HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Hillary also ran into her former White House chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, outside an event in New York. Verveer, who ran Vital Voices, an NGO supporting women in leadership around the world that Hillary had launched, urged her to take the job. Lissa Muscatine, the veteran speechwriter, made a similar pitch. Still, the many reasons to accept the offer didn’t obviate or eliminate all the reasons to reject it.

  Kris Balderston, sitting at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, waiting for his daughter to return home from college one night that week, tapped out a message to Hillary on his BlackBerry, laying out the arguments for why she should take the job. “You’re an executive branch person, not a legislative branch person,” he wrote, playing on Hillary’s deeply held belief that Republicans are patient and Democrats are impatient. “You are impatient.” It was a long note, one that would have taken up at least a page and a half on paper.

  He wasn’t alone. “Everybody sent their individual e-mails to her,” one Clinton insider said. “There was a surge.”

  On Tuesday, November 18, five days after her trip to Chicago, Hillary’ top advisers convened a conference call to discuss what a rejection of Obama’s offer would look like. To ensure that Hillary’s impending no wasn’t revealed to everyone on the call, they also quickly chatted about what she would say publicly if she took the job. Of course, if she said yes, it would be up to Obama to make the announcement. The lion’s share of the two-hour call was devoted to the “no” version.

  Williams, Mills, Reines, Jim Kennedy, Abedin, longtime Clinton lawyer Bruce Lindsey, Doug Band, and others were on the call.

  Reines divined a window of opportunity to stall Hillary’s decision making. Obama’s team was still in the process of reviewing potential conflicts between Bill’s charitable work and the duties of the secretary of state. If she said no now, Reines argued, the press would read it as Bill failing the vet. She should wait until that process was finished, he advised, even suggesting that the Clinton camp deliver a full physical printout of all of Bill’s donors—rather than just the coterie of $200,000-plus contributors Obama had requested—to the transition headquarters.

  Band was initially resistant to the idea. Charities aren’t generally in the practice of handing over donor lists, and Band was justifiably worried about potential headaches that could arise. He had to be brought around to the idea because “it was such a rash suggestion,” said one source on the call. Bill’s camp wasn’t “prepared to be in this situation at all,” the source said. But, in the end, Band agreed.

  The list exceeded the capacity of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, and Maura Pally, a Mills confidante and Hillary loyalist, had to hop in a cab to hand-deliver the industrial-size printout to Obama’s team. The stratagem bought the yes crowd a little bit more time.

  By Wednesday, November 19, Hillary had heard all the arguments. “She knew who was where,” said one aide. “Everyone who was for it was ineffective.”

  She tried to get in touch with Obama to turn him down. But he wouldn’t take her call. At one point, to avoid the rejection, Emanuel told Hillary that Obama was in the bathroom. Finally, late that night, they connected.

  Please say yes, Obama cajoled. I need you on my team.

  “You’re really making this hard for me,” she said.

  “I mean to make it hard for you,” Obama told her. “I want you to take this position.”

  No thank you, Hillary told Obama, for at least the third time.

  Once again, he refused to accept her rejection. But he made clear that he wasn’t going to ask again. He needed an answer. If it was no—really no—he had to move on and give the job to someone else. He was ratcheting up the pressure. Sleep on it and give me your final answer tomorrow, he said.

  The major roadblocks had been removed: Bill wouldn’t be a problem, Obama already had shown some willingness to help her retire the campaign debt, and pivotally, he assured her that she would be able to fill the State Department with her own people, not his.

  As the night wore on, Reines got no indication that Hillary would reverse herself. He prepared himself to send out a press release the next morning that would put an end to the drama.

  By eight a.m., he was back at his desk in the Senate, staring at two computer windows, a Microsoft Word document with the statement up on the screen and an Outlook press list. He was ready to blast it out to reporters as soon as he got the final call. Though Hillary had made initial edits to the statement, she hadn’t yet signed off on it. But the order wasn’t coming. There was “radio silence,” said one adviser who worked on the release. As the minutes turned to hours, Reines began to get a gut feeling that something had happened.

  He was right. Around eleven a.m., Maggie Williams called. Reines moved into Hillary’s personal office and sat at her desk to talk privately. Williams told Reines to take his finger off the button.

  Hillary had called Obama back that morning.

  “All right, let’s start talking about the conditions that I would need if I were to do this,” she said—a clear indication that she was taking the job.

  Obama’s persistence had paid off. He was thrilled with her decision, he told her. He was confident they’d make one hell of a team.

  Ultimately, Hillary thought, she would want him to say yes if their roles were reversed. “What finally tipped it for me is I really started thinking about, suppose I had won, and suppose I was facing the same multiple crises that the president was facing—two wars going on, an economic meltdown—and I wanted him to be in my cabinet,” she said. “And I had thought a lot about it, I believed he was the best person for the job, and I asked him, and he said no; how would I feel?”

  The call of service was a strong motivator, too. “I’m old-fashioned enough to think that when your president asks you to do something, you better have a really good reason not to do it,” she said. “And I loved being a senator. I thought I could be a really helpful partner in the Senate. But this is what he wanted me to do, and he needed an answer.”

  FOUR

  Us and Them

  Hillary’s deference had won out. The new president asked her to serve her country, and she couldn’t turn him down. Left unspoken, secretary of state could be the perfect stepping-stone to the presidency, a four-year reprieve from domestic political battles and a hard-to-match foreign policy résumé all rolled into one.

  Hillary had plenty of work to do to learn the nuances of foreign policy and win the confidence and trust of her new department, her colleagues in the cabinet, and Obama’s fresh crop of empowered White House aides. Following the model she had used as a freshman senator, she began gathering political capital by keeping her head down and proving, through her work ethic and command of the subject matter, that she belonged in the job.

  The trick of building a relationship with Obama’s aides remained the toughest of all, and it got off to an inauspicious start. In early December 2008, two days after the president-elect introduced his national security team at a Chicago press conference, the Washington Post published a photo of Jon Favreau, Obama’s twenty-seven-year-old speechwriter, mock-cupping the breast of a cardboard cutout of the incoming secretary of state. Another young man, standing on the other side of the Hillary cutout from a grinning Favreau, kissed the side of Hillary’s head and held a beer near her mouth. Hillaryland had accused Obama of playing gender politics during the campaign, and the image, which had first been posted to Facebook, threatened to roil two camps still struggling to forge a new bond, both publicly and privately.

  When the photo went online, Obama’s campaign veterans and reporters assigned to cover the new administration were at the Capitol Hill bar The Hawk and Dove at a party honoring Robert Gibbs, who had just been named Obama’s White House press secretary.

  The reporters at the bar were blissfully unaware of the delicate diplomacy about to take place between the Obama and Clinton camps. Tommy Vietor, an Obama press aide, reached out to Reines to try to broker a détente before the image caused
a major rupture in the fragile Obama-Hillary relationship. Reines stepped away from his dinner to jump on a conference call with Vietor, Favreau, and Jon Lovett, a former Hillary speechwriter who would go on to work for Favreau in the White House. The call was the first time Favreau and Lovett had ever spoken.

  Together they tried to figure out the best way to defuse the situation—a sign both of goodwill toward the young speechwriter, who was liked in both worlds, and the recognition that it wasn’t in anyone’s interest to feed the story. Favreau and Lovett helped write a tongue-in-cheek statement that went out under Reines’s name: “Senator Clinton is pleased to learn of Jon’s obvious interest in the State Department, and is currently reviewing his application.”

  A distraught Favreau was eager to apologize directly. While he pondered the most elegant way to say “I’m sorry I cupped your cardboard breast,” he noticed he had missed a call. Checking his messages, he heard Hillary’s voice.

  “I haven’t seen the picture yet,” she said lightheartedly, “but I hear my hair looks great.”

  Favreau was relieved. If Hillary wasn’t going to make a federal case out of it, no one else could credibly do so. Together the Obama and Clinton teams had turned a potentially fraught situation into a moment of levity. It was the first test of the ability of the two rival camps to work as one, and these hard-charging young aides put aside their differences more easily than might have been expected.

  “Little things like that matter,” said one Obama aide, “because you have these conduits who would say ‘these guys aren’t total assholes over here’ and vice versa.”

  The subtext of the statement that Favreau drafted for Reines even poked fun at the very real tension surrounding Hillary’s power to fill the State Department with her own loyalists. That single promise from Obama to Hillary, while crucial to bringing her on board, created more friction up and down the ranks of the two camps than any other single factor through Hillary’s first year at the State Department. In one stroke, the president-elect had excluded most of his own people from winning sought-after jobs at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, and he had guaranteed that Hillary would be able to reward some of the dead-enders from her own campaign who had never really warmed to Obama and weren’t trusted by his team.

  But he had left the pledge vague enough—it wasn’t etched in stone or signed in blood—to set the table for a fight between his White House aides and Hillary’s team over just what it meant. For example, Obama reserved for himself the right to pick a deputy secretary, the number two post at State, and the ambassadors to major countries. His aides also believed they would still be able to control the process for narrowing the list of hopefuls for particular jobs.

  Most of the battles played out between Hillary consigliere Cheryl Mills and Obama adviser Denis McDonough. On occasion, they took disputes to Obama for a resolution. The White House hoped to exclude certain Hillarylanders by leaving them off lists of hiring options, according to a senior State Department official who watched the process closely. “The original fight was the White House thought they were going to send slates to [Hillary] and she would pick off the slate,” the official said. “Cheryl said, ‘No, we have total autonomy,’ and that led to the first clash of the titans.”

  McDonough had been in the room when Obama promised Hillary she could pick her own staff, but that didn’t mean the White House was going to give up easily on placing Obama people at State or blackballing hated Hillarylanders. There were examples of both, but they were the exceptions to the rule. McDonough found out quickly that Mills had no compunction about waving the president’s promise in the faces of White House personnel officials. The tension was natural, Mills thought, and she had sympathy for the bind McDonough was in, having to explain to fellow White House aides why State was off limits. The two began scheduling weekly Saturday breakfasts, often at the low-budget Tastee Diner in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland. If they missed a session, they’d make it up over coffee (McDonough) and hot chocolate (Mills). The need for a regular sit-down pointed to the volume and intensity of the personnel fights early on in the administration.

  Staffing at State presented Hillary’s first chance to correct bad personnel decisions that helped torpedo her primary run. Her friends had told her constantly throughout that summer and fall that she had been too loyal, and too forgiving, to aides who weren’t equipped to do the jobs she had given them during the campaign, whose outside interests conflicted with her own as a candidate, or whose inability to play well with others sowed dysfunction. At State, she shut out the high-volume drama from her campaign, but she still relied on an intensely insular inner circle that prized loyalty to Hillary above all else. The campaign’s hired guns, many of them veterans of the Bill years who had their own interests to tend to while moonlighting for Hillary, didn’t fit into her plans at State. Instead, she surrounded herself with the small set of advisers who had most completely demonstrated that they would sacrifice themselves on the altar of her success.

  Hillary would give Mills sweeping authority in the State Department, allowing her to merge two of the most significant roles in the agency, chief of staff and counselor, into a single power base. Widely respected for her competence, her loyalty to Hillary, and her sharp elbows, Mills would handle State’s management and operations, as well as some sensitive political issues.

  An Army brat and a Stanford law graduate, Mills had been a thirty-three-year-old aide in the White House counsel’s office when she defended Bill Clinton during his Senate impeachment trial. Through the various Clinton scandals of the 1990s, Mills’s loyalty, discretion, and skills as a lawyer caught Hillary’s attention, and Mills sealed their bond as a general counsel on the presidential campaign. Joe Lockhart, who was White House press secretary under Bill Clinton, described Mills as the “voice of reason” on Hillary’s campaign. Her pugnacity as an attorney and aide reflects Hillary’s own background as a lawyer and staffer working on the House impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, and she is perhaps even more direct than the blunt-spoken Hillary. “Secretary Clinton wants to know you’re a team player, but she wants to hear it straight,” Lockhart said. “And she gets exactly that from Cheryl.”

  Described by one of Hillary’s campaign aides as a “ball-buster” and by one of her admirers in Obama’s camp as a “pit bull,” Mills could keep big egos in check. “Tell that man I’ll call him back,” she once said when Bill Clinton was trying to reach her. “We all worked for Cheryl,” one of Hillary’s senior State aides said. Indeed, she was the unquestioned leader among a set of three aides—known at State as “the troika”—whose final word on matters was taken as Hillary’s gospel.

  Before long into the transition, “The Huma Factor”—an echo of “The Hillary Factor” from White House days—became shorthand for the influence that Huma Abedin, Clinton’s most trusted personal aide, wielded in Foggy Bottom. Born just a few years before Chelsea, Huma had worked in the White House at the tail end of the Clinton administration and became Washington’s quintessential “body woman” as a high-ranking aide to Hillary in the Senate. In Washington parlance, a body man or woman is the person closest to an official, the one who makes sure that he or she gets from place to place on time, has all the materials he or she needs—a phone, lipstick, hand sanitizer—and keeps track of who he or she interacts with. Huma was all that and more. She demanded to be involved in everything the secretary did, according to one State Department source. “No one tells Huma no, even Clinton,” that source said.

  Abedin, by then deep into a relationship with Brooklyn-based New York congressman Anthony Weiner, combined black-haired, brown-eyed South Asian beauty with political smarts and an uncommonly subtle grace. “She looks like what you can imagine Scheherazade might have looked like,” one Clinton confidante at State said. “Absolutely gorgeous—exotic looking and gorgeous. And she is paradoxically one of the sweetest and nicest people you could ever meet. Sh
e does have this kind of iron-butterfly face that she can put on,” the confidante said. “She’s kind of the thinking person’s body person.”

  Not everyone was so enamored of Huma. In particular, some members of State’s career staff viewed Huma as aloof, more comfortable hobnobbing with celebrities than engaging with her new colleagues. They also felt that Huma wasn’t willing to collaborate with them.

  “She will not really be in touch with you for working on a project for the secretary or planning a trip, and then come in at the last minute and say that ‘everyone has done a bad job, but I’m going to fix it,’ and then do a few things and say that she fixed it for the secretary, and she’ll take credit for it,” said one midlevel official. “This was sort of her M.O. I know this because it happened to me, and I know it happened to several other folks.”

  Her presence created tension because she involved herself in substantive matters in which she had little apparent background or expertise, and she guarded her proximity to Clinton jealously. Hillary trusted her like a family member and empowered her to be a force within the department. Seldom farther than arm’s length from Hillary at that time, Huma was chosen to serve as deputy chief of staff for planning, one rung below Mills. If there was one person who played best to Hillary’s demand for loyalty, it was Huma.

  The third member of the troika, thirty-two-year-old Jake Sullivan, had been planning to go home to Minnesota when Mills called him at the tail end of November to ask if he would run Hillary’s Senate confirmation team, a job that also required him to become heavily involved in her transition planning. Sullivan had told friends that he wanted to reestablish his roots in Minnesota so that he could someday run for public office, but he chose to defer designs on launching his own political career.

  Blue-eyed and pale-skinned, with thin, light brown hair swept across his forehead, Sullivan cut a figure as lean as Obama and stood out among Hillary’s diverse set of advisers for looking much more like a traditional Ivy League–pedigreed State Department official. He didn’t neatly fit into the cult of personality that defines Hillaryland, where many top aides are, like Madonna, known simply by one name: Huma, Philippe, Capricia. Or, at times, just by their initials. Reines is PIR, Mills is CDM, and Marshall is CPM. Hillary, of course, is in on the alphabet act, too, as talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres found out during an interview in 2005.