HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (17 page)

The truth is Gates and Clinton had barely met before Obama introduced them as part of his national security team in early December 2008. More than fifteen years earlier, they had shaken hands in CIA director Jim Woolsey’s office at a memorial service for officers killed in an attack on CIA headquarters in suburban Langley, Virginia. They didn’t have a conversation then, and Gates didn’t see Hillary face-to-face again until the Chicago press conference.

During the transition, they found that their policy instincts were similar. Gates, a moderate Republican, and Hillary, a hawkish Democrat, both saw the value of using all of the tools in America’s foreign policy kit. Sometimes that meant a missive and sometimes it meant a missile. In a speech at Kansas State University in November 2007, Gates had embraced the smart-power approach favored by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party’s national security apparatus.

There was also a strategic imperative to their alliance. Hillary needed the defense secretary to ensure State’s voice was heard on matters of war, diplomacy, and development and to reinforce her budget and policy requests. The purpose of the State Department is to conduct diplomacy and execute the president’s foreign policy. Ideally, America’s international footprint looks more like the sole of a wingtip than a combat boot. But during the Bush administration, the ever-growing Pentagon had taken over for State in global hot spots, most notably Iraq and Afghanistan. Both Gates and Hillary believed that the Pentagon was playing too much of a role in providing civilian aid, which both usurped the diplomatic role in foreign policy and distracted the military from its core defense mission.

When he had to make a case to a roomful of Democrats, the Republican Gates benefited from having Hillary on his side. “She was an influential voice in the administration,” one Gates insider said of why Hillary was valuable to the Pentagon. “She had enormous political capital.” Moreover, they liked each other, and they were outsiders at Obama’s national security meetings, which were full of newcomers who had helped the president win election by promising to rock the status quo. In order to survive and thrive, they needed to function as a bloc as often as possible. “I think there was some strategy to it. When you have a secretary of defense and a secretary of state going into the interagency process united or going into the Oval Office together on an issue, they go in a much stronger position,” said a high-ranking Pentagon source. “They often compared notes or coordinated in advance of some of those meetings to find common ground to allow them to influence or drive the direction of policy on a given issue.”

Once or twice a month, Gates and Hillary ate lunch together, alternating between her office at State and his at the Pentagon. They also had a standing weekly lunch with the national security adviser in the West Wing. Most important, they kept an informal channel open to compare notes. “It was not uncommon for them to pick up the phone or have a pull-aside before or after a meeting they were both attending. They checked in with each other,” the Pentagon source said. “In the cases where they disagreed, that was also useful to know early or to alert them where this was an area of disagreement.” Major disagreements would come later, when Obama wanted to strike Osama bin Laden and when he weighed whether to intervene in Libya’s civil war. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, Hillary and Gates were on the same side in the Situation Room. “She and Gates were a pretty powerful tandem,” said a former senior government official.

In October 2009
the unlikely pair sought to highlight their odd-couple status, appearing onstage together as part of a conversation series and rare joint interview at George Washington University. During the session with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and GWU’s Frank Sesno, both cabinet secretaries spoke about their mutual admiration and drew contrasts between their relationship and that of their predecessors.

It was clear that they were not just being polite and politically correct. They had forged a kinship and a bond so tight that when they wrapped the hour-long interview that night, they went and grabbed dinner at the Blue Duck Tavern, a pricey Washington restaurant near Georgetown. “It was a good example of how they enjoyed each other’s company,” said one mutual acquaintance. “They wanted to go to dinner.”

When he returned to the Pentagon the next day, Gates told aides he’d had “fun”—a term he didn’t use a lot—at the CNN forum. That might have been in part because he came off a bit more relaxed and witty than his celebrity counterpart. But sources in both camps say their genuine affinity for each other strengthened a potent strategic alliance and sent a message to rank-and-file State and Defense
employees that their bosses expected them to play well together. “He was always cognizant of how unusual it was that they got along so well,” a senior Defense official said.

Clinton won the respect of Gates and the small circle of Bush holdovers at the Pentagon. Some of Obama’s advisers—awed by her presence but still feeling the reverberations of the campaign—went through the same kind of progression, developing first respect and then warm feelings for Hillary. Shortly after she broke her arm in the summer of 2009, Tommy Vietor, one of Obama’s fiery and loyal young press aides during the presidential campaign, ran into Hillary in a hallway at the White House. Vietor, who had recently dislocated his shoulder, noticed that Hillary’s sling had a State Department seal on it.

“Oh, you’re in a sling, too,” said Hillary, who was accompanied by the ever-present Huma. “What did you do?”

“I hurt it playing basketball,” replied Vietor, who was still scared of Hillary after having attacked her foreign policy chops on the record during the campaign. “Your sling is a lot cooler than mine.”

Two days later, sitting inside the press office at the White House, Vietor received a white box from the State Department. Inside he found a sling with the logo. The gesture melted any lingering animus from the campaign days.

But because their suspicion of Hillary ran much deeper, some others in Obama’s world, including Plouffe and Gibbs, never really warmed to her. With them, she didn’t help her cause by lining up with Gates or backing Richard Holbrooke, whom the president could hardly stand.

While Hillary cleverly built power by working with, and sometimes around, the other luminaries in Washington, her unstinting loyalty to Holbrooke came at a price to her standing within the administration. It was a classic example of her belief in her people, and their wisdom, taking precedence over other concerns, for better or for worse.

Holbrooke was an innovator, a persistent operator, and a constant source of frustration for a White House that prized a kind of control that it couldn’t exert over him. For his part, Holbrooke was
obsessed with gaining access to Obama and his inner circle, and complained loudly and often about the president’s national security team trying to freeze him out. He tried everything to get in, including hanging out at the Hay-Adams hotel because he knew White House aides were denizens of the bar there.

In particular, he sought out David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser. In the book
This Town
, author Mark Leibovich tells the story of Holbrooke standing next to a young Axelrod aide at a White House urinal to try to book an appointment.

“He wanted access and he wanted to talk through what his concerns were,” said one West Wing aide. “He was vocally frustrated about his access to Obama. He was trying to ingratiate himself within the White House and he knew David was part of that.”

Axelrod was a route around the people Holbrooke typically dealt with at the White House, and he worked Axelrod hard.

“He was very big about massaging people’s egos,” the aide said.

While Axelrod could certainly provide access to Obama, there was another reason to work the veteran operative: Holbrooke believed that the major impediment to his plan to use a surge of forces in Afghanistan to force the Taliban to the negotiating table was the fear of Obama’s political team that a quagmire could damage the president’s hopes of winning re-election in 2012. If he could demonstrate to Axelrod that a peace deal was better than a drawdown of U.S. forces without one, perhaps he could turn the president’s thinking.

The biggest fight within Obama’s National Security Council in the first term erupted over the Afghanistan “surge,” a process that took until December 2009 to resolve. The president made an initial commitment of 21,000 more troops early in the year, a force that could hold back Taliban fighters until a bigger decision about whether to send as many as 40,000 more could be made later in the year. The debate over the number of troops and overall American strategy was so clamorous and acrimonious that Bob Woodward was able to write an entire book on the deliberations, called
Obama’s Wars
.

The Gates-Clinton alliance was a threat to the power wielded by
Obama’s White House aides in the early years of the administration, particularly as a narrative began to take hold that they, along with Central Command chief David Petraeus and other military leaders, were pushing the president into a surge in Afghanistan that he didn’t want to order. It’s hard for presidential aides to steamroll the top two cabinet secretaries if they are in lockstep. If they are divided, however, each can be pushed around. In this case, Hillary left no daylight between herself and Gates. “The core objective was really to ensure that Afghanistan did not once again become a sanctuary for Al Qaeda or other transnational extremists as it was when the 9/11 attacks were planned there and the initial training was conducted there,” said a former senior government official. Hillary “recognized that the only way to achieve that objective was to enable Afghans to secure themselves and govern themselves adequately,
adequately
being a key phrase there. And the only way to do that was through a comprehensive civil-military campaign that halted the momentum that the Taliban had achieved.”

Fans of the twin titans of the Obama cabinet say they prevented the new team from steering American foreign policy off course. Obama was just coming off an election in which he had promised to end two wars and open direct diplomacy with Iran and Cuba, and the fear in the centrist Washington foreign policy establishment was that he might immediately pursue those objectives to the detriment of American interests.

Certainly the president’s team sought to shrink America’s footprint in the region. Vice President Joe Biden wanted to ramp down in Afghanistan rather than deepening U.S. commitment, as did Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Axelrod and the set of advisers who had worked on the Obama campaign. They distrusted the phalanx formed by the Pentagon’s leaders and Hillary, though it was military leaders, not Hillary, whom they blamed for leaking frequently, making unhelpful public statements, and presenting unreasonable alternative options for the president in an effort to box him in on the surge. Still, Hillary’s alliance with the pro-surge Pentagon camp did not help her standing with some of Obama’s old campaign hands.

In an October 2009 Situation Room meeting on Afghanistan, Hillary spoke to the president of “
the dilemma you face,” a construction that caught the attention of Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, a member of Obama’s brain trust since his Senate days. Gibbs jotted down her use of
you
—rather than
we
—in his notebook. Holbrooke later described it as a “Freudian giveaway” of Clinton’s feeling of detachment, according to Woodward. Holbrooke, who was distant from the president and his advisers, had plenty of reason to portray Hillary as detached from the process. One of Hillary’s aides, who conceded that Clinton’s wording could have been better, described Gibbs’s reaction as “the ultimate in parsing.”

In the end, Hillary and the others supported Obama’s decision to go with a hybrid plan that gave the Pentagon 33,000 more troops but also announced a timeline for drawing down after a year and a half. Once the strategy was announced at West Point in early December, Afghanistan policy moved off the front burner. That eased the relationship between Hillary and the White House aides.

To some officials with a foot in each camp, the idea that a cabal of top leaders at the Pentagon and the State Department had ever jammed the new president was laughable. “There was a very open, free-flowing, vigorous debate,” said Jim Steinberg. “This is a president who never does anything he doesn’t want to do.” The review of American strategy gave Hillary an opening to enhance State by turning war into peace. Hillary, who had her own feel for the electorate as well as a desire to find a solution to the vexing Afghanistan problem, was willing to entertain the idea that the surge could put enough pressure on the Taliban to bring them to the table for a negotiated end to the war, according to sources who briefed her.

“The difference between her and the president on Afghanistan is she was more willing to complement a surge with diplomacy,” said a senior member of Holbrooke’s team. “I don’t think the president was ever serious about diplomatic options in Afghanistan.”

Hillary gave wide latitude to Holbrooke to see if he could find the sweet spot for a deal, but she was also clear-eyed about the obstacles. “She was very sober about the prospects for success, both
if the Taliban would actually cut a deal or if the regional actors who all have their own interests would all line up behind a coherent diplomatic outcome,” said one of her chief advisers. “Despite that sobriety, she was very intent on getting a serious muscular diplomatic process launched and executed, and she felt like as time passed, we were losing leverage and opportunity, the maximum opportunity, to make it successful.”

In the mold of other savvy Washington operators, Hillary can be very good at keeping her motives to herself. That’s why there is disagreement to this day about how much she truly believed that it was possible for Holbrooke, or anyone else, to put together a peace deal involving the United States, the Taliban, the Karzai government in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis, and other stakeholders in the region. But she kept bailing Holbrooke out every time he found himself in a deeper hole at the White House.