HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (4 page)

She later apologized for the outburst, but the anger ran true and deep. The Altmire episode would remain a sore spot for Hillary and her aides for years. They felt he had milked his superdelegate status for all it was worth, exchanging the favor of his time for access to the former president and first lady. The Clinton team expected that at some point he might stop acting the coquette and just give it up.

“The hottest places in hell are for those who declare neutrality in times of trouble. He was one of them,” one adviser recalled. “I’d rather have one of these guys come up to me and say, ‘I’m not for her. Fuck you.’ ”

On the day before Thanksgiving 2008, after Bill and Hillary
had campaigned for Obama successfully, Altmire approached the former president at the VIP reception before a fund-raiser for Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl. Bill was cordial but cold and minutes later turned downright icy. Taking the stage at the Steel City’s Omni William Penn,
packed with more than four hundred people, Bill launched into a hearty endorsement of Ravenstahl and another local pol, Dan Onorato, both of whom had backed Hillary in the primary.

Then, catching sight of Altmire at a table up front, he looked the congressman dead in the eye as he delivered the clincher: “And I am never going to forget the people who supported Hillary.”

More than a year later, at the western Pennsylvania funeral of the legendary congressman John P. Murtha, Bill again gave Altmire a perfunctory greeting. Clinton would eventually get the chance to do more than turn a cold shoulder to Altmire or stare him down at a fund-raiser. The bill for Altmire’s neutrality would come due nearly four years later, to the day, in the 2012 Pennsylvania Democratic primary.

While Hillary worked at the State Department, Bill used his influence, his fund-raising ability, and his campaign skills to tend to the family’s political network. He helped nearly every friend of his or Hillary’s when they needed assistance defeating an Obama acolyte—and even punished some who had remained neutral when the Clintons felt they were owed allegiance. Longtime party builders, the Clintons generally weren’t into helping Republicans beat Democrats—though Bill’s efforts resulted in a GOP win on at least one occasion. But no holds were barred in a primary. The message from the Clintons to the rest of the Democratic political world was clear: It’s better to be with us than against us. Over four years, Bill racked up some high-profile victories in races matching one Democrat against another. These were practical as well as punitive: every victory by a Clinton loyalist ensured that Hillary would have a more powerful team in place if she ran again. And the Mossad-style, get-you-when-you-least-expect-it payback politics would have a chilling
effect on politicians who thought about crossing her in the future. “They’re into loyalty,” one Clinton aide explained. “They’re used to loyalty.”

It would be political malpractice for the Clintons not to keep track of their friends and enemies. Politicians do that everywhere. The difference is that the Clintons, because of their popularity and the positions they have held, retain more power to reward and punish than anyone else in modern politics. And while their aides have long and detailed memories, the sheer volume of the political figures they interact with makes a cheat sheet indispensable. “I wouldn’t, of course, call it an enemies list,” said one Clintonworld source. “I don’t want to make her sound like Nixon in a pantsuit.”

Another one of Hillary’s longtime advisers also sought to soften the long-term relevance of the list. “I’m sure Doug does have some sort of fucking memo on his BlackBerry like the rest of us,” the adviser said, “but the notion that it is updated, circulated, disseminated, and relied upon is absurd.”

In the summer of 2008, Hillary Clinton couldn’t have known whether or when she would run for president again. But she knew who was on her side and, name for name, who wasn’t.

On June 6, three days after the last presidential primary, Hillary invited about two hundred campaign aides, advisers, and friends to the family’s
$4 million–plus redbrick home on Whitehaven Street for a backyard get-together. The event was a final expression of gratitude for the brainpower, tears, and sweat they had poured into her cause for more than a year.

On this day, the sweat kept coming. It was a sweltering Friday in the nation’s capital, with violent summer storms brewing in the suburbs, and Clinton’s air-conditioned house was off-limits to guests, except for one bathroom that was accessible from the outside. Some of her aides kicked off their shoes and dipped their feet in the pool for relief. Hillary ignored the heat and stifling humidity to work one last crowd, taking pictures with midlevel staffers in sweat-soaked shirts.

Like a weekend griller, Bill Clinton held court in his own backyard, complaining about
Meet the Press
moderator Tim Russert to just about anyone who would listen. Russert had called the time of death on Hillary’s campaign a month earlier on the night of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. “Sometimes in campaigns the candidate is the last to recognize the best timing,” Russert had said. “It’s very much like being on life support. Once they start removing the systems, you really have no choice.”

Much as Bill blamed big-media types for jumping on the Obama bandwagon, Russert was just reporting a truth that was evident even
to Hillary. The narrowness of Hillary’s victory in Indiana, where she had run the field operation for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, was just as telling as the pounding she took in North Carolina that night. The day after those primaries, on a conference call with the campaign’s top executives, she issued the edict to cease and desist on attacks that could hurt Obama in the general election. The final month of the campaign was a slow march to her inevitable fate.

At the end of that slog, the backyard party had the feel of a wake, a bittersweet goodbye. Though the Washington air was thick with speculation about whether Obama might pick Hillary to be his running mate, the two former rivals had met the night before at Senator Dianne Feinstein’s D.C. home and, unbeknownst to the partygoers at Hillary’s house, Obama made clear that
he did not intend to ask her. For the most part, the extended Clinton family of friends and aides tried to keep the mood in the backyard upbeat. But surface conviviality couldn’t hide the fact that this journey was ending on the north lawn of the Whitehaven house rather than on the South Lawn of the White House.

While Hillary listened to battlefield stories, shared laughs, and posed for pictures, she gave no hint of the emotional and politically delicate task that lay ahead of her that night. As the last of the political operatives and press aides shuffled off the property, Hillary headed to her dining room to write the final draft of the highly anticipated concession speech that she would deliver the next morning to a nation of Democrats waiting to see whether she could endorse Obama with conviction. The dining room, separated from the foyer by sliding French doors, is the business center at the Clintons’ Washington home, a 5,500-square-foot Georgian temple to the 1950s that they bought in 2000 so Hillary would have a place to live while she served in the Senate.

By the time Hillary sat down late that afternoon with aides Doug Hattaway and Sarah Hurwitz, the latest draft of the speech reflected the scars of a staff still riven. Nearly all agreed that Hillary had to endorse Obama and acknowledge her own supporters, but they couldn’t come to terms on the best approach. For several days, her
various communications advisers had been e-mailing drafts back and forth, fighting one another through edits to the text. The bigger camp, made up mostly of high-priced advisers like chief strategist Geoff Garin, demanded a full-throated endorsement of Obama that would convince his team, the Democratic Party, and the rest of the country that she was completely on board.

The smaller set, which included several of the women closest to Hillary, as well as Hattaway and Hurwitz, insisted that she couldn’t credibly make the case for Obama if she didn’t deliver a powerful acknowledgment of the historic nature of her own candidacy and particularly of the women who had supported it. At the heart of the matter was an existential question that had plagued the campaign from its earliest days: how should Hillary handle being the first viable female candidate for president?

For most of the campaign, she had sided with old-school professionals who believed she needed to project strength and thus keep the talk about being a woman to a minimum. She hadn’t given a speech that called attention to her gender the way Obama had made a race speech. But her campaign had been resurrected by vulnerability, in a moment of emotional exhaustion, when a tear rolled down her face at a stop in New Hampshire. Those who felt she performed better when she showed her underdog side believed the concession speech gave Hillary an opportunity to talk about the very aspect of her persona that she had held back for so long and that appealed to so many voters.

When Hillary sat down with Hurwitz and Hattaway, the draft they reviewed included both an endorsement of Obama and an oratorical run about her place in history. For months, she had resisted the close circle of advisers who had wanted her to frame her candidacy in terms of history, the way Obama had. Now the text in front of her did just that. Jim Kennedy, a longtime Clinton hand, had come up with the phrase that melded Hillary with her voters in the continuum of the women’s movement. Text-messaging his thoughts
from his home in Venice Beach, California, earlier in the week, Kennedy said Hillary should speak of the “eighteen million cracks” that her campaign had put in the most fortified glass ceiling of them all.

Hillary had always favored making a robust endorsement, her aides said. But as she reviewed the latest draft at her dining room table, she still wasn’t sold on the riff about her place in history. She was more inclined to show first and foremost that she was a team player—an attribute she prized in herself and that was important to preserving her political future. She had to be brought around to putting so much emphasis on honoring her achievement as the woman who had come closest to winning a major party’s presidential nomination.

She scrawled a question mark in the margin beside the paragraphs about her.

“It wasn’t about being a woman,” Hillary said.

“Think about talking not about you as a woman but to the women who supported you,” Hattaway countered, framing his argument in terms that might appeal to the midwestern Methodist who reflexively worried about the potential unseemliness of calling attention to herself. “This is a big accomplishment for them.”

Hillary wasn’t convinced. “Her head wasn’t there,” said one source. Then Hurwitz, a Harvard-educated lawyer and speechwriter who had been taking notes quietly, leaned forward and made the case. For one young woman with proximity to power, this was the moment to speak for the millions of women her own age, as well as for the mothers and grandmothers, who had stuck by Hillary. They burned to see the first woman in the Oval Office, choosing that cause over another cherished hope for many of them—to elect the first black president. This, above all else, mattered. It wasn’t that Hurwitz was consumed with hatred for Obama. Within weeks, she would join his campaign, and she ended up landing a coveted job on the White House speechwriting team. But this moment mattered for so many women who had pinned their hopes on Hillary. In the end, Hurwitz’s passion, and her reason, won out.

Okay, Hillary said, it stays.

The denouement was pivotal, as much for what it said about the evolution of Hillary’s persona in the coming years as it did for the tenor of the speech she would give the next day. Hillary’s toughness and her femininity weren’t mutually exclusive; they were bound together. Voters, particularly women, identified with her precisely because she was a woman with an iron spine. Over that summer, from her dining room table in June to the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August, she started to develop a new narrative in which she embraced being a trailblazing political force in her own right.

Though the point in her speech was resolved, Hillary’s night was far from over. There was a lot riding on this address, and she needed to strike the perfect chord with the endorsement. She couldn’t afford to alienate her remaining loyalists. Her advisers even feared that supporters might walk out if she was too strong in her endorsement. She knew that 10 percent of them would never go over to Obama, but she had to make sure she could move the other 90 percent. Yet neither could she come up short in praising Obama. It wasn’t really an either-or proposition. If she failed to give a hearty enough endorsement, she might severely and permanently damage her own standing in the Democratic Party. No one wanted to relive the awful moment when Ted Kennedy refused to join hands with Jimmy Carter after their 1980 primary fight.

Hillary stayed up with the speech past four a.m., and then it was circulated to top advisers. Garin, the chief strategist, was dumbstruck at the final version, which he thought had too much about Hillary and not enough about Obama. He e-mailed an F-word-punctuated missive that the revisions had to go.

To this day, there are still disagreements among Hillary’s advisers about the degree to which edits were made that morning. “There was no resistance or reluctance to change it back,” said one source who sided with Garin’s view. “It’s not like there was a real fight over this.”

But a friend who favored Hillary’s version disputed that conclusion. “There were a lot of attempts by some people in that other
camp to [put in] more refrains about Obama,” the friend said. “She kind of ended up where she was overnight.”

The morning of Hillary’s concession speech played out in inadvertently comic fashion—half royal wedding and half afternoon car chase. The news media staked out the Whitehaven house, so viewers knew the minute her motorcade left for the National Building Museum. The museum, defined by the seventy-five-foot-high Corinthian columns in its Great Hall, is a nineteenth-century Bureau of Pensions building that Congress converted into a
memorial to “the built environment.” Its Roman-themed interior was meant to house both the federal pension service and Washington’s great social galas. That Great Hall, and the thousands of Clintonites who filtered into it, had to wait for Hillary, who was running late. Even the delay was turned into the kind of minidrama of speculation that the cable networks live for.