This Town (26 page)
• • •
H
illary Clinton told friends she felt badly that her loss to Obama in 2008 almost assuredly cost Holbrooke a chance at a bigger job (though appointing him secretary of state was hardly the sure thing some believed). She always had a weakness for Big Personality men—typically older, narcissistic, and often prone to self-destructiveness. Her late father, Hugh Rodham, a my-way-or-the-highway conservative with whom she would often clash in her youth, fit this category. And so did her husband, at least in key ways (narcissistic, prone to self-destructiveness). These were not No Drama men. And it was hardly surprising that Holbrooke was a bad fit with Obama and his staff. His “Richard being Richard” antics could be exhausting, even to Secretary Clinton, who confided in his final months that she was expending way too much time and energy dealing with Richard-related (or Richard-exclusive) matters.
The Obama team had much contempt for what they called the “I Told You So” crowd. These were Democrats—often Clintonites, if not Bill himself—who complained that people like Holbrooke were not being deployed properly. If only this administration was more savvy, they complained, like the Clintons were. In the foreign policy establishment, a chief annoyance to the Obama people was Leslie Gelb, a State Department official in the Carter years who went on to have a distinguished career as a national security correspondent and editor at the
New York Times
. Gelb had a knack for complaining on television or in the press that the Obama team was ignoring all the vast knowledge available to them. Whenever Gelb or one of his fellow I Told You So’s went off, I would receive “There they go again” e-mails from someone in the White House like this one: “Remember how I told you that this guy Les Gelb craps on us and has told people that he does so because we don’t call him? I would have thought he wouldn’t say that on the record, but he basically did in this article. Nice window into the assholeishness of the foreign policy establishment in this city.” Included in the e-mail was a clip from
National Journal
in which Gelb was quoted saying, “I don’t get the sense that the Obama White House is reaching out. I rarely hear of them calling anybody on the outside.” Or certain people on the inside, Gelb was also saying privately. Holbrooke was one of his closest friends.
As Obama’s approvals sank in late 2010 and early 2011—and he had just been “shellacked” in the midterms—the I Told You So’s were emboldened. Holbrooke’s death became a flashpoint. “What in God’s name would make you not make full use of Dick Holbrooke?” Gelb said in
Newsweek
.
Kati Marton herself had been a vocal critic of the Obama administration, especially over how she believed her husband had been treated. She viewed so many people in the White House as small-minded, easily threatened, and not mature enough to fully utilize the towering talent in their midst. “Richard knew his place in history was assured,” Marton told me. “And when he came up against the likes of [Jim] Jones, he would say to me, ‘Kati, this is all going to come out when history is written.’”
Fifteen eulogists performed (fifteen!) at the Kennedy Center, most of them no stranger to motorcades. They included Presidents Clinton and Obama, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, and of course Hillary. Gelb delivered a marquee performance, quite hilarious and without bitterness. Illustrating Holbrooke’s competitiveness, he told a story of how Holbrooke would devote hours to mastering Donkey Kong, the old video game. He cursed the machine at one point, Gelb said, “accusing the Donkey Kong company of war crimes.” The lineup offered a grand proxy for that particular moment in the Democratic power structure: the Obama administration was beaten down and the I Told You So’s were engaging in a funereal end-zone dance on Richard’s behalf.
“I loved the guy, because he could
do
,” said Bill Clinton, the I Told You So in Chief, as Gelb nodded hard onstage behind him, and so did Hillary. Implicit in this statement was a question: What had the current president “done,” peace-wise, in AfPak?
The service went on for nearly two hours. Obama was forced to sit through all of it. He sat to the left of Hillary, fidgeted, and stole “Get me out of here” glances backstage. Obama hated sitting through other people’s speeches. Early in his presidency, he complained a great deal about having to hear Biden introduce every dignitary in the room while he waited behind him to speak. The president dispatched Jarrett to relay his displeasure to Biden’s office, and from then on, Obama usually spoke first and left.
Even worse about this Holbrooke ordeal was Obama’s lack of enthusiasm for the departed. He paid tribute to Holbrooke’s career but didn’t bother pretending he had any relationship with the guy. “We come together to celebrate an extraordinary life,” Obama began, then launched into twelve boilerplate minutes of résumé recital and nods to someone who “made a difference,” “spoke truth to power,” and so forth.
After he was finished, Obama returned to his seat and was subjected to more verbiage, some of it veiled criticism of him. And some of it barely veiled at all. In this, no one topped the penultimate speaker, Bill Clinton.
“I could never understand the people who didn’t appreciate him,” Clinton said of Holbrooke. “Most of the people who didn’t were not nearly as good at
doing
.”
Clinton, like Holbrooke, was a ferociously social animal. Like Holbrooke, Clinton could also be desperately insecure and vulnerable. This had great drawbacks, but it also allowed him to identify with the neediness of others—recognizing, for instance, that late-night phone calls to Newt Gingrich, whose neediness rivaled his own, could go a long way.
Obama is impressively self-contained. That is a strength, but it can also exacerbate the isolation of his job and make him impatient with the fragile egos of the city. Larry Summers, a Treasury secretary under Clinton who later became one of Obama’s top economic advisers, would express surprise to colleagues about Obama’s tendency to eat lunch by himself in the Oval Office on many days. Marton said Henry Kissinger called to console her a few days after Holbrooke died. In the conversation, he compared Obama to Nixon. Both were loners, Kissinger said. “But the key difference is that Nixon liked to have big personalities around him,” he said. “Obama does not.”
The slumping president-of-the-moment never seemed more alone than when he sat on the crowded stage of eulogists. While Obama stared straight ahead, Bill Clinton finished by cuing up the final speaker, his wife.
“Hillary and I were asked to end the program, and we are appearing according to Holbrooke protocol,” Bill Clinton said. “The one with the real power speaks last.”
• • •
T
hough Barack Obama won the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton won Obama’s first term.
As she rose to cap off the Holbrooke pageant, Clinton did so as the most popular political figure in Washington. She achieved this status by leaving town. As secretary of state, she could avoid the cesspool that Obama had vowed to purify in 2008. The Clinton campaign’s big argument in 2008 was that Hillary knew the game. She knew Washington. How it worked. She was tough enough to play here and savvy enough to prevail. Obama’s argument was that he would change the game. Voters opted for the game change. And Hillary, with a bright, tight smile, said, “Fine, I’m out of here,” until Obama enticed her back to run the State Department.
Putting Clinton at State looked like a smart, even Machiavellian move, the kind of gritty political play that led skeptics to think maybe Obama did have the gonads to operate in This Town. (That skepticism was articulated by James Carville, who joked that “if Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama, he’d have two.” He had said this publicly a few times and Hillary asked him to please stop.)
While the president fidgeted and fumed onstage, the secretary of state strode with squared shoulders to the lectern. It had been thirty months since she and Bill had walked into the Kennedy Center for Tim Russert’s memorial, laid low by the Obama dynamo. But the Big Dogs don’t die. They can be disgraced, impeached, defeated. The Clintons come back, particularly Hillary, who frequently invokes a mantra she attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: women in politics, she said, “need to develop skin as tough as a rhinoceros hide.”
“I joke that I have the scars to show from my experiences,” then candidate Clinton told me in an interview a few months before Russert died in 2008. “But you know, our scars are part of us, and they are a reminder of the experiences we’ve gone through, and our history. I am constantly making sure that the rhinoceros skin still breathes. And that’s a challenge that all of us face. But again, not all of us have to live it out in public.”
Hillary was, per trademark, the exemplar of that first political virtue: survival. She hung around, waited out the others, and stayed alive. Funerals and memorial services were crowning forums for her magnificent survival play. Like Bill, Hillary gave great eulogy. That’s where she performed best, with perfectly maternal command and stoicism.
“I had a front-row seat for Richard being Richard,” Hillary Clinton said, calling Holbrooke’s sudden departure “a loss personally” and “a loss for our country.” She hailed Holbrooke as “a genius at friendship,” which was a classic construction of This Town, Clintonian vintage or otherwise. Friendship as craft, demanding “expertise,” or “genius.” The elite practitioners collected the biggest, shiniest friends and then exhibited them at grand pageants such as this. If Holbrooke was a genius at friendship, the Clintons were grand masters. “Friends of the Clintons’” (FOBs, FOHs) became their own subcommittees of the political class.
She is ever guarded, a fundamentally “private person” despite her global superfame. She has always been easier for people to follow than truly know. Her admirers speak of her in tones of distant awe, suggesting that they are more acolytes than real friends. “Hillary is a person who feels herself very vulnerable, and her response is to make herself bulletproof,” said Nancy Pietrafesa, a classmate of Clinton’s at Wellesley College and one of her closest friends in young adulthood.
But moments of grief offered her entrée into the rituals of mass comfort at which she and her husband thrived. They have honed public mourning to a raw perfection. Even semi-private mourning: a Democratic press aide I know was with Clinton in 2002 when the news broke that Paul Wellstone, then her Senate colleague, had been killed in a plane crash in his home state of Minnesota. Upon hearing the news, in a holding room in suburban Philadelphia where she was attending a campaign event for Representative Joe Hoeffel, Clinton burst into tears. Her personal assistant, Huma Abedin, asked my friend, the press aide, to leave the room. When she was allowed to return five minutes later, Hillary was again stoic and stone-faced, made no mention of anything being wrong, and gave her speech.
Hillary Clinton told friends she was “devastated” by Richard Holbrooke’s death. “He lived enough for ten lives, so while we mourn, we have reason for joy,” Clinton said of the man she called wholly unique in the world. She closed the marathon with a solemn “God bless you, my friend,” and big applause from the home crowd.
Hillary was asking about possible replacements immediately. She called Kati periodically to check in, but This Town will always move on. That’s the coldest part of any Washington ride, no matter how exhilarating.
In March, Kati received a postcard in the mail addressed to “Richard C. Holbrooke” from the Democratic National Committee. “Your membership has expired.”
• • •
I
nevitably, people started asking Clinton if she was running for president again in 2016. No way, she said, and after she repeated this a few times, her husband and Terry McAuliffe urged her not to be so definitive. She laughed. In addition to everything else, there’s no better point of seduction in politics than being reluctant, or acting it.
As 2011 hit spring, Washington was consumed by the head-slapping stalemate of debt-ceiling negotiations, threats of government shutdowns, and persistently high unemployment numbers. Hillary—off somewhere on the planet being Queen of the World—looked so much better than the small silliness of This Town. She told friends how little she missed the city when she was away. She expressed quiet relief that she did not have to worry about things like rehearsing a speech for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, because, well, she didn’t win the presidency, so she did not have to speak, let alone show up at all (and she did not).
I was sitting in the office of Robert Gibbs in the final days of his tenure as White House press secretary in early 2011. The officers of the White House Correspondents’ Association were nervous because the British royal family had just announced that the wedding of Prince William would occur on April 29, the same weekend of the Correspondents’ Association dinner. If the president traveled across the pond for the royal wedding, would he miss “the Prom”? Gibbs had to assure the president of the Correspondents’ Association that the “other” president (Obama) would not be attending the royal wedding. And This Town exhaled.
As it turned out, the president’s involvement was nearly messed up anyway by the U.S. raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. A few days before the mission, on April 28, the tiny group of high-level national security principals who knew about the operation was discussing the timing of it in the White House Situation Room. While the raid ultimately happened on Sunday night, Saturday night was first raised as a possibility. But someone pointed out that Obama was scheduled to be at the Correspondents’ Association dinner that night and his absence (and that of other top administration officials) could tip off the journalist-filled room that something was up.
At which point, Hillary Clinton looked up and said simply, “Fuck the White House Correspondents’ dinner.”
10
Anarchy in the Quiet Car
B
in Laden was killed on Sunday, which was good because it made the world safer and, more important, did not interfere with the Correspondents’ Association dinner. The Big Get of the weekend was Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor who showed up at Katharine Graham’s old, uninhabited mansion for Tammy Haddad’s brunch.
You go, Tamster!
Palin, still considered an even bet at that point to run for president in 2012, was accompanied by her husband, Todd, her daughter Bristol, her Fox News pal Greta Van Susteren, and Van Susteren’s lawyer husband, John Coale. Palin did her red-carpet duty and then descended into the mosh pit of “lamestream media” who, at the sight of her, became kids chasing the Good Humor truck.
Palin was a spectacle—exotic, even (from Alaska!)—and the crowds around her were three and four deep. Reporters snapped cell phone pictures and told her about their kids. In full revelation, I also chatted with Palin, though she came to me—or more like wound up next to where I was standing. Tammy snapped a picture and put it on some website somewhere. Jessica Yellin of CNN was standing between us in the photo. We (Jessica and I) both looked a tiny bit too enamored in the shot for our own good, but whatever. Palin could not have been nicer. We had met once before, for about five seconds on her campaign plane in 2008. At the brunch, I told her I had been in Alaska a few months earlier. And she opened her mouth wide in a look of genuine surprise, as if no one had ever gone to Alaska before. “Why didn’t you look me up?” she said, again sounding sincere. I made a joke about not wanting to get shot. She made me promise to look her up in Wasilla next time. (How does one “look up” Sarah Palin in Alaska, anyway? Is she listed? Can we become texting buddies?)
A few weeks later, Palin was back in rogue mode, setting off on a bus tour of the Northeast that many thought to be a precursor to her getting into the 2012 race. She made a point of not releasing a public schedule to the press, which forced them to follow her bus on a wild-goose chase, from Virginia to New Hampshire (just missing a tornado in Western Massachusetts). Everyone bitched, Palin did not care, and all was back to normal.
“I don’t think I owe anything to the mainstream media,” Palin said in an interview aboard her bus—with Van Susteren. Coale, Van Susteren’s husband, marveled at the media’s nerve. “They have trashed her every which way,” he said. “And they still expect to be kowtowed to?”
Well, yes!
But it was nice of Palin to show up and play nice on Prom Weekend. And it was a big win for the Tamster, who also “got” Rupert Murdoch to come to her megabrunch, among others. She—Tammy—was off on a great run. She seemed to be everywhere, even by her everywhere standards. At a time when Washington was getting nothing done and attracting massive scorn, Tammy was the prime mover behind the one thing This Town seemed to be doing right: celebrating itself.
A few months before, Tammy had cohosted a book party for first-time novelist Graham Moore, the twenty-nine-year-old son of Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, Susan Sher. At one point, Tammy rushed over to me and the guy I was talking to and announced “ELIZABETH EDWARDS IS DYING! ELIZABETH EDWARDS IS DYING! I JUST GOT OFF THE PHONE WITH HER DAUGHTER!
“Now c’mon, come meet the novelist,” Tammy said, shifting midstream and pulling me away to meet Susan Sher’s son. A woman intercepted Tammy and told her, “We’re going to your party on Wednesday night.”
“Oh, I’m just everywhere!” Tammy replied.
The Wednesday night party was put on by CURE, the Axelrod family’s epilepsy research group, which was honoring Tammy as its Woman of the Year. The tribute included a video montage featuring several members of the news media (David Gregory, Joe, and Mika) all testifying to Tammy’s power, stamina, and fabulousness.
That Saturday, Tammy did another bash, this one at the elegant Jefferson hotel to honor Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister. He had written an “important new book,”
Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization
. Lots of dire talk in there about global poverty and income disparities, the kind of things you think of when you’re eating salmon and caviar canapés under the chandeliers of the Jefferson.
The grand hotel, which opened in 1923, could not have sparkled brighter for the occasion. Festivities were webcast on Tammy’s WHC Insider website. The actual in-person experience was a bit crowded and hot. I tried to slip out, but Terry McAuliffe insisted I join him in a private dining room to pay respects to Tammy’s pal Connie Milstein, the real estate maven who owned the hotel and who obviously set off the sensor in the Macker’s brain stem that activates whenever he’s within thirty feet of a rich campaign donor type. As I stood in the private room, waiting for Andrea Mitchell and Chairman Greenspan to finish talking to Milstein, Tammy bounded in with Gordon Brown himself. She introduced me to the former prime minister, who looked exhausted. “He’s writing a book about how Washington works and trying to get me to participate,” Tammy explained. “And I think he’s crazy.”
“I don’t,” Gordon Brown said, looking at me. “Just follow Tammy around. You could do worse.”
Tammy blushed.
The evening’s highlight came earlier, when Tammy gave her welcoming remarks praising Prime Minister Brown’s book. She made several references to this being a “special night” and an “incredible night” and an “amazing night” even though “we are going through difficult times and tough times here in Washington and around the world.” At which point, I surveyed the chandeliers, the high cream-colored ceilings, and McAuliffe standing a few feet away, raising a flute of champagne.
• • •
I
n July 2011, the Amtrak train I was riding broke down between New York and D.C., somewhere in godforsaken Delaware. All power was lost. We were without AC. It was hot. The bathrooms stank. People were cranky. The situation presented a philosophical/ethical dilemma. Do the rules of the Quiet Car apply aboard a grounded train? Some thought no, and spoke freely on their cell phones; others thought yes, glared at the alleged offenders, and in some cases yelled. A few yelled back. A third constituency urged peace. People kept talking on their phones. More stares, more yelling, back and forth. A passenger asked another if there was any news. “Shut up!” shouted a third passenger, a Quiet Car militant. “No, you shut up!” shot back a counterinsurgent. Another attempted a straight answer while another tried to be a comedian, saying they halted Amtrak service to pay down the deficit, and they should have sold off Delaware while they were at it. No one laughed.
It was anarchy in the Quiet Car. And also an apt reflection of the collaborative spirit back in Washington. The debate over the raising of the federal debt ceiling had been raging between the White House and Congress. It was one week from the August 2 deadline when the United States government would default on its credit obligations. Everyone was arguing, nothing was moving—like our train.
Eventually Congress and the White House struck a deal and, whaddaya know, the train started moving, too, and I got back to Washington in time to attend a going-away party for Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton’s White House press secretary during the darkest days of Monica. After leaving the White House, Lockhart joined with two top Gore aides—Mike Feldman and Carter Eskew—to start the Glover Park Group, a Democratic media firm that grew into a bipartisan “integrated services” colossus of lobbying and strategic communications that was bringing in $60 million in annual revenue. Lockhart was now heading to a new job as head of corporate communications at Facebook in Menlo Park.
The Glover Park Group’s shiny downtown offices were crawling with regulars for the send-off. The gathering occurred in the midst of the News Corp. phone hacking scandal that was then roiling Great Britain and much of the media. It was a prevailing topic of seemingly every conversation at the party as we munched finger foods and sipped the cocktails courtesy of the Glover Park Group, which, by the way, was also a major lobbying and communications provider to News Corp.
Not far from the outdoor patio, I struck up a conversation with Geoff Morrell, a former White House correspondent for ABC News who went on to be the chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Robert Gates under President Bush and then Obama. After four years in government, Morrell—one of Mike Allen’s closest friends—was days away from leaving the Pentagon and would soon have several big job offers to consider. Morrell didn’t say what companies he was talking to, but did mention he had retained Bob Barnett to help him navigate the process. No surprise there, and no sooner did Morrell tell me this than Barnett himself walked over to join the conversation. Barnett told me how “premium” a client Morrell was.
I later learned Morrell had been offered a leadership role at Hill & Knowlton Strategies, U.S., the public relations colossus run by Dan Bartlett, the former top White House aide to George W. Bush whom Morrell knew from when he covered the White House, as well as one from Tony Podesta, the Democratic mega-lobbyist whose firm, the Podesta Group, was having another stellar year despite the lagging economy.
On Labor Day, as the national unemployment rate stood at 9.1 percent, Morrell did his part to lower it, and Mike Allen broke the news in Playbook. Geoff had joined BP as its head of U.S. communications. “
BP America, facing a spate of investigations and lawsuits stemming from the catastrophic Gulf oil spill, has chosen former Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell as its head of U.S. communications,”
Allen wrote in his lead item. This signaled “an aggressive new effort to recover from past communications debacles and improve its image in an essential market.
“Morrell, who starts Tuesday, will remain in Washington, with frequent travel to BP headquarters in Houston and London. . . . Morrell, forty-two, has worked both sides of the podium: He covered the White House for ABC News, then was Pentagon press secretary throughout the tenure of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, spanning two presidencies and consumed by two wars.”
The Playbook item went on for 645 words and filled nearly 30 percent of that morning’s edition. “You got more than Obama got for killing Bin Laden,” Tony Podesta marveled to Geoff in a congratulatory e-mail. This is what is known in the political-corporate PR space as “a successful rollout.”
When someone is leaving a government job to “pursue opportunities in the private sector,” the successful rollout is critical. It is important that a big announcement accompany news of the new position—both as a means of reminding everyone how important you were while in government and to ensure that everyone knows where to find you now that you are out “monetizing government employment.”
Morrell’s big news illustrated the big tangle of interests that make up the D.C. self-perpetuation machine today: Old Media (ABC News), Republican administrations, Democratic administrations, corporate (BP), and New Media (Playbook) converging at the gold-plated revolving door, facilitated by Barnett.
Morrell was recruited into the BP fold in part by his friend Dick Keil, a former White House reporter for Bloomberg who had gone to work for Purple Strategies, the bipartisan media consultancy founded by Republican pundit Alex Castellanos (CNN) and Democratic talking head Steve McMahon (MSNBC). Keil, who had gotten to know Morrell on the White House beat back when Morrell worked for ABC, is a congenial and earnest operator whom I first met years ago when he was still a reporter. Like most people in Washington, Keil is always working. I once ran into him at the market and teased him about the work Purple had been doing to help BP “reposition” its image after its little problem on the Gulf Coast. Without missing a beat, Keil unleashed his own gusher—of flackery—calling BP the “the greatest corporate turnaround story in history,” or some such, before moving on to the deli counter. Sure enough, BP was recovering quite well for itself, in part from the generosity of the United States Defense Department. Bloomberg News would later report that BP’s Pentagon contracts more than doubled in the two years after it caused the biggest spill in U.S. history (
exploding to $2.51 billion, from $1.04 billion in fiscal 2010).
Morrell’s hiring was part of an audacious trend of Obama bigwigs latching like newborns onto the teats of the administration’s biggest nemeses. If BP wasn’t the single biggest corporate villain of the first term, it certainly cracked the top three.
Other candidates? Perhaps no company had taken more blame (or revulsion) over the economic mess that the Obama administration inherited in 2009 than Goldman Sachs. They were at the center of the subprime mortgage crisis that started the whole thing. They took bushels of emergency loans from the government and subsequently paid out similarly huge bushels in executive bonuses. So it might look slightly odd, or even unseemly, to have a top Obama Treasury official helping Goldman to de-smudge their corporate image. But a few months later, the Treasury Department counselor, Jake Siewert, announced he was leaving the Obama administration; soon after, he would become the head of global communications for Goldman Sachs. Siewert, who served as White House press secretary at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term, had decamped to Alcoa for nine years before joining Obama. He was well-known and liked within operative and media circles, and his next trip through the revolving door had been speculated upon within The Club.
Mike Allen suggested in Playbook that Siewert could be the next head of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank that had been run by John Podesta, the former chief of staff in the Clinton White House and co-chair of the Obama transition team (and Tony Podesta’s brother). Instead, Siewert landed at Goldman. “We’re lapsing into self-parody,” one senior White House official told me on the subject of high-profile officials leaving the Obama administration and then jumping to the corporate giants the White House had done battle with.
To complete the unholy triplet of Siewert going to Goldman and Morrell going to BP, Peter Orszag—the former director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—had previously gone to Citigroup, another prime avatar of the financial crisis, beneficiary of a government bailout, and bestower of numerous bonuses.