HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (51 page)

But in January, as the inevitable legacy stories began to appear in newspapers and foreign policy journals, Hillary faced criticism from a variety of outside experts who portrayed her as a strong advocate for the United States but one who fell short of piling up major accomplishments. “Even an admirer, such as myself, must acknowledge that
few big problems were solved on her watch; few victories achieved,” the centrist scholar Michael O’Hanlon wrote, concluding that her term was “more solid than spectacular.”

Indeed, some critics even took aim at her work ethic as more self-glorifying than effectual. In a column entitled “Hillary Clinton’s Ego Trips,” Michael Kinsley of Bloomberg wrote,
“Clinton looks
awful and has looked worse for years. I don’t mean to be ungallant. It’s just that she clearly has been working herself to death in her current job as well as in her past two, as senator and first lady. And for what? Despite all the admiration she deserves for her dedication and long hours, there is also a vanity of long hours and (in her current job) long miles of travel.”

Yet Obama left little question about how valuable he found Hillary’s efforts. In the fall, he told Ben Rhodes he wanted to do something special for her, to show how much he appreciated her work on his behalf. Rhodes, in turn, began discussing with Hillary’s aides various options for the president to give an interview to a major newsmagazine.

“The original idea was
Time
magazine, a wrap-up piece on her that he would very much cooperate with,” said one of Hillary’s aides. The conversation was put on pause when Hillary was sick around the holidays. But when she recovered and headed back to the State Department in the new year, the discussion picked back up.

And soon the idea shifted to one with even greater visibility. Reines, who prefers the imagery of television to print, thought the idea of having the two sit together for a magazine or newspaper interview seemed lame. “We were like, ‘If we’re gonna do it, do it right, let’s put them on TV together,’ ” said a senior State official. “The image of them together is what would be powerful.”

Rhodes and Reines brainstormed what show would be best. They ruled out the morning shows and the evening news because they would only get five to seven minutes of airtime. Likewise, they thought the Sunday shows wouldn’t be the best way to illustrate their relationship because the shows, while an obsession in Washington, were “silly,” the senior State official said. They settled on
60 Minutes
because it has “no peer in terms of ratings,” the aide added.

In a joint White House prep session before the interview with
60 Minutes
’s Steve Kroft, Rhodes broached the topic of Obama’s personal relationship with Hillary. “They’re going to ask a lot about what it took for you two to get past disliking each other,” he said.

“I never had that problem with Hillary,” Obama said.

“I think a lot of this was staff,” Hillary said.

“Yeah, I think that maybe it took some of the staff longer to get over the primary,” Obama said, looking directly toward Reines as he spoke. Reines, always quick with a one-liner, made everyone in the room laugh with a self-conscious joke.

Obama made one further effort to make sure it was clear there was no ill will toward either Hillary or her staff. When State Department colleagues held a going-away party for Cheryl Mills, Obama dispatched his chief of staff, Jack Lew, to deliver a note saying that his team of rivals had become an “unrivaled team.”

In the actual
60 Minutes
interview, Obama told Kroft why he had decided to give her the parting gift of a joint television appearance.

“Hillary’s been, you know,
one of the most important advisers that I’ve had on a whole range of issues,” Obama said. “Hillary’s capacity to travel around the world, to lay the groundwork for a new way of doing things, to establish a sense of engagement, that our foreign policy was not going to be defined solely by Iraq, that we were going to be vigilant about terrorism, but we were going to make sure that we deployed all elements of American power, diplomacy, our economic and cultural and social capital, in order to bring about the kinds of international solutions that we wanted to see.”

When asked whether Obama’s endorsement of Hillary’s work as secretary would carry over to a 2016 presidential run, they both dodged. “
I was literally inaugurated four days ago, and you’re talking about elections four years from now,” he said. And Hillary, less than a week from leaving office, wasn’t ready to give up the political cover provided by her job. “
I’m out of politics,” she said, “and I’m forbidden from even hearing these questions.”

The exaggeration spoke to an obvious fact: it wasn’t in her interests to talk about politics. Moreover, she needed a rest from policy, too. Even those closest to her knew that the rigors of the job had taken more of a toll on her than past posts had. She had redefined the job of first lady as an active participant in government, only to watch successors Laura Bush and Michelle Obama take on more traditional and less visible roles in their husbands’ administrations.
Michelle Obama’s war on childhood obesity wasn’t quite the same as taking a health system overhaul up to Capitol Hill.

“
I won’t lie to you. I’m tired,” Hillary told Kim Ghattas, a BBC reporter who wrote a book about her travels with Hillary. “My friends call and e-mail and say ‘Oh my gosh, I saw you on television. You look so tired!’ To which I reply, ‘Gee, thanks a lot!’ ”

Even Hillary knew it was time to back off a little bit. Her friends said she was leaving public life behind at a perfect time, when she could rebound from the concussion and take the time off that she needed so desperately, time she had never had in a twenty-year run as first lady, senator, and secretary of state.

On February 1, 2013, in a bookend ceremony in the atrium of the State Department’s main building, with all the pomp of her arrival four years earlier, Hillary addressed her troops before she exited the big glass front doors one last time. Most of Hillary’s closest advisers were leaving with her, but Marshall and Mills would remain at the State Department well into 2013, and many other Clinton loyalists remained marbled into the bureaucracy as Kerry struggled to fill political jobs with his own people.

“
I’m proud of the work we’ve done to elevate diplomacy and development, to serve the nation we all love,” she told the crowd, “to understand the challenges, the threats, and the opportunities that the United States faces, and to work with all our heart and all of our might to make sure that America is secure, that our interests are promoted, and our values are respected.”

At a farewell party at her house that week, aides reminisced with Hillary about the last four years. Marshall joked about Jon Favreau’s cardboard-cutout groping incident way back in 2008. “You’re still talking about that?” Hillary asked, her amusement evident. The old injuries were forgiven, if not entirely forgotten.

Despite the criticism that she had struck no major peace deal, the last Gallup poll before her departure, taken after Benghazi in November 2012, found that
63 percent of Americans approved of the job she was doing, three points below her peak as secretary but nine points higher than she had stood during the 2008 Democratic
National Convention. It was within the margin of error of her standing when she was sworn in as secretary, which was 65 percent, suggesting that, at the very least, she had served her four years without doing any damage to her prospects for the presidency in 2016. Already, perhaps inevitably, her interest in running was a hot topic in the national press, and clues about her viability were piling up.

In her final days at State, Hillary sent out 811 individualized, typed thank-you notes. Delivered in special envelopes with cardboard inserts—so they could be preserved as keepsakes—the notes were sent to cabinet officials; senior members of the military; national security staff; House and Senate leaders; and State Department employees who were political appointees, members of the foreign service, and members of the civil service. No doubt some of the recipients viewed the letters as possible presidential mementos.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for the presidency had already begun—without her—on November 6, 2012, the day Barack Obama won a second term.

That night Allida Black and Adam Parkhomenko, veterans of Hillary’s 2008 campaign, began e-mailing each other about plans to construct a virtual national campaign called Ready for Hillary. They knew Hillary had been on the sidelines of politics for four years and hadn’t been able to build her list of volunteers, activists, and donors as aggressively as an overtly political figure could, at a time when the rapid advancement of social media had revolutionized the art of developing a national constituency. They wanted to build Hillary a grassroots organization while she decided whether to run.

Black, a George Washington University professor with a background in social and political activism dating back to the 1970s, had traveled to fourteen states for Hillary’s 2008 campaign, attending more than five hundred house parties and knocking on more than five thousand doors by her count.

Part of her allegiance to Hillary stemmed from the fact that after Black’s mother, Anna, suffered a heart attack, Hillary had called Anna at the hospital and had been the last person to talk to her. “I’m really sorry that I haven’t met you,” Hillary said. “But I want you to know that you must be a wonderful woman because you raised a wonderful daughter.” Then Black’s mother died.

Black and Parkhomenko, who had worked under the deposed
Patti Solis Doyle on the 2008 campaign, both had strong ties to Hillaryland’s central nervous system. After Parkhomenko left the campaign following Doyle’s departure, he and Black worked on a petition drive called Vote Both, organized around the hope of a Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton “dream ticket.” And when Parkhomenko ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2009, his small
donor list was packed with people who had worked for Hillary or contributed large sums of money to her campaign. He reported receiving donations from Elizabeth Bagley and José Villarreal, the pair who raised money for the Shanghai Expo; Beth Dozoretz, a longtime big-dollar Clinton family donor who would later be appointed head of the State Department’s Arts in Embassies program; heavy-hitting Texas megadonor Alonzo Cantu; and a who’s who of Hillary aides starting with Capricia Marshall, Harold Ickes, Burns Strider, Minyon Moore, and Jonathan Mantz, the national finance director for Hillary’s 2008 campaign.

Black, who knew Maggie Williams, Melanne Verveer, and Marshall well, believed strongly that if Hillary didn’t like what she was doing, someone high up in Hillaryland would call and say “Allida, shut this down!” That call never came, and over time an increasing number of high-profile Hillary loyalists jumped on board to give the fledgling super PAC a boost in credibility and fund-raising prowess.

Hillary’s supporters weren’t the only ones champing at the bit to run the 2016 race. The day after the election, at
Politico
’s headquarters in Rosslyn, Virginia, editors slated a story about a possible Hillary Clinton–Jeb Bush 2016 matchup for the top of the website the following morning. The story, which began “
American politics may be headed back to the future,” posted online at 4:34 a.m. on November 8, less than thirty-six hours after Obama was declared the winner of the 2012 race, and it carried the bylines of the paper’s A-team of political reporters, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman.

Not too long after that, the RNC researcher who dealt with foreign policy issues was assigned to full-time Hillary 2016 duty. While the Republican Party kept tabs on other potential Democratic candidates—Vice President Joe Biden, New York governor Andrew
Cuomo, and Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, among others—Hillary was what RNC communications director Sean Spicer called the “eight-hundred-pound gorilla” in the Democratic field.

Even former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had angered mutual supporters by claiming neutrality while tacitly helping Obama in 2008, jumped on the bandwagon in mid-December, presaging a trend in which women politicians who opposed Hillary in 2008 treated the prospect of a 2016 run as a chance to get back into the good graces of Hillary and her loyalists. “
I hope she goes,” Pelosi told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “If she decided to run, and I think she would win, she would go into the White House as well prepared or better prepared than almost anybody who has served in that office in a very long time.”

The depth and breadth of the list of prominent leaders who thought Hillary would make for a capable candidate and commander in chief were impressive. David Petraeus, once mentioned as a possible GOP opponent to Obama, is among those who think she’s more than up to the task. “She’d be a tremendous president,” he said.

Everyone in the political world, it seemed, was ready for Hillary to start the 2016 campaign—everyone but Hillary.

After she left State, Hillary took a breather. Though she was the subject of countless headlines, she said very little publicly in her first six weeks as a private citizen. In mid-February she announced that the Harry Walker Agency would manage her lucrative turn on the lecture circuit—the “speeches” part of her “beaches and speeches” mantra. She persuaded Bill to take her out on a triple date with her friends Meryl Streep and Esprit founder Susie Tompkins Buell, and their husbands, to see the play
Ann
on Broadway. Hillary already had seen the show, a one-woman act about former Texas governor Ann Richards, and she desperately wanted Bill to see it with her the second time. The couples topped off the evening with a dinner at Cafe Luxembourg on the Upper West Side, the kind of outing she had rarely had time for in years past. She was spotted a handful of times in New York and in Washington, where she continued to live part-time and where she set up a small postgovernment operation
on Connecticut Avenue called Hillary Rodham Clinton Office, or HRCO in the e-mail convention her aides used.

Then in mid-March, prodded by the timing of the arguments before the Supreme Court on a pair of gay marriage cases, Hillary jumped back into the domestic policy debate, in an area in which public attitudes had shifted most dramatically during her time away from the political battlefield. While at State, she had pushed forward on gay rights in ways that she felt fit within the four corners of foreign policy, but she hadn’t addressed her own position on gay marriage in the United States. “She and Cheryl mapped out an agenda,” said one of Hillary’s aides, that boiled down to “We’re going to do, within our field, what we can do, we’re going to do things internally to help our own people, we’re going to put it on the diplomatic agenda, and that’s how we’re going to work on this issue.”