HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (13 page)

On January 21, 2009, the full Senate confirmed Clinton by a vote of 94–2. About an hour later she took the oath of office, putting her fourth in line to the presidency. When she was finally confirmed, Clinton, as promised, hired her own staff. And dozens of loyal aides from Clinton’s past jobs—the White House, the Senate, her presidential campaign, and her HillPac political action committee—lined up to play a part in her new world. Obama’s offer was a sign of the high regard in which he held Hillary.

But most of his team still had little use for her or her people. Part of it was residual bad blood between Plouffe and Mills, who had sparred over the retirement of Hillary’s debt, filtering down. Part of it was a concern among the incoming White House team—warranted—that the Clinton folks wouldn’t be able or willing to serve Obama first and Clinton second. They were all loyal to Hillary first. The best that Obama could hope for was that Hillary would make clear that loyalty to him was loyalty to her. Another part of it, as one of the president’s aides said, was that “they really didn’t hire any Obama people for the State Department.” After Favreau’s incident with the cardboard cutout of Hillary, the two sides had come together in mutual interest, but it would take years for some of Obama’s other aides to warm to her. In other words, Hillary’s us-and-them construct was no one-way street.

“It’s like the Civil War. We’re the North and we beat you,” one Obama aide said in January 2013 of the attitude toward the Clinton contingent. “And that still was the feeling, like, years into the administration, by many, many people. I would say even today.”

In the spring of 2009, Obama’s vetting team gathered, as it often did, in White House counsel Greg Craig’s wood-paneled corner office on the second floor of the West Wing. In lunchtime sessions, the small set of senior aides typically shuffled through the paperwork of as many as fifteen job candidates. On this day, one name conjured such searing memories from the campaign trail that it stood out from the others: Capricia Marshall.

The West Wing crew considered Marshall, a staunch Hillary loyalist, to be an enemy combatant. Like many of the women who surround Hillary, Marshall is graceful, disciplined, and down-home brassy. A brunette with a chic short haircut and highlights, the half-Croatian and half-Mexican Marshall, who favored rigorous P90X workouts, went way back with the Clintons. Marshall had been one of Hillary’s closest confidantes in Washington since becoming the youngest White House social secretary in memory following Bill’s 1992 campaign.

When Hillary suspended her own quest for the presidency in June 2008, she entrusted Marshall with running her political action committee, at a time when some Democrats feared that Hillary might make a final play for the nomination at the convention. Back then the animosity between the two camps had run so deep that Hillary’s face was bulletin-board material in the Obama scheduling office. “They had all these unflattering pictures of her,” said one source who saw the display. “Kind of the sports locker room
mind-set.” Even after the primary was decided, Marshall had been in charge of sensitive projects like recruiting staff to count late delegates from the Texas party convention to make sure Hillary won her fair share. But no single Marshall sin stood out in the minds of Obama’s aides so much as a general view that she embodied the hated Hillaryland.

The president’s team had acquiesced when Hillary chose Cheryl Mills as her chief of staff and, with even greater hesitancy, Philippe Reines as her senior adviser. They were members of Hillary’s personal staff and thus entirely within her domain. But Hillary picked Marshall to be the nation’s chief protocol officer, a position that carried with it the coveted prestige of an ambassador’s rank and a reserved seat on Air Force One anytime the president traveled abroad. Not only would Hillary’s gal pal have a lot of face time with Obama, she’d be taking up a high-profile spot in the administration that could have gone to a friend of the president.

There was another red flag on her nomination. Generally vetting issues run the gamut, from serious ethical lapses to DUI charges and, occasionally, embarrassing associations; one nominee had been photographed with Lisa Ann, the porn-film actress who played the title character in a
Hustler
-produced video called
Who’s Nailin’ Paylin
.
Marshall’s problem was less lascivious than that but troubling all the same: she hadn’t filed a tax return in 2005 or 2006. She rectified the omission in the fall of 2008, around the time it became clear that Hillary might take a job in the administration. As it turned out, Marshall was entitled to refunds in those years. Still, tax issues had beset several Obama nominees, including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle, and the White House had little appetite for another tax-cheat story line.

As a vetting attorney from the Justice Department read a three-page memo on Marshall aloud, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina and deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer grew visibly agitated in their upholstered wingback chairs, as did other Obama campaign veterans around the room. By all rights, this job was a plum that should be going to an Obama loyalist—not to
Marshall, and not if it meant defending yet another nominee against questions about improper tax filings. Pfeiffer in particular thought “it was going to be a press problem at a time when we had been through a lot of confirmation issues with Daschle and Geithner.”

They reacted viscerally. “Fuck no.” “She was a complete bitch during the campaign.” And worse.

Marshall’s combination of experience with White House–level social planning and her closeness to Hillary made her a natural selection for the job, but Obama’s aides didn’t see it that way. No one in the room spoke up to defend her. Not legislative affairs specialist Sean Kennedy, who would have to get Marshall confirmed by the Senate if she was nominated. Not personnel director Nancy Hogan. Not ethics czar Norm Eisen. Not Greg Craig, who, along with Senator Richard Blumenthal, had been a study buddy of Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham in the days when Bill cooked up his mama’s fried chicken to serve to guests debating the Vietnam War in the future first couple’s apartment near the Yale Law School. Craig’s alignment with Obama had been a major betrayal during the campaign.

Aides close to Obama say it was less that they were against Marshall than that they wanted one of their trusted own in the high-profile role. “It was ‘We should have our person. We need our person,’ ” said one senior White House aide familiar with the discussions on Marshall. “It would have been the equivalent of the roles being reversed if Hillary was president and us cutting a deal that … [longtime Obama friend] Desiree Rogers or Valerie Jarrett would be protocol officer,” the aide said. “When you think of it that way, it’s like why would they ever want one of us traveling with them?”

The vetting process worked in such a way that by the time a job candidate reached the team in Craig’s office, he or she was the only hopeful under immediate consideration. It was up or down on Marshall. If Obama rejected her, another candidate would be lined up in the same way, a process that could take weeks or months.

Publicly the Obama and Clinton camps claimed they had put the primary behind them. But here, huddled in Craig’s office, where the bookcases were still empty and the only personal effect was
a Robert F. Kennedy poster on the wall, the truth poured out. The two sides didn’t understand each other, they didn’t like each other, and they didn’t trust each other. The president’s aides didn’t have another candidate in mind when Messina asked his colleagues to cast their votes, but they were certain they didn’t want Marshall.

One by one each aide extended a fist with the thumb pointing down. But then Messina, a strawberry blond Montanan whose soft voice takes the edge off his often-profane vocabulary, delivered some bad news to the team.

“I agree,” he said. “But this is very clearly an HRC pick and needs to be raised with the president.”

Typically, skirmishes over lower-level aides were resolved when either Mills or Obama’s aides backed down rather than kicking the decision up the command chain. Obama’s team tried to draw a line in the sand on Marshall, a proxy for Hillary. It was one of the rare occasions when a personnel fight ended up at Obama’s door. This was a “test case” and a “watershed moment” in a brutal, months-long fight between the White House and State over Hillary’s power to pick her team, according to one of the vetters.

Marshall had a secret weapon in another cousin of Valerie Jarrett, Ann Marchant, who had worked as a special assistant to the president in the Clinton White House. Marchant lobbied Jarrett on Marshall’s behalf, describing her strengths and skills and encouraging Jarrett to prod the president.

Hillary went to bat for Marshall, too. The White House team didn’t fully appreciate the role of a chief protocol officer and what went into it, she thought. It wasn’t just some glorified advance staffer or a donor with little experience in Washington.

“There’s nobody better to do this job,” Hillary told Obama. “She’s got the experience from the social office, she’s got a great touch and feel for helping organize people. She’ll be fabulous.” Hillary had also gone rounds with the president’s aides. “No, I’m telling you this is the best person,” she had said. “You will know that I am right after you’ve worked with her for a month.” And Hillary knew she held the trump card. “The president told me I could pick
the people in the State Department, and this is my pick,” she said. “So let’s move forward.”

In the end, Obama overruled his own vetting team, sending a strong signal to both camps that he would give Hillary the support he had promised in recruiting her. The dynamic infuriated Obama’s foreign policy advisers, who were all but frozen out of State. Hillary blocked Samantha Power, an Obama campaign aide who had called Hillary a “monster,” a remark that had cost her an official role with the Obama campaign. “You essentially had a merger, like a merger of two major corporations,” recalled one senior White House adviser. “Beyond the ambassador stuff, Sam Power comes here instead of going to State, which she wanted to do.”

Lingering bitterness and resentment over personnel choices colored the way the president’s national security team interacted with the State Department during the first year of the administration and, for some aides, well beyond that. “The State Department was an island unto itself. I mean, no other cabinet secretary could plant people in the way that she could,” one White House source said. “Her world, it was Clinton loyalists, where they could go without any fear of retribution for whatever sins or crimes against humanity they had committed during the campaign.”

Obama’s blessing gave Hillary tremendous leverage as her chief antagonists in Obama’s camp—Messina, Pfeiffer, Robert Gibbs, and David Plouffe—learned the hard way. Of the various and sundry staff-level fights that roiled the relationship between the White House and State in Hillary’s first year on the job, those over personnel were among the most hotly contested. Traditionally, the White House makes the bulk of the political appointments in any given cabinet department; the secretary is given the power to hire only a small handful of personal advisers. At State, the ratio was flipped because of Obama’s promise.

So when Hillary first arrived at the State Department’s headquarters, the Harry S. Truman Federal Building, as the new boss, she brought with her an entourage befitting an international icon. And she was greeted as a celebrity.

Her celebrity status came not only because she had the last name Clinton. It came, those who know her well say, because she is a woman who got up and fought every time the world knocked her down, from her failed health care reform effort and her husband’s very public infidelities to the brutal slog of the 2008 Democratic primary. Time and again her personal tragedies and subsequent triumphs played out in real time for a global audience. Even though she had been first lady and U.S. senator, she retained an underdog quality. She had served as her husband’s most valued adviser for decades but suffered accusations that she had ridden his coattails, unaccomplished in her own right.

When Hillary entered the atrium of the limestone and granite main State building on her first day on the job, January 22, 2009, she found it alive with anticipation. Lined with flags from around the world and filled with light pouring onto its black floors and square marble columns, the atrium of the building is an oasis at the center of a bureaucratic matrix remarkable mostly for the dim, drab, off-white hallways that suggest a 1950s-era junior high school that has never been renovated. That day sedentary bureaucrats navigated these hallways to come greet a boss whose very arrival promised to make their work more prominent.

The State Department is unusual within government in that it has a class of roughly fourteen thousand highly educated, highly trained foreign service officers who remain with the government from administration to administration, regardless of party, and who work overseas for most of their careers. They are complemented by a slightly smaller corps of civil servants—about eleven thousand in all—who support diplomacy, as well as forty to fifty thousand local employees in the roughly 270 American embassies and consulates around the world.

The foreign service officers are the heart of the department, and they traditionally come to State from Ivy League schools, though Georgetown, George Washington, and American University in Washington have also become major feeders. While State is actually a more diverse place now, the upper ranks of its foreign service still
teem with adventurous do-gooders who grew up playing tennis at the club. They’re difficult to impress, as part of their collective charm is a seen-it-all attitude, which, in turn, has been adopted by a civil service staff that increasingly includes high-level professionals who view themselves on a par with the vaunted foreign service officers.

But few of them had seen anything like Hillary Clinton’s arrival at the State Department. “It was like a fucking rock concert,” said one member of the civil service, who couldn’t find an open spot on the jam-packed floor. He raced through the press briefing area and made his way to a narrow ledge above the landing where Hillary was set to make her remarks. He wasn’t the only one with that idea: when he got there, the ledge was full. Government officials were almost literally hanging from the rafters, and finally diplomatic security officers prevented more people from cramming onto the ledge. The eager civil servant and the rest of the overflow crowd had to watch the speech on BNET, the State Department’s closed-circuit television system.