The Secretary (20 page)

Clinton’s counterparts around the world were also impressed by the loyalty she showed
her former rival. She had more experience and she was older than Obama, but there
was never a hint of bitterness or any attempt to sound more important than the president.
The seamless political reconciliation was unfathomable in many countries.

For a while, the subject of her failed bid for the presidency would still come up
in town halls in world capitals. Hillary congratulated a woman who had just won the
presidency of a leading NGO for women’s rights in Mumbai and laughed heartily, telling
her, “At least you won!”

It was hard to discern how much of the laughter was real and what residual bitterness
still lingered. But Hillary also believed in what was meant to be: her presidency
in 2009 was not. In public, on the world stage, Hillary was shining, reveling in the
attention, as she worked to restore not only America’s image but also her own, with
careful stagecraft by her aides like Philippe. They laid the ground for her slow emergence
from the shadows at home, and by the time she had gone to Pakistan in October, Hillary
had found her footing and her voice.

Obama, meanwhile, was discovering that the world did not respond to his soaring speeches
with immediate cooperation, that if other countries had stood against America over
the last few years, it wasn’t just because George W. Bush had been president but also
because America was America. Clinton was not a fan of Obama’s lofty addresses, and
he in turn often didn’t like her bluntness, but with Obama focused on the economy
and the longer-term goal of reelection, Clinton’s more pragmatic, deal-making approach
to foreign policy came to the fore. Clinton was focused on diplomacy and development
but never forgot that America’s power was also military. She had allied herself with
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and together they argued for a large surge of troops
in Afghanistan. She pushed for tougher sanctions on Iran. She had spent the first
year being a good soldier and a good listener, learning her brief and gaining the
trust of the president and his aides. She had been mostly a participant. She would
never become part of Obama’s very tight inner circle; there was no chumminess. But
now she was ready to lead and speak more forcefully.

By the end of the year, Obama and Clinton were easing into their alliance, and they
bonded together against the chaotic rise of the world’s emerging powers at a meeting
in Copenhagen in December 2009. More than one hundred world leaders had come together
to negotiate a new agreement on climate change at the Bella conference center, usually
the stage for Copenhagen’s Fashion Week every season. The summit was the most disorganized
gathering Hillary had attended since her eighth-grade student council.
17
Chinese president Wen Jiabao kept deferring a meeting with Obama, claiming he wasn’t
ready, while he was in fact secretly conferring with the leaders of Brazil, India,
and South Africa. Behind the scenes, Beijing was trying to block all efforts to impose
standards for measuring, reporting, and verifying progress on carbon reduction. The
emerging powers didn’t understand why they were being asked to curb their carbon emissions
at the risk of slowing their economic growth when climate change was the fault of
rich nations that had spent the last few decades polluting the air and the world.
(For years, the United States had flouted international agreements on climate change
to protect its own economy.)

Obama and Clinton decided to crash the secret meeting. They pushed aside a Chinese
protocol officer guarding the door of the Chinese delegation room and started shaking
hands, smiling like candidates on a campaign trail, while everyone ignored the naked
dummies left over from a fashion exhibit that were scattered around the room. With
Obama doing most of the talking and Clinton sliding him pieces of paper, they negotiated
with the developing world. Clinton had laid the groundwork two days earlier, and Obama
closed the deal. They were developing a natural pas de deux, but they still mostly
stayed out of each other’s spotlight.

PART II

“You have come to visit our country, sir, at a season of great commercial depression,”
said the major.

“At an alarming crisis,” said the colonel.

“At a period of unprecedented stagnation,” said Mr Jefferson Brick.

“I am sorry to hear that,” returned Martin. “It’s not likely to last, I hope?”

Martin knew nothing about America, or he would have known perfectly well that if its
individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always IS depressed, and always
IS stagnated, and always IS at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though
as a body they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists at any hour of the day
or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable
globe.

—Charles Dickens,
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit
, 1844

7

CAMELS ARE UGLY

It was Valentine’s Day again, exactly a year after Clinton’s maiden voyage to Asia,
and we were going on the road once more. Snowmageddon had struck the U.S. East Coast,
complicating everybody’s preparations for the trip. The advance team from the Line
and from Diplomatic Security had to drive six hours south to find an airport that
was operating despite the snow. Embassies in Washington were shut, and the State Department
employees who looked after visas for outgoing delegations—including the media—were
struggling to get stamps into our passports. To make matters worse, there were no
cookies on the plane.

But at the end of the journey, a king awaited us.

We left Washington wrapped in our coats, sweaters, and earmuffs and proceeded to take
off a layer at each stop of our journey. SAM had to refuel at the Irish airport of
Shannon, the westernmost part of Europe and the first bit of dry land after crossing
the Atlantic. Airport officials regaled us with stories about their other VIP visitors:
Ahmet Davuto
ğ
lu, the Turkish foreign minister, was a frequent visitor. We all ordered a drink to
help us sleep on the next seven-hour flight. After a quick stop in Qatar, we stepped
into the heat at the royal terminal of the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh.

*   *   *

Hillary thought of her Bubble as a caravan going from place to place, which made her
think of an old proverb: sometimes the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. She called
it a movable adventure. The caravan and the barking dogs with its imagery of a long
majestic convoy of vehicles and camels snaking through the desert means one shouldn’t
pay attention to petty criticism. Hillary had long ago developed a thick skin. She
moved on quickly and didn’t take anything too personally, though her staff remained
overprotective of her, even when she was literally in a caravan. On this occasion,
she felt like was she was on a rock band tour.

The Saudi king had sent his personal bus to pick up the secretary and drive her to
his private desert retreat in Rawdat Khuraim. It stood outside the VIP terminal at
the head of the motorcade of heavy beige and black SUVs. Clinton’s limousine was there
too, just in case, but the foreign minister Saud al-Faisal escorted her onto the bus,
Fred stepping in right behind her. Tea and plates of nuts and dates streamed out of
the small kitchen at the back of the bus, behind the two thronelike chairs where the
elderly Saudi official and Clinton sat facing each other. It was highly unusual for
Diplomatic Security to agree for Clinton to travel in any vehicle other than an armored
American embassy limousine. Huma’s eyebrows had arched to the roof when she was told
by the advance line officer in Riyadh that the king was sending a bus to pick up her
boss. She asked for multiple pictures of the inside of the vehicle and checked with
Hillary. Oh, come on, Hillary had said, Saud al-Faisal has asked for this. I’m going
to do it. DS finally acquiesced. Both Clinton and the Saudis wanted this visit to
be perfect. There was no room for more upsets: Obama’s last meeting with King Abdullah
had not gone well.

*   *   *

Much has been written about the chummy ties between the royal family and the Bush
administration, but the king had greeted Obama’s election with surprising relief.

“Thank God for bringing Obama to the presidency,” the king had told visiting American
officials in the following months.
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He said it had created great hope in the Muslim world. America and the world needed
such a president. He had only one request—that Obama restore America’s credibility
around the globe. The two men had first met in London in April; Obama had then stopped
in Riyadh in early June 2009 on his way to Cairo for his speech to the Muslim world.

The Riyadh meeting with the king had been a last-minute addition to Obama’s itinerary,
hastily arranged and badly prepared. Obama was already frustrated with Bibi’s lack
of flexibility on the question of settlements. He and Clinton had just issued their
forceful calls for a stop to Israeli settlement construction, and Bibi’s recalcitrance
was instantly obvious. Obama was planning to keep pushing the Israeli leader, but
he wanted to create some momentum and was looking for an opening elsewhere. Clinton
and Mitchell, the Middle East envoy, were meeting Obama in Cairo; he was surrounded
in Riyadh by a team of close advisors, including Rahm Emanuel, his gung ho, abrasive
chief of staff.

If the Israelis were not responding to pressure fast enough, perhaps the Arabs could
be convinced to make peace offerings to Israel that the United States could then use
to make Bibi budge. Such gestures were called CBMs, confidence-building measures,
and whenever the parties to peace were too far apart, Washington used these as a fallback
strategy to keep the process moving forward. The Israelis desperately wanted the gestures,
which would make them feel less despised, or perhaps even grudgingly accepted, by
their hostile neighbors. It sounded a lot less positive when Arabs described it: normalizing
ties with the enemy. Israel had full diplomatic relations with only two Arab countries,
the two countries with whom it had signed peace treaties: Egypt and Jordan. A handful
of Arab countries had sporadic trade relations with Israel but from most of the Arab
world you couldn’t even place a phone call to Israel: the phone would just give you
a disconnect signal.

Over dinner at the king’s farm, Obama didn’t linger on the niceties and got down to
business fairly quickly. He presented the eighty-six-year-old monarch with a long
list of requests. He wanted the Saudi king to allow Israel’s national carrier El Al
to overfly the country and asked that Saudi Arabia start receiving Israeli trade delegations.
It sounded so simple, but it was like asking an American president to shake hands
with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to help build confidence before the Iranians had promised
to do anything in return. On the campaign trail as a candidate, Obama had said he
would be ready to meet with America’s foes Iran, North Korea, and Cuba. As president,
despite promises to reach out, he had been exceedingly cautious in public. Now he
was asking the Saudis to publicly open their arms to Israel and embrace their enemy.

The king paused. “Whoever advised you to ask me this wants to destroy the Saudi-American
relationship,” he said. He sounded deeply disappointed. Obama had not expected to
leave empty-handed.

By definition, a monarchy is traditional, a reminder of days past. In Saudi Arabia,
the king is an absolute monarch and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, a combination
of tradition, conservative mores, and orthodox religion that produces a highly risk
averse and opaque foreign policy. Despite bitter rivalries among Arab countries and
rulers vying for the position of regional leader, the Saudi king was still regarded
by many as a reference, the ultimate protector of Arab and Sunni Muslim interests.
He could not be seen to be appeasing the Israelis. But there was also a long history
of American presidents asking favors and making promises in their conversation with
Saudi royals—and King Abdullah remembered well being asked for CBMs once before by
an American president.

In June 2003, at a peace summit in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh,
American officials had pleaded with Arab foreign ministers to offer similar CBMs and
build normal ties with Israel in a communiqué. Conversations went deep into the night.
The Israelis wanted it as an incentive; the Arabs saw it as the big final reward for
peace. The Saudis just did not do bold gestures. Colin Powell threatened that President
Bush would not show up in the morning. The Saudis retorted that their leader wouldn’t
show up, either. Finally, the Americans relented. In the morning, President George
W. Bush told the Arab leaders gathered, addressing mostly Abdullah who was still crown
prince, “If I did not think we could do this, I would not be here.”
19

In the end, Bush’s peace efforts amounted to naught and the Saudis shrugged—they had
been right to be cautious. Who knows whether things would have been different if the
Saudis had really reached out to the Israelis? Someone had to make the first step,
and the Arabs were rarely if ever willing to do it. Perhaps King Abdullah remembered
the disappointment that his own father had felt after his meeting with yet another
American president sixty-four years earlier—an encounter that had marked the formal
beginning of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

On February 14, 1945, World War II was drawing to an end, the Axis alliance was collapsing,
and after meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Yalta President Franklin
D. Roosevelt sailed on the USS
Quincy
from Malta to the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal to meet King Abdul Aziz ibn
Saud. Abdul Aziz was the first ruler of Saudi Arabia, which had just discovered oil
although no one knew yet the extent of the riches this would bring the desert peninsula.
FDR wanted Abdul Aziz’s help with Zionism. He explained that the Jews who had suffered
indescribable horrors at the hands of the Nazis had a sentimental desire to settle
in Palestine. The king suggested that the Allies give the Jews and their descendants
“the choicest lands and homes of the Germans who had oppressed them.”
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The king, like so many Arabs, did not understand why they had to pay for the crimes
committed by Germany.