Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine

by Daniel Halper

  But in fact the reality was slightly different in that present moment: America was still heavily involved in two wars, and worse, the Middle East was once again about to go up in flames. A “pivot” would prove to be in name only.

  No matter how much Hillary may have wanted to forge a new path, Team Obama had other ideas. The tone was set early on with cabinet meetings. As with other recent administrations, these were scripted affairs, opportunities for select cabinet officials to report on what their departments were doing, but not open for freewheeling discussions. “It wasn’t a debating society, but more of a reporting session,” one former cabinet secretary who served during Obama’s first term tells me in an interview. Officials were informed who would be issuing reports and for how long. “It was a lot of window-dressing to show . . . the country and to show Washington that the president was consulting those cabinet officials,” the former cabinet secretary says. The meetings usually ran about ninety minutes.

  Instead of relying on his cabinet secretaries, Barack Obama relied on a small, insular team of White House insiders who have been calling the shots since the first day of his administration. People like Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s loyal, longtime confidante; Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security advisor; and a host of White House staffers who toil in anonymity but whose memos and talking points have the power to shape American foreign policy as much as, if not more than, any decree issued by the secretaries of state or defense.

  If tensions between Obama and Clinton eased after the 2008 campaign, that never became true among staffers at the lower levels. This was due to “the campaign hangover,” according to State Department employee Vali Nasr, who served as a special advisor to the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Obama’s inner circle, veterans of his election campaign, were suspicious of Clinton,” he told me shortly after the publication of a memoir of his time in the Obama administration—one that wasn’t received well inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “And even after Clinton proved she was a team player, they remained concerned with her popularity and approval ratings, and feared that she could overshadow the president.”

  Clinton and Obama’s defense secretary Robert Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration, shared a resentment of the maneuverings of a National Security Council (NSC) populated by people they found largely young, arrogant, and out of their depth. None of them had much of an affinity for Hillary Clinton. One of Obama’s top campaign surrogates, Samantha Power, had called Hillary “a monster.” She resigned from the campaign, but then subsequently was hired as a senior director on the NSC, undoubtedly making chilly some meetings in the Situation Room when both women were present. With the Power selection, Obama was also making another point—Hillary wasn’t in control of national security policy. He was.

  Obama had never run a government bureaucracy bigger than a Senate office (which generally has about thirty or forty staffers, a budget of around $2 million to $3 million, and a couple of state offices in addition to its main office on Capitol Hill). Still, his approach was to try to run the important things himself, such as foreign policy, where he had pledged to do things differently than his predecessor George W. Bush—and to restore the trust and confidence the world once had in America.

  When Obama recruited Hillary for his cabinet, he told her that his top priority would be jobs and the economy. The economy had tanked. Big banks had collapsed and unemployment had surged to highs not seen in recent years. It was for this reason, among others, that he’d need her to take the reins on foreign policy. Whether he meant it or not—he probably didn’t—the reins in fact never left Obama’s hands.

  “Part of the fighting was that—where does policy get initiated?” Vali Nasr recalls as I question him in his office at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he’s now dean after leaving Hillary’s State Department. “The national security apparatus is such that the agencies suggest policies, provide intelligence, provide information. The job of the National Security Council is to organize this for the president and set up a decision-making process for the president based on the input of these groups, so they’re really giving the president policy options.”

  But it was different with Obama. “When I was there, that’s not the way NSC worked,” Nasr says. “They wanted to basically shape the policy there and then for these agencies to implement it. Basically, it became a singular policy-making apparatus, which then begs the question what is the quality of the decision making there, and what is the quality of the people making these policies there, and what is their objective? Is the objective to protect the president from foreign policy? Is the objective to manage his image? Or is the objective to further America’s national interest?”

  As Hillary, the pragmatist, had demanded before taking the job, she did have regular “one-on-ones” with the president. For Clinton this offered the visual, at least to the Washington press corps, that she was an integral player. To Obama it was a chance for respectful listening and making sure that Hillary personally felt looped-in to the happenings at the White House. But it never seemed to stop him from doing whatever he wanted to do once she left the room.

  “As secretary of state I think that her relationship with the president was cordial, but never close,” says Senator McCain, who served as the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and observed her up close. McCain’s a foreign policy hawk—one more aligned with Hillary than Obama, so it is with a tinge of regret the former Republican presidential nominee makes this observation one morning in his Senate office. “I don’t believe that when crucial decisions were made that she was necessarily in the room. . . . [W]hen it came to some crucial decisions I don’t think that Mr. Donilon was swayed by her opinion. I’m not saying she wasn’t consulted, but I think it’s very well known she was not in the inner circle of decision makers on national security.”

  “I think she had very little interaction” with the president, says one veteran State Department employee. “A lot of this was, you know, she would go to meetings of the NSC when she was in town and called, but it was a very distant relationship.”

  The NSC sidelined Clinton at every turn—as it did other cabinet secretaries from Gates to his successors at the Pentagon, Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel. “They would send [the defense secretary] to someplace like Botswana while they crafted North Korea policy at the White House,” one former Defense Department official says.

  “The structure of the White House was set up particularly by people who are not experienced in foreign policy, often came from a domestic policy background, and had their eyes on 2012 and the poll numbers,” says State’s former special advisor Nasr. “They were micromanaging. They were micromanaging the strategic review on Afghanistan. They were micromanaging the Pakistan policy. They were micromanaging Egypt. They were micromanaging all of these issues.”

  Contemplating how Bill Clinton would have adapted to the workings of the Obama cabinet, one person who served both Presidents Clinton and Obama laughs. “My prediction is that . . . he would have been a disaster,” he says, “because he would have had a hard time keeping in his lane.” Hillary didn’t have that problem.

  “Obama brought her into the administration, put her in a bubble, and ignored her,” says a former high-ranking diplomat. “It turned out to be a brilliant political maneuver by Obama, making it impossible for her to challenge him, unless she left the administration, and not giving her an excuse that she could resign in protest. So she was stuck.”

  One early signal to Hillary about her real place in the administration involved formulation of policy toward Afghanistan, which came during the first year of Obama’s presidency. The decision was whether to escalate the war or not. It would be Obama’s first major foreign policy decision, centered on what he had called the “good war,” a contradistinction to the bad war, which he considered Iraq. This one was Afghanistan, which the United States had invaded soon after the September 11, 2001, ter
ror attacks—the largest and most devastating in America’s history. He felt less good about the war upon coming into office.

  Hillary, for her part, suggested President Obama listen to his commander on the ground—General Stanley McChrystal—who had requested a surge of forty thousand troops. Gates basically was in agreement, though he could have lived with a smaller commitment.

  “I want an exit strategy,” Obama reportedly told Gates and Clinton, according to Bob Woodward’s account, in a private Situation Room war meeting.

  But he ended up deciding that a surge of thirty thousand troops on a limited and preordained timeline was what would be appropriate. The deciding factor? Not so much Hillary, though it wouldn’t have exactly been a position of strength to retreat from war without his cabinet behind him. It goes deeper. Obama’s natural instinct was to retreat, to pull back from the world and let the Afghans deal with the problem of Afghanistan. He had made that promise in Iraq—it was a central campaign promise that set him apart from Hillary, who had voted along with most other Republicans and Democrats to support the war in Iraq. The problem was that full retreat was the least politically tenable option, and it would require his crossing the entire military establishment. Pulling back entirely would have resulted in charges of abandonment.

  A first-term president already looked at with caution by the hawkish wings of the Democratic and Republican parties did not feel he had the strength to make such a decision.

  Hillary had appointed Richard Holbrooke, a longtime Clinton aide, to be her point person on Afghanistan. This didn’t sit well with the president and his loyalists.

  From the start, Obama didn’t trust him. And as a result he didn’t listen to him. The president deferred instead to an insular circle of loyalists, many of whom had far less experience in foreign policy. That list included Tom Donilon, a political type with midlevel stints at the State Department who had been an executive at mortgage giant Fannie Mae; Denis McDonough, a longtime Senate aide with a low profile, who was personally close with Obama; UN ambassador Susan Rice; family friend and confidante Valerie Jarrett; and chief political advisor David Axelrod, who was on hand at the weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings in the Situation Room, where President Obama developed his “kill list” of terrorist targets. These were the trusted advisors in the White House. Not Hillary—or her hand-selected staff.

  The selection of Holbrooke, some think, was a classic Hillary mistake: Rely on a dear friend from over the years instead of someone who might be better suited to managing the war on which President Obama was most focused. Holbrooke was in some ways a brilliant foreign policy thinker, but he set out to align himself with the opponents of Afghan president Hamid Karzai in part because Karzai was considered George W. Bush’s man in Kabul. When it came time to work with the complicated and imperfect Karzai, the relationship was sour almost from the start.

  Hillary’s loyalty to Holbrooke was unwavering. After he fell ill in 2010 and his condition deteriorated, Hillary visited him every day at George Washington University Hospital. “The night that he was dying or when they decided to pull the plug, she just, wherever she was, she just left and came straight there,” Nasr remembers. When Holbrooke died, his whole crew—all his staff—was waiting downstairs in the hospital. Hillary hugged everybody.

  “Let’s go to the closest hotel,” Hillary told the shocked and mournful staff. “Let’s go there and have an Irish wake.”

  They left the hospital for the Ritz-Carlton, less than a half mile away, where Hillary stayed until about midnight. “She told stories. She listened to other people tell stories. She cried with everybody, and had tears in her eyes,” Nasr recounts. “That’s the side of her we saw.”

  Once she realized she would never really be a major player in Obamaland, Hillary Clinton did what she always did: adjusted her course. “She kept her head down on large issues,” says a former Obama administration official. “She did a nice job of tamping down any tension between her and the White House.” And she focused on her own future. With Clinton taking to the skies and traveling the world, her post at the State Department became a platform for the United States and Hillary Clinton. Except not in that order.

  To handle mundane State Department activities, she set up a traditional State Department operation, filled with people comfortable with, and to, the foreign policy establishment.

  Her first press secretary, P. J. Crowley, was typical. Crowley’s professional history was steady, but far from sparkling: twenty-six years in the air force; an assistant to the president in the Clinton White House; a vice president for public affairs for the Insurance Information Institute; a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, the organization that had been designed to be a White House in waiting for Hillary while she was in the Senate.

  As a spokesman for Hillary’s State Department, Crowley was not nimble enough for the Foggy Bottom press corps. Clumsy at the podium, he would often create news at times when the State Department wanted to play down stories. By contrast, a good press secretary can conduct an hour-long, on-the-record briefing that makes no news. To be fair, the State Department podium is one of the most difficult to man—it requires knowing America’s position toward every nation in the world. One slipup and an international crisis can be created.

  Most infamously, Crowley broke with the U.S. government on the issue of Bradley Manning, the man who leaked secret U.S. documents to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. “What is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid on the part of the Department of Defense,” Crowley would tell a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2 The break from the administration was so sharp President Obama had to address it later that week at a press conference. Crowley was soon out.

  To replace him, Secretary Clinton turned to State Department veteran Victoria Nuland, an immensely talented and knowledgeable foreign policy hand. It was widely thought in Washington that Hillary picked her to preempt criticism from the right. She held previous appointments in the Bush administration, and her husband is Robert Kagan, a conservative foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post and former foreign policy advisor on John McCain’s 2008 presidential run. Nuland’s appointment prevented many establishment Republicans from crossing the prominent Kagan by going after his wife in public.

  Hillary even appointed Kagan to her Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which was headed by Strobe Talbott, who had long ago forgiven his former roommate, Bill Clinton, for once hitting on his girlfriend while they were in school. The board, like so many in Washington, was perfunctory—and indeed it’s not apparent any substantive policy recommendations from the board were ever adopted by Hillary. That was hardly the point. Instead, the primary function was similar to the reason Nuland was appointed: If the Washington foreign policy establishment is working for you, and serving you in some way, it’s much less likely that they’ll publicly criticize your actions.

  There was a second, almost entirely separate operation set up by Clinton, which might as well have been dubbed “2016.”

  In a sign of just how much Obama was determined to corral her into his cabinet, the president and his top aides had reluctantly agreed to let Hillary, unlike other cabinet officials, refrain from hiring the usual political appointees and campaign staffers and bundlers who had worked to help Obama get elected. Certainly, she wouldn’t have to hire anyone who had worked in 2008 to defeat her. She and she alone would pick political appointees for her department. By contrast, Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, complained that he couldn’t get any of his people through the White House personnel system. (Kerry had endorsed Obama in 2008.)

  There were occasional limits to that power. Hillary proposed bringing aboard Sidney Blumenthal, for instance, a trusted Clinton advisor who had fired some of the heaviest artillery directly at Obama in the 2008 campaign. Rahm Emanuel, the brash former Clintonite brought on as Obama’s chief of staff, was given the job of telling her no. It’s long
been suspected that it was Blumenthal who during the campaign sent around a photo of Obama dressed in African garb in what was seen as an attempt to make Obama, whose father was born in Kenya, look foreign. It helped feed into the baseless rumors that Obama himself had been born in Kenya—a trope that appears to have originated in Clintonland in a nasty and subversive attempt to dismiss the young senator during the outset of the campaign.

  Otherwise, Mrs. Clinton was able to largely reassemble her political operation at State. This included her longtime speechwriter Lissa Muscatine, her press-hating press secretary Philippe Reines, and of course her devoted Huma Abedin, who traveled with her on almost every one of her trips to more than one hundred countries.

  “Huma and Philippe were very close personal managers of her affairs,” Nasr says.

  Indeed, so close was Reines to Hillary that he was spared what otherwise might have been a firing offense. Because of his actions Hillary was humiliated in front of the Russians, when the cockiness of the press aide prevented him from using wise judgment.

  In March 2009, less than two months into the Obama administration, Hillary was meeting her Russian counterpart on neutral ground in Geneva. She brought along a gift: “an emergency stop button that had been hastily pilfered from a swimming pool or Jacuzzi at the hotel,” according to the book HRC, cowritten by a former staffer for Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.3 The red button, printed in Latin script and not Cyrillic, said peregruzka, meaning “overcharge.” It was supposed to read “reset,” a reference to a line Vice President Joe Biden had offered the previous month about offering a “reset” in U.S.-Russia relations following George W. Bush’s rule, but Reines got the translation wrong.