HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (26 page)

Mills was on the phone around the clock, working with Haitian officials on every detail. To this day, she remembers which flights carried which orphans to adoptive parents in the United States, a product of poring over lists to figure out how to expedite paperwork for kids whose records had been destroyed or lost in the rubble along with their orphanages and Haitian government facilities. She and McDonough made sure that all the players on the president’s national security team were on the same page in terms of search and recovery, military flights, and disaster aid.

In addition to directing the overall federal response, Obama summoned presidents Clinton and George W. Bush to the White House to announce a relief organization modeled after the fund established by Clinton and George H. W. Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. As Clinton and George W. Bush waited for Obama in the Cabinet Room, they joked about being like brothers. After all,
Clinton and Bush are about the same age, and they grew much closer as a result of Clinton’s partnership with the elder Bush.

Even their wives, who were not present for this meeting, had grown closer through a shared interest in two issues: empowering women and girls around the world and pressuring the Burmese military junta into adopting democratic reforms. The two former first ladies spoke privately with each other about Burma on more than one occasion, and as a courtesy, Hillary dispatched Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for the region, to give Laura Bush periodic briefings on developments in the Southeast Asian nation. The Bush and Clinton clans had found their comfort zone, a fact underscored by the demonstration of bonhomie by George W. Bush and Bill in the Cabinet Room, but Bill and Obama still hadn’t hit that sweet spot.

The atmosphere changed when Obama walked into the room. Here was the new president, with his two immediate predecessors, one of whom he had trashed as the architect of a savaged economy on a daily basis and the other who had campaigned against him for months. It was clear, according to one observer, that while the Clinton-Obama relationship was getting better publicly, it was still awkward behind closed doors. “It was friendly but slightly stiff,” the source said.

The Hall of Famer and the Rookie of the Year were still sizing each other up, trying to strike a delicate balance in which each man gained the most and lost the least from partnering on politics and policy. Sometimes their interests and beliefs brought the two presidents together; at other times, they drove them apart. More than any past president in memory, Bill remained wholly invested in electoral politics, a dynamic that surely owed both to the possibility that Hillary would run again and to Bill’s own love of the game. Though he had two stents inserted at New York Presbyterian Hospital after feeling chest pain a few days before Valentine’s Day, Bill went back to work within a week. He was eager to show that he was in fighting shape, and by April, with the midterm elections looming and analysts predicting that Republicans had a shot at taking control
of the House and Senate, he began filling his political calendar.
He cut radio ads to help Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas fend off a primary challenge from Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter; showed up in western Pennsylvania to
campaign for Mark Critz in a special election to fill the late representative Jack Murtha’s seat;
and even auctioned off a little bit of his time to help cut into Hillary’s debt. At that point, she had whittled it down below $1 million, but its presence still bothered her.

At times Bill went head-to-head with Obama, proving that there were still defined Clinton and Obama wings of the Democratic Party. In Colorado, Bill backed Andrew Romanoff, a state legislator who had been loyal to Hillary, against Obama’s candidate, Senator Michael Bennet, who had been appointed to succeed Interior Secretary Ken Salazar the year before.
Obama’s aides had tried and failed to push Romanoff out of the race with the offer of a low-level administration job, much like an effort they had undertaken—through Bill—to get Joe Sestak to bail in Pennsylvania. Obama recorded a message for Bennet, and Romanoff appealed to Clinton to counter it. Guy Cecil, a senior aide on Hillary’s campaign who had become Bennet’s chief of staff, didn’t find out that the former president was going to weigh in until an hour before Colorado voters started getting phone calls with Bill’s recorded voice on the other end. Obama won the proxy war, a fact that Cecil, who enjoys a strong relationship with the Clintons, wouldn’t let Bill forget. “Your record’s not perfect anymore,” Cecil teased when Bill came out to do a general-election event for Bennet.

But with the 2010 primary season ending, Obama’s political team was eager to get Bill out on the hustings for Democratic candidates. Patrick Gaspard, the head of Obama’s office of political affairs, asked Doug Band to meet in midsummer to map out a strategy for using Bill to assist Democrats, particularly in highly competitive states and districts where an Obama visit might backfire. The magic of Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, according to both Clinton and Obama loyalists, is that he can “go anywhere.” While Obama had done just fine with Democratic voters, he couldn’t do
much to help junior House Democrats who needed independents and some Republicans to win their districts. Bill had the capacity to sway middle-of-the-road voters and rally the party base.

Though it might have bruised their egos a little bit to admit the truth, each man was stronger when partnered with the other. For both, the pull of self-preservation was strong. Bill had inflicted enormous damage on himself during the 2008 primary, and joining forces with Obama was the best and fastest way to heal his image. As for Obama, the remainder of his first-term agenda depended on maintaining majorities in the House and the Senate. To the extent that Bill could help with that goal, it was worth bringing him back into the fold. They still weren’t buddies, not in the way that Obama and Hillary were becoming closer personally, but mutual interest served as an adherent. And the budding friendship between Hillary and Obama couldn’t help but reinforce Bill’s relationship with Obama. The same dynamic replicated down the ranks at the White House and State, with aides reflecting the warmer rapport enjoyed by their bosses.

Most dead-end loyalists never achieved a full rapprochement, but by the second year of the Obama presidency, petty infighting about suspected leaks to the press and personnel matters diminished significantly. Obama himself drove part of that dynamic.
After he fired the top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for comments made in a
Rolling Stone
article called “The Runaway General,” Obama gathered his national security team in the Oval Office for a lecture. On the same day, the
New York Times
had reported the story of the cable, written by national security adviser Jim Jones and shared with a wide circle, suggesting that Holbrooke would soon be out of a job—a missive that, along with other slights, like efforts to exclude him from important meetings, undercut Holbrooke’s standing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“The president said he didn’t want to see pettiness, that this was not about personalities or reputations. It’s about our men and women in uniform and about serving our country,” a source told Lloyd Grove of the
Daily Beast
. Holbrooke remained a point of contention
between the White House and State, but as the rest of the respective staffs began to see threats as common—from international crises to news stories about the state of the Obama-Hillary relationship—Obama’s aides and Hillary’s developed respect for each other’s abilities. “You are in the same foxhole,” explained one of Obama’s aides. “You build a bond with people that way, you just do.”

The most surprising integration of the two camps came in the form of Capricia Marshall. It didn’t take her long to become part of the furniture in the administration. “I’ve never been more wrong about anyone in my life,” Dan Pfeiffer, who had tried to block her nomination, later told her. At a White House state dinner in the spring of 2010, Marshall led the Obamas out the door of the north portico to meet the Mexican president. As the first couple walked down a red carpet, Marshall, clad in a formfitting pink dress, gracefully peeled off onto a white marble landing.

As she reached the top of a small flight of stairs, her skinny Manolo heel caught. “Oh my God,” she thought, “I’m going down!” The P90X routine paid off, however, keeping her core balanced. Rather than falling flat on her face, she bounced onto her backside and quickly got back to her feet, like an Olympic gymnast who had missed her dismount.

“
Don’t take that picture,” the first lady admonished nearby photographers. “Don’t take that picture,” the president repeated, waving his finger, as the cameras audibly snapped in the background.

Michelle Obama made a last-ditch appeal for Marshall: “Don’t print that picture.”

It was too late. The pictures—and a full video—were captured for posterity and YouTube.

Marshall flashed a double thumbs-up, a fitting symbol of her rebound from the day Obama’s aides had all put their thumbs down on her nomination.

At the next state dinner, the president teased Marshall as she waited to lead the Obamas out to meet a foreign leader. Standing directly behind her and adopting the hushed tone of a golf announcer, the president offered up a play-by-play.

“We are getting close,” he said playfully. “Will she stay up or will she go down?”

Marshall had made it far enough into Obama’s circle that he felt comfortable giving her a hard time. Still, the routine didn’t impress Michelle Obama much.

“Oh, shut up, Barack! Stop it,” she said. “Stop teasing her.”

While Michelle Obama was defending Capricia Marshall from the president’s gentle ribbing, Hillary Clinton was going to bat for Barack Obama on Capitol Hill. In June she invited Howard Berman and Chris Dodd up to a conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department to discuss a pending bill intended to punish Iran by sanctioning foreign companies that did business in the petroleum and banking sectors there. The basic concept was to force other countries to pull out of Iran and thus cripple its economy, which might persuade the Iranians to negotiate an end to their pursuit of nuclear weapons in exchange for the removal of sanctions.

Berman, a bespectacled veteran House Democrat with half a head’s worth of curly white hair, was the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and as good a friend of the pro-Israel lobby as anyone on Capitol Hill. Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, had written a book about the letters that his father, Thomas Dodd, had written home when he prosecuted Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg after World War II. There was no question where they stood on Israel’s mortal enemy, Iran. Each man had passed a version of a bill called the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions and Divestment Act, or CISADA, through his respective chamber with little or no opposition. Berman and Dodd had written slightly different bills, and they had had to convene a conference committee of House and Senate members to sort out their differences and send the bill to the president for his signature or veto. But in reality, the work of the conference committee was now being done by Hillary, Berman, and Dodd on the seventh floor because the White House had serious concerns about the consequences of
the congressional approach; and with Democrats in control of both chambers and the presidency, Berman and Dodd wanted to find a path that would avoid an ugly showdown between the White House and Congress.

For the most part, members of Congress always wanted to hit Iran with the biggest hammer available. Over the years, the United States had imposed every unilateral sanction imaginable on the Iranians—to little effect. Now the idea was to punish them further by sanctioning foreign entities if they did business with the regime. If all went well, the Iranian economy would plunge, and that could bring about the demise of the existing government or at least bring the Iranians to the table.

That would be all well and good if other countries also chose to stop doing business in Iran rather than face American sanctions. But the danger was that the other countries, particularly Russia, China, and Brazil, would decide it was better to suffer American sanctions and keep doing business with Iran. Aside from the question of which choice was economically better for each country, no leader would want to appear weak to his or her people by buckling to American demands.

In conjunction with the White House and the Treasury Department, Hillary was looking for a new approach that could provide incentives for foreign companies, some of which were state-run, to join in isolating Iran. One such angle, which flummoxed Iran hawks, was a State Department proposal to let companies evade sanctions by demonstrating that they were on a serious and irreversible path toward getting out of Iran. That way companies that wanted to cooperate with the United States wouldn’t get hit with sanctions just because it took them a little bit of time to disentangle themselves from complex business relationships. While it sounded to many in Congress like the administration wanted to let bad actors off the hook, the top sanctions analysts in the executive branch thought that it was a creative way to produce a better outcome.

Nuance on Iran had never before been a specialty of Hillary’s. As a senator from heavily pro-Israel New York, she had been among
the hard-liners. In 2006, as she ran for reelection to the Senate and geared up for a presidential bid, she had blasted the Bush administration for “downplaying the threat.” But as secretary of state, she worked for an administration that had concerns about the practical consequences of blunt-force sanctions. What her new perch taught her—or made it easier for her to accept—was that American efforts to coerce other countries into imposing sanctions might cause a backlash that ultimately hindered progress.

For months, her former congressional colleagues commented on her change of opinion. But Hillary told them it was natural that her perspective now differed from theirs. “You have a different position,” she would say. “You work in a different place.” The line allowed her to preserve some credibility as a hawk on Iran while suggesting to members of Congress that they might not hold the only reasonable point of view about the most effective way of putting pressure on the regime.