HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (21 page)

Just after she took office, Hillary ordered a review of same-sex partner benefits for members of the foreign service, a follow-up to Obama’s direction that federal agencies look at ways to promote equality within their ranks. At best, disparate treatment of same-sex spouses amounted to extra inconveniences in traveling and living overseas for gay and lesbian foreign service officers. At worst, it meant that a State Department employee’s same-sex partner could be left in a war zone during an evacuation in which the federal
government took care of the families of foreign service officers in opposite-sex marriages.

“I view this as an issue of workplace fairness, employee retention, and the safety and effectiveness of our embassy communities worldwide,” Hillary said on February 4, 2009, promising to determine what she had the power to change and to move forward on rewriting policy quickly. In May the
New York Times
reported on an internal memo detailing an emergent new policy for the equal treatment of same-sex partners of foreign service officers. The plan was formalized the following month, when new rights were codified in the State Department’s manual. They included benefits such as medical treatment and housing expenses for same-sex partners and the children of same-sex couples.

Many of Hillary’s new charges were surprised to find just how much thought and energy she put into empowering them. They also learned that they were dealing with a relentless campaigner who never failed to plot or execute a strategy for lack of personal effort. Her travel schedule, of course, became legendary, a function both of her commitment to backing up Obama’s promise of a new American diplomacy, and of a public relations team that made sure the statistics were easy to track. The front page of the State Department website was turned into an interactive living history of her travels, which eventually covered 956,733 miles and 112 countries. Previous secretaries’ aides had kept logs of their whereabouts but not with the zeal of Hillary’s image-conscious PR team. It was an essential part of her narrative as secretary that she outhustled everyone. But within the State Department, both political aides and career officials were far more impressed with her diligence in drilling deep into arcane policy issues.

Dating back to her time in the Senate, Hillary started her day with a large packet of news clips that an aide began gathering at four a.m., in an informal competition with the staffer who did the same job for Bill Clinton. Hillary had been jealous of her husband’s stack of news stories, and she instructed her staff to prepare a similar
briefing each morning. At State, they included major news articles and stories about her husband and daughter.

Her day ended with a massive briefing book, as well as funny cat clips inserted by an aide. Rob Russo, who had sent out her thank-you notes following the 2008 primary, was responsible for making sure the book was in good shape each day. It included her schedule for the following day, memos on each meeting on the agenda, speeches and talking points for public events, and short biographies on people she would be meeting. The tabs upon tabs of information were sent in by staff around the building and compiled by two career officials. Often enough, aides were working on it as late as midnight.

While there’s nothing unusual about a department head or member of Congress taking a briefing book home at night—most do—Hillary’s command of each day’s homework shocked her advisers. “She really read the memos,” said one senior aide. “I worked on her Senate confirmation and also the first set of budget hearings that we had. I’d give her these big three-hundred-page things that I assumed would never be read, at least not the bottom fifty pages. And she’d take them home over the weekend, and on Monday she’d come back with them, page two hundred fifty folded over, highlighted with a note in the margin like ‘This doesn’t make sense’ or ‘Explain this to me.’ ” She gave the same attention to the stacks of personal notes that went out with her signature, often returning drafts with typos circled or small notes to add a recipient’s nickname or fix some other detail.

Hillary’s discipline and attentiveness were two of the ways in which she contrasted with her husband, who is famous for arriving late and multitasking. For those who know both of them, her style is as respectful as his is disrespectful. “Standing at the desk of the president of the United States while you’re briefing him for a major meeting,” Albright said, “and he’s doing a crossword puzzle, and you feel like saying ‘God damn it, listen to me,’ and you never know, and then he’d say everything that you’d briefed him on, so you always knew that he had actually absorbed it. She, being a Wellesley girl, takes notes.”

Even one of the most embarrassing episodes of Hillary’s young life, when she failed the Washington, D.C., bar exam, didn’t appear to result from a lack of discipline. She enrolled in a bar study class with a professor, Joseph Nacrelli, who had a reputation for knowing every nook and cranny of the D.C. test. But in 1973 the exam was in its second year of including a multistate portion that tested more generally on American law rather than just city-specific questions. Hearing the professor lecture on a topic they knew well, some of the students in the class determined that portions of the material he was teaching were wrong. Those students panicked because the bar would test them on subjects they hadn’t taken in law school. So they began to study those subjects independently, in addition to continuing the class, and they passed. It’s hard to know whether Hillary failed because she studied the wrong information—some of those who relied solely on the class made the grade. She was a great student but didn’t have the vision to see the trouble some of her peers identified and adjusted for.

In her first weeks in office, Hillary set in motion a major initiative that spoke to her interest in building the institution and her penchant for preparation and planning, even as it alienated some of her in-house constituents. It was a project that she hoped would modernize the State Department at all levels, enhance its chances of securing big budgets, and ensure that diplomats were seen as the face of America in host countries. She invited several of her top aides to dinner on the eighth floor, where American treasures such as Thomas Jefferson’s desk are housed in a matrix of marble columns, hardwood floors, and balcony that provides a stunning panorama of the city.

As she sat down to eat and plot with Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, policy planning aide Derek Chollet, and Rich Verma, the department’s lobbyist on Capitol Hill, Hillary began to talk about how effectively the Pentagon persuaded Congress each year to fund its massive budget requests, which had grown to more than $650 billion including supplemental spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a member of the Armed Services Committee, she explained,
she had watched how the Pentagon brass had been equipped not just with the power of their special mission to defend the nation but also with planning documents that bolstered their case for funding increases. Every four years the Pentagon developed a report, called the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), that assessed longer-term strategy and priorities, including needs for weapons, personnel, and vehicles. Its basic function was to make sure that there was a directed, if sometimes vaguely stated, national defense strategy. But it also served as a reference point for military leaders who came to Capitol Hill with colorful presentations aimed at getting Congress to keep funding an old weapons system or to put out the seed money for a new one. The new ask could always be shoehorned into a strategy articulated in the last QDR.

But what the QDR gave the Pentagon, more than anything else, was a sense of long-range mission and purpose that integrated the needs of the department with the strategic vision of its civilian leadership. “I don’t know why we don’t do that here,” Hillary told her aides. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

State didn’t “have a big-picture compelling strategic rationale why a given program is not only important in its own right but critical to the bigger-picture vision,” said a government official familiar with the thinking behind Hillary’s push. “It’s not just the document that’s valuable. I think it’s more the process of articulating clear priorities.”

Hillary listened attentively to her advisers’ input, scribbling notes to herself. Then she wrote down the words
Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review
. She already had given a lot of thought to the QDDR by that point—she had discussed it with Jim Steinberg before she was confirmed—and the dinner was just a way of unveiling it to a wider circle of aides.

It turned out to be a long and painful process, nearly two years in the making, and many officials complained bitterly about the extra workload. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Office and the lead official on the QDDR, later wrote a piece for
The Atlantic
about the impossible demands on her time at State, headlined “Why Women Can’t Have It All.” Richard Fontaine,
a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, which was originally cofounded by one of Hillary’s assistant secretaries, noted that “even for those questions the QDDR does answer, implementation will be difficult.” Even Hillary’s top aides declined to sugarcoat the way the QDDR was received. “I assure you people hated it as they were going through it,” one of them said. “But it was a really effective exercise.”

In the end, they had a 242-page blueprint for elevating diplomacy and development as equal partners with military force in the conduct of American foreign policy. The first QDDR’s goals included making ambassadors CEOs for American agencies in foreign countries; bolstering soft-power tools like economic assistance; improving the lives of women and girls around the world; reorganizing the department’s bureaus to better reflect modern challenges; ensuring that diplomats had up-to-date computers and handheld devices; reforming the foreign service exam to bring in sharp new diplomats; increasing diplomats’ direct engagement with the people of their host countries—not just their governments; and using technology such as social media platforms for diplomacy. The entire exercise was aimed at strengthening the institution, even if the medicine tasted bad going down. “The QDDR was a tough process, but it was about getting ‘the building’ right,” said one veteran diplomat. “It was about affirming the work that got done here and trying to organize it in a better way.”

It also reflected Hillary’s modus operandi, for better and worse. She seized on someone else’s idea, devised a plan for emulating it, and powered it through to completion. “She’s not the most creative one, but she has the command of the substance, and she has the command of the strategic direction,” one of her top advisers said. Her strengths were in executing on the good ideas that came to her and applying lessons learned from one problem to resolving another.

Hillary used her strength as a student, as well as her staff, to compensate for not being a fount of innovation. Insatiable for ideas, she solicited them from a wide range of people, and she imported a technique from her days in the Senate that was old hat for longtime Hillarylanders. Laurie Rubiner had been her Senate legislative
director for about two months in 2005 when she was called into Hillary’s office to find a pair of suitcases on two card tables. Inside were hundreds of pages of newspaper and magazine clippings with scribbles in the margins in the handwriting of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Rubiner could have been forgiven for thinking she had walked into the Unabomber’s office. It was an old gambit that Hillary’s previous senior legislative staff had discontinued. But with a new director now running the operation, Hillary renewed the game. Rubiner’s task was to assign clips to all the junior legislative staffers in the office and get them to report back to Hillary on potential courses of action that could be taken to rectify a problem or take advantage of a new way of doing business. The practice spilled over to State, where Jake Sullivan ended up spending long hours going through clips with Hillary on her plane.

Much has been made of the nearly 1 million miles Hillary traveled around the globe over four years, and detractors have used the statistic to suggest she was vainly focused on setting records rather than on solving international problems. Her aides say she understood that her greatest value to the president was to physically represent the United States on his behalf. She’s a natural diplomat, which is to say a politician who didn’t have to win an election.

Hillary’s celebrity creates a bit of an intimidation factor for many of the people she meets around the world, a dynamic she often breaks down with a compliment for a man’s tie or a woman’s necklace. “Oh my God, where did you get that purse?” Hillary exclaimed upon meeting one job applicant. “Oh, Huma, look at this purse!” The applicant, who got the job, saw Hillary use the same icebreaker time and again.

“This is a tactic I see her use with people all the time,” the woman said. “She knows people are nervous around her, so she does this.… It’s a calculatingly nice thing to do to somebody who is extremely nervous around you.… It’s keenly self-aware.”

And because Hillary was a demanding boss who would put State’s career employees through the paces of painful internal changes like those outlined in the QDDR, her ability to connect with them—and demonstrate loyalty—mattered all the more. They were
her constituents, and she had to find ways to serve them to win their support. In unveiling the QDDR in July 2009, she held a Senate-style town hall meeting in the State Department’s ground-floor auditorium, soliciting questions both online and from the live audience.

Emily Gow, who worked in the Office of International Religious Freedom, presented Hillary with the perfect opportunity to demonstrate her command of constituent service.

At first, the audience laughed at Gow’s question, which seemingly had little to do with the cultural change Hillary sought to implement through the QDDR. “It’s about biking and running to work,” Gow said, “and whether you would support an initiative to get us access to showers.” Despite the prospect of embarrassing herself in front of her colleagues and her boss by asking about the most picayune of all daily details, the young woman pressed on. “First of all, it would save the government a lot of money because we wouldn’t have to get our transit subsidies. I’d much rather bike to work than take the Metro. It would be green, and it would promote morale.”