HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (12 page)

Hillary already had begun to scout the talent she was inheriting. Following the tradition for incoming secretaries, she
and her team worked out of a transition space on the ground floor, where current State officials could visit her rather than risk the awkwardness of the outgoing secretary’s successor wandering around executive offices. She brought Sullivan with her to a December 9 orientation visit there, where she met with Bill Burns and Pat Kennedy, among others.

Burns, the undersecretary for political affairs, was the highest-ranking foreign service officer, and he gave her the first briefing. An expert on the Middle East and Russia, where he had served as an ambassador during the Bush administration, Burns had white whiskers that stood out in the decidedly clean-shaven foreign service. Using notes scribbled on a three-by-five card, he gave Hillary a two-hour tour of world affairs and found himself impressed. She reminded him of former secretary of state James Baker in terms of her preparation and the grasp she already had of the material he covered. Mostly Burns hoped to help connect dots for her among various parts of the world and emphasize the importance of prioritizing in a job in which new crises hit every day.

In addition to foreign policy, Hillary pressed Burns about the institution and its people—a line of inquiry that demonstrated her political savvy. “It’s a group of people both in the foreign service and the civil service who have a lot of energy and a lot of experience,” he told her. “A little bit of attention goes a long way in terms of reaching out to people and doing an early town hall and going around to meet with more junior officers and things like that.” He would come to be pleasantly surprised by the degree to which she not only followed the advice but sustained her effort to win hearts and minds in the building.

Hillary was impressed with Burns, too. “I gotta keep this guy,” she told Sullivan.

The same went for Pat Kennedy, the undersecretary for management, whose penchant for micromanagement and bureaucratic maneuvering made him one of the most powerful figures in the foreign service. If a State Department employee wanted a BlackBerry or transfer papers for an assignment on the National Security Staff,
Kennedy had to sign off on it. Often his management style infuriated subordinates, but everyone needed something from Kennedy, and he had doled out a lot of favors over the years. Hillary remembered Kennedy from her husband’s administration. By keeping Burns and Kennedy, respectively the most beloved and the most parochial institutions within the institution, Hillary sent a message to the career staff at the State Department that their views would be taken into account, even as she appointed a remarkably insular and loyal team of personal and political aides to exert power behind the scenes.

While Hillary was building her team and getting ready for her Senate confirmation hearing, Bill was reorganizing his life to accommodate hers. Doug Band helped negotiate a five-page memorandum of understanding between Bill and Obama’s transition team that
limited the former president’s international activities. Dated December 12 and signed four days later by longtime Clinton lawyer Bruce Lindsey and Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, the document dictated that Bill would publish the names of donors to the Clinton Foundation, separate the Clinton Global Initiative from the foundation, remove himself from an official fiduciary role in CGI, stop soliciting money for CGI, and prohibit CGI from accepting money from foreign governments during his wife’s tenure at State. In addition, the White House and State Department would have to review his speaking schedule. Some Clinton aides chafed at the standards to which the former first couple were being held, feeling that they had been forced to go above and beyond the bar that would have been set for anyone else.

In the days before her confirmation hearing, Hillary met with vice president–elect Joe Biden, the former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to get his advice, and she made sure she spoke to
every living secretary of state, from Henry Kissinger to Condi Rice. When rumors had first surfaced that Obama might pick Clinton, some in Rice’s inner circle wrote them off, but Rice herself intuitively knew it was true. She placed a congratulatory call to Hillary as soon as the official announcement of her selection was made. After eight years as national security adviser and secretary of
state, Rice was eager to hand over the playbook to her successor and get back to academic life at Stanford. She reached Hillary in New York and
issued an invitation to a private dinner in one of the most famous of all of Washington’s political landmarks, the Watergate.

Hillary knew the confirmation process had much less to do with her public profile than with her ability to connect with her old colleagues on a personal level. She made sure to touch base with each member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a banal ringkissing exercise that was valuable in winning votes and softening any potential opposition. In a sign of respect—and because it had far greater concern about other nominees—the White House largely left Hillary alone to run her own confirmation effort, though Obama national security advisers Ben Rhodes and Denis McDonough attended her last prep session.

“The first thing you have to do are these courtesy meetings where you suck up and you call the senators and you say, ‘Can I come to your office so you can lecture me on foreign policy and the prerogatives of the Senate for forty-five minutes?’ And you have a lot of people who say, ‘I’m above that. I know these senators individually,’ ” one White House official involved in confirmations said of a common pitfall. “She was absolutely charming on that front. She handled it like a complete pro.… I think that she did everything right so early on that we were like, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ We were tracking it, but we weren’t going to go office to office with her as we would with other cabinet secretary nominees.”

In the end, Clinton, who aides said was entering a phase marked by the “reemergence of the nonpolitical Hillary,” needed only to persuade her colleagues that she was qualified and competent in a Foreign Relations Committee hearing. While it wasn’t expected to be as grueling as the firing line that awaited attorney general–designate Eric Holder, she spent the better part of several weeks huddled with close aides to prepare for the big moment in the Senate spotlight. She had two main objectives, one Clinton insider said. “One is how to frame the message of what kind of secretary of state you’re going to be and how you’re going to tackle the problems. And then there
was how to deal with the Q and As. What sort of tough questions that would come up about money and the foundation.”

No one can predict the future, and promises in Washington have a way of vanishing into the humid air, but to a remarkable degree, throughout her tenure at State, Hillary would stick to the philosophy and agenda she outlined in her confirmation hearing. Whether that’s a sign of a sound strategy or stubbornness, the continuity is undeniable.

In her opening remarks, with Chelsea sitting dutifully behind her and Bill watching at home with Hillary’s mother, Clinton laid out the framework for Obama’s foreign policy approach. Rather than creating an Obama Doctrine, he would be nondoctrinaire in his dealings with foreign powers, she said. “The president-elect and I believe that foreign policy must be based on a marriage of principles and pragmatism, not rigid ideology,” she said. “I believe that American leadership has been wanting but is still wanted. We must use what has been called ‘smart power,’ the full range of tools at our disposal—diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural—picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be
the vanguard of our foreign policy.”

She also laid out the theory of the case for integrating diplomacy with military power and development, particularly in the most dangerous parts of the world. In particular, she said, it was imperative that the United States work to better the lives of Pakistanis and Afghans to help lay the groundwork for rooting out Al Qaeda and the Taliban. She toured the globe rhetorically, enunciating how the president would approach relations with Russia, China, Japan, African nations, and old European allies.

Hidden in her remarks was a hint of the emphasis that she would put on the State Department understanding and affecting actions by nonstate actors—terrorist organizations, political movements, and social groups—that presented new partnership opportunities and potential calamities. By the time “globalization” became a catchword, she said, “we were already living in a profoundly interdependent world in which old rules and boundaries no longer held fast—a world
in which both
the promise and the peril of the twenty-first century could not be contained by national borders or vast distances.”

For the question-and-answer period, which might be hostile, her team had had to anticipate which senators would be antagonists and decide how she would respond to a variety of questions both about foreign policy and about Bill’s international dealings. This last point was the X factor for Hillary’s prep team, though there were other messy kinks to work out, too. They had to square her hawkish worldview with Obama’s more nuanced policy prescriptions. “
She can’t show up the president. She can’t appear like she’s trying to formulate her own foreign policy,” one aide told
Politico
at the time. The
New York Times
editorial page, never fond of Hillary in any of her roles, stoked the fires of doubt on the Sunday before her hearing. While expressing support for her confirmation, the
Times
begged the committee to examine “the awkward intersection between Mrs. Clinton’s new post and the charitable and business activities of her husband.”

She fielded six hours of mostly cordial questions on tough foreign policy matters, from Israel to Iran. “I don’t get up every morning thinking only about the threats and dangers we face,” Clinton told the committee. “In spite of all the adversity and complexity, there are so many opportunities for America out there.” The line sounded like pure Rice, who famously noted that the Chinese word for
crisis
consists of the characters that mean “danger” and “opportunity.” David Vitter, the Louisiana Republican best known as a client of the D.C. Madam, accused Bill of presenting a “
multimillion-dollar minefield of conflicts of interest” and said he wouldn’t vote for that. In the end, Vitter stood alone. The committee voted 16–1 to recommend Senate confirmation of her nomination, leaving just a perfunctory floor vote between Hillary and the Cabinet Room at the White House.

Though she prepared assiduously, there could have been little doubt in Clinton’s mind that she would sail through the process. Less than a week before she was confirmed, an emotional private party was held for her one evening in the LBJ Room in the Capitol, where senators had their weekly policy lunches, just steps from the
Senate floor. A teary-eyed Clinton worked the room, hugging and kissing her colleagues, smiling for pictures, and thanking them for their camaraderie and support, reminding them that although she was leaving, she would be “just around the corner” in Foggy Bottom.

In a brief speech, once again with Chelsea at her side, Clinton told her colleagues that serving in the Senate “has been the greatest experience of my life” and that leaving them was “like leaving family.”

Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had quietly thrown his support behind Obama and then deflected other senators’ requests that Hillary be given an outsize role in the Senate, choked up as he addressed the crowd, his famously soft-spoken, hushed voice quavering. “Parting is such sweet sorrow, I have such sweet memories of you,” said Reid, his insincerity evident to insiders. “I feel like crying.”

Clinton’s eyes welled, more because she was leaving her home of eight years than as a response to Reid, and she grew increasingly emotional. “
This is not goodbye,” she said. “This is just a wave, Harry.… We’re going to be in each other’s hearts and minds.”

If Clinton was popular in her own caucus, she was also well regarded across the aisle. Republican senators Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, Bob Corker, Olympia Snowe, Johnny Isakson, and John McCain showed up to honor her and her eight years in the upper chamber. And as her past collided with her future, she was joined at the reception by members of the Obama team—Rahm Emanuel, who had worked in her husband’s administration and was Obama’s new chief of staff; John Podesta; and her husband’s final treasury secretary turned Obama economic adviser, Larry Summers. One after another, Hillary’s colleagues shared stories and toasted her future. Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from New York, said he had “complete confidence” in the soon-to-be top diplomat, predicting that she would be “the best secretary of state this country has ever known.” It was an easy time for Schumer to be gracious. He chased cameras with the same gusto that cameramen chased Hillary; now he would be the top dog in the New York delegation again.

Clinton smiled at her colleague but soon struck a more businesslike tone, saying her goal was to create “a real partnership between the State Department and the Congress.”

“Let’s go out and make the future better than it is,” she said. It was typical Hillary: forward-looking, positive, and a bit hokey.

The Friday before she took over at State, Hillary and Huma made a drape-measuring visit to Foggy Bottom. Rice and her aides had been working with Obama’s State Department transition team for weeks, and they wanted to make sure it was a smooth transfer, not a repeat of the enmity that characterized the Clinton-Bush transition eight years earlier. The Bush folks were determined to make sure there wouldn’t be any stories about political aides taking the keys off of computer keyboards or trashing offices. When Hillary and Huma made their way to the seventh floor to meet with Rice that Friday, Rice’s aides took immediate notice of two physical attributes. Hillary was shorter than they had expected, and Huma was strikingly attractive. “That’s Huma,” one Rice aide whispered to another in awe.

Clinton met privately with Rice in the secretary’s inner office, and then Rice walked her out to meet the staff—some of whom would be leaving in the transition and others who would stay on. In all, the visit lasted about ninety minutes and was described, like the ongoing relationship between Clinton and Rice, as cordial and pleasant. In their various interations during the transition, there was one dynamic that the Rice team took as foreboding in dealing with Clinton: Hillary still referred to her loyalists as “us” and to Obama’s people as “them,” according to a source familiar with the situation.