HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (29 page)

Now, as doctors performed marathon surgical work on Holbrooke, Hillary embraced his tight-knit team again, appearing at the hospital repeatedly during their three-day vigil. On one of the nights, she took them to dinner, walking with them through Washington Circle, past the bronze statue of the nation’s first president at the Battle of Princeton, to Mei Wah, a Chinese restaurant where signed pictures of politicians, including both Clintons, adorn the walls. It had long been Bill’s favorite spot for takeout, and Clintonites have turned it into a lunchtime conference room over the years.

When Hillary received word that Holbrooke had died, she left Obama at a State Department reception and rushed to the hospital. Half a dozen members of Holbrooke’s team congregated in the lobby.

Hillary found them there, crying. One by one, she hugged his aides.

“Let’s go to the bar and have an Irish wake for Richard,” she said.

The death of Richard Holbrooke turned into an opportunity for his advocates and critics to slug it out over his legacy in obituaries and at the numerous memorial services held in his honor.
Much was made in Washington of the contrast between the Clintons’ efforts to canonize him and the dry, impersonal eulogy that Obama delivered at Washington’s National Cathedral. But on another level, Holbrooke’s passing removed one of the final remaining points of tension between Obama’s White House and Hillary’s State Department. He was a reflection of the differences in their operations, a brilliant player with a flair for drama.

White House aides had soured on Holbrooke early on. Beyond his threats from the campaign trail, they had become convinced that he was the source of damaging leaks about sensitive negotiations regarding the future of Afghanistan and its president, Hamid Karzai, and then lied about it. “Those discussions can only work if they happen quietly and they don’t get leaked, and he was leaking all the time,” said one White House aide. “He would tell people at the White
House to their face, ‘I haven’t talked to a reporter in a year.’ And the reporter would tell us, ‘Holbrooke won’t stop calling me.’ And you go to his memorial and reporters were giving testimonials about how they had heard from him every day. It’s not that people had any lack of respect for his intellect or his ability.… It’s that he didn’t tell the truth. And when someone lies to your face, that’s frustrating.”

With Bill emerging as an important validator for the president and Holbrooke no longer a flashpoint, the White House had little remaining reason to question Hillary’s loyalty. Instead, after two years of working together, the prevailing view of Hillary at the White House was that she could be trusted.

The Situation Room fell quiet on February 1, 2011, as President Barack Obama and the members of his National Security Council paused to look at a television screen on the far wall. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was speaking, and like millions of ordinary citizens around the world, America’s highest-ranking officials wondered whether he was ready to give up power. Mubarak, whose government had clashed with prodemocracy protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, still clung to power, and the men and women in the Situation Room hung on his every word, because they had no better intelligence than the average viewer about what he would say.

For most of a week, the veteran foreign policy hands on Obama’s National Security Council, including Hillary, Vice President Joe Biden, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, had argued that the United States should give Mubarak as much operating room as possible. Hillary told reporters that Mubarak’s
regime was “stable” on January 25, and two days before Mubarak’s speech to the Egyptian people, when she finally called for an “
orderly, peaceful transition to real democracy” on
Meet the Press
, she didn’t offer a timetable for starting that process. The old guard had personal ties to Mubarak, who was a rare ally in a tumultuous region and who had kept peace with Israel for more than thirty years. They also worried about the message it would send to other leaders in the region if the United States abandoned a longtime friend in his moment of crisis. Most important, they feared the unknown. There was no telling whether Mubarak’s
successor would be a friend or foe of the United States. But from the National Security Staff’s perspective, indeed in Obama’s own mind, those factors were outweighed by the simple truth that the United States couldn’t do anything to save Mubarak, and it was better to get on the right side of the revolution as soon as possible.

Rather than stepping aside, Mubarak dug in. While he would not seek reelection, he said, he did plan to remain in power until the next election—certainly long enough for protesters to worry that he could rig the outcome or simply back down from his promise to move toward democratic reform. He cast his political opponents as thugs and criminals, commanding “censorship authorities and legislative authorities to carry out immediately every measure to pursue those who are corrupt and have been responsible for what has happened in all the destructive acts and looting and fires that have taken place in Egypt.”

Inside the Situation Room, Obama knew that Mubarak’s message would only inflame the revolutionary spirit in Cairo. The legendary New York congressman Charles Rangel has a saying, “I’ll be with you as long as I can,” meaning that he will stick with an ally up until the point that it becomes politically untenable. Obama had reached that moment with Mubarak. He called the Egyptian president to push for a swift exit.

Ben Rhodes, an adviser and speechwriter for the president on foreign policy matters, drafted a response statement for Obama to deliver from the White House that night. Because an NSC meeting had been under way when Mubarak spoke, the principals were all still gathered at the White House, and Rhodes circulated it on the spot, turning the normally complex process of formulating U.S. policy toward another major nation into an on-the-fly cram session.

The first version, reflecting Obama’s view, called for Mubarak to get out in terms that neither he nor the nations of the world could possibly interpret as anything other than a full abandonment of the Egyptian president. But Hillary wasn’t ready to go as far as Rhodes’s original draft. Pen in hand, she began editing the text, as did Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other members of the NSC.

“Going beyond Mubarak was entering into an unknown. Everybody knew Mubarak; nobody knew what was going to come after Mubarak.… When you don’t know what comes next, it’s hard to call for somebody to go,” said an Obama aide who was in the room. “The president’s point was ‘it’s not as [though] if we didn’t call for him to go, he’d be able to stay in power.’ It was almost an analytical point, which was ‘This guy has lost control of the country. What he’s trying to do to stay in power is not going to work, so we just need to get to that reality faster.’

“The people around the table were a little more cautious about going that far,” the aide added. Another White House source said they were “nitpicking Ben’s statement.” Obama sided with his speechwriter and delivered remarks nearly in line with the original draft. From the Grand Foyer of the White House, the president aimed his speech at the world community rather than a strictly American audience. “
What is clear—and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak—is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now,” he said.

Ten days later the NSC scene played out a second time in similar fashion, with some of the same officials watching a defiant Mubarak from the Situation Room and then group-editing a Rhodes statement. Again, the president was willing to go further than his top lieutenants. But even with Obama taking a more forward-leaning position than his NSC, he still seemed behind the times. Ten days were an eternity in Egypt’s real-time revolution, and the tipping point had long since passed. But America, the leader of the free world, still didn’t know what it wanted to say—much less do—in the face of a democratic transformation in a region that had long been home to a handful of America-friendly dictators.

While no one could have predicted the exact chain of events that transpired in the Middle East and North Africa, when the Arab Spring made its way into Egypt, the American foreign policy apparatus, informed by Hillary and like-minded officials at the White House and the Pentagon, proved slow to respond. It appeared to outsiders that the United States favored democratic reforms only if they
didn’t threaten to replace autocratic American allies with elected extremists. Of course, each country was its own case, each call complicated by complex political calculations. It was hard enough for a superpower, with a deliberative and democratic political process, to react to real-time revolutions. In Egypt, the conflicting impulses of promoting democracy, supporting a longtime ally, and preventing extremists from taking control of a geopolitically important nation compounded the paralysis.

Hillary “was reflecting a little bit her caution that every situation is different, and I think we learned in the last decade that just ‘rahrah democracy’ in every situation is too blunt a sentiment,” one of her advisers said. “She knew Mubarak pretty well. She knew some of the opposition figures and knew the military and was appropriately concerned about how this was all going to play out.”

There was a personal element, too. The Clintons’ relationship with the Mubaraks dated back as far as April 1993, when Bill had hosted the Egyptian president at the White House. “
I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,” Hillary had said in March 2009.

As it turned out, Hillary’s concern about trading out a moderate dictator for an untested but democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood president was warranted, as American officials would see two years later, when the new government was subjected to a counterrevolution that looked like a rerun of the movement that toppled Mubarak, aides to both Obama and Clinton said.

Still, of all the president’s advisers, Hillary should have been the least likely to get caught behind the curve of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. She had long since recognized the emerging factors, primarily the power of technology to galvanize activists, which favored fast-sweeping political change. She knew that ideas, money, and power could be transferred from one place to the next in the time that it took to upload a YouTube video or hack into a computer. After all, it was Hillary who had said during her 2009 Senate confirmation hearing that “
the promise and the peril of the twenty-first century could not be contained by national borders or vast distances.” She
had traveled to the region just weeks earlier to warn the leaders of the Middle East and North Africa that change was coming, whether they wanted it or not.

But it was far easier to topple a government than to create a new one. The modern leaderless revolution, accelerated by instantaneous electronic communication, could leave a country without anyone experienced in governance to establish a stable government. The writing was on the wall, but it didn’t include instructions for how America could play a constructive role in encouraging both democracy and stability in a region where American interests had for so long depended on moderate autocrats suppressing popular extremism. So Hillary could glimpse the future, but she couldn’t shape it—at least not yet.

In the first week of January, as the Arab Spring was beginning to stir, Hillary had summoned Dan Schwerin—who had risen through the Hillaryland ranks from junior press aide to speechwriter—and another wordsmith, Meghan Rooney, to her personal office, a small alcove with a desk, a short sofa, and three or four chairs. The tiny space connected to Cheryl Mills’s office on one side and Hillary’s much larger official reception room on another.

Hillary was heading to Doha, Qatar, the following week for an annual gathering of Middle Eastern leaders called the Forum for the Future, and she would have an unusually short window of five minutes in which to address the audience. She told Schwerin and Rooney that she was determined to make each moment count. “You know, we go to the Middle East all the time, and we give the same old message, and it never breaks through, and I am not going to do that this time,” she said. “They are sitting on a powder keg. No one is talking about it. Find something fresh and interesting that we can say that’s going to make them wake up.”

Though the outcome wasn’t yet clear, the seeds of revolution had been planted the previous month in Tunisia, where a street vendor had set himself on fire to protest the government’s oppressive economic policies. That breathtakingly graphic act had touched off a wave of demonstrations that ultimately led to the downfall of the
Tunisian government. Schwerin, liberated by the reversal of a diplomatic speechwriter’s typical assignment—it’s not often they are told to shake things up—quickly reached out to experts within the State Department and at Washington think tanks to ask what they had always wanted to say about the Middle East but had not because of political sensitivities. The result was a prescient call for Middle East leaders to reform their own societies before others took charge.

“
While some countries have made great strides in governance, in many others people have grown tired of corrupt institutions and stagnant political order,” Hillary said in Doha. “In too many places, in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand.… Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever.… Extremist elements, terrorist groups, and others who would prey on desperation and poverty are already out there, appealing for allegiance and competing for influence. So this is a critical moment, and this is a test of leadership for all of us. I am here to pledge my country’s support for those who step up to solve the problems that we and you face.”

Hillary aides still recall that members of the State Department’s traveling press corps raved about her speech. “ ‘Why doesn’t she talk like this always? This is amazing,’ ” one aide remembered hearing. “And people in the audience were like ‘Wow, we didn’t expect to be talked to like this.’ Some of them were offended. But some of them were inspired.”