Authors: Kim Ghattas
Inside a massive auditorium with a futuristic concrete exterior, the audience waited
for Hillary to come onstage while listening to the Christian hymn “Amazing Grace.”
Huge banners hung all around the stage welcoming “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton” and large television screens were on the walls to beam Hillary’s performance
to the back of the room. On our large press passes, a picture of a younger Hillary
dwarfed the written details of the time and place of the event. In the audience, a
woman was proudly showing her friends a picture of herself with Hillary and Bill Clinton
in the 1990s.
The secretary was running late. Everything on this trip had run late, every day, all
day. If it was a hallmark of the Clinton administration to be an hour late, this was
the Hillary-at-the-State-Department version. The tardiness was deeply frustrating
for everybody, the traveling press corps who had to hurry up and wait and then miss
their deadlines, the State Department staffers running the show, the local officials
trying to keep to their own schedules, the local journalists who had to show up early
for events to be screened for security and then wait and wait some more for Hillary
to actually arrive.
But Hillary was in a back room meeting the university’s president and some of its
alumni. As she always did, she gave the people she was talking to her full attention
and listened closely to their stories, head tilted, eyes focused. She didn’t rush,
didn’t cut anyone off. She made them feel like she had traveled all the way from Washington
just for them. The crowds could wait. And when she finally walked onto the stage,
the two thousand women in the audience leapt to their feet, clapping excitedly like
groupies. And when she told them, speaking into a microphone from behind a lectern,
how delighted she was to be with them, they felt so special that they forgave her
instantly for being late. In her red jacket and black trousers, Clinton began by saying
that women’s rights weren’t just a “moral issue” but a “security issue.”
“[No democracy] can exist without women’s full participation,” she told the crowd.
“No economy can be truly a free market without women involved.” That’s why she was
putting women’s rights at the center of her agenda. The women listened intently as
she moved on to discuss North Korea, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and climate
change. And then it was time for questions.
When the line officers had been told to organize the town hall, they asked how free-flowing
the secretary liked the exchange to be. The answer had been: “Very.” Looking for raised
hands in the dark auditorium, she picked at random, acting as her own master of ceremonies,
walking up and down the stage and trying to be equitable between the different sides
of the auditorium.
“Do you have a microphone? Here, I’ll take one over there. Okay. Oh, too many hands.
Too many hands,” she said laughing.
How did she balance work and marriage?
Be true to yourself and make your own choices.
What was it like being at Wellesley College?
She loved it.
How did you know Bill was the one for you?
“I’m very lucky because my husband is my best friend, and he and I have been together
for a very long time, longer than most of you have been alive. We are—we have an endless
conversation. We never get bored. We get deeply involved in all of the work that we
do, and we talk about it constantly. And I just feel very fortunate that I have a
relationship that has been so meaningful to me over my adult life.”
How special is Chelsea to you?
We could be here forever, she replied.
She answered each question with enthusiasm and candor, as though she were sitting
in a café with friends having a cup of coffee. She told them she felt right at home
and drew rousing applause. She spoke about the discipline of gratitude—the need to
be grateful about at least one thing a day, regardless of how difficult your problems
were. I suddenly thought that Ewha sounded rather like Iowa, and that this felt and
sounded like the primary campaign trail where voters wanted to know what the candidate
was really all about—only here, unlike in Iowa, there was no sniping.
Hillary’s autobiography had been a huge best seller in South Korea; the audience had
clearly read it and wanted to dig deeper. She obliged graciously. It was hard to tell
where Hillary Rodham Clinton—wife of Bill, former First Lady, political icon, and
best-selling author—ended and where the American secretary of state began. The women
in the audience looked at her and saw America.
The crowd listened intently. The seats were filled with politicians, movie stars,
designers, the crème de la crème of Korean society, and they were all floored. No
official of theirs had ever spoken to them with such candor or made herself so accessible
and human. And in a deeply patriarchal society, with still-formal notions of how a
senior official should behave, a woman with Hillary’s power, speaking in such a manner,
was nothing short of extraordinary.
“I feel more like an advice columnist than secretary of state today,” Clinton said
with a giggle. She answered questions until her anxious staff signaled she was running
over schedule again. It was hard to imagine any other secretary of state responding
to an audience’s expectations with such passion.
This was part of the grand experiment to find Hillary’s new public persona as secretary
of state. For eight years, she had watched Bill Clinton execute American foreign policy;
she had been his eyes and ears when he wasn’t in the room. She had met countless heads
of state, sat next to them and their wives for hours at dinners and lunches. She had
held her own meetings, attended summits, and delivered speeches in various capitals.
She had been on the Senate Armed Services committee. She knew the world and all the
issues, even if she didn’t yet know all the details and nuances. She was as comfortable
on the world stage as in her own dining room, and here she was, redefining the job
at the same time as she was redefining herself. Every day, every meeting, and every
public event was an opportunity to test and learn. But Clinton didn’t just use her
plain talk to discuss her personal life. She also made news—real, unexpected news.
* * *
After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had split up Korea between
the two of them. The two Koreas forged very different destinies. The North was ruled
repressively for decades by Kim Il Sung. When he died in 1994, his son Kim Jong Il
took over and ruled with the same principles: starve the people, build up the army
and a nuclear program. Kim Jong Il was now sixty-eight years old, frail and sick,
and Seoul and Beijing worried about what would happen when he died. Would the country
collapse? What would happen to the nuclear weapons? Would millions of refugees flood
South Korea and China?
No one said a word in public. The Chinese even refused to discuss contingency planning
in private with American officials for fear it would end up on the front page of the
New York Times
. American officials, respectful of their allies’ sensitivities, did not discuss the
succession in public either. Erratic Kim Jong Il could go into one of his missile-firing
fits just to prove he was strong and going nowhere.
During a briefing given to the traveling press, Clinton broke the diplomatic taboo.
She not only mentioned the word “succession,” but she also discussed South Korea’s
concerns about the day after Kim Jong Il. Her words ricocheted from Seoul to Beijing,
to Pyongyang, Washington, and back as Asia experts and Asian officials gasped.
Standing next to Clinton at a press conference, the South Korean foreign minister
was asked for his reaction to her comment. He ventured only that his country had an
eye on the situation. Clinton seemed amused. She may have sounded bookish at the start
of her trip, but she had quickly translated diplomatic facts into her own language.
“I think that to worry about saying something that is so obvious is an impediment
to clear thinking,” she said when we asked her what she thought of the reaction to
her very public reference to Kim Jong Il’s frail health. “And I don’t think it should
be viewed as particularly extraordinary that someone in my position would say what’s
obvious … The open press is filled with such conversations. This is not some kind
of a classified matter that is not being discussed in many circles.”
Kim Jong Il’s life expectancy was not the only obvious conversation to Clinton. The
global economic crisis had left the United States and the world reeling. China held
more than a trillion dollars in U.S. Treasury bills, and its economy was still growing
at the astounding rate of 8 percent a year. For years, American officials had been
forceful in their public criticism of China’s human rights records. In 2008, a State
Department report had listed China as one of the world’s worst abusers of human rights,
and Hillary herself had urged the Bush administration to boycott the opening of the
Beijing Olympics in the authoritarian state. Talking to the traveling press ahead
of the flight to Beijing, she indicated that human rights had to be part of the whole
range of issues on the agenda, not a focus of the talks. The economic crisis had to
be the heart of the conversation.
“We pretty much know what they’re going to say. We know that we’re going to press
them to reconsider their position about Tibetan religious and cultural freedom and
autonomy for the Tibetans and some kind of recognition or acknowledgment of the Dalai
Lama. And we know what they’re going to say, because I’ve had those conversations
for more than a decade with Chinese leaders.”
The secretary of state sounded as though she didn’t want to harangue America’s banker,
and the reaction was vociferous. Headlines on front pages everywhere in the United
States and Europe screamed treason—the Obama administration was going soft on Chinese
human rights, cowering in the face of the rising Asian giant. American congressmen
accused Clinton of pandering to Beijing. Human rights organizations called on her
to make clear human rights in China were a priority for the Obama administration.
Clinton was trying to say she didn’t want to bang her head against the wall on the
issue of human rights with a government that wasn’t listening anyway. She found this
approach counterproductive and wanted to advance the human rights agenda in new ways:
by connecting with grassroots organizations, by using the Internet—anything to bypass
the government. It was part of the strategy devised on the seventh floor of the Building
by her team to connect American diplomacy with people around the world.
Clinton’s statement, however, was not part of the traditional diplomatic script, and
the world was not ready for her new style of diplomacy. The White House was annoyed
by the criticism that her off-script comments had unleashed about the administration’s
approach to human rights. Hillary’s team was somewhat taken aback. They knew her bluntness
would likely displease some quarters, but they weren’t ready for the all-out onslaught.
Hillary was no longer just a presidential candidate expressing her opinion on the
campaign trail when she opened her mouth; now, it was America speaking. Every word
was weighed, examined, parsed. People read between the lines, below them, above them;
they read into commas and pauses.
Fifty years ago, even twenty years ago, secretaries of state came out on specific,
often orchestrated, occasions to make a statement or a speech or take the occasional
question from a reporter. Their words were the definitive position of the United States
of America. When Henry Kissinger traveled to Lusaka, Zambia, in 1976, he attacked
the apartheid regime in what was then Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe, spelling out America’s
support for racial equality and black self-determination on the continent. The
New York Times
reprinted his speech in full—over a whole page. No one got that kind of newspaper
coverage anymore, except perhaps lifelong presidents of developing countries where
the state controlled the media.
Words now also traveled around the globe at lightning speed. Social media, cable news
television, and the Internet were all accelerating the news cycle, forcing American
officials, including the president, to react more frequently and swiftly in public.
The secretaries of state and defense gave more press conferences and spoke in different
forums, more casually. Their utterances were no longer scripted down to a comma. Yet
the world’s expectations had not evolved in parallel; every word spoken had the same
value and weight as ever. There should have been a discount rate for words, Jake thought.
Hillary waved away the controversy over her comments; she was used to being excoriated.
Jeffrey Bader from the NSC gave her a yellow sheet with a few scribbled points
5
that she could use as an aid to make her point next time she mentioned human rights,
mainly that the United States raises concerns about human rights privately and publicly
and that she had done so on this trip as well. Though she rarely admitted she had
been wrong, Hillary would often then try to adjust course. But this comment left a
permanent stain on her record, in the eyes of the human rights community.
* * *
Chinese officials too were surprised. They religiously stuck to the script, especially
about human rights. Say it once in private; repeat it once in private; move on. They
didn’t know what to make of Clinton’s statement. How did her words fit into the bigger
picture? What did this statement say about America? This was the woman who had infuriated
them in 1995 at the UN conference about women’s rights in Beijing when she famously
said that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights. Her
hosts had dismissed her at the time, saying “some people from some countries” had
made “unwarranted remarks and criticisms.” The foreign ministry added that “these
people had to pay more attention to the problem within their own countries.” The Chinese
government had blacked out her speech from the closed-circuit TV in the conference
hall, and the only reference to her speech in the Chinese media was one line in the
official
People’s Daily
: “American Mrs. Clinton made a speech.”