HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (42 page)

But through the Pentagon chain of command, the special forces team was denied authorization to leave. “
This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military,” one of the special forces troops said to Hicks.

The flight departed without the unit, which included a medic, and did not arrive in Benghazi until after the firefight had ended. That is, despite the intense focus of congressional investigators on the questions of who told them to stand down and why, these special forces troops couldn’t have done anything to mitigate an assault that already had happened.

Around seven-thirty a.m. local, wounded survivors of the attacks on the Benghazi compound and annex departed for Tripoli on the private jet that had brought the original team of reinforcements to Benghazi hours earlier. U.S. diplomats in Tripoli worked with Libyan officials to secure the use of a Libyan C-130 transport plane, and American security officers still in Benghazi contacted local allies to bring what they believed was Chris Stevens’s dead body to the airport. He was positively identified at 8:25 a.m. local.

After one a.m. in Washington, Hillary left the State Department for her home on Whitehaven Street, where she stayed up to work until four a.m. She was there when she got word from Mills, at about two-thirty a.m., that Stevens had been confirmed dead.

Hillary had been an anchor for the team in the command center, said people who were there with her that night, balancing the emotion of the moment with the need to execute.

“She has this rare ability to be compassionate but also get stuff done,” said Nides. “She’s a really good executive. I saw it in real time, and she handled a real crisis. And you know, she wasn’t mechanical, screaming at people, but she was emotional, she was firm in getting facts and getting the issues resolved.”

In private moments that night, through the hours of crisis management and profound heartbreak, Hillary wore unmistakable anguish on her face. She had sent Stevens to Libya. This was on her.

The next morning she went to the White House to stand with Obama in the sunny Rose Garden as he delivered a mournful public statement. Before the address, he huddled with Hillary outside the Oval Office. He wanted to do more than just deliver remarks to reporters, he told her. He asked if he could visit the State Department, where she had planned to spend the morning with the men and women who served under her. Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, e-mailed one of Hillary’s aides to make the arrangements. Rather than riding with the president, Hillary raced back to the State Department so that she could greet him when he arrived.

Together the once-bitter rivals made their way to the State Department’s courtyard, which is surrounded by dark granite walls and features a massive Marshall Fredericks sculpture of a man astride a globe with a disc in each hand. Hillary instructed her staff to gather the people who knew Chris Stevens best in one spot. She had to push her tired voice to deliver brief remarks because her microphone didn’t work.

Obama, who was given the working microphone, spoke for about fifteen minutes, without notes, to the hundreds of employees who had answered an invitation to come to the courtyard, and to those who listened from open windows above. There was no official transcript, but Obama personalized the moment by discussing his childhood abroad and the meaning the U.S. foreign service held for him. When he was finished, he found the throng of Stevens’s coworkers and friends. Hillary introduced them to the president, one by one, name by name, as he shook their hands and offered his condolences.

Heartbreak permeated the State Department. It is an unusually close-knit group for a government agency, in part because of the common experiences and values of the foreign service officers who
dedicate their lives to traveling the world on behalf of the United States. Bringing people together to focus on moving forward would be a delicate balancing act.

She didn’t need to add the weight of televised interviews. The three networks all wanted her to appear that night on their broadcasts, but she agreed with Reines’s recommendation that she decline the requests. Within a few hours of the president’s visit—and within twenty-four hours of the attack on the annex—Sunday-morning television talk show producers began asking State and the White House whether Hillary would be available to appear that weekend.

Reines responded that he didn’t think it was likely. A mythology has built up over time that Hillary never goes on Sunday-morning television. But during her tenure at State, she appeared on
Meet the Press
nine times. What is more accurate to say is that she doesn’t like appearing on the shows. She is judicious about how often, and under what circumstances, she goes on, and there was no advantage to be gained from appearing on television to talk about Benghazi.

But the White House wanted her to go on. “Our thinking was, it made sense for a senior diplomat to go out and talk about the service of a senior diplomat. But it wasn’t just that issue that day,” said a White House official who was involved in picking someone to represent the administration on TV. “We also wanted somebody who could go out and talk about the Arab Spring, try to calm all the craziness about the video, deliver the message again that it was not a U.S. thing.”

The White House was also anticipating questions about Iran and Israel because Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to be on TV that Sunday morning, and the White House had reason to be concerned, with only several weeks left before the election, that he might try to make Obama look bad on the subject of Iran’s effort to develop a nuclear weapon. All in all, it added up to making sure that someone very familiar with foreign policy was sitting across from the tough interrogators on the five Sunday shows.

“We thought it made sense to have her or Susan [Rice],” the White House official said. Obama aides, conscious of how busy she
was in the aftermath of the attacks, made a soft request to State for Hillary to go on. Reines declined on her behalf.

The White House had moved on to Rice by Friday morning, offering her up to all five of the Sunday shows—NBC’s
Meet the Press
,
Fox News Sunday
, CBS’s
Face the Nation
, ABC’s
This Week
, and CNN’s
State of the Union
. The feat of appearing on all of them on the same Sunday is known in Washington as the “full Ginsburg,” a reference to Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, William H. Ginsburg, who pulled it off in 1998.

For Rice, the Sunday shows offered an outsize opportunity to audition for a bigger job in Obama’s second term. For Hillary, they were a nuisance to be avoided unless she needed to get a message out, like when her presidential campaign started flagging or when newspapers were writing that she had been sidelined at State in her first six months. She didn’t need the platform, it was a politically risky proposition in the middle of a crisis, and it was true enough that she didn’t have extra time for the arduous preparation required of any guest on the big political programs.

As most of the State Department mourned, Capricia Marshall and her team worked through their grief. It fell to the protocol office to plan the somber Andrews Air Force Base ceremony at which Hillary and Obama would receive a military plane bearing the bodies of the four murdered Americans, which had since been flown to
America’s Ramstein Air Base in western Germany. Deputy Secretary Bill Burns, who had known Stevens, cut short a trip to Baghdad to accompany the remains home on the long, lonely flight from Ramstein to Andrews.

Marshall and her staff dug through their archives for precedents. They met with Pentagon officials and coordinated with the White House. The transfer of the bodies was scheduled for Friday, September 14, at Andrews. Marshall, the former White House social secretary, was a clinician when it came to pulling off major events. But she had just two days and so many arrangements to make.

Reines told Marshall that she should talk to the families of the men who had died. Even though the State Department had provided
grief counselors, it was important to walk them through the ceremony so that they could raise any concerns or objections beforehand. On Friday morning, Marshall went to the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown to have coffee and juice with the families. Most were fine with the plan, but one family broke down at the mention of cameras and reporters. Marshall called Reines, who came up with a solution: the press would be held back until all the families were seated so that only the backs of their heads would be visible to television audiences.

Hillary arrived early for the afternoon ceremony at Andrews so she could meet with the families. Marshall welled up as they shared their stories, but Hillary did not.

“It was almost as if they were pouring their grief out upon her,” said a source who was in the hangar. “Bodies were slumped and hanging, and children were all around. I did not see her tear up. I just saw her feel it. The face of ‘I’m here.’ I think a bit of it is her Methodist roots and her belief in the Lord and her faith, and then it’s this kind of ‘What am I here to do? I’m here to be that person.’ She believes in service to country and government, and part of her role is that—being that compassionate person.” Marshall had planned to introduce Obama to the families, but when the president arrived, Hillary took on that job.

This was the darkest moment for Clinton and Obama. At the home of Air Force One, where Obama often played golf on the weekends, they stood together to bear witness to a horrific homecoming.

The flag-draped coffins containing the remains of the four dead Americans were unloaded from a military jet for the formal transfer back to U.S. custody. During the opening prayer, Clinton and Obama stood as mirror images, heads bowed, hands delicately crossed in front of them.

As if speaking to her own resilience, Hillary issued a call for fortitude. “
We will wipe away our tears, stiffen our spines, and face the future undaunted,” she said. Her voice cracked and the exhaustion and emotion of the week were evident on her face. She had lost a new friend, the man she had sent to Libya as a special envoy, and
administration critics and journalists were already asking tough questions.

When it was his turn to speak, the president quoted the book of John:
“ ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Their sacrifice will never be forgotten.”

With the election looming, pressure was mounting—on State Department staff, who had just lost four of their own; on Hillary, who ran the agency; on Obama, the man who had sworn the most solemn oath to defend the country; and on a policy of supporting certain revolutions in the Arab and Muslim worlds that suddenly looked less wise. Both Obama and Clinton had a lot on the line—they would be judged by whether this policy ultimately made America safer or more vulnerable to volatility and hostility in the region. This moment required resolve, Hillary said at Andrews. “
The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia did not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob,” she said. “Reasonable people and responsible leaders in these countries need to do everything they can to restore security and hold accountable those behind these violent acts.”

It was still striking to see Obama and Clinton, once fierce political adversaries, standing and speaking in unison. But over the previous four years, whenever the nation had had an international inflection point—from the surge in Afghanistan to the Bin Laden raid to the Arab Spring and its aftermath—they had stood within arm’s length, physically and substantively. Hillary had served as the dutiful executive of Obama’s policy. But in the previous few days, he had demonstrated a political loyalty uncommon for him. He had brought Hillary to the Rose Garden for a public statement the day after the attack. He had gone that day to the State Department to address the beleaguered staff, and he had put his arm around her as they received the bodies of their fallen compatriots. When their speeches were finished, Hillary reached out for Barack and grasped his right hand in her left hand. He had been there for her during the most deeply emotional period of her four years at State. She whispered in his ear, “Thank you.”

While Obama and Clinton were at the service at Andrews, the president’s national security team was in the early stages of a tussle over talking points. At a private briefing, Maryland representative Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, had asked CIA director David Petraeus to provide talking points about the Benghazi attack that lawmakers could repeat in television, radio, and print interviews. It is not uncommon for members of Congress, particularly those of the president’s party, to seek guidance on what should and should not be said publicly when matters of national security are at stake. Running afoul of laws prohibiting the unauthorized disclosure of classified information happens all too easily, even by accident.

The CIA’s career staff worked up a batch of talking points for the committee members to use.
The original draft asserted that the Benghazi attack was “inspired by” the assault on the embassy in Cairo earlier that day; there had been a crowd outside the compound before violence erupted;
militants with ties to Al Qaeda participated in the attack; an extremist group called Ansar al-Sharia had not denied participation;
the easy availability of weapons in Libya contributed to the deaths of the American personnel; previous terrorist acts had been carried out in Benghazi; and the intelligence community was working with Libyan officials and other American agencies to find the perpetrators.