HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (35 page)

A few weeks after Obama’s aides visited Clinton in New York,
the two presidents came together again in downtown Washington.

As the economy was beginning to awaken after a steep decline, Obama held an event on the twelfth floor of an environment-friendly building to announce a $4 billion initiative in federal and private green building investments aimed at creating jobs. He invited Clinton, who had worked extensively on the green building effort through his Global Initiative, to join him.

Even then, after Obama’s campaign had courted Clinton and sought his advice on the reelection, the exchange between the two presidents seemed polite but perfunctory. “Work friends,” one White House aide called them, adding that the two wouldn’t necessarily be hanging out on a Saturday night recounting old tales over beer. Deep down, they had little in common—and said as much both publicly and privately.

But Bill Clinton tried his best to show the world that he was on Obama’s side more than ever. “
I never got to open for the Rolling Stones, so I’ll try and do my best for the president,” he said, before introducing Obama at the event in Washington.

The two presidents had spent some time earlier that fall on the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base, the first time Obama had invited Clinton onto the links. They golfed for four hours on a cloudy day, accompanied by White House chief of staff Daley and the ever-present Band. It was Band who had recommended to Patrick Gaspard that Obama invite the former president
to play a round of golf as a means of bringing the two sides together. There, as they took swings, Bill offered his opinions to Obama. It was too much for Obama, who said he could only take Bill “
in doses.”

Two months later, around the time Obama aides traveled to Clinton’s office to woo him, the former president
continued to offer his opinions to Obama in a book he penned,
Back to Work
. The older president had been frustrated for quite some time, feeling as though Obama had lost his message. He would complain about Obama’s loss of narrative to anyone who would listen: friends, former aides, and even those with ties to the president. The book was his way of explaining the policies, in classic Clinton style: simple and bite-sized.

Some White House aides privately grumbled about the book in the halls of the West Wing. But Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, told the
New York Times
, “We appreciate his insights and his advocacy.” Aides on both sides had always maintained there was little daylight between the two presidents on policy. And now at the green building announcement, Obama aimed to incorporate Clinton’s presidency into his own narrative.

“
When Bill Clinton was president, we didn’t shortchange investment,” Obama said. “We lived within our means. We invested in our future. We asked everybody to pay their fair share. You know what happened? The private sector thrived, jobs were created, the middle class grew, its income grew, millions rose out of poverty, we ran a surplus. We were actually on track to be able to pay off all of our debt. We were firing on all cylinders. We can be that nation again.”

Incorporating Clinton into the fold was a mixed bag for Obama. It was smart to draw parallels to his Democratic predecessor, but it also served as a reminder of the good old days in the Clinton administration, while making Obama look more like the inexperienced leader he had been portrayed as during the 2008 campaign. Ultimately, Obama was willing to sacrifice a little pride in service of winning a second term.

Moments after Obama concluded his remarks, Ed Henry, the senior White House correspondent for Fox News, shouted a question for the president. President Clinton, that is. “President Clinton, do you have any advice for President Obama
about the economy?” Henry asked. A smiling Clinton, who had rarely shied away from the cameras during his presidency, lit up, while Obama tried to bat it down.

“Oh, he gives me advice all the time,” Obama said to laughter, as he shook Clinton’s hand and tried his best to end the conversation there. White House press aides, always guarding against the risk of unscripted moments, began shouting for reporters to make their way out of the building. But as Obama shook the hands of the other attendees, Clinton, wearing a chocolate brown three-piece suit, slid up to the podium with its presidential seal and took a stab at the question.

“
I just want to, I’ll say again, this announcement today, the reason you should be encouraged by this, you can run the numbers and see how many jobs,” the former president began. By then Obama was standing off to the side watching Clinton yet again commandeer the microphone. It was almost a repeat performance of the time a year earlier when an at-ease Clinton had taken the reins of the podium at the White House, fielding questions from reporters for nearly half an hour. Now as Obama looked on, Clinton settled in right at home, his elbow leaning against the podium and his right leg comfortably crossed over his left.

He never directly answered the question on what advice he would give Obama. Aides close to Clinton say he doesn’t like to discuss the regularity with which he and Obama speak or what
ground they cover. But Clinton gave his endorsement of the president’s announcement.

“The president, by doing this, can trigger pools of investment so that you can have more buildings like this,” he said. The nod may have seemed issue-specific, but what Clinton was really doing was giving his early endorsement to the 2012 reelection campaign and, more than anything, showing that the past was just that—in the past.

In mid-December, Hillary attended a baby shower for Huma Abedin at the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington. Huma’s pregnancy had first been revealed over the summer as a coda to Weiner’s texting scandal, with the news serving as a final outrage for those angered by his betrayal. A good number of them were present for the baby shower, which brought together what one participant described as a “great sisterhood” of Hillaryland. The guest list also included Alyssa Mastromonaco, the veteran Obama scheduler who had first contacted Huma to set up the meeting at which Hillary was asked to join the administration, and two of Hillary’s most important rising-star allies in Democratic politics, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Wasserman Schultz.

When Huma’s friends offered toasts to her, Hillary was asked to give a speech. “Today is not my day. Today is Huma’s day,” Hillary demurred. “I love her, and I wish her the best.”

“Huma is family to them,” the participant said. Hillary “just wants her to be happy and have people leave her alone.” But that would prove impossible when Weiner ran for mayor of New York in 2013, ensuring that Huma’s personal life would be tied to Hillary’s political narrative as the 2016 campaign season drew closer. “In a perfect world, she would not be with Anthony so that stuff would go away or come up to a lesser degree,” one source with longtime ties to Clinton said. “He’s an impediment. But the damage is done now. If she runs, it will be part of the narrative. Republicans are going to push it out in the press to remind people.” Still, the source added, even with Huma’s link to her husband, “she’s more of an asset than a liability.”

Hillary was just sitting down for an interview with CBS News in Kabul, Afghanistan, on October 20, 2011, when Huma Abedin handed her a BlackBerry to share the news that Muammar Qaddafi had been killed.

“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary crowed, laughing as she clapped her hands together. There could be no mistaking her glib reaction, the unseemly swagger of a victor who reveled in the demise of her vanquished foe. Hillary later said that she didn’t know at the time the circumstances of Qaddafi’s death—he had been captured by rebels, physically assaulted, and then summarily executed near his hometown of Sirte. But even days later, amid international calls for an investigation into whether the rebels had committed a war crime by murdering him without a trial, Hillary
declined to say she regretted her initial boast.

She had wanted Qaddafi dead, and she took credit for his killing. Two days earlier, during a surprise visit to Libya, she had issued a decidedly undiplomatic call for him to be “
captured or killed soon.” Now, after rebels seized him, battered him, and shot him to death, Qaddafi had been both captured and killed. Seven months after Hillary had put together the coalition to stop his advance on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, she was in the process of expanding American support for the nascent government, much of it through technical assistance rather than straight cash payments. Qaddafi’s
death marked a major milestone on what appeared to be a fast march to Libyan liberty and in the narrative of Hillary’s tenure as secretary.

From the constant chatter about her taking another administration post, to Ellen Tauscher’s advice about preserving her capital when she left office, to America’s efforts to foster democratic reform movements in the Middle East and Asia, neither Hillary nor the rest of the political class could help but think about her future toward the tail end of 2011. At that point, Libya presented the best opportunity for a headline achievement—a “deliverable,” in political parlance—that would ice her legacy as the smart-power secretary.

On the trip to Libya, just before Qaddafi’s death,
Time
magazine and its photographer Diana Walker had been granted an unusual level of access to Hillary and her aides, for a cover story on her use of smart power. That was indicative of the State Department’s confidence that Libya would be a signature achievement for Hillary, as she is typically very careful about which media get access to her and when. “There was a feeling that they had turned the page,” said one adviser who traveled with the secretary to Libya. “It was an illustration of the smart-power approach.”

On a military transport flight from Malta to Libya, Walker captured
the most enduring image of Hillary in command. She was sitting in one of several business-class seats that had been installed in the middle of the plane when Walker began snapping photos. As usual, Hillary was surrounded by stacks of briefing papers held together by massive binder clips. Wearing sunglasses and a stone-faced expression, Hillary was looking at the screen of her BlackBerry. The photo conveyed an unmistakable countenance: She was in charge.

“You got this sense of power in her, and I think a lot of people gravitated toward that,” said Stacy Lambe, who several months later would turn the image into the Internet sensation
Texts from Hillary
. “It captured her in a way that I think a lot of people hadn’t seen.”

Like an umpire in baseball, a diplomat is most effective when his or her work goes unnoticed. But that’s death for politicians. To win elections and to have sway within government, they need visibility, the ability to point to what they’ve done. By the beginning of her fourth year, Hillary’s own capital within the administration was at an all-time high, Obama’s team was in hot pursuit of her husband’s help, and nearly two-thirds of Americans approved of the job she was doing. Only the most hardheaded of Obama’s aides still harbored a grudge against her from the 2008 campaign. As a token of his appreciation, Obama gave Hillary a black iPad case with “HRC” embossed in gold lettering on the cover and “Sec State” on the spine.

But most of Hillary’s work had been behind the scenes. She had kept her head down for much of the first two years, but by the third year, she had emerged as a player who could tip the balance in internal White House deliberations on matters of war and peace. She had stood with Obama in going after Bin Laden—at no small political risk to herself if the raid went bad—and pieced together the coalition for war in Libya. Libya was truly Hillary’s account, and it was on track to be the success that defined her legacy. The big knock on her was that she didn’t have a major foreign policy breakthrough under her belt. As the
Time
cover spread showed, she had the confidence, and the political imperative, to start raising her profile. If all went right, Libya would be the jewel in her crown.

Legacy was clearly on Hillary’s mind when she gathered her senior aides to her outer office in early January 2012. An aquamarine sofa and upholstered chairs sat around a small coffee table atop a gigantic blue and red Persian carpet. Hillary often met there one-on-one with visiting dignitaries such as Afghan president Hamid Karzai, sitting at one corner of the sofa while her guest took a pink-upholstered chair. Across the room, there was an old fireplace that no longer worked, and a midsize conference table with eight or ten chairs stood in the back of the room, near the entrance to Hillary’s personal office.

On this day, with only a year left in their term together, Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, Tom Nides, Bill Burns, Wendy Sherman, Harold
Koh, and a handful of other aides gathered around Hillary, who had come prepared with one of her trademark long legal pads. She had written action items on page after page of ruled sheets. As she went around the world, frozen conflict by frozen conflict, to see what new approaches might be taken, what efforts might be redoubled to achieve a breakthrough, there was a collective sigh of exhaustion that was as real as it was inaudible. Three years after Burns had given her a presentation on the state of affairs all across the world in the transition space on the ground floor, Hillary was now delivering the same kind of country-by-country, issue-by-issue analysis from the comparatively ritzy confines of her seventh-floor office.