HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (8 page)

Biden had sought Bill Clinton’s advice before entering the 2008 race, and, as a longtime friend of both Clintons, never endorsed Obama in the latter stages of the primary. Instead, he had offered his counsel to both Obama and Hillary as they battled it out across the country.

“The president was looking for what the vice president was going to say,” Kaufman recalled. “The vice president was a strong supporter of Hillary.”

When Obama went around the room to count the yeas and nays—his personal choice evident already—the decision was unanimous.

On November 13, four days after Obama’s call to the Clintons, Mitchell reported that Hillary had been spotted on a flight bound for Chicago. Later that day reporters staking out the Obama transition office at a federal building downtown caught sight of a motorcade that didn’t belong to the president-elect, raising the question of which other dignitary was visiting. Still, the two camps weren’t talking about it publicly. The operation was so hush-hush that when Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau ran into Abedin at the office that day, he assumed Huma was being interviewed for a job in the administration; the thought that Hillary was in the office listening to Obama’s sales pitch never crossed his mind.

Obama and Clinton huddled in a bland conference room, face-to-face without any aides.

Obama said he wanted her for the job.

“I’m really flattered, Mr. President-elect,” Hillary replied, “but I’m going to go back to the Senate. That’s what I really want to do. You’ve got great people to choose from to be secretary of state.”

She offered up two names: veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke
and retired general Jim Jones, a former commandant of the Marine Corps.

“I can help you in the Senate, because it’s going to be challenging to get your agenda through,” she told Obama. “You’ve got the economic crisis to deal with.”

But Obama had given it a lot of thought, he told her, and she was the woman for the job. While he was tied down in Washington with the financial collapse, he needed a star-power diplomat to represent him across the globe.

Hillary said no again.

Go home and give it some thought, Obama instructed her, as only a newly elected president could. He wasn’t taking no for an answer. They could talk about it later, he said.

Hillary had plenty of reasons to reject Obama’s first entreaty. She was coming to grips with returning to the Senate; she didn’t want to run an agency full of Obama appointees; her husband’s international dealings could become an unwanted distraction for Obama; and she wouldn’t be able to pay off the
$6.4 million debt that her campaign still owed to vendors if she held a post in the executive branch. Besides, why would she want to work for the upstart who beat her and look at his portrait every day in her office? And—never stated but obvious to anyone in politics—playing coy with Obama gave her leverage to extract a better deal if she ended up accepting. It all added up to a demurral.

Until their face-to-face meeting, all but a few insiders in each camp had been kept in the dark. But the
Huffington Post
reported the next day that
Obama had offered her the job, citing two Democratic officials. Suddenly it felt more real. It was a lifeline for Hillarylanders who had once imagined themselves in the West Wing only to snap back toward Capitol Hill. The State Department represented a soft landing in between.

As Hillary began researching the job and soliciting opinions, she soon found out that her closest friends and advisers were divided on whether she should take it.

Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, was driving
in heavy traffic on M Street in Washington when Hillary called to get her thoughts. A dozen years earlier Hillary had urged Bill to make Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, his second-term secretary of state. The two women had traveled abroad together during the Clinton administration, and their bond was enhanced by the common experience of a Wellesley education. Not only was Albright a friend of Hillary’s, she was the only Democratic woman ever to serve as secretary of state and thus was uniquely positioned to offer counsel both about what the job entailed and about whether Hillary should take it. Albright pulled off onto a side street in Georgetown for what she correctly suspected would be a long conversation.

“She knew I’d liked the job,” Albright said. “We talked about what the job was about, what you could do with it, how much travel there was, what the building was like.”

What her friend was really driving at, Albright knew, was whether Hillary would enjoy being at State. “I told her obviously that I thought the job was terrific, that she’d be wonderful at it, and that it was something that she could take great pride in doing,” Albright recalled. “Often people think foreign policy has nothing to do with domestic policy, and they’re part of the same spectrum. So I just knew she would be good at it.”

Mark Penn’s knee-jerk reaction was that she shouldn’t go to work for Obama. But ultimately he had a clear-eyed view of what was best for Hillary—especially when it involved plotting for a second presidential run.
He came to see the political benefits that could accrue to Hillary if she took the job. Among them, it would bolster her credibility as a foreign policy expert; it would prove again that she was a good Democrat, not an out-for-herself freelancer; it would once and for all liberate her from Bill’s shadow; and it would please the Democratic primary voters who wanted to see her and Obama join forces.

Penn had been so iced out of Hillaryland by that point, according to longtime Clinton hands, that his advice probably didn’t matter much. But his personal ambivalence exemplified the divide within
Hillaryland. “Our office was kind of split because a lot of people didn’t want her to do it,” said one of Hillary’s Senate aides. “A lot of people wanted to retain their jobs—they were kind of negative about Obama and bitter. Then there were others who thought this was a good opportunity for her.”

Obama put on the full-court press. Working on his behalf, a long list of high-profile Democratic players urged her to take the post, and it became clear that Bill was willing to do anything to ease that path, including adjusting the nature of his charitable work and sharing his donor list with the new White House team. But he was sensitive to the criticism he had received during her campaign. While he made clear that he thought she should take it, he didn’t pressure her.

Podesta became the key go-between for Obama and Hillary.
He had suggested Hillary for the job during meetings in the summer of 2008 only to find that Obama had already given it thought. Podesta urged Hillary to take the gig and advised Obama on the strategy and tactics of getting her to yes.

For a week, news reports went back and forth on the question of whether she had actually been offered the job and whether she would take it. Behind the scenes, some Clinton and Obama aides worked hard to make a match. Reines and Andrew Shapiro, an adviser on national security matters, came up with a gambit for lobbying Hillary indirectly. Joe Biden’s birthday was coming up in a few days, and they urged her to call the vice president–elect a couple of days early, knowing that once they were on the phone, Biden would apply friendly pressure. He did his part. Emanuel made his own appeal to Hillary.

But while the Clinton allies within Obama’s high command worked back channels to persuade her, much of the rest of his team was unsettled by the prospect of trying to assimilate the Clinton universe into the Obama world.

“The majority of people, and I mean this not at the top echelons, but up and down the campaign, would not have suggested that she and her people become part of” the administration, one Obama insider said. “The majority of people who I knew were not for it.”

As these subterranean fights played out between those who
wanted Hillary at State and those who didn’t, the calculus flipped. At first it looked like Obama was on the verge of scoring a coup by getting Hillary to join a “team of rivals” cabinet. But with the public latched on to that story line, it became clear it would be an equally jarring embarrassment for Obama if she turned him down. That meant her own reputation was suddenly on the line, too—there could be a backlash if fellow Democrats read a rejection as a deliberate attempt to sabotage her former rival.

Hillary had been concerned about those optics from the moment she left Obama’s transition headquarters. She instructed aides not to talk publicly about the offer, so that if she turned Obama down it wouldn’t reflect badly on either one of them.

For several days, Hillary remained unsold. She was just getting used to the idea that her next act would be in the Senate, where a player with extraordinary contacts and political muscle could make a career as a serious legislator, even after a failed presidential campaign. Ironically, the model was Ted Kennedy. The cultural differences between Obama’s camp and Hillary’s raised serious doubts about whether they could all get along, and the candidates themselves had clashed some on foreign policy approaches during the campaign. While they had more in common than not, the contrast between them was real. During the primary, Obama had repeatedly knocked Clinton for voting to authorize the war in Iraq. Clinton had portrayed Obama as a naïf who would wilt in the face of troublemaker nations like Iran.

As the days crawled by, Hillary kept leaning no. Several of the women closest to her, including Williams and Mills, urged her to reject the offer, according to one adviser familiar with the discussion at the time.

But there was also a committed cadre who pushed her to get to yes throughout the weeklong flirtation. Reines pushed every button he could to get her to reconsider, and then asked others to do the same. “If you think she should be secretary of state, you better send an e-mail to her right now, because she is saying no,” he told one colleague late one night.

Ellen Tauscher, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, was among those who reached out to Hillary in the final days before the decision. A Wall Street wunderkind who wandered into Democratic fund-raising after moving to California with her then husband, Tauscher had chaired Senator Dianne Feinstein’s first two campaigns for the Senate. Running as a Clinton-style centrist, she then edged out a Republican incumbent to win a Bay Area House seat, as Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996.

She was tall and warm—and as tough as a Trident missile. Tauscher had befriended the first lady, and Hillary had helped talk her through a tough divorce from a husband who had admitted to extramarital activity at the same time Bill Clinton was on trial over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. After Hillary won the Senate seat, the two women grew closer when they worked together on military issues as members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

Tauscher believed that Obama, who had limited foreign policy experience, needed gravitas on his national security team. She had urged Defense Secretary Robert Gates to hold over from the Bush administration to help Obama sort out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and she considered Jim Jones, the incoming national security adviser, a close personal friend. As chairwoman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Tauscher not only liked the idea of having three allies in the Situation Room, she thought Hillary’s skills, expertise, and relationships around the world could help restore America’s battered reputation and focus attention on serious policy issues that the Bush administration had neglected. And Hillary wouldn’t have to spend much time getting up to speed.

Tauscher got her on the phone. “You’ve got to do this,” she said. Hillary laughed her familiar chortle and stammered a bit in protest. But then she started listening. Tauscher explained that Hillary would add value to Obama’s national security team immediately, using a Rolodex matched only by her husband’s to create a sense not just of push but of pull. The Bush administration had been almost hostile to the rest of the world, including longtime allies and potential
strategic partners. In particular, Tauscher noted, the START treaty was expiring and America would need a superstar to repair its tattered relationship with Russia. “We’ve got to get this done,” she said of the nuclear pact.

In all, it was a thirty-five-minute pitch, and it was one Tauscher would hear repeated back a few months later, nearly word for word, when Hillary asked her to leave Congress to become undersecretary for arms control and international security affairs.

Hillary also ran into her former White House chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, outside an event in New York. Verveer, who ran Vital Voices, an NGO supporting women in leadership around the world that Hillary had launched, urged her to take the job. Lissa Muscatine, the veteran speechwriter, made a similar pitch. Still, the many reasons to accept the offer didn’t obviate or eliminate all the reasons to reject it.

Kris Balderston, sitting at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, waiting for his daughter to return home from college one night that week, tapped out a message to Hillary on his BlackBerry, laying out the arguments for why she should take the job. “You’re an executive branch person, not a legislative branch person,” he wrote, playing on Hillary’s deeply held belief that Republicans are patient and Democrats are impatient. “You are impatient.” It was a long note, one that would have taken up at least a page and a half on paper.

He wasn’t alone. “Everybody sent their individual e-mails to her,” one Clinton insider said. “There was a surge.”

On Tuesday, November 18, five days after her trip to Chicago, Hillary’ top advisers convened a conference call to discuss what a rejection of Obama’s offer would look like. To ensure that Hillary’s impending no wasn’t revealed to everyone on the call, they also quickly chatted about what she would say publicly if she took the job. Of course, if she said yes, it would be up to Obama to make the announcement. The lion’s share of the two-hour call was devoted to the “no” version.

Williams, Mills, Reines, Jim Kennedy, Abedin, longtime Clinton lawyer Bruce Lindsey, Doug Band, and others were on the call.

Reines divined a window of opportunity to stall Hillary’s decision making. Obama’s team was still in the process of reviewing potential conflicts between Bill’s charitable work and the duties of the secretary of state. If she said no now, Reines argued, the press would read it as Bill failing the vet. She should wait until that process was finished, he advised, even suggesting that the Clinton camp deliver a full physical printout of all of Bill’s donors—rather than just the coterie of $200,000-plus contributors Obama had requested—to the transition headquarters.