Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (8 page)
Read Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas Online
Authors: Edward Klein
W
hen Barack Obama returned from his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, he telephoned Bill Clinton and invited him out for a round of golf.
Clinton didn’t want to go.
“I’m not going to enjoy this,” he told Hillary when they gathered with a group of friends and political associates in the third week of September at Whitehaven, their neo-Georgian home on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.
The mansion, which the Clintons bought in 2001 for $2.85 million, was known among Democratic wags as “the White-House-in-Waiting” or “Fund-Raising Central.” Designed as the perfect launching pad for Hillary’s presidential ambitions, it had a spacious ballroom, which was custom-made for fund-raising events, and a dining room that sat thirty people. In the back, there
was a raised terrace overlooking manicured gardens, a pool, and a lawn big enough for a large party tent.
“I’m not going to enjoy this,” Clinton kept repeating as he paced up and down the Oriental rug in the sunroom, which was decorated in muted camel and coral colors and featured presidential mementos and Clinton’s collection of dazzling Chihuly glass. From time to time, he picked up one of the expensive glass objects and held it while making a point.
“I really can’t stand the way Obama always seems to be hectoring when he talks to me,” Clinton said, according to someone who was present at the gathering and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Sometimes we just stare at each other. It’s pretty damn awkward. Now we both have favors to ask each other, and it’s going to be very unpleasant. But I’ve got to get this guy to owe me and to be on our side.”
Once he got started talking, it was hard for Clinton to turn himself off. Listening to him riff on his tortuous relationship with Obama was like eavesdropping on a neurotic patient free-associating on a psychiatrist’s couch. What came out was not always pretty.
According to one of the invited guests who reconstructed Clinton’s soliloquy in an interview for this book, Clinton said he wouldn’t allow his antipathy for Obama to cloud his strategic thinking.
“I hate that man Obama more than any man I’ve ever met, more than any man who ever lived,” he said. “He called me a racist! They tried to make me and my wife out to be racists. But the important thing to keep in mind is that Obama’s decision to invite me out for a game of golf is a sign of his weakness, since any deal we might strike will immediately place Obama in my
debt. The crucial question is: How am I going to exploit this advantage?”
As always, Clinton was thinking several moves ahead. A deal with Obama would offer Clinton the opportunity to restore his image, which had been badly tarnished in left-wing circles of the Democratic Party by what many interpreted as his racist comments during the 2008 primary campaign. Then, too, recapturing the White House was uppermost in his mind. At some point in the future—if not in 2012, then in 2016—Hillary would reach again for the brass ring of American success: the presidency. If Clinton was going to unite the Democratic Party behind Hillary, the support of the Obama wing of the party would be critical.
But Clinton hated the idea of being beholden to Obama. Like Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama, Clinton still had a bitter taste in his mouth from the 2008 primary battles, in which he had been made a whipping boy by the Obama campaign. In particular, Clinton could never forgive Obama for one particular nasty remark he had made during an appearance before the Nevada caucuses—that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that . . . Bill Clinton did not.”
“He put a hit job on me,” Clinton complained about Obama, long after the dust had settled on the 2008 campaign.
“He played the race card on me,” he grumbled on many other occasions.
And still other times he protested: “I’ve had two successors since I left the White House—Bush and Obama—and I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama. I have no relationship with the president—none whatsoever.”
O
nce before, Clinton had made a serious effort at détente with Obama. After Obama won the 2008 election, Clinton offered to cooperate with the new president’s transition team and do whatever was necessary to clear the way for Hillary to become secretary of state.
This had required considerable sacrifice on Clinton’s part. For starters, he agreed to seek the Obama administration’s prior approval of all his speeches and to stop addressing organizations that did business with the U.S. government. What’s more, after a decade of refusing to disclose the names of donors to the Clinton Foundation, he signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Obama under which he agreed to open the books on his fund-raising efforts. The list of 205,000 donors—who, in total, had ponied up more than $492 million—included Saudi and Indian
billionaires; Denise Rich, the ex-wife of fugitive financier Marc Rich, whom Clinton had pardoned; the China Overseas Real Estate Development Corporation; the U.S. Islamic World Conference; and Teva Pharmaceutical, Israel’s biggest drug company.
And Clinton’s promises had gone further than that. During the time Hillary served as secretary of state, he would publish an annual list of donors to his foundation, abstain from holding meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative outside the United States, and refuse to accept contributions from foreign sources.
And what did Bill Clinton get in return for sacrificing tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees, putting a crimp in his foundation’s fund-raising efforts, and going into partial political hibernation while Hillary was at Foggy Bottom?
“For one thing, having his spouse in that position didn’t hurt his work at the Clinton Global Initiative,” Ryan Lizza wrote in the
New Yorker
. “He invites foreign leaders to the initiative’s annual meeting, and her prominence in the administration can be an asset in attracting foreign donors.”
But as far as Clinton was concerned, he got nothing but ingratitude and disrespect from Barack Obama. Since Obama had become president, Bill and Hillary had never once been invited to dinner at the White House. Indeed, the White House had become a den of anti-Clinton sentiment, and Clinton seethed with anger when he learned that Obama and his inner circle used the word “Clintonian” as a slur for policy proposals they found incompatible with their leftist approach to governance.
As much as Clinton resented the way Obama treated him, he was even more upset by Obama’s treatment of Hillary. During the 2008 primary fight, the Obama campaign said that Hillary couldn’t be “trusted or believed when it comes to change,” because “she is driven by political calculation not conviction.” And from the day Hillary arrived at the State Department, the members of Obama’s inner circle went out of their way to be nasty to her.
Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, held a grudge against Hillary because she thought
she
, not Hillary, should have been named secretary of state. Valerie Jarrett thwarted Hillary at every opportunity. If Hillary wanted to appoint one of her own people an assistant to an assistant secretary, a position low on the totem pole, Jarrett would object. The appointee had to be an Obama person. Jarrett would prevent Hillary from appointing one of her own, even at the sub-sublevel.
“Bill had a vision for Hillary’s legacy as secretary of state that was very much big concepts,” one of Bill Clinton’s oldest friends and closest advisers said in an interview for this book. “He wanted her to make peace for Israel, as he had tried to do when he was president. He wanted her to go to North Korea and open a dialogue. He saw her bringing pressure to bear on Iran, which would end their nuclear program. In other words, he saw no small-bore housekeeping functions. He pushed for big projects that would be world changers.
“But the problems Hillary faced were manifold,” this source continued. “First, Barack and his people weren’t about to let Hillary make policy, grand strategy. Second, Hillary is essentially a detail person. She wanted the trains to run on time and didn’t have the instinct to be a foreign policy titan. But Bill pushed her hard, and she was aggressive enough to make Barack nervous. They clashed often.”
Another close Clinton source put it this way: “I’ve known Hillary since we were kids, and she has a combative streak, especially around someone as imperious as Barack. I seriously doubt the president would have appointed her to another term at State even if she had wanted it.”
One expert who agreed with this assessment was Vali Reza Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of
The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat
. A leading expert on the Middle East, Nasr served under the legendary diplomat Richard Holbrooke in the State Department and had a front-row seat to the turf battles between the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton.
“The problems Hillary faced stemmed from the people around Obama, but at the end of the day Obama chose those people and the policies they generated for him,” Nasr told the author of this book. “It was Obama’s choice to surround himself with a small cabal of people who ran foreign policy the way they did. There was a wall between Obama and the people he chose to run foreign policy, on the one hand, and Hillary, on the other. Obama was ultimately responsible for how shamefully Hillary was treated.
“In my view,” continued Nasr, “Hillary’s biggest contribution was that she was a big enough person to put up with all of this. She could have left the administration much earlier, she could have resigned, as Al Haig did in the Reagan administration, and that would have opened a huge fissure in the ranks of the Democratic Party and jeopardized an Obama victory in the 2012 presidential election. Hillary understood that if she took umbrage at not being heard, or if she grew tired of being manhandled by the people around Obama, she would have damaged the whole party.
“Obama’s three most important foreign policy advisers were David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and John Brennan, deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism [Brennan has since been appointed director of the CIA]. Obama put Brennan in charge of drones and the fight against terrorists, the two prongs of Obama’s wartime foreign policy initiatives. Whenever Hillary went on a trip to, say, Saudi Arabia, Brennan would go along, and the Saudis treated him as the person who really mattered, not Hillary. Ultimately, John Brennan made Middle East policy. Axelrod and Jarrett made other policies, in other parts of the world. These three people—Brennan, Axelrod, and Jarrett—were the ones calling the shots. It was they who decided we should surge in Afghanistan or the direction of our Pakistan policy. Not the State Department, and not Hillary.
“Hillary disagreed with the president on many issues: the manner of our troop withdrawal from Afghanistan; the way the president handled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak; how to deal with Libya; and what we should do about Syria—she wanted to get involved. She didn’t agree with the policy of leading from behind.”
D
uring the Clintons’ gathering at their home in Whitehaven, a guest noticed that Bill kept clenching his fists as he spoke about his frustration with Barack Obama.
Just the month before, he had urged Hillary to challenge Obama for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2012. Despite Bill’s secret poll showing that she could beat Obama, Hillary had refused to turn on a sitting president of her own party, fearing that doing so would damage her in the eyes of the Democratic faithful for all time.
Walking across the sunroom, Clinton plopped down on a caramel Rose Tarlow velvet sofa, looked across the room at Hillary, and said, “I still think you should have done it.”
“It was an obsession he couldn’t shake,” said a person who participated in the conversation. “He believes with a religiosity
that the country needs the Clintons, and he means to make it happen come hell or high water. I don’t think anything Hillary has ever done or not done in their marriage disappointed or infuriated him as much as her decision not to run against Obama. Bill would have loved the fight.
“And Hillary wants the presidency too,” this person continued. “It was never that she didn’t want the presidency. She has since high school. Being secretary of state was never something Hillary saw as a crowning career achievement. It meant carrying out the president’s policy, not her own. And it turned out to be even worse than that. She had to carry out the policy of a cacophonous mob that surrounded the president. But it clearly put the crown on her foreign policy experience. It was calculated to do just that—a major mark on her already impressive CV that she can hold up against whoever might try to challenge her for the nomination in the future.”