THE “DAMN EMAILS”
Like the phases of grief, those on the receiving end of a serious political scandal pass through several stages: confusion, denial, obfuscation, arrogance, and at long last, contrition.
As the 55,000 pages of emails came to light, Clinton tried an initial strategy of lighthearted jokes and dismissiveness. She was aided by content that showed her struggling to operate a secure fax machine and searching for emoticons on her new BlackBerry, a good way to humanize a woman to all those who have ever struggled with a new piece of technology. Other emails are inane—her search for the show Homeland, reactions to how she arranged her hair, and enthusiastic comments about her appearance from sycophantic staff.
But for her critics, her handling of the situation revealed a tone deafness to an issue on which she is increasingly vulnerable—the idea of being above the rules. Her explanations that it was “more convenient” and that carrying two phones made her handbag too heavy were unpersuasive.
Clinton staffers contributed to the problem in several ways: when getting wind of a possible investigation, they deleted emails deemed to be “personal,” a unilateral decision that later had to be walked back, causing Clinton further embarrassment. They then sent the emails to the State Department as printed hard copies, which meant the department spent several months retyping the messages electronically, prolonging a news story that should have been put to rest quickly.
The State Department’s decision to release the emails as they were read and classified on a monthly basis gave the story very long legs. The media seized on each new release looking for revelations, leading in turn to new headlines and new questions which, to the annoyance of Clinton and her supporters, distracted the public from her presidential campaign.
For some, the most concerning aspect was her inability to deal with the problem and put it behind her. Six months into the scandal Democratic elected officials, many of them Clinton supporters, were willing to go on the record, exasperated that she had allowed the situation to run on and on.6 Clinton’s supporters turned their focus on the State Department, overwhelmed by flurries of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from media and watchdog organizations. Senior department officials, under pressure from federal judges to speed up the process, explained that while they hoped to hire fifty more staffers to handle the volume, they had made offers to only a few dozen applicants, and only three had started working by mid-October.7 The department had fallen behind by the end of 2015, further prolonging the story.
Clinton got help from an unexpected quarter at the October 2015 Democratic presidential debate when rival Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), with evident exasperation, said, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!” The line got laughs and applause, but not everyone was happy.
Defenders point out ambiguities in the laws at the time—detractors would call them loopholes. Others say the problem is symptomatic of big data and that the entire U.S. government is drowning under the weight of emails that must be archived for the public record. The State Department alone produces 2 billion emails a year. Agencies are required to classify the information, which inevitably leads to the painstaking job of declassifying it, a job requiring reading, analysis, substantive knowledge, and subjective judgment—all of which takes time and money.8
As in many aspects of Clinton’s tenure, it is the small things that matter. The emails revealed the enormous power and close relationships she has with a handful of carefully selected staff. The emails revealed that two of them, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, argued over a staffing change in Clinton’s protective detail. This is a telling exchange. Career officers follow a strict “needs of the service” assignment policy that, as was discussed in chapter 8, sends them to some of the toughest places in the world, occasionally unaccompanied by family. The “needs of the service” imperative is the most frequently heard phrase for officers and supervisors alike come transfer season. But this exchange between Abedin and Mills showed that the needs of Clinton threatened to trump the needs of the service.
Abedin was upset that a trusted security agent was about to be transferred, and she argued that he had given them wider leeway—an unsubtle indication that rules don’t apply. “[Redacted] just filled me in on your conversations. I would have appreciated a chance to discuss this before it was finalized,” Abedin wrote Mills. The person, she continued, “has been a HUGE asset protecting our interests and balancing usss [U.S. Secret Service] politics. He has gone above and beyond in every way and anyone more stringent will make our life and travel more complicated. Starting from scratch with someone else is going to be challenging.”
Protective details are all about being stringent—even when it makes life and travel more complicated. That’s their job. Starting from scratch is a normal part of the foreign service, where tours are seldom longer than two or three years.
Mills took the high road stating that the transfer would offer “an opportunity for career growth and development for [redacted] something I know you support . . . We should embrace and reward that, even when it means we have to make new adjustments . . . This is rotation time and while I am sure if asked he would stay, he would miss the chance to manage the security at the [redacted].” 9
In such trivia lie larger truths. In this instance at least, the emails support the notion that in the Clinton State Department expedience sometimes prevailed over following the rules.
WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS
Clinton owns the women’s rights issue like no one else in Washington. At a watershed speech at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, she had told the world that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights,” and she has never looked back. “The message of Beijing and the lifetime of work it represented had become so much a part of my identity it was practically written into my DNA,” she wrote in her memoirs.10
Following the Beijing speech, she, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and then-ambassador Swanee Hunt laid the groundwork in Vienna in 1997 for an organization to promote the empowerment of women. The Vital Voices Democracy Initiative was launched with funds from the U.S. government, along with the United Nations, the European Union, the Nordic Council of Ministers, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank. By 2000, the organization had evolved into the Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, the purpose of which is to “identify, invest in and bring visibility to extraordinary women around the world by unleashing their leadership potential to transform lives and accelerate peace and prosperity in their communities.” 11
No one argues with the goals of Vital Voices. Embassy officers have seen firsthand and reported on how women in many parts of the world face violence, abuse, and stultifying poverty; are denied education and the tools of economic betterment such as lines of credit and bank accounts; and are shut out of participation in government. Apart from being unfair, holding women back holds societies back.
The problem, at least in the early years, was that a very American message about enabling women to become “agents of change” was entangled with cultural hubris. The United States has a history of missteps in this field. As we saw in the discussion on anti-Americanism, Bush administration under secretary Karen Hughes’s gaffes to all-female audiences in Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia were heavily reported, as was her audiences’ anger at her presumptuous characterization of their lives. American foreign service officers living overseas were more likely to understand such cultural nuances but were rarely asked their opinion on how to address women’s issues outside the United States. There is no indication that Clinton’s team had any inkling how tricky the initiative might be.
Vital Voices’ privileged pedigree gave it traction with ambassadors and embassies, but it didn’t always translate locally. Cultural differences sometimes contrasted with the very American can-do image the organization promoted.
For example, women in post-Communist countries were suspicious, recalling how the Communist party exploited women’s issues for propaganda purposes. There was sometimes a naive assumption that the goals of Vital Voices were so universal that every woman in every country and society must embrace them.
Vital Voices’ outreach overseas proved awkward. Washington staffers relied heavily on help from embassies to run its seminars, programs, and training sessions. This led to demands made on behalf of well-connected big names in Washington and left local embassy staff scrambling to accommodate them. Training sessions were often funded through already strained embassy public diplomacy budgets and representational funds (earmarked for embassy receptions), diverting resources from other post-designed programs that had been calibrated to address unique local issues, which ranged from Muslim outreach to indigenous rights to environmental protection, among other themes. Vital Voices staffers didn’t always listen to public affairs officers, and their stubborn insistence on doing it their way led to a canned approach, consisting of a reliance on blockbuster conferences but little follow-through. For embassies already straining to staff reporting requirements for human rights, religious freedom, trafficking in persons, and setting up programs for congressional delegations, Vital Voices became just one more Washington-mandated chore.
The big names swept in and swept out, leaving embassies to sweep up. A week after a conference it was hard to see any impact. The organization’s political clout in Washington ensured a virtuous circle of triumphal reporting cables, and embassies found it easier to claim victory than take the fall. There is no analysis, no frank discussion of the organization’s limitations. Of the sixty-some WikiLeaks cables mentioning Vital Voices, the organization frequently comes in for a mention only when a post was asked to enumerate a laundry list of women’s outreach efforts or in debriefings of participants returning from conferences. Everyone is always “energized, empowered, and excited.” Reporting on measurable results is vague. The danger of such perfunctory reporting was that it perpetuated more programs in more countries.
The Vital Voices experience suggests the limits of relying on embassies for advancing agendas. The lack of follow-up with conference participants does not reflect indifference but rather the limitations of embassies already tasked with advocating for so many policies with limited time and resources. As Vital Voices gained experience, it shifted away from embassies and began working directly with local NGOs. Removing the embassy as middleman was probably a good move—allowing Vital Voices an opportunity to invest in sustained contact with women leaders who embraced its goals and could work directly with the organization. No one argues that Vital Voices as it exists today hasn’t benefited tens of thousands of women, but its early days show what can happen when programming in the field is directed by Washington.
Clinton’s use of the State Department as a platform for advancing women’s issues goes back a long way. At one time the women’s agenda was the purview of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, but the first Clinton administration created a new office, the Senior Coordinator for International Women’s Issues, authorized by Congress in 1994. That entity evolved into the current Office of Global Women’s Issues, which ensures that the rights of women and girls are fully integrated into the formulation and conduct of U.S. foreign policy.12
Keeping a focus on women throughout the U.S. government required interagency coordination, so in 1995 President Clinton created the President’s Interagency Council on Women, headed by Hillary Clinton as honorary chair and Madeleine Albright as council chair. The body was initially charged with seeing that gains made at the Beijing conference would be implemented throughout the federal government, and the Council headed U.S. activities around the Beijing Plus Five, a special session of the UN General Assembly to review implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action, a comprehensive document enumerating how women and girls are affected by global issues such as poverty, education, health, violence and armed conflict, economic development, governmental leadership roles, human rights, media, and environment.
The council lasted until 2003, when it was disbanded by President Bush, an indication, perhaps, that the government’s role in global women’s issues is not without controversy. The experience offered Clinton a cautionary tale: presidentially created entities could be dismantled. A decade later she ensured that the position she created for the ambassador-at-large for women’s issues would have better long-term prospects, convincing President Obama to sign a memorandum making it permanent and ensuring that the position reported to the secretary of state. The first appointee, Melanne Verveer, came from the Vital Voices operation and had the access and the profile to make a big splash.
Clinton as secretary of state had no patience for stragglers on women’s issues and insisted on their priority. As she recalled in Hard Choices, “Women’s issues had long been relegated to the margins of U.S. foreign policy and international diplomacy, considered at best a nice thing to work on but hardly a necessity . . . We had to push tradition-bound bureaus and agencies to think differently about the role of women in conflicts and peacemaking, economic and democratic development, public health, and more.” 13 She went on to say:
Even at home in Washington our work on behalf of women was often seen as a parenthetical exercise, somehow separate from the important work of foreign policy. In one Washington Post article about our efforts with women in Afghanistan, an unnamed administration official sniffed, “Gender issues are going to have to take a backseat to other priorities . . . There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.” I have to admit, I got tired of watching otherwise thoughtful people just smile and nod when I brought up the concerns of women and girls.14
An alternative interpretation of the quote that so troubled Clinton might be fatigue and exasperation with Washington’s habit of chasing too many priorities with too few dollars. Single-issue advocacy of the latest policy trend can make those tasked with implementing new directives feel as though they are operating with no overarching strategy. Clinton’s impatience also revealed a lack of political space for nuanced points of view on women’s issues. It should not be heresy to suggest that in some countries at certain moments, women’s issues, vital though they are, might need to take a back seat. Clinton might have done better to consider why the person quoted believed this to be true. She would have heard that cultural complexities—especially in war-torn places like Afghanistan—were getting trampled under the relentless march of multiple Washington directives from multiple agencies.
Several factors combined to suggest a communications problem over women’s issues, and American diplomats were an audience Clinton needed to reach. As one example, at a time when many were still redefining their roles in the age of transformational diplomacy, female foreign service officers were battling low promotion rates and low representation at the highest ranks. Some had been advised to focus on hardcore policy issues such as trade, economics, and arms control and to avoid career-slowing backwaters such as women’s issues. Scores of foreign service women had in some cases put off marriages and pregnancies to be “all in” for the rigors of a job that now featured unaccompanied assignments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, service in countries requiring mefloquine and other antimalarial prophylaxes with side effects, and postings in which the best treatment for any medical complication might be the next flight out. This, too, was part of transformational diplomacy.
A second factor was the knowledge gap. As gender studies have matured, there is an ever-growing body of specialized knowledge, literature, and scholarly thought leaders. Being a woman in an embassy hardly qualified one as an expert on global women’s issues. Few officers had the background to be authoritative advocates, and not every female foreign service officer shares an innate passion for women’s issues.
A third factor was that some American women in the diplomatic corps wer
e uncomfortable working on women’s issues when the United States suffered in comparison to countries with more family-friendly policies. Women in Western Europe have access to paid maternity leave for months and sometimes years, child care is heavily subsidized, and working hours are more family friendly. As one foreign service officer put it, “How am I supposed to advocate for women’s issues when my own country won’t even give me time off for breast-feeding?” That only changed relatively recently with the Affordable Care Act of 2010. For nursing mothers, the State Department headquarters building offered many reminders that diplomacy had long been a male domain. Bathrooms featured outmoded toilets, and for years there was no private place for nursing mothers who wanted to pump breast milk. Overseas, embassies had even fewer facilities.
Finally, there is the definitional problem of what constitutes global women’s issues. Clinton’s tendency to focus on women in the developing world meant she missed (or ignored) conversations in the developed world. In many embassies, women were not talking about honor killings in Pakistan but about Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, Marissa Mayer’s chances of success as CEO of Yahoo, and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s frustration as evinced in her Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” the most-read article in the history of the magazine, and one uniquely relevant to Clinton’s State Department, given Slaughter’s position.
To the Secretary Page 30