Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  One debate was over Capricia Marshall, who I wanted for Chief of Protocol, the senior official responsible for welcoming foreign leaders to Washington, organizing summits, engaging with the diplomatic corps, traveling with the President abroad, and selecting the gifts he and I would present to our counterparts. As First Lady, I learned how important protocol is to diplomacy. Being a generous host and a gracious guest helps build relationships, while the alternative can result in unintended snubs. So I wanted to be sure we were at the top of our game.

  As White House Social Secretary in the 1990s, Capricia already knew what the job required, but the White House wanted someone who had supported the President during the primaries. I thought this was shortsighted but understood that some friction and growing pains were inevitable as we worked to merge the sprawling entities known as Obamaworld and Hillaryland. “We’re going to figure this out,” I assured Capricia. “I wouldn’t be pushing this if you weren’t the right person for the job—and you are.”

  The President asked me if we needed a peace process between Cheryl and Denis McDonough, one of his closest advisors, but no intervention was required. They worked it out and Capricia got the job. I knew she would not disappoint, and she didn’t. Denis later recounted the story of how he and his wife, Kari, heard Capricia do an interview on NPR one morning. Kari was enchanted and asked about this “absolutely elegant” diplomat. Denis admitted that he had originally opposed appointing her. Kari thought he was crazy, and Denis agreed. He later told Cheryl, “No wonder I lost that one. And good thing I did.”

  Capricia’s success was a microcosm of the journey we all went through, from campaign rivals to respectful colleagues. Cheryl and Denis, the two lead combatants in our early dustups, became not only colleagues but also friends. They talked constantly nearly every day and met for early-morning breakfasts on the weekends, strategizing over eggs and hot chocolate. Near the end of my tenure as Secretary, the President sent a farewell note to Cheryl, saying that we had grown from a “team of rivals” into “an unrivaled team.”

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  I also was determined to recruit Richard Holbrooke, a force of nature who was widely viewed as the premier diplomat of our generation. His hands-on efforts brought peace to the Balkans in the 1990s. As UN Ambassador, he convinced Republicans to pay our UN dues and emphasized HIV/AIDS as a security issue. Soon after accepting the job as Secretary, I asked him to serve as our Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. From the first day in office the new administration would face serious questions about the future of the war in Afghanistan, especially whether to send more troops, as the military wanted. No matter what the President decided, we would need an intensified diplomatic and development effort in both countries. Richard had the experience and moxie to pursue that goal.

  Another priority was, as ever, the pursuit of peace in the Middle East. I asked former Senator George Mitchell to lead our effort. George was Holbrooke’s opposite, as buttoned up as Richard was wide open, but he had a wealth of experience and expertise. He had represented Maine in the Senate for fifteen years, including six as Majority Leader. After stepping down in the mid-1990s, he worked with my husband to midwife the Irish peace process. He later headed the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee, which investigated the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising that began in 2000.

  Many Presidents and Secretaries of State had used Special Envoys for targeted missions and to coordinate policy on certain matters across our government. I had seen how well that could work. Some commentators said the appointment of high-profile diplomats like Holbrooke and Mitchell would diminish my role in important policy- and decision making. That’s not the way I saw it. Appointing people who were qualified to serve as Secretary themselves enhanced my reach and the administration’s credibility. They would be force multipliers, reporting to me but working closely with the White House. The President agreed and came to the State Department along with the Vice President to announce both Richard and George. I was proud that men of such stature would agree to serve in these roles as part of my team. After long and distinguished careers, neither Richard nor George needed to take on what were by any measure difficult, if not impossible, assignments. But they were patriots and public servants who answered the call.

  I also needed top-notch Deputy Secretaries to help run the Department. President Obama’s one personnel recommendation to me was that I consider Jim Steinberg for my Deputy Secretary for Policy. Some in the press speculated that Jim would be seen as an Obama plant and predicted there would be tension between us. I thought that was just silly. I had known Jim since he served as Deputy National Security Advisor during the Clinton Administration. During the 2008 primaries he offered foreign policy advice to both campaigns and both the President and I held him in high regard. He was also a student of the Asia-Pacific, a region I wanted to prioritize. I offered him the job, and in our first meeting I made it clear that I viewed us as one team. Jim felt exactly the same way. In mid-2011, Jim left to become dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. I asked Bill Burns, an exceptionally talented and experienced career diplomat, to take his place.

  Traditionally there had been only one Deputy Secretary of State. I learned that a second Deputy position, for management and resources, had been authorized by Congress but never filled. I was eager to bring in a senior manager who could help me fight for the resources the Department needed up on Capitol Hill and at the White House, and to make sure they were spent wisely. I chose Jack Lew, who had served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget at the end of the 1990s. His financial and management expertise would prove invaluable as we worked together to institute policy reviews and organizational changes.

  When the President asked Jack to reprise his old role at OMB in 2010, he was seamlessly succeeded by Tom Nides, who had long experience in both business and public service. His years as Chief of Staff to Speaker of the House Tom Foley and then to my friend U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor prepared him well to advocate for the Department with Congress and to go to bat for U.S. companies abroad. He brought superb negotiating skills to a number of thorny issues, including a highly sensitive standoff with Pakistan that he helped resolve in 2012.

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  As my confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approached, I dove into intensive preparation. Jake Sullivan, an earnest and brilliant Minnesotan with impeccable credentials (Rhodes scholar, Supreme Court clerk, Senate aide), had been a trusted advisor on my Presidential campaign and had assisted then-Senator Obama with debate prep during the general election. I asked Jake to work with Lissa Muscatine, my friend and a former White House speechwriter, who reprised that role at State. They helped me formulate a clear message for the hearing and answers for what we anticipated would be questions on every issue under the sun. Jake went on to become my Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and later Director of Policy Planning and was at my side nearly everywhere I went for the next four years.

  A transition team, working with career professionals at State, deluged me with thick briefing books and in-person sessions on every topic imaginable, from the budget for the Building’s cafeteria to the policy concerns of every member of Congress. I’ve seen my fair share of briefing books, and I was impressed with the depth, magnitude, and order of these State Department products. Great care went into the smallest details, and a broad (at times byzantine) clearance process allowed experts from across the Department and the wider government to weigh in on the substance.

  Beyond the formal briefing process, I spent those weeks reading, thinking, and reaching out to experts and friends. Bill and I took long walks, talking about the state of the world. Our old friend Tony Blair visited me at home in Washington in early December. He updated me on his work with the “Quartet”—the United States, United Nations, European Union, and Russia—on Middle East peace negotiations since resigning as Prime Minister of the United Kingdo
m in June 2007.

  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice invited me to her apartment in the Watergate complex for a private dinner that gave us a chance to discuss policy challenges and personnel decisions I would face. She made just one request: Would I keep on her driver? I agreed and soon became as dependent on him as Condi had been.

  Condi held another dinner for me with her senior staff, on the eighth floor of the State Department in one of the formal dining rooms that are tucked away there. Her advice about what I should expect in my new role proved very helpful.

  I spoke with the living former Secretaries of State. This is a fascinating club that transcends partisan differences. They had each taken a leg of the relay race and were eager to help me grab the baton and get off to a fast start. Madeleine Albright was my longtime friend and partner in promoting rights and opportunities for women and agreed to chair a new public-private partnership to foster entrepreneurship and innovation in the Middle East. Warren Christopher gave me what might be the most practical advice I received: Don’t plan vacations in August because something always seems to happen that month, such as Russia invading Georgia in 2008. Henry Kissinger checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels. James Baker supported the State Department’s efforts to preserve the ceremonial Diplomatic Reception Rooms and to realize the long-standing goal of building a museum for American diplomacy in Washington. Colin Powell provided candid assessments of individuals and ideas that the President and I were considering. Lawrence Eagleburger, the first and only career Foreign Service officer to serve as Secretary of State, joined me for the fiftieth anniversary of the Department’s Operations Center (or “Ops,” as everyone in the Building calls it). But it was George Shultz who gave me the best gift of all: a teddy bear that sang “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” when its paw was squeezed. I kept it in my office, first as a joke, but every so often it really did help to squeeze the bear and hear that song.

  I thought a lot about the experiences of my predecessors, going back to the first Secretary, Thomas Jefferson. Crafting American foreign policy has always been a high-wire balancing act between continuity and change. I tried to imagine what Dean Acheson, whom I had met all those years before at Wellesley, and his illustrious predecessor, George C. Marshall, had thought about the tumultuous international landscape of their day.

  In the late 1940s the Truman Administration’s mission was to create a new world—a free world—out of the destruction of World War II and in the shadow of the Cold War. Acheson described it as a task “just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis.” Old empires were breaking up and new powers were emerging. Much of Europe was in ruins and menaced by Communism. In what was then called the Third World, people long oppressed were finding their voice and demanding the right to self-determination.

  General Marshall, a hero of World War II who served as both Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense under Truman, understood that America’s security and prosperity depended on capable allies who would share our interests and buy our goods. Even more important, he knew that America had a responsibility and an opportunity to lead the world and that new challenges meant leading in new ways.

  Marshall and Truman launched an ambitious plan to rebuild Europe’s shattered countries and ward off the spread of Communism using every element of American power: military, economic, diplomatic, cultural, and moral. They reached across the aisle to build bipartisan support for their efforts and enlisted business leaders, labor organizers, and academics to help explain their goals to the American people.

  Sixty years later, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, our country once again found itself navigating a rapidly changing world. Technology and globalization had made the world more interconnected and interdependent than ever, and we were grappling with drones, cyber warfare, and social media. More countries—including China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and South Africa—had influence in global debates, while nonstate actors such as civil society activists, multinational corporations, and terrorist networks were playing greater roles in international affairs, for good and ill.

  Although some may have yearned for an Obama Doctrine—a grand unified theory that would provide a simple and elegant road map for foreign policy in this new era, like “containment” did during the Cold War—there was nothing simple or elegant about the problems we faced. Unlike the Cold War days, when we faced a single adversary in the Soviet Union, we now had to contend with many opposing forces. So like our predecessors after World War II, we had to update our thinking to match the changes we were seeing all around us.

  Foreign policy experts often refer to the system of institutions, alliances, and norms built up after World War II as “architecture.” We still needed a rules-based global order that could manage interactions between states, protect fundamental freedoms, and mobilize common action. But it would have to be more flexible and inclusive than before. I came to liken the old architecture to the Parthenon in Greece, with clean lines and clear rules. The pillars holding it up—a handful of big institutions, alliances, and treaties—were remarkably sturdy. But time takes its toll, even on the greatest of edifices, and now we needed a new architecture for a new world, more in the spirit of Frank Gehry than formal Greek classicism. Where once a few strong columns could hold up the weight of the world, now a dynamic mix of materials, shapes, and structures was needed.

  For decades foreign policy tools had been categorized as either the “hard power” of military force or the “soft power” of diplomatic, economic, humanitarian, and cultural influence. I wanted to break the hold of this outdated paradigm and think broadly about where and how we could use all the elements of American foreign policy in concert.

  Beyond the traditional work of negotiating treaties and attending diplomatic conferences, we had to—among other tasks—engage activists on social media, help determine energy pipeline routes, limit carbon emissions, encourage marginalized groups to participate in politics, stand up for universal human rights, and defend common economic rules of the road. Our ability to do these things would be crucial measures of our national power.

  This analysis led me to embrace a concept known as smart power, which had been kicking around Washington for a few years. Harvard’s Joseph Nye, Suzanne Nossel of Human Rights Watch, and a few others had used the term, although we all had in mind slightly different meanings. For me, smart power meant choosing the right combination of tools—diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural—for each situation.

  The goal of smart power and our expanded focus on technology, public-private partnerships, energy, economics, and other areas beyond the State Department’s standard portfolio was to complement more traditional diplomatic tools and priorities, not replace them. We wanted to bring every resource to bear on the biggest and toughest national security challenges. Throughout this book, you’ll see examples of how this worked. Consider our efforts on Iran. We used new financial tools and private-sector partners to enforce stringent sanctions and cut Iran off from the global economy. Our energy diplomacy helped reduce sales of Iranian oil and drummed up new supplies to stabilize the market. We turned to social media to communicate directly with the Iranian people and invested in new high-tech tools to help dissidents evade government repression. All of that bolstered our old-fashioned shoe-leather diplomacy, and together they advanced our core national security objectives.

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  On January 13, 2009, I sat across the table from my Senate colleagues for my confirmation hearing with the Foreign Relations Committee. Over more than five hours I explained why and how I planned to redefine the role of Secretary, outlined positions on our most pressing challenges, and answered questions on everything from Arctic policy to international economics to energy supplies.

  On January 21, the full Senate confirmed my appointment by a vote of 94 to 2. Later that day, in a sma
ll, private ceremony in my Senate office in the Russell Building, surrounded by my Senate staff, Judge Kay Oberly administered the oath to me as my husband held the Bible.

  On January 22, in keeping with the tradition for all new Secretaries, I walked into the State Department through its main entrance on C Street. The lobby was full of cheering colleagues. I was overwhelmed and humbled by their enthusiastic welcome. Fluttering in a long row were the flags of every country in the world with which the United States maintains diplomatic relations. I would visit more than half of those countries, 112 in all, during the whirlwind that was about to begin. “I believe, with all of my heart, that this is a new era for America,” I told the assembled throng.

  Behind the crowd in the lobby, I saw etched into the marble walls the names of more than two hundred diplomats who had died while representing America overseas, going back to the earliest years of the republic. They had lost their lives to wars, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, epidemics, even shipwrecks. I knew it was possible that in the years ahead we’d lose more Americans on duty in dangerous and fragile places. (Sadly we did, from the earthquake in Haiti to the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, and other places in between.) That day and every day I resolved to do everything I could to support and protect the men and women who served our country around the world.

  The Secretary’s office is in the seventh-floor suite known as “Mahogany Row.” The hallway was lined with imposing portraits of my predecessors. I would be working under their watchful gaze. Our warren of offices and conference rooms was guarded by Diplomatic Security Service officers and routinely swept for listening devices. It was called an SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) and could sometimes feel as though we were working inside a giant safe. To prevent eavesdropping, nobody was allowed to bring in any outside electronic devices, even a cell phone.