HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (38 page)

But Hillary ran into resistance from the White House, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community. The Defense Department and the CIA felt that the Pakistanis owed the United States an apology for, at the very least, failing to prevent attacks on American soldiers. Some believed the Pakistanis were complicit.

“There was a lot of concern that these guys’ behavior, the Pakistanis, they should be apologizing to us for some of the things they were doing to our soldiers in Afghanistan,” said Deputy Secretary Tom Nides, who had succeeded Jack Lew.

With Romney accusing Obama of going on an “apology tour,” it hardly made good political sense for the president to issue an apology to Pakistan, where Americans knew Bin Laden had been hiding in plain view for years. That could play right into Romney’s unfounded attack that Obama liked apologizing for America. “When you go out and say that you’re sorry, people like the Republicans jump on you and say, ‘Oh, my God, why are you apologizing to the Pakistanis?’ ” Nides said of a major undercurrent of concern in internal debates.

But Hillary thought it was vital to American interests to apologize, and she was willing to take it on the chin if there was a political backlash in the United States. “I have political capital. I’ll expend it,” she said. “If they attack me for saying that, I’m sorry, then so be it. I’m willing to do that.”

She dispatched Nides, a veteran of Wall Street and domestic politics, to Pakistan, where he opened up a back channel with Pakistani finance minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh. The Pakistanis were losing revenue from the closure of the supply route, and Hillary believed it was in their interests, too, to resolve the dispute.

Nides and Shaikh negotiated the language of a carefully worded deal in which Hillary issued a soft apology and Pakistan reopened the supply route. Hillary believed that “the ability to admit you’re wrong is a sign of strength, not weakness,” one of her senior aides said later.

Hillary’s elevation of Pakistan, through her visits and direct engagement with both the country’s leaders and its people, had helped make her the American official with the most credibility in the country. “I’m still shocked that the Pakistanis love her and hate Obama for the same damn policy,” said one senior administration official focused on Pakistan. “That is a successful operation.”

The pact was consummated in a July 3 telephone call between Hillary and Pakistani foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar. “
We are sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military. We are committed to working closely with Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent this from ever happening again,” Hillary said in a statement.
“Foreign Minister Khar has informed me that the ground supply lines into Afghanistan are opening.”

Romney, who had titled his precampaign book
No Apology
, chose not to jump on Obama for acceding to Pakistan’s demands for an American mea culpa. When the subject came up in his debate prep, he told advisers he drew a distinction between blanket apologies for America and saying sorry in a specific instance. “As a country, you don’t apologize for the country and your national stance and your point of view,” Romney said. “Of course you make mistakes, but that’s different than apologizing for who you are.”

“It’s one of those cases where he did not want to grandstand,” one of the Romney advisers recalled.

Through Nides, Hillary had found a way to go around the fraught relationship between the two countries’ military and intelligence communities to find a solution that benefited both the United States and Pakistan. Hillary’s “artful apology,” as her senior aide termed it, had opened up the supply routes but not a window for Romney to take advantage.

On April 29, 2012,
more than five hundred donors packed into the backyard of Terry McAuliffe’s seven-thousand-square-foot mini-mansion on Old Dominion Drive in McLean, the tony Washington suburb where Robert F. Kennedy’s kids had grown up. Still bursting with the boyish enthusiasm that helped make him a great fund-raiser, McAuliffe was looking toward a second bid for governor in 2013. But he hadn’t opened up his yard on this sixty-degree evening to fill his own coffers. The contributors were there to see two presidents—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—at the first of several joint fund-raisers for Obama’s reelection campaign.

Obama’s courtship of Bill Clinton was working. The ice had thawed, even if Bill’s response was a function of self-interest more than genuine affection. Raising money for Obama would unlock the door to the donors Hillary needed to pay off the last of her debt. But before that cash started flowing to her account, Bill had to prove himself a loyal field marshal in Obama’s campaign.

He announced that night that he was lending support to Priorities USA, the flailing pro-Obama super PAC started by former White House aides Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney. The outfit had suffered a slow start in large part because Obama had spent so much time blasting super PACs publicly that many liberal donors didn’t want to be associated with them. It had only been a couple of months since Obama finally blessed Priorities USA, and raising money was still a problem. Bill, having been a pioneer fund-raiser in
the era of unlimited “soft” money, didn’t have Obama’s reluctance to squeeze small pools of donors for vast sums of cash.

The more important factor for Obama, who was still battling a sluggish economy and mounting debt, was winning a seal of approval for his policies from the last man to preside over budget surpluses. At this point, though, his praise for Obama was a little fainter than it would get later in the year.

Obama “deserves to be reelected,” Bill said. “I think he’s done a good job. I think he is beating the historical standard for coming out of a financial collapse and a mortgage collapse. I think the last thing you want to do is turn around and embrace the policies that got us into trouble in the first place.”

Clinton was really just warming up, though. During a follow-up question-and-answer session, held under a tent for about eighty VIPs, the presidential pair grew more comfortable. Sitting side by side on stools, Obama and Clinton played off of each other, with Clinton taking on the atypical role of best supporting actor. The singer will.i.am asked Obama a question about education policy. When he didn’t get a satisfactory answer, he pressed Obama a second time. Clinton jumped in to defend the president. And so it went for nearly an hour.

When the two-man improv act was over, Clinton went to the foyer of the house to say goodbye to Obama. Without a camera or a reporter in sight, the two presidents shared a private moment.

“Thanks for all your help,” Obama said to Clinton.

“I’m here to do whatever I can,” Clinton replied.

They didn’t shake hands. They hugged.

“It was clear that night that, whatever issues they had had in the past, that event was a coming together,” said a Democratic official who witnessed the physical and political embrace.

Shortly before Bill delivered on his end of the bargain to get behind the president, Obama fund-raising chief Matthew Barzun, who had attended the peace-pipe dinner for Obama ambassadors and Hillarylanders at the Cosmos Club in early 2009, put the word out to Obama’s leading donors that it was time to retire the last of Hillary Clinton’s debt. The joint fund-raiser at McAuliffe’s house
was held on April 29; in May and June, dozens of Obama’s elite givers, including
Vogue
editor Anna Wintour, contributed to retiring Hillary’s debt, helping her shave it from $245,000 to $100,000 by the end of June. None of Obama’s big-time donors had given to her during the 2012 cycle before Bill’s turn at the April fund-raiser for Obama. It was the payoff for Bill buckraking for Obama.

If the scars that the Obama and Clinton camps had inflicted on each other had not been forgotten, they had at least been forgiven. As the campaign season heated up in the spring and summer of 2012, however, the reconciliation between Obama and the Clintons created a delicious political irony. No sooner had he buried the hatchet with Obama than Bill Clinton dug it up for use on politicians who had backed Obama over Hillary in 2008, the names counted on the post-primary hit list. For his own political standing and for Hillary’s future, Bill had to pursue rapprochement with Obama; but when it came to the betrayals of friends and associates, there was no forgetting and no forgiving. A full presidential-election cycle later, Bill was still determined to get payback. The once-a-decade redistricting process had seeded a bumper crop of high-profile Democratic primaries in which one candidate had supported Obama in 2008 and the other had backed Hillary.

Just a few days before the fund-raiser at McAuliffe’s house, the Clinton bell finally tolled for Jason Altmire, the Pennsylvania congressman who had infuriated Hillary in 2008 by withholding his superdelegate endorsement. Earlier in the spring, Bill had gone into overdrive
to help Kathleen Kane, a Hillary supporter, in a primary for the Democratic nomination for Pennsylvania attorney general. She was running against Altmire’s fellow Obama-besotted pol Patrick Murphy, who had endorsed Obama early in the 2008 cycle and was now trying to make a comeback after losing his House seat to a Republican in 2010.

When Bill endorsed Kane in late March 2012, Altmire saw the writing on the wall. He called one of his leading advisers, Rachel Heiser, and told her he was worried that if Bill was willing to involve himself in a state attorney general’s race to exact retribution for
2008, Bill’s next step would be to target Altmire for defeat. At the time, Altmire was the heavy favorite to beat fellow Democratic representative Mark Critz in a redistricting-induced primary, because their new, shared district included more of Altmire’s old turf than Critz’s. But Bill had helped Critz succeed his old boss, the late representative John Murtha, who had backed Hillary in 2008.

On April 12, about two weeks before the primary, Altmire’s fears were validated. “
I am proud to endorse Mark Critz for Congress,” Bill said in a statement. “I know that Mark will continue his work to create jobs, strengthen the middle class, protect Social Security and Medicare, and do what is right for western Pennsylvania and our nation.”

Critz immediately turned the endorsement into a TV ad, and on primary election day he
edged Altmire by 1,489 votes out of more than 63,000 cast. Critz won Cambria County, where Bill had campaigned for him in a 2010 special election, with 91 percent of the votes cast there. It’s impossible to say how many votes Bill Clinton turned or turned out, but everyone involved in the race agreed that his endorsement of Critz had been pivotal. “It certainly had an impact,” Altmire conceded.

On the same day,
Kane beat Murphy, who had picked up an endorsement from Obama adviser David Axelrod, 53 percent to 47 percent. While Kane went on to win in the general election, Bill Clinton’s aid to Critz may have resulted in the loss of a Democratic seat in the House: in November, Critz lost to Republican Keith Rothfus, the man Altmire had beaten in 2010, by less than four percentage points.

But the ledger had been balanced. Four years after Michelle Obama had wooed Altmire and Murphy, telling them how Barack Obama was going to blindside Hillary, Bill had blindsided them.

That same spring businessman John Delaney shocked Maryland’s political establishment by defeating state senate majority leader Rob Garagiola in a primary in a solidly Democratic district anchored in Washington’s wealthy Montgomery County suburbs. Garagiola and his friends in the legislature had drawn the district so
that it would elect him to the U.S. House. He had picked up endorsements from Governor Martin O’Malley, House minority whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), and most of the liberal groups in the state.

But Delaney, who had raised money for Hillary, had Bill on his side. Delaney coasted to victory, helped along in part by a robocall Bill recorded for him. “Bill Clinton was as much involved and as much responsible for Delaney winning as anyone,” said a former State Department aide familiar with Bill’s activities.

In June, Bill went head-to-head with Obama in a New Jersey Democratic primary featuring Representative Bill Pascrell, a cigar-smoking seventy-five-year-old member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, against Representative Steve Rothman, a fifty-nine-year-old member of the similarly powerful Appropriations Committee. Both men had first been elected to the House on Bill Clinton’s coattails in 1996. Pascrell had jumped into Hillary’s camp in 2008, while Rothman had gone with Obama. As president, Obama had been judicious—some might say stingy—in hitting the campaign trail for other candidates, particularly in Democratic primaries. On occasion, in his place, one of Obama’s advisers would give an endorsement to a favored candidate, as Axelrod had for Murphy.

But when Bill showed up in Paterson to campaign for Pascrell, Obama countered personally. He invited Rothman to meet him at the White House, where pictures of the two men walking past the Rose Garden were taken. There was no guile in the act. “The president said he had
invited me to the Oval Office because he wanted everybody to know that he supported my reelection to the Congress so I could help him with his agenda in his second term, as I have in the first,” Rothman said.

But Obama didn’t go all out for Rothman the way Bill did for Pascrell. In what had been expected to be a close race,
Pascrell coasted, 61 percent to 39 percent.

Obama had plenty of reasons to stay out of intraparty feuds as much as possible and particularly to avoid appearing on behalf of other candidates at public rallies. By taking sides in other races, he would inevitably alienate some of his own supporters and would be
seen as a partisan political operator, at a time when his own reelection hopes depended on his ability to capture the political middle ground. And of course, he didn’t have a lot of extra time on his hands to campaign for other candidates. Bill wasn’t constrained by the latter two considerations, but because Hillary might run again, he had to avoid angering her base with his activities on the campaign trail.

In an unusual twist, Bill backed off of Howard Berman, who had launched a full-scale campaign to persuade him not to raise money or campaign for Brad Sherman. Because of a new election system in California, Berman and Sherman were actually pitted against each other twice, first in a pivotal primary in the spring and then again in a general election in November. In May 2012, Obama lent his imprimatur to Berman
by letting Berman ride with him to an Obama reelection fund-raiser at movie star George Clooney’s house. But Bill, after releasing his August 2011 statement of support for Sherman, never reengaged with the race.