HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (20 page)

Shortly before five o’clock on a mid-June afternoon,
as she walked from an elevator to her awaiting motorcade inside the basement garage at State, Hillary fell and landed squarely on her right elbow. She had been on her way to the White House with Holbrooke, where they were scheduled to talk to the president about a number of issues, including an imminent trip that Melanne Verveer, Hillary’s old chief of staff turned new ambassador for women’s issues at State, was planning to take to Afghanistan.
The pain was so unbearable and excruciating that Hillary lay on the basement floor, wincing. Struggling to get back up, she asked Holbrooke to continue on to the White House and attend the meeting without her. “That’s an order,” Holbrooke recalled her telling him.

While Holbrooke would go on to meet with Obama, Hillary, her elbow throbbing, made her way back up to her seventh-floor office. She left a short time later for George Washington University Hospital, just down the street, where she underwent treatment for a fracture to her elbow. Later that evening, at around ten, now surrounded by Bill and Chelsea, who had flown into Washington immediately to be by her side, she fielded a check-up call from Obama.

Doctors told her that she would need surgery in the coming days, and Hillary—who rarely if ever took a sick day—holed up at her Embassy Row home. Unable to ever sit still, aides say, she spent her time reading briefing papers and making calls. During one briefing after the fall, State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley quipped that Hillary was figuring out “how well you can text with one arm in a sling.”

The joke hinted that she was fit to be tied. Hillary knows one gear: overdrive. That had been a source of concern to her friends early in her time at State, who saw that the nonstop international travel, late-night briefing-book readings, and lack of exercise were already taking more of a toll on her than had past jobs. She had never missed a step in two decades of high-profile public service in Washington, but she admitted privately that she was running herself into the ground.

At a 2009 event for Vital Voices, Hillary ran into Mo Elleithee, a traveling press aide from her 2008 campaign, backstage. “How are you liking the gig?” he asked.

Hillary smiled and paused. “I love it,” she said. “I absolutely love it. The work is great.”

Then she paused again.

“But I am working so much harder now than I ever have in my entire life.”

The remark was striking to Elleithee, who had watched her slog
through a brutal primary campaign, moving at a dizzying speed and putting in “110 percent” without complaint.

Obama noticed, too. At a cabinet meeting, he decided to make an example of Hillary. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, he told her and the rest of his top advisers. “Hillary was pushing herself too far or too hard,” said one cabinet member, “and he basically said that she needed to maintain her stamina and her health, and he wanted to make sure everyone did the same.” Now the fall was going to set her back. Before undergoing
a two-hour early morning surgery a couple of days after her spill, Hillary was forced to scrap her public schedule, including an event for World Refugee Day that she had been set to attend alongside actress Angelina Jolie.

The fall came at an awkward time for Hillary. She didn’t just lose her footing literally—she lost it figuratively, too. She had to cancel an upcoming trip to Greece and Italy, where she had planned to meet counterparts in the Group of Eight to discuss Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Iran.
She also missed out on Obama’s visit to Russia, where he and President Dmitri Medvedev negotiated a joint statement in support of continuing efforts to fight terrorism and drug trafficking in Afghanistan, creating a new START nuclear-nonproliferation treaty, and preventing North Korea and Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

The broken elbow became a metaphor for a gathering narrative that the boys in the West Wing were shoving her out of the foreign policy picture. It was clear that she still had a long way to go to prove herself to some of the folks in the White House, and the ongoing tension between Hillary’s team and Obama’s complicated her efforts to rebuild the State Department, the United States’ image abroad, and her own reputation at home, because she was not regarded publicly as the central player on Obama’s team.

The week after her fall, Ben Smith of
Politico
began working on a story headlined “Hillary Clinton Toils in the Shadows.” The thrust of the article was that her grind-it-out style and staff-level fights with the White House had kept her on the back burner. As an example of her limited influence, Smith planned to single out Denis
McDonough’s victory over Cheryl Mills in the fight over who had the power to appoint ambassadors. Reines reached out to a new friend on the White House team, Tommy Vietor, for help in tamping down the story. Vietor, responding to Reines’s request, arranged interviews for Smith with McDonough and Tom Donilon, the president’s deputy national security adviser. McDonough told Smith that a report of him going “mano a mano” with Mills was “not accurate” and that “one of the many blessings of this job has been working with and getting to know Cheryl.”

Smith didn’t buy it, personally, but dutifully reported the quotes. The White House and State had worked hard enough to dilute the story that for a few weeks other major news outlets declined to follow his smart lead. By the time Obama negotiated with Russian leaders in Moscow in early July, though, it became hard to deny the obvious contrast that Hillary was on the sidelines in a sling.

Her support network reacted as if her fall were somehow part of an Obama plan to marginalize her. “It’s time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa,” Tina Brown wrote in a provocative article for the
Daily Beast
on July 13. “You could say that Obama is lucky to have such a great foreign-policy wife. Those who voted for Hillary wonder how long she’ll be content with an office wifehood of the Saudi variety.”

It wasn’t just Hillary’s cheerleading section that saw the White House diminishing her. Reines and Vietor may have delayed a pile-on after Smith’s
Politico
story, but the narrative was taking hold nonetheless. A few days later, timed to Hillary’s first major address to the salon of intellectual elites at the Council on Foreign Relations, the diplomatic correspondents for the Associated Press, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
New York Times
, and the
Washington Post
all wrote stories that cast her as struggling to regain lost influence.

Together the articles painted a secretary of state who chafed at being circumscribed by other powerful forces in the administration, led by Obama himself. One pointed to her special envoys, Holbrooke and Mitchell, as players whose portfolios took her out of the game on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East, as well as Biden’s prominent
role as Obama’s point man on Iraq. Another noted that Hillary’s senior adviser on Iran, Dennis Ross, had just been reassigned to the White House; her pick to head the U.S. Agency for International Development was hamstrung in the White House vetting process; and Obama had selected a big-time contributor to become ambassador to Japan over her choice, smart-power advocate Joseph Nye.

Whether the stories were the result of Hillary supporters’ frustration with the Obama team, a White House campaign to undermine her, or simply careful observation by reporters, private friction between the State Department and the West Wing had sparked into full public view. Within the State Department, some senior-level foreign policy experts strongly believed at the time—and still do, years later—that Obama’s White House aides were a bunch of piker neophytes whose desire to keep a tight leash on foreign policy wasn’t nearly as limited as their real-world experience. “These are not your Kissingers or Brzezinskis,” one still-miffed former State Department official said.

In turn, many of the White House aides saw the Clinton network as part of a bipartisan Washington foreign policy establishment that kept getting it wrong, particularly in backing George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Some of the exhibits in the case of Hillary’s diminished influence were misguided, while others were more convincing. For example, Ross’s move to the White House staff ultimately served as an end run around Mitchell, who resigned in disgust because he had been effectively boxed out of Middle East negotiations.

But the notion that the special envoys were a challenge to Hillary’s power was off base. They had been her idea, she had picked them, and she continued to believe that the strategy of giving high-profile portfolios to the likes of Holbrooke, Mitchell, and others strengthened her hand. Reporters also missed the nuance between a “special envoy,” the title given to Holbrooke and Mitchell, and a “special adviser,” which was Ross’s role at State. The envoys were expected to get into the muck of diplomacy and reported both to Hillary and Obama. Ross was basically Hillary’s top counselor on Iran.

Moreover, the president always has more power than the secretary of state in setting foreign policy—and in most cases, so do his White House aides. It is a rare secretary of state—Henry Kissinger—who essentially runs foreign policy. Still, in this case, the gap between the story line and the reality threatened to damage the administration’s efforts all around. Hillary’s close associates say she is particularly well attuned to the effect that perception has on power, and halfway through her first year, the growing perception in Washington was that she didn’t have much power. That was a dangerous counternarrative for a diplomat who relied to some extent on her celebrity—a status conferred by public perception—to do her job.

If the rest of the world were to think she had little or no influence with Obama, her star wouldn’t shine as brightly when she reached out to foreign counterparts. The same was true at home, where she wouldn’t have as much influence with colleagues in government if they perceived her to be weak. It might not have been apparent to everyone on Obama’s staff, but Hillary’s stature was important to the execution of the president’s foreign policy. Some of the White House message men understood that dynamic, which helps explain why they put the president’s top foreign policy aides on the record with
Politico
. “Once we’re all in government together,” said one White House official, “a story that is negative on Hillary is bad for the White House.”

Hillary and Obama may have made an odd couple, but what Tina Brown didn’t pick up on or didn’t write—and what the White House aides might have lost sight of at times—was that Obama was better off with an empowered Clinton at his side. She provided a tremendous amount of political cover for him, and her successes were his successes. Her public blessings on his policy, which she conveyed without reservation, conferred added gravitas to his views. If she split from him on policy—or resigned—a good bit of his own party would second-guess every decision he made on the international stage. She was the rare Cabinet secretary with her own substantial national political following.

Six months in, it wasn’t just Hillary who was hearing questions about her influence. Obama, too, was learning that a bar set high is hard to clear. He had promised other countries during his inaugural address that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” But even with the groundwork being laid for a new START treaty, there had been no breakthrough in the first half of 2009.

Huma later confided to Wendy Sherman that the incoming fire had been more than Hillary’s staff had anticipated. “You never told us how relentless it was,” Huma said.

“Yes, I did,” Sherman replied. “But you didn’t believe me.”

Sherman’s point about handling the barrage of daily crises was so poignant because Hillary didn’t have the luxury of choosing in which order she built her influence, promoted her agenda, and responded to challenges thrown at her from the White House and the world. And while other officials are required to pull off similar balancing acts—the president and the defense secretary, among them—secretary of state is high on the list of tightrope performers. Even as the media portrayed Hillary as a secondary player on Obama’s national security team in those first six months, she continued to gather capital behind the scenes, not just within the administration but, importantly, within the State Department.

Any good politician knows that local politics are as important as geopolitics, and Hillary immersed herself in the issues that affected both the foreign service and the civil service, from setting long-term strategies to empower diplomats abroad, to fixing small quality-of-life problems that annoyed the folks at the department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters.

She had walked into the State Department with a reputation for running a high-drama operation in which loyalty was rewarded over competence. The fact that Obama had given her nearly free rein to choose political appointees threatened to exacerbate fears that she would ignore the permanent structure of the department. Her unprecedented control over political jobs made it hard for her
to counter the notion—and the reality—that most decisions would be made by an inner circle of longtime advisers whose ranks were almost impossible to crack. Those appointees, who generally came in and left with the secretary, were layered on top of the foreign service and civil service and given both formal and informal power within the bureaucracy.

In every agency, there’s tension between the relatively small political set, which holds outsize influence with the secretary, and the much larger career staff. That natural clash between the two classes, combined with the dysfunction of Hillary’s campaign, was cause for concern at the department, even among the small group of political appointees who didn’t come from Hillary’s own circle. “If you didn’t work on the campaign, it was pretty clear where you stood,” said one appointee who was outside Hillary’s circle. “
Game Change
had come to the State Department.”

That’s why Hillary’s emphasis on daily-life issues held a symbolic power as forceful as the substantive changes she made. She had to win “the building”—to get the career State Department folks on her side—and to do that, she knew it was smart to focus on the little things that made their lives better. If she was going to rebuild State’s influence in the federal government and America’s reputation abroad, she needed to invest in her people so that they would trust her and follow her. “She was clearly making a very authentic and really real effort in a very difficult circumstance because it’s a huge bureaucracy, and it’s very complicated to reach out to people and be part of the family,” said one midlevel State official.