HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (11 page)

Hillary’s courtship of Petraeus would pay dividends, both on policy and personally. In mid-February 2010 she found herself stranded in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, because of mechanical problems with her jet. Petraeus, who had been in nearby Riyadh, redirected
his own plane to pick Hillary up and bring her back to the United States. On the plane, Hillary picked Petraeus’s brain on the region monitored by U.S. Central Command, an area encompassing twenty countries that spans from Egypt in the west to Pakistan in the east, and from Kazakhstan in the north to the waters off Somalia’s coast in the south. During their conversation, it became clear that both Hillary and Petraeus were exhausted from their respective trips. So Petraeus, playing the part of an officer and a gentleman, offered Hillary his bed in the compartment at the back of the plane. As Hillary settled into Petraeus’s bed, he stretched out on the floor outside the door to the compartment. She had won him back.

Initially, Holbrooke had hoped to become the deputy secretary of state, but the Obama camp couldn’t forgive him for threatening messages he had delivered to foreign policy experts during the campaign, vowing to deny them jobs in a Hillary administration if they signed on with Obama. Instead, Obama picked Jim Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration who had counseled Obama during the general election. Steinberg, then the dean of the University of Texas’s public policy school, was with his daughter at a birthday party in November when Obama called to offer him the job. Disappointed that he wouldn’t become Obama’s national security adviser, Steinberg asked for one concession from the president: Give me a permanent seat at National Security Council meetings. That would ensure that he couldn’t be shut out of the top level of the policy-making process. It’s okay with me, if it’s okay with Hillary, Obama said. Hillary liked that idea because Steinberg’s presence would mean State had two seats at the national security table, and Steinberg was an acceptable number two because of his long-standing ties to trusted Clintonites.

Hillary sat down with Steinberg in early December in an apartment on Central Park South, overlooking the lush rectangle of gardens, fountains, and playgrounds that stretches from the northern reach of midtown Manhattan to the southern edge of Harlem. She
used the apartment for a series of one-on-one sessions with advisers and potential hires that fall and winter. The location allowed her to meet with them discreetly, lowering the risk that reporters would find out who was up for a job at State, and in an environment cozy enough to promote comfort and informality. Once visitors stepped out of the elevator on the appropriate floor, Hillary’s Secret Service detail—a perk of her status as a former first lady—guided them to the right door. Inside, Hillary played hostess, boiling pot after pot of green tea as she planned her execution of Obama’s foreign policy vision. The apartment was dotted with pictures of the Clinton family, and Hillary seemed so at home in the dining alcove with the view of the snow-glazed park that, years later, Steinberg thought the apartment belonged to the Clintons. It didn’t. It belonged to Doug Band.

For three hours, as afternoon turned to evening, they had what Steinberg recalled as a “lovely, long conversation where we talked about the excitement of getting these new jobs and the opportunities and what kinds of people we wanted to work with and bring into the department, and how we wanted to use our time, and how we would conceive our mutual roles.” Hillary still didn’t know exactly which jobs she could offer to which candidates, but she had a pretty firm idea of who she wanted at the top, what her agenda would look like, and what strengths she brought to the position.

Two main “meta” objectives informed everything she wanted to do at State: restore America’s standing in the world, and infuse the theory of “smart power” into America’s foreign policy. The term, coined by Clinton administration Pentagon official Joseph Nye, is shorthand for an approach to influencing other countries that combines traditional “hard power” such as military force and economic sanctions with the “soft power” of inducing foreign nations to change their behavior by offering carrots such as political or economic assistance. “
Smart power is neither hard nor soft,” Nye wrote in 2004. “It is both.” A cultural shift toward smart power—and using both hard- and soft-power tools together to influence a single country—would take time. The more subtle and comprehensive approach
to relationships with other countries often meant waiting for results. For the knee-jerk hard-power devotees, it looked weak in the short term. There was always someone in Congress screaming for the White House to take more aggressive action toward a rival, even if the hard-power route was likely to backfire.

More immediately, Hillary consumed herself with the question of how to reverse the damage Bush had done to America’s reputation. “There was a lot of question globally about how was the United States using its power and how it was perceived in the world,” Steinberg said, “and I think that strong sense of being able to project a different America and a different America abroad was her paramount objective. I think she recognized because of who she was and her own experience that she was particularly well suited to be the carrier of that message, of a different kind of America, an America that was going to protect its interests but could take into account the concerns and perspectives of others as well.”

In that way, the objectives of using a smart-power approach and rebuilding America’s standing meshed perfectly. America would increase its influence in the world by taking advantage of opportunities to engage other countries in trade, investment, philanthropic partnerships, and military coalitions. In particular, Hillary told aides in those early days, she believed it was vital to engage other countries at all levels, from top to bottom. Political leaders are responsive to their people, so engaging the public at the grassroots level could bolster America’s ability to influence foreign nations.

“Her first priority, above all else, that she talked about in every single meeting, was how do we restore America’s standing in the world? What’s it going to take? And how do I reach not only to governments but to people to be able to convey the message about our vision for the future, about President Obama’s and my commitment to the values that people appreciate about America?” said a source who was in the transition meetings. “That was, above and beyond, her biggest thing.”

For Hillary to play effectively on the global plane and within the American government, she would need her house to be in order at
State. Even as she discussed a partnership with Steinberg, Hillary began circumscribing him. Steinberg was a gifted thinker in the public and foreign policy arenas but less talented as a day-to-day manager. Rather than handling all of the duties of the deputy secretary of state, Hillary told him, his job would be split into two. Congress had approved a second deputy slot at the end of the Clinton administration, but Bush hadn’t made use of it. Now Hillary planned to bring in a Wall Street banker who had served as the cabinet-level director of Bill Clinton’s White House budget office: Jack Lew. An Orthodox Jew with a zealot’s devotion to public service, Lew would become Steinberg’s equal if Hillary could lure him away from a lucrative job at Citigroup. Steinberg would be the deputy for foreign policy, and Lew would be the deputy for management and budget.

Lew wasn’t Hillary’s first choice for the new post. She had offered it to Wendy Sherman, who had been Albright’s right hand at State. But Sherman declined. For his part, Lew had hoped to land a spot as chairman of Obama’s National Economic Council. But when Tim Geithner was picked for treasury secretary, former Clinton treasury secretary Larry Summers slid into the NEC role. Geithner brought Lew in to discuss the deputy secretary slot at Treasury, and when Lew returned to his office, he had a message from Hillary, who wanted to hire him at State. Rahm Emanuel objected to Lew being hired at Treasury, not out of personal animus but because he worried that it wouldn’t look good to put a Citigroup executive in that job in the midst of a Wall Street bailout. About a week after talking to Geithner and Hillary about their respective deputy secretary openings, Lew accepted Hillary’s offer.

Between Sullivan’s role in the formulation of foreign policy as a deputy chief of staff and Lew’s control over the budget, the deputy secretary slot Steinberg got had been sliced into a much smaller fiefdom. Hillary told Steinberg that Holbrooke would be brought in as the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a post that technically reported directly to both Hillary and Obama. The main
global hot spot, then, would be in Holbrooke’s hands, at least as far as State’s influence went in formulating so-called Af/Pak policy.

She also wanted George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, to become a special envoy to the Middle East to deal with the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, and Dennis Ross, a longtime Washington hand, would become a senior adviser to her on Iran. If Steinberg felt threatened by the A-team Hillary assembled before his eyes, he didn’t mention it. Years later he insisted that he welcomed the news of Lew coming in to handle the budget, calling it the best personnel decision Hillary made at State. Her closest advisers maintain that Hillary welcomed Steinberg and had no intention of carving up his new job and parceling out choice pieces to favored lieutenants. But the proof was in the outcome—a much smaller domain for her new deputy—according to other aides who watched the process play out.

“It is fair to say that it had that effect. But I don’t think that was the intent—to diminish Jim’s authority. Jim and Jack got on well, as did Jim and Jake,” said one high-ranking State official. “But Jake was clearly Hillary’s guy, and Jim clearly was not. Hillary wanted her own people, and as they came in, Jim’s turf was smaller.”

Ultimately, whether they worked with him, went around him, or fought with him openly, senior State officials found that Steinberg could be marginalized, said another aide to Hillary.

“Even though Jack was principally focused on budget and management, he was also the lead deputy on Af-Pak and Iraq. He had the development agenda, which is typically a place where [Steinberg would have been] involved,” said one senior State official. “Jake’s role ensured that Jim was not the last policy official to talk to HRC, and it kept policy speeches mostly away from Jim.”

Hillary made another major change to the deputy position that spoke more to the insularity of her inner circle than an effort to sideline Steinberg, but still had the same effect. In the Bush administration, the deputy secretary had authority over the S-class, a set of nearly a dozen offices under the secretary. But when Hillary came
in, she removed her new deputies from the chain of command, meaning veteran loyalists who were appointed to run those offices, including Capricia Marshall and Melanne Verveer, did not report to anyone but her.

The use of special envoys, special representatives, and senior advisers was nothing new, but Hillary seemed to have a better understanding than her predecessors of how deploying them could circumvent the stodginess of the institution she was about to inherit. With direct access to the secretary and her explicit imprimatur, these aides were empowered to put policies on a fast track through a department in which change often became mired in bureaucratic inertia. These jobs, like those on Hillary’s personal staff, didn’t require Senate confirmation, but they carried a downside risk of Hillary failing to get credit if one of her lieutenants reached a breakthrough peace agreement. Still, the big-name diplomats offered Hillary a degree of insulation, too: if Holbrooke and Mitchell failed to solve a conflict, it would be more on them and less on her than if she had picked anonymous newcomers.

In group meetings with her top staff, including Steinberg, Mills, Sullivan, and incoming congressional liaison Rich Verma, Hillary pounded on the theme of finding ways to restore America’s brand. It was clear that she knew, even in those early days, that her stature and confidence were chief assets in building a team at State, interacting with her peers in Obama’s cabinet, and most important, repositioning America in the world.

“No other secretary of state could have convinced Richard Holbrooke and probably George Mitchell to come work for them,” said one senior State Department official. The same was true of Lew, who was moving down from the last post he held, as a cabinet-rank official, but felt intense loyalty to the Clintons and knew he could be a player from a senior post at State.

The construction of a top-notch staff mattered a lot in Hillary’s case for several reasons. First, the mission of acting as the face of America abroad meant that she would be traveling almost continuously and had to delegate day-to-day management of most activities
to trusted advisers. Each former secretary had fallen victim to pitfalls that Hillary was determined to avoid. Albright’s failure to win over the career officials at State meant she had had to fight the bureaucracy rather than mobilizing it in support of her goals, and Condoleezza Rice had gotten bogged down in the details of a handful of crises at the expense of other issues that also needed attention. “We had necessarily spent the past eight years very focused on threats, and focusing on threats would always have to be a part of our foreign policy, but it couldn’t be our foreign policy,” said one top official who was involved in the transition planning.

Second, the heavy hitters—Lew in particular—gave State a leg up in its relations with the White House and other agencies, which strengthened Hillary’s hand not only in the policy-making process but also in showing her new rank-and-file employees that her arrival signaled the return of influence to the State Department. Third, her operational model, in which information is highly compartmentalized and the lines of authority often run through informal channels rather than the official bureaucracy, requires competence among the true powers to function. She needed people close to her who could execute her will.

During the sessions in the Manhattan apartment, Hillary took notes on a long legal pad, which would become a trademark accessory during her four years at State. But even as she was starting to put together a staff in her mind, the details of Obama’s agreement to let her do the hiring at State were already a sticking point with the president-elect’s aides—and, at times, a convenient out for her. When she talked with Bob Hormats, a Goldman Sachs executive and longtime friend of the Clintons, Hillary told him that she couldn’t yet offer him the undersecretary job she planned to give him. “I have to work out each of these jobs with the White House,” she said, “because these are presidential appointees.”