HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (7 page)

After opening with a little riff on her pride—as a mother, a New York senator, a Democrat, and an American—she hit the punch line, calling herself “a proud supporter of Barack Obama.” No one would have been surprised if the Obama team backstage had been prepared to count the minutes before she said his name. But it was out in a matter of seconds. There it was, for the world to hear. In the skybox they shared, Joe Biden and Michelle Obama leaped to their feet.

Then for the first time, Hillary dropped the gloves and threw roundhouses at McCain, the Senate traveling buddy with whom she had once done vodka shots in Estonia. “My friends,” she said, echoing—perhaps gently mocking—the Republican nominee’s favorite rhetorical tic, “it is time to take back the country we love.”

She continued, “I haven’t spent the past thirty-five years in the trenches advocating for children, campaigning for universal health care, helping parents balance work and family, and fighting for women’s rights at home and around the world … to see another Republican in the White House squander the promise of our country and the hopes of our people.… No way. No how. No McCain.”

But the heart and soul of the speech was a final section on finding the faith to persevere in the face of hardship. Extending the arc she had first drawn in her concession speech of a shared struggle for women and African Americans, Hillary used the heroism of a second black woman to drive home her point.

“On that path to freedom, Harriet Tubman had one piece of advice: ‘If you hear the dogs, keep going,’ ” Hillary said. “ ‘If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.’ … But remember, before we can keep going, we’ve got to get going by electing Barack Obama president.”

The crowd exploded in applause one more time as Hillary concluded.
Bill and Chelsea beamed. Biden whispered his approval to Michelle Obama. He had been an ally of Bill’s White House on Capitol Hill and later a good friend of Hillary’s in the Senate and on the campaign trail. At times during the early presidential debates, when he was still a candidate for the nomination, Biden had seemed a lot closer to Hillary than to Obama, and Hillary was clearly much more fond of Biden than Obama. “Even when they were opponents in the primary, anytime someone would mention his name around her, she would get this little smile,” one of her top aides said. “She really likes him. He really likes her.”

Having heard her emphatic endorsement, Biden raced deep into the arena to Hillary’s holding room. Finding her, he dropped to his knees and clasped his hands in a dramatic gesture of praise.

After the convention, Hillary turned most of her attention back to the upper chamber. Steeped in grandeur, tradition, and sloth, the Senate had never seemed like a perfect match for the former first lady, who had to learn to control her natural impatience.

“I don’t know if I can take this,” she had told an aide as they walked back to her office from a vote in the Capitol in her first year. “I don’t know if I could stay in this job and just go back and forth and vote and go to committee hearings.”

But over eight years, she had come to find rewarding aspects of her job. She’d fought hard to get this seat that was once held by Robert F. Kennedy, and she had used it as a power base far beyond the walls of the Senate. And while she had first won her seat in the shadow of the end of the Clinton presidency, she had soon begun to prove that she was a political force in her own right as a senator. She liked completing tasks, and the Senate afforded her a platform to make laws, have a voice in the national debate, and even attack issues from outside the legislative process. In a system designed, with checks and balances, to effect change slowly, Hillary constantly looked for ways to use both her official power as an officeholder and her celebrity to jump-start action on policy issues. Many of the
projects she took pride in involved what she called the “power to convene”—her unique ability to bring together stakeholders from government, the private sector, and academia to solve problems. Few said no to a meeting request from Hillary Clinton.

Just as she would later creatively use her power to launch public-private initiatives at the State Department, Hillary established herself as a resourceful player in the Senate. All members of Congress introduce bills, vote, and help constituents navigate the federal bureaucracy when they have trouble getting veterans benefits and Social Security checks. But Hillary saw the job as a platform for connecting institutions in different parts of society to achieve goals. She persuaded Cornell University to link upstate New York farmers with markets in the city that were buying produce from New Jersey, and she played a helpful role in bringing about a settlement between the New York Power Authority and the Buffalo area to redevelop the city’s waterfront.

Back in the Senate full-time after Labor Day, Hillary was excited about the prospect of working in a Democratic-led Congress with a Democratic president, which seemed to augur well for a new push to reform the nation’s health care system. From the outside, she looked weakened by the primary loss. But inside the Senate, her allies were adamant that majority leader Harry Reid find a way to elevate her. That was particularly true among the women, and not just the group of them who endorsed her. A strong feeling had taken root that Hillary should be embraced, a sentiment of which Hillary was almost certainly aware.

The smallest senator in stature, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, may have been the biggest Hillary booster behind the scenes. Mikulski, who had served twenty-two years in the Senate, and who had endorsed Hillary in the primary, prodded party leaders to find an enhanced role for her. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana was also among those who led the charge. The drawling daughter of former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu had regrets about the primary campaign. She counted herself among Bill Clinton’s biggest supporters and among Hillary’s greatest admirers. But when Obama came
calling, armed with the fact that Landrieu was running for reelection and would need a big black turnout in New Orleans and across the state, she had privately committed to vote for him at the convention. Now Landrieu wanted to make things right. At one point, she pleaded with Reid to take care of Hillary. Reid responded by half-jokingly telling the oft-troublesome Landrieu that Clinton could have her spot as chairman of the Small Business Committee.

Reid ultimately blocked Hillary at every turn. He and Schumer weren’t going to irritate other Democratic colleagues by giving Hillary a leg up. There was an inherent risk in giving her a more prominent role in the Senate, particularly on health care: she’d have a better spot from which to challenge Obama. If any Democrat was going to be the face of health care reform in the Senate, it was going to be the dying Ted Kennedy, whose endorsement of Obama was one of the most pivotal moments of the primary and one of the most stinging rebukes of Clinton. If it wasn’t Kennedy, it would be his best friend in the Senate, Chris Dodd, the red-cheeked, white-haired son of a senator who had been Kennedy’s carousing buddy in their salad days on Capitol Hill. Clinton asked Kennedy to give her control of a health care subcommittee, but he turned her down cold. Instead, he offered her a runner-up trophy as chair of a special task force on insurance industry issues—the very industry that had strangled her health reform effort in the White House.

Yet, while Reid ran the Senate, Hillary’s advocates, including some surprising sources of goodwill, turned to Obama, the nation’s new top Democrat, for help. Even Claire McCaskill privately made the case to Obama’s aides that he should help find a position of prominence for Hillary, whether in the Senate or in his administration. “Her message was that Hillary and Hillary’s camp needs to continue to be engaged by the Obama folks,” said a source familiar with the discussion. “She had to be included. She needed some seat at the table.”

The Clintons were out for a Sunday stroll in a wooded preserve in the scenic Hudson Valley, not far from their Dutch Colonial home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua, New York, when Bill’s phone rang. It was November 9, five days after the election, and the president-elect was calling for the last Democratic president. But Bill wasn’t getting good reception on his cell phone, and he asked if he could call back when he got home. When they finally had a sound connection, from the Clinton house, Obama explained that he was busy filling in the roster for his new administration, a project that former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta had been running behind the scenes for months, and he wanted Bill’s thoughts on a couple of personnel moves. Before they hung up, Obama asked Bill to tell Hillary that he would soon want to speak to her as well.

A small set of Obama’s top advisers knew the reason: she was his pick for secretary of state. Political insiders had started hearing whispers about Hillary at State almost immediately after the election. The day after Obama’s victory, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News asked Philippe Reines, Hillary’s senior adviser and spokesman, whether Hillary would land at State. He gave the same answer he would have delivered had he been asked whether Hillary would sign on as dog catcher: anything’s possible.

Aggressive, with intense brown eyes, the Upper West Side native had earned his place in Clinton’s inner circle with fierce loyalty and a sharp instinct for how to build and protect his boss’s narrative,
often in insult-laden e-mail exchanges with reporters. Reines relished petty put-downs like using the wrong first name for a junior congressman to indicate the lawmaker wasn’t famous enough to merit being remembered, and he once described himself as a hockey goalie defending the Hillary net against the flying pucks of the press. Now he, too, wanted to know if the roller-coaster ride of the 2008 election was going to end at a new height—at the State Department.

On November 7, in an e-mail chain with several of Hillary’s top advisers, including Maggie Williams, Cheryl Mills, and Capricia Marshall, Reines asked his boss whether she would end up at State.

He’s going to offer you the job, Reines wrote.

“Ain’t gonna happen for a million reasons,” Hillary replied to the group. She thought it was ridiculous, even absurd. She told him she couldn’t fathom where the rumor was coming from. But it couldn’t be true, she wrote.

The call from Obama that Sunday night added to the intrigue for Hillary and her staff.

Longtime Obama scheduler Alyssa Mastromonaco then reached out to Huma Abedin, who handled Hillary’s most sensitive personal and political tasks, and they plotted a trip for Hillary to Obama’s transition headquarters in Chicago. Hillary was getting a lot of attention right after the election for someone who didn’t think she was going to be asked to join the administration, but she still wasn’t nearly as convinced as some of her aides that a job offer was forthcoming.

Inside Hillary’s Senate office on the fourth floor of the august Russell Building, a century-old Beaux Arts mix of marble slabs and Doric columns where the squeaking shoes of generals and admirals can be heard as they come to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee, aides were still wrestling with the question of how Hillary could continue to make her mark from Capitol Hill. After a summer of discontent, there was suddenly a buzz of excitement over the surprising possibility that Hillaryland might find a new home in the Obama administration.

On the other side, there had been deep misgivings among some of Obama’s high-profile aides, including David Axelrod and Jim
Messina, who had discussed the choice with the president-elect
in late October, shortly before the election. As early as the summer of 2008, Obama had been pondering what a Hillary-run State Department would mean for his presidency.

Axelrod had been dumbstruck when Obama first said he wanted Hillary for the job. “How can this work?” Axelrod asked. “We just had this very vigorous campaign.”

“She was my friend before she was my opponent,” Obama replied. “She’s smart, she’s tough, she has a status in the world. I’m sure she’ll be a loyal member of the team. I have no concerns about it.”

While she wouldn’t be answering the infamous three a.m. calls she had discussed during her campaign, she would have a major role in dealing with them if she landed in the job. During their grueling primary fight, Obama had mocked her for overstating her foreign policy portfolio. Worldliness wasn’t just about “what world leader I went and talked to in the ambassador’s house,
who I had tea with,” he’d said. But as the primary battle wore on, Obama aides said, he became impressed with her persistence, her desire, as one put it, to “bust through a brick wall.” And in the months after he defeated her, he admired her fierce loyalty to the cause in the general election.

Valerie Jarrett, the president-elect’s closest adviser and friend, ultimately embraced the idea. The campaign had been painful for her because she had a relationship with the Clintons that went back many years and was developed through her cousin, Ann Jordan, the wife of Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan. Jarrett had always admired and respected both Clintons and was relieved by the prospect of mending fences.

Obama wanted Hillary on his team, and in making the case to his own aides, he knocked down the argument he had made on the trail that her experience was limited to tea parties. As important, having Hillary on the inside would let Obama keep control over perhaps the nation’s most potent political force other than himself.

In a series of meetings in Chicago beginning two days after the election, Obama had gathered his brain trust, including Joe Biden, Podesta, Messina, and Rahm Emanuel, to pick the top officials in his
Cabinet. Because the economy was in free fall, the first decision was to ask Tim Geithner to take the reins at the Treasury Department. Secretary of state was second on the agenda. By that point, Obama had made clear to his campaign team why he wanted Hillary. Biden spoke up in favor of that decision, according to Ted Kaufman, his longtime Senate chief of staff, who was also in the room.