the State Department, Mills followed her to Foggy Bottom, where she was an efficient, devoted, and occasionally notorious guardian of all things Hillary Clinton. Clinton loyalists were quick to praise her. “Cheryl Mills ran that building extremely well,” says Vali Nasr.
Among those in the building she ran so well were the two people in the positions Congress created in 2000 when it split in two the normally administrative job of deputy secretary of state, the number-two position at the department. Clinton filled one of those jobs with a typical Foreign Service type. The other position went to a seasoned political operative, Tom Nides, who protected Hillary’s political future.
“Tom [Nides] was just a big protector of Secretary Clinton,” says one former State Department official who also served in the Bush administration. With a wife working as a senior executive at ABC News (she’d later move to CNN), Nides also had excellent ties to the mainstream media.
Together Nides and Mills did the department’s dirty work, while Clinton maintained a statesmanlike distance as she worked to enhance her image. (One insider predicted in fact that Nides would get the coveted White House chief of staff job if Hillary won in 2016—not Mills.)
“They would decide what would go in to Secretary Clinton and what they would secretly get her to sign off on, but not make any public announcements on, so that she was protected in the decision-making process,” says one State Department employee. “She needed to be able to officially stay away from the issues, so that she could deny that she knew anything” if something went wrong.
“She was able to kind of stay above it,” says an official, “and as the policy began to really fail, she stayed away from it.”
Mrs. Clinton’s celebrity was the one clear advantage she brought to the job and the Obama administration. She was far better known going into the office of secretary of state than any of her predecessors—from Henry Kissinger to Colin Powell to Condoleezza Rice. And this helped put a pleasing public face on the administration around the world.
It also helped her attract unlikely admirers, like Secretary of Defense Gates, who seemed to beam around Hillary whenever they were in the same room. One Gates aide described him as coming across like a groupie with a rock star. They allied together on many issues against the Obama NSC, even if they usually lost.
No doubt with an eye to avoiding a repeat of 2008, she placed a special focus on strengthening relations with members of Congress—the Democrats she’d need for endorsements and the Republicans who might run against her. One Republican senator who once had an acrimonious relationship with the Clintons remembers the secretary of state being extremely receptive to his ideas—and willing to listen whenever he had thoughts he wanted to share with her.
One of her potential challengers in 2016, Congressman Paul Ryan, also counts himself as a Hillary fan, having worked with her during her State Department tenure. “I think we both respect each other as, you know, talented—she’s a talented leader in her party,” he tells me in an interview. “And so she has my respect and I get the feeling that Hillary’s mutual.”
Keenly aware of the Senate’s massive egos, Clinton had a reputation for returning calls quickly, following up on congressional requests, and giving the impression of personal attentiveness to even their most mundane, even kooky, ideas.
One senator called her up to share some ideas about the nature of Islam. Hillary returned his phone call almost instantly. “My suggestion was that we needed to look for forums by which we can gather Islamic leaders, and then we ask simple questions like, ‘Well, do you believe a Christian should be given equal rights in Saudi Arabia?’ And when these ‘Islamic leaders’ publicly admit not to believing in equal rights for Christians and Muslims and Jews, then we could have a public airing of these differences,” he explains.
The senator compared his plan to the way he believed segregation was ended in America. “When CBS News put the microphone to the preacher’s face and said, ‘Can a black person come to your church?’ It’s all right not to have any and not to do it for a hundred years, but are you going to say on TV he can’t come to my church because of the color of his skin? I’m thinking that these guys are getting away with saying all kinds of things in their mosque, and all this hateful stuff, and you get them in public and ask them some simple questions they’re going to have a hard time.”
After a rather lengthy conversation with the senator, Hillary told him, “Well, I’ll think about it.” The senator had voted to convict her husband on both articles of impeachment and had been a fierce opponent of her legislative initiatives. But he felt like he’d been listened to, which is all most members of Congress want anyway. By the time Hillary left Foggy Bottom, he felt affection and respect for her.
The issue her aides try to emphasize the most—suggesting what they might consider Hillary’s most impressive accomplishment—is women’s rights, which she brought up, famously, when in the Democratic Republic of the Congo toward the beginning of her tenure. She was asked (according to the translator on the scene at the time), “What does Mr. Clinton think, through the mouth of Mrs. Clinton?”
She ripped the translating device from her ear. “Wait, you want me to tell you what my husband thinks?” shouted an indignant Hillary, dressed in a purple pantsuit with a matching purple shirt. “My husband is not the secretary of state, I am. So, you ask my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I’m not going to be channeling my husband.”
The question was about Chinese contracts in the Congo, but it mattered little.
Back stateside, video of the event, which also featured former basketball star Dikembe Mutombo, went viral.9 The tabloids mocked Hillary, however. “Hill: I Wear the Pants,” read the New York Post. “Hey, I’m the Boss, Not Bill,” is what the New York Daily News went with.
It was a theme Hillary tried to bring to the rest of the world—and usually with a bit more forethought and a bit more calm. “Women’s equality is not just a moral issue, it’s not just a humanitarian issue, it is not just a fairness issue,” Hillary said at a conference. “It is a security issue, it is a prosperity issue, and it is a peace issue . . . it’s in the vital interests of the United States of America.” These were lines that were widely quoted—and ones, it’s safe to assume, that she wants defining her tenure as America’s top diplomat.
It would echo what she said in China in 1995. “It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights,” the then first lady said at a women’s conference.10 “It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small . . . when thousands of women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.” Hillary’s good friend Melanne Verveer would credit that speech for “help[ing] spark a movement around the world for women’s progress.”11
It was a powerful message in 1995—and when she returned as secretary of state, she claimed progress. “I think we have made an enormous amount of progress, and we have women able to chart their own lives much more than ever existed in human history. But there are external barriers and internal barriers. Externally, there are still many places where education is not available, health care is not available, jobs are not available, training, credit, you know, just the basics of being able to construct your own approach to your life,” Hillary would say at a meeting with women leaders in Beijing in May 2010.12
“And then, internally, each woman has to make the right balance in her life, and we have to respect the decisions that women make, because we’re all so different. But there are still some attitudes in the minds o
f men and women that keep it very hard for women to feel like they are achieving and being able to get supported in their choice.”
She’d also make an effort to talk up gay rights. In a video released by the State Department, Hillary made a domestic plea: “Like millions of Americans, I was terribly saddened to learn of the recent suicides of several teenagers across our country after being bullied because they were gay or because people thought they were gay,” Hillary said as she stared into the camera. “Just think of the progress made by women just during my lifetime, by women, or ethnic, racial and religious minorities over the course of our history—and by gays and lesbians, many of whom are now free to live their lives openly and proudly. Here at the State Department, I am grateful every day for the work of our LGBT employees who are serving the United States as foreign service officers and civil servants here and around the world. It wasn’t long ago that these men and women would not have been able to serve openly, but today they can—because it has gotten better. And it will get better for you.”13
It was odd only in that it was a rare entry into American domestic politics. Not something a secretary of state normally does, but it demonstrated how important Hillary finds the issue. She’d talk it up abroad, too, perhaps becoming the first secretary of state to embrace gay rights as such an important issue to American foreign policy.
These are all issues she’ll tout as defining moments of her tenure. And although there aren’t clear victories showing progress—it’s hard to claim victory on women’s rights or gay rights—it’s helped build the foundations for a presidential run. She’ll say that electing her will ensure that the fight for these issues continues.
Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Page 21