“I want you on my team,” Obama insisted. Three times she turned him down; three times he refused to take no for an answer. Finally saying she should think it over one last day, she told him, “You’re really making this hard for me.” “I mean to make it hard for you,” said the president-elect.
“What finally tipped it for me,” she said later, “is I really started thinking about, suppose I had won . . . and I wanted him to be in my cabinet. 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?” When she called him the next day, it was to discuss what she would need to take the job. He gave her what she asked for: He would provide help in retiring her debts, and – crucially – she could choose her own team, without running her appointments by the White House.
Clinton knew that she and Obama were in agreement when it came to the issues she would face in the State Department. First, the war in Iraq had tarnished the United States’ image. Confidence in the country was at bottom all through the Middle East and not much better in Europe. It would be up to Secretary Clinton to rebuild the warmth for America that the world had poured out in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
A corollary task: Restore the prestige of the State Department inside the government. During the previous administration, the department had lost considerable influence to the military and to the Central Intelligence Agency. President George W. Bush’s secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, had regularly come into conflict with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Clinton would have to repair that damage and, along the way, rebuild the battered morale of 70,000 workers in the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. She had to reach out to “the building” and win loyalty and commitment from the career employees.
Given her experience in her husband’s administration and the Senate, the new secretary had few ideological misconceptions about her role. She knew she would have to be a pragmatist, reacting to events as they barreled toward her and trying to sort out priorities in the constant press of daily crises. But even she wasn’t fully prepared for the barrage of issues she and her department had to face every day. “The incoming is relentless,” one of Madeleine Albright’s former aides tried to warn one of Clinton’s advisors. Months later, the same adviser complained that she hadn’t been warned. “You didn’t believe me,” said the Albright aide.
Pragmatist though she was, Clinton did have one concept that she wanted to build into American foreign policy. It was originated by Joseph Nye, a Pentagon official in President Clinton’s administration: “Smart power,” a melding of the traditional “hard power” of military force and economic sanctions with the “soft power” of such inducements as economic aid and political support. This would be a subtler, more diplomatic stance than America had recently taken. Hillary believed smart power would be more effective and much less costly in terms of blood and money.
Arriving at the Harry S. Truman Building, the State Department’s drab Washington headquarters, Secretary Clinton had a tool many of her predecessors lacked: celebrity. When she entered the building, the atrium was jammed with people curious to see and hear her, and an overflow crowd had to watch the welcoming ceremony on closed-circuit television.
Clinton proclaimed a “new era for America” and pledged to regain the department’s clout. All the while, she was careful to stay close to Bill Burns, the previous administration’s undersecretary for foreign affairs, as a signal that long-serving foreign-service professionals would be important in her time there.
She had a great deal to learn about the intricacies of international diplomacy, but she impressed Burns and others with how much she knew already and how willing she was to reach out to the people who could help her.
Burns was witnessing what Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, in their book HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton, called the “stages of Hillary.” As a top adviser of Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the writers, “You know, you first dread the prospect of working with her, then you sort of begrudgingly begin to respect her, then you outright respect her and her incredible work ethic. You know, she’s inexhaustible, she’s tough-minded, and then you come to actually start to like her, and you just can’t believe it but you actually like this person, and she’s charming and she’s funny and she’s interesting and she’s inquisitive and she’s engaging.”
That metamorphosis captivated a lot of people in Washington, and the process usually did begin with Clinton’s work ethic. She started every day with a packet of news clippings, which one of her aides began cutting out for her at 4:00 a.m. She spent the day soaking up information, in large meetings and one-on-one, and took home a hefty briefing book. It included stacks of notes to go out under her signature, which she read and sometimes amplified before signing. Then she got to her agenda for the next day. A memo detailed the particulars of every meeting on the schedule, prepared speeches or talking points for all the public events, and brief biographies and notable points about all the people she would be meeting. Unlike most officials with briefing books, Clinton pored through them. She would turn up at the office with a page from deep in the book bookmarked and a note in the margin: “Explain this to me.” And the focus of her new life at State was her equally indefatigable travel schedule, which quickly became the stuff of legend. Eventually, she would log 956,733 miles in visiting 112 countries.
One key to her operations, at State as in the Senate and the White House, was her staff. As they settled into the State Department, there were three people who set the tone, always had Clinton’s ear and were trusted with her most sensitive and confidential musings. Cheryl Mills, first among equals, effectively combined two powerful functions, chief of staff and consigliere, handling operations, management, and some of the most delicate political issues. Blunt and plain-spoken, Mills was the latest of a line of top aides, beginning with Maggie Williams in the White House, who spoke for Hillary. Huma Abedin was Hillary’s longtime “body woman,” Washington’s name for the person who tends to an official’s personal needs, keeps her on or close to schedule, and controls who is allowed to have access to her. She makes sure she has whatever she needs, whether it’s hand sanitizer and medications or a passport and a smartphone. Jake Sullivan was the junior member of the troika, having joined Hillaryland only in the 2008 campaign. But he quickly made himself indispensable in a wide array of roles, including deputy chief of staff for policy and head of the State Department’s in-house think tank.
The power of the troika was informal, based on Clinton’s trust. They presided over a structure of some 200 political appointees in the department and the Agency for International Development, nearly all of whom Clinton named. The White House initially tried to renege on Obama’s promise of complete autonomy, presenting lists of candidates from which the secretary could choose. But the issue was settled after Clinton reminded the president of his commitment in several disputes.
Early in the administration, Hillary won a key battle when it came to establishing the lines of influence that define any presidency. The State Department had been losing ground to other agencies in some areas of foreign policy. In Hillary’s view, the department’s purview included all foreign policy – except, perhaps, when the Pentagon was actually fighting a war. In one field especially, relations with China, the Treasury Department had been setting up a series of talks called the Strategic Economic Dialogue. The new Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, had studied China at Dartmouth, spoke Mandarin, and had all the credentials to be chief spokesman. He would run the talks.
But Hillary wanted at least a piece of the conversation, and she knew Geithner was fully busy dealing with the vast economic collapse that Obama had inherited. With his consent, she told Obama it would be a mistake to allow the principal U.S. dialogue with China to focus only on financial and economic issues. Political, military, and other strategic issues, she said, had to be considered. With the p
resident’s blessing, the talks were renamed the Strategic & Economic Dialogue, with the ampersand as a token of the State Department’s new clout. When the State Department plane arrived in China in 2010 for the first installment of the talks, her staffers were wearing baseball caps emblazoned with large white ampersands.
Hillary made a personal ally of Defense Secretary Gates, restoring cordial relations between State and the Pentagon. Previously the slightest of acquaintances, the two found they shared convictions about the U.S. role in the world. He agreed with her preference for smart power while she shared his hawkish belief that the nation must maintain a strong military and not be afraid to use it. As the two most experienced players on the National Security Council, they were in a position to counter the institutional clout of the national security adviser (James Jones, followed by Tom Donilon) and his national security staff. Clinton and Gates lunched regularly and telephoned often; they were reliably on the same side of all issues for the first two years of the administration.
But Clinton’s most significant relationship was, of course, with Obama. At first, it was polite, even cordial, but hardly warm and personal. She had yet to establish her loyalty and willingness to reflect his views, and many of their staffers were still chafing over slights and insults exchanged in the primary campaign. By September of the first year, however, Obama was in the early throes of his fight to pass the Affordable Care Act. Healthcare reform was no part of Hillary’s foreign policy concerns, but she sympathized with his struggle. And she took the lead in a Cabinet meeting to persuade her colleagues to get behind the president and stop voicing private doubts about the bill.
Their friendship grew three months later when he and Clinton traveled together to a climate summit in Copenhagen meant to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The conference had been poorly organized, with no real groundwork for reaching a deal. At one point, as Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes tell the story, the U.S. team became aware that China was holding a secret meeting with Brazil, India, and South Africa. Obama decided to crash the gathering, and invited Clinton to go along.
When they walked into the room, the chief Chinese diplomat exploded in his own language. “I don’t know what he’s saying, but I don’t think it’s ‘Glad to see you guys,’” Obama joked. They confronted the group, improvising tactics and figuring out how to respond to arguments, with no staff input. In the end, they came away with a five-nation agreement on a climate proposal that was nonbinding and ineffectual and wasn’t adopted by the conference as a whole. But they had enjoyed the fray – and as a White House official told Allen and Parnes, “They were real buddies after that.”
As secretary of state, one of Clinton’s major policy successes came in pressuring Iran to the point that it would agree to start bargaining with the Western allies to end its nuclear weapons program. Initially, Obama tried to reach out to Iran’s leaders, appealing to their better nature to acknowledge their secret goal and agree to give it up. Clinton was always dubious that this tact would be effective, but more optimistic about the usefulness of economic sanctions. She welcomed the chance to get tough.
However, the sanctions would be a real sacrifice for the countries and multinational companies that would have to slash investment and trade with Iran. Clinton knew that they couldn’t be imposed with a draconian set of rules binding on everyone doing business there. Instead, she would use smart power: Companies from friendly countries would be given incentives to help isolate Iran, because it would take time for them to unwind complex relations with their Iranian counterparts, and they would be forgoing sales and profits in the process. So the State Department proposed that some companies be temporarily exempted from sanctions if they could show that they were on a serious and irreversible path to getting out of the country.
Clinton’s former colleagues in Congress objected at first that the policy wasn’t hawkish enough, but they finally agreed that it would work better than sledgehammer diplomacy in the long run. The sanctions, gradually imposed, cut deeply into Iran’s oil exports and crippled its currency.
Clinton’s policy was successful as far as it went, in pushing Iran to the bargaining table. But she wasn’t in charge of reaching the deal or of carrying it out. That came later.
In 2011, Hillary Clinton leaned toward war. It was far from her usual stance. As the U.S. secretary of state, she backed President Obama’s efforts to pull out of the long, costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this case was different. The target of the war she favored was Muammar Qaddafi, the tyrant who had inflicted repeated atrocities on his own people in Libya and had given his blessing to the bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Scotland that killed some 270. The people of Libya were rising in revolt as part of the Arab Spring movement of 2011. And Qaddafi was cracking down with a ruthless military campaign that could leave scores of thousands dead and his country in ruins.
Clinton had seen her own husband so gripped by his abhorrence of war, the practical problems of waging it, and the caution of his advisers that he was slow to stop the genocide that shattered Rwanda in 1993. That reluctance tarnished his presidency, and she wanted to avoid another such failure. She sensed that Obama felt the same.
But she was in the minority among Obama’s counselors. Robert Gates, usually her ally on the National Security Council, argued the armed forces were already stretched thin. The United States had no vital interests at stake in Libya, he said, and any U.S. action to stop Qaddafi would be long, bloody, and likely to fail. Vice President Joe Biden agreed with Gates, and so did White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley and Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The odds were against Clinton. And whatever Obama’s leanings, she knew he could be persuaded to take action only on one iron-clad condition: No American soldiers on the ground. To win him over, she would have to cobble together a coalition of allies, and get the endorsement of an international patron – at least NATO, but preferably the United Nations.
Improbably, she set out to do it. Even more improbably, she succeeded. The story of how she did it highlights Clinton’s formidable talents as a leader and diplomat. But the cost and still-painful aftermath of what some call “Hillary’s War” continue to come under close examination.
The crisis grew worse every day. Protests against Qaddafi had begun on February 15, 2011, prompting a violent crackdown by his troops. Rebels soon seized cities in eastern Libya, along the Mediterranean coast. The west, including the capital, Tripoli, was under Qaddafi’s control. But there, Qaddafi’s guns shelled residential neighborhoods. His troops pulled dissident citizens from their houses and shot them in the streets. The toll of dead and injured was impossible to calculate. Qaddafi’s tanks moved inexorably eastward along the coastal road. Without outside aid, the rebellion was doomed.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron said they stood ready to help the rebels by setting up a no-fly zone, blocking Qaddafi’s planes from taking to the air to crush the uprising. And on March 12, to the astonishment of the world’s diplomats, the twenty-one countries of the Arab League voted unanimously to support a no-fly zone. The League had never before backed outside action against an Arab government. That vote could provide cover for a Western coalition to act.
The main obstacle, Clinton knew, was that a no-fly zone wouldn’t be sufficient. Even if an outside force were to eliminate the Libyan air defenses and keep Qaddafi’s planes on the ground, the more pressing threat was the tanks and troops bearing down on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. The poorly armed rebels didn’t have the munitions or training to mount an adequate defense. Defending the rebels would require bombing and strafing, along with bombardment from the sea and, probably, soldiers. Given that Obama would never deploy troops to fight on the ground, Clinton would have to persuade her allies to work and sacrifice their own soldiers’ lives to overthrow Qaddafi.
She first worked to persuade the Arabs that they would have take part in any such move. On March 14, at a meeting in Paris of the Group
of Eight major economic powers, Clinton met in her hotel room with Sheikh Abdullah bin-Zayed al-Nahyan, the head of the Gulf Cooperation Council of oil-rich Arab countries. The sheikh was chafing over a rebuke the White House had just delivered for Bahrain’s crackdown on an Arab Spring uprising. He complained bitterly about it to America’s chief diplomat. Then he agreed that his member nations would provide warplanes to help enforce a no-fly zone in Libya. It was a promising start.
Hillary’s next step was to find out who the Libyan rebels were – still a critical unknown. Inevitably, they would include extreme Islamists, perhaps even men linked to Al Qaeda. But there couldn’t be more than a handful of these, and they had to be kept under control. If U.S. intervention could end with Libya ruled by jihadists, the campaign would be a failure. So the next visitor to Hillary’s hotel suite was Mahmoud Jibril, head of the loose rebel coalition, who had been secretly flown to Paris and smuggled into the hotel for the meeting. Jibril fit no one’s image of a fiery revolutionary. He was soft-spoken and lucid, with a doctorate in political science from the University of Pittsburgh and a distinguished career as a management consultant. Jibril assured the secretary of state that his people had an inclusive, benign, democratic vision of Libya after Qaddafi. Clinton pushed back hard enough about extremist elements that he was afraid he had failed, but he persuaded her.
The next requirement was to persuade Clinton’s French and British colleagues – and hopefully the Germans – that they had to be ready for more than a no-fly zone. In past crises - Kuwait in 1990 and Iraq in 2003 - the United States had assembled coalitions of allies willing to provide cover for U.S. goals, as long as Washington was willing to put up most of the money and troops for the actual fighting. In this war, the allies would have to furnish both funds and troops. Clinton’s tactic was to avoid being seen as the driving force for action, taking a back seat to Sarkozy and Cameron.
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