Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (24 page)

After her virtuoso performance—and Bill Clinton’s acquittal—Mills could have had almost any legal job in Washington. The president even offered her the position of White House counsel. But Mills was burned out. She moved to New York in 1999 to become a vice president at Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Media, and after two years, she took a job as general counsel at New York University—leaving far behind her more than six years of subpoenas, congressional investigations, independent counsels, and investigative reporters. She may have been one of the few lawyers in history who moved to Manhattan for a taste of tranquility.

Mills’s quiet life away from politics lasted for eight years—until Hillary Clinton announced her campaign for the presidency. Mills came on board as a counselor, and when Hillary fired her campaign manager after a string of primary defeats, the trusted, combative, and indefatigable Mills took the reins de facto. “Sometimes on campaigns,” said traveling press secretary Jay Carson to a reporter, “you can end up in a situation where there’s not a clear single person, no clear leader, no clear power center. When Cheryl is in charge, that’s never a problem.”
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Others were not only impressed but also terrified of her. “I really like Cheryl,” says an aide who worked with her on the 2008 campaign. “She’d kill me if she knew I were talking to you.” The aide adds, “I never, ever saw the, like, the crazy Cheryl moments that I’ve heard about. But I’ve definitely heard about them. I know they exist.”

After Hillary Clinton’s defeat and move from the Senate to the State Department, Mills followed her to Foggy Bottom, where she was an efficient, devoted, and occasionally notorious guardian of all things Hillary Clinton. Clinton loyalists were quick to praise her. “Cheryl Mills ran that building extremely well,” says Vali Nasr.

Among those in the building she ran so well were the two people in the positions Congress created in 2000 when it split in two the normally administrative job of deputy secretary of state, the number-two position at the department. Clinton filled one of those jobs with a typical Foreign Service type. The other position went to a seasoned political operative, Tom Nides, who protected Hillary’s political future.

“Tom [Nides] was just a big protector of Secretary Clinton,” says one former State Department official who also served in the Bush administration. With a wife working as a senior executive at ABC News (she’d later move to CNN), Nides also had excellent ties to the mainstream media.

Together Nides and Mills did the department’s dirty work, while Clinton maintained a statesmanlike distance as she worked to enhance her image. (One insider predicted in fact that Nides would get the coveted White House chief of staff job if Hillary won in 2016—not Mills.)

“They would decide what would go in to Secretary Clinton and what they would secretly get her to sign off on, but not make any public announcements on, so that she was protected in the decision-making process,” says one State Department employee. “She needed to be able to officially stay away from the issues, so that she could deny that she knew anything” if something went wrong.

“She was able to kind of stay above it,” says an official, “and as the policy began to really fail, she stayed away from it.”

Mrs. Clinton’s celebrity was the one clear advantage she brought to the job and the Obama administration. She was far better known going into the office of secretary of state than any of her predecessors—from Henry Kissinger to Colin Powell to Condoleezza Rice. And this helped put a pleasing public face on the administration around the world.

It also helped her attract unlikely admirers, like Secretary of Defense Gates, who seemed to beam around Hillary whenever they were in the same room. One Gates aide described him as coming across like a groupie with a rock star. They allied together on many issues against the Obama NSC, even if they usually lost.

No doubt with an eye to avoiding a repeat of 2008, she placed a special focus on strengthening relations with members of Congress—the Democrats she’d need for endorsements and the Republicans who might run against her. One Republican senator who once had an acrimonious relationship with the Clintons remembers the secretary of state being extremely receptive to his ideas—and willing to listen whenever he had thoughts he wanted to share with her.

One of her potential challengers in 2016, Congressman Paul Ryan, also counts himself as a Hillary fan, having worked with her during her State Department tenure. “I think we both respect each other as, you know, talented—she’s a talented leader in her party,” he tells me in an interview. “And so she has my respect and I get the feeling that Hillary’s mutual.”

Keenly aware of the Senate’s massive egos, Clinton had a reputation for returning calls quickly, following up on congressional requests, and giving the impression of personal attentiveness to even their most mundane, even kooky, ideas.

One senator called her up to share some ideas about the nature of Islam. Hillary returned his phone call almost instantly. “My suggestion was that we needed to look for forums by which we can gather Islamic leaders, and then we ask simple questions like, ‘Well, do you believe a Christian should be given equal rights in Saudi Arabia?’ And when these ‘Islamic leaders’ publicly admit not to believing in equal rights for Christians and Muslims and Jews, then we could have a public airing of these differences,” he explains.

The senator compared his plan to the way he believed segregation was ended in America. “When CBS News put the microphone to the preacher’s face and said, ‘Can a black person come to your church?’ It’s all right not to have any and not to do it for a hundred years, but are you going to say on TV he can’t come to my church because of the color of his skin? I’m thinking that these guys are getting away with saying all kinds of things in their mosque, and all this hateful stuff, and you get them in public and ask them some simple questions they’re going to have a hard time.”

After a rather lengthy conversation with the senator, Hillary told him, “Well, I’ll think about it.” The senator had voted to convict her husband on both articles of impeachment and had been a fierce opponent of her legislative initiatives. But he felt like he’d been listened to, which is all most members of Congress want anyway. By the time Hillary left Foggy Bottom, he felt affection and respect for her.

The issue her aides try to emphasize the most—suggesting what they might consider Hillary’s most impressive accomplishment—is women’s rights, which she brought up, famously, when in the Democratic Republic of the Congo toward the beginning of her tenure. She was asked (according to the translator on the scene at the time), “What does Mr. Clinton think, through the mouth of Mrs. Clinton?”

She ripped the translating device from her ear. “Wait, you want me to tell you what my husband thinks?” shouted an indignant Hillary, dressed in a purple pantsuit with a matching purple shirt. “My husband is not the secretary of state, I am. So, you ask my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I’m not going to be channeling my husband.”

The question was about Chinese contracts in the Congo, but it mattered little.

Back stateside, video of the event, which also featured former basketball star Dikembe Mutombo, went viral.
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The tabloids mocked Hillary, however. “Hill: I Wear the Pants,” read the
New York Post
. “Hey, I’m the Boss, Not Bill,” is what the
New York Daily News
went with.

It was a theme Hillary tried to bring to the rest of the world—and usually with a bit more forethought and a bit more calm. “Women’s equality is not just a moral issue, it’s not just a humanitarian issue, it is not just a fairness issue,” Hillary said at a conference. “It is a security issue, it is a prosperity issue, and it is a peace issue . . . it’s in the vital interests of the United States of America.” These were lines that were widely quoted—and ones, it’s safe to assume, that she wants defining her tenure as America’s top diplomat.

It would echo what she said in China in 1995. “It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights,” the then first lady said at a women’s conference.
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“It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small . . . when thousands of women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.” Hillary’s good friend Melanne Verveer would credit that speech for “help[ing] spark a movement around the world for women’s progress.”
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It was a powerful message in 1995—and when she returned as secretary of state, she claimed progress. “I think we have made an enormous amount of progress, and we have women able to chart their own lives much more than ever existed in human history. But there are external barriers and internal barriers. Externally, there are still many places where education is not available, health care is not available, jobs are not available, training, credit, you know, just the basics of being able to construct your own approach to your life,” Hillary would say at a meeting with women leaders in Beijing in May 2010.
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“And then, internally, each woman has to make the right balance in her life, and we have to respect the decisions that women make, because we’re all so different. But there are still some attitudes in the minds of men and women that keep it very hard for women to feel like they are achieving and being able to get supported in their choice.”

She’d also make an effort to talk up gay rights. In a video released by the State Department, Hillary made a domestic plea: “Like millions of Americans, I was terribly saddened to learn of the recent suicides of several teenagers across our country after being bullied because they were gay or because people thought they were gay,” Hillary said as she stared into the camera. “Just think of the progress made by women just during my lifetime, by women, or ethnic, racial and religious minorities over the course of our history—and by gays and lesbians, many of whom are now free to live their lives openly and proudly. Here at the State Department, I am grateful every day for the work of our LGBT employees who are serving the United States as foreign service officers and civil servants here and around the world. It wasn’t long ago that these men and women would not have been able to serve openly, but today they can—because it has gotten better. And it will get better for you.”
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It was odd only in that it was a rare entry into American domestic politics. Not something a secretary of state normally does, but it demonstrated how important Hillary finds the issue. She’d talk it up abroad, too, perhaps becoming the first secretary of state to embrace gay rights as such an important issue to American foreign policy.

These are all issues she’ll tout as defining moments of her tenure. And although there aren’t clear victories showing progress—it’s hard to claim victory on women’s rights or gay rights—it’s helped build the foundations for a presidential run. She’ll say that electing her will ensure that the fight for these issues continues.

Hillary also worked to cement her relationship with Obama, which, while never warm—the president was known to have warm relations with almost no one—was cordial, correct, and businesslike. Those were the qualities an aloof leader like Obama prized most highly.

Hillary’s staff made it very apparent to the press where the two had disagreed. Clinton portrayed herself as more hawkish than her boss. First was in the summer of 2009 in Iran, where a presidential election was stolen by the hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an avowed hater of America and our allies. The people took to the streets there to rise up and express their displeasure. The unrest was widespread and sincere. It was a real moment, the first in more than three decades, where it looked like the repressive regime might be able to be challenged.

Hillary, her aides have maintained, wanted to get the United States involved in playing a role in shaping a post-Khomeini outcome. Even her aides, acting under the unsubstantiated belief that it was a social media revolution, driven by the collective power in social media platforms like Twitter, tried to harness that into something more substantive. It was in part a reaction to losing the election to Obama, who they believed had beaten them using the collective power of the Internet. But Obama viewed the Iranian uprising differently, as a purely internal matter. “It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be,” Obama said. So nothing substantive happened and eventually the protests subsided under withering attacks and arrests by pro-regime forces—and that moment to help the Iranian people perhaps topple their repressive regime was lost forever.

Similarly, in Syria, where an internal civil war turned into a regime crackdown on the uprising, Hillary wanted the United States to come to the aid of the Syrian rebels. She wanted America to do
something
. President Obama didn’t. These are the sorts of distinctions that are in no way lost on some of Hillary’s staunchest supporters. Likewise, the distinctions bred skepticism throughout the Obama years.

Obama seemed to give her a pass when she quietly let out word of such disagreements. He still needed her, especially as he approached his 2012 reelection campaign. And he especially needed her renegade husband. Bill would be happy to help out, if there was something in it for him.

With Obama’s poll numbers sagging by the middle of 2012, and the president seemingly unable to articulate a coherent rationale for his reelection, it increasingly fell to Bill Clinton, of all people, to serve as Obama’s champion. It was not a job the former president came to naturally, or easily.

“They had moments where it was really ugly,” a senior Clinton and Obama aide says. “I was in the [2008] campaign and I think for whatever reason, the Obama people resented what he did more than what she did, because he said some things that really stick in their craw.”