Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (49 page)

For their first and last campaign appearance together, Clinton and Obama took the stage with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Even more effusive than in his convention speech, Clinton held back nothing. Speaking for just under fifteen minutes, he made a cogent case for Obama, reviewing his philosophy, his platform, his intellectual strength, and his determination to create change.

“He’s got the right policies—I’ve read them all. And I’ve read his opponent’s,” he told the diverse crowd. “People used to make fun of me for being a policy wonk, but after the last eight years, it really matters what people advocate.”

Pointing to Obama’s calm handling of the financial crisis, he said, “We know we need a president who wants to understand and who
can
understand. . . . I think it’s clear the next president of the United States should be, and with your help will be, Barack Obama!”

The man who had been his bitter antagonist now embraced him warmly. Then Obama took the microphone, gestured toward Clinton, and said loudly: “In case all of you forgot, this is what it’s like to have a great president.” As he listened to those words, Clinton was touched, his face etched with emotion.

On November 4, Barack Obama was elected the forty-fourth president of the United States, carrying twenty-eight states plus the District of Columbia, with 365 electoral votes, and almost 53 percent of the popular vote. As Clinton predicted, he had won handily.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

For all the pundits and politicians across the ideological landscape who had believed that Barack Obama would at last extirpate Bill and Hillary Clinton from American public life, the weeks following his election victory became repetitive episodes in cognitive dissonance. With astonishment and chagrin, they watched the president-elect name friends, allies, and former employees of his former rivals to run his transition—and then his government.

To oversee the wrenching shift from the Bush administration, Obama had chosen John Podesta, a veteran of both Clinton administrations, including a stint as White House chief of staff. To serve as his own new chief of staff, Obama chose Rahm Emanuel, who had also worked as a senior political adviser to Clinton. And he had followed those startling selections with a lengthy roster of Clintonites slated for top positions in the West Wing and cabinet agencies.

But anyone distressed by hearing so many of those familiar names—at the very dawn of what was supposed to be a merciless cleansing—might have simply passed out upon hearing that Obama would name Hillary herself as secretary of state. By the time that rumor appeared as an item inside the
Washington Post
on November 14, only ten days after the election, the process leading to her appointment was well under way.

It began when Bill Clinton’s cell phone rang on the morning of November 9, as he and Hillary were taking a Sunday hike around the Mianus River Gorge, a nature preserve about ten miles from Chappaqua. The voice on the phone was Obama, who greeted him warmly and said he needed to talk with Clinton “and Hillary.” Neither of the Clintons had spoken with him since election night, when she had called to offer congratulations, and he had thanked them both for the hundreds of campaign events, calls, and appearances they had logged on his behalf.

With weak cell reception on the trail, Clinton suggested resuming the conversation when they got home. He told Hillary that the president-elect probably wanted to discuss the transition, and perhaps ask their opinions about a few people. When they connected again later in the day, Clinton turned out to be right—Obama wanted to talk over the names of former Clinton administration figures he was considering for positions involving the economy, his top priority. At the end of their conversation, he mentioned that he looked forward to seeing Hillary “sometime soon.”

If that sounded mysterious, there were already clues, as Hillary learned when she called her adviser and press secretary, Philippe Reines. He told her that George Stephanopoulos—another former Clinton hand—had said that same morning on ABC News’
This Week
that her name was being mentioned for secretary of state. Still, she didn’t take the idea very seriously, or so she later wrote in her memoir
Hard Choices
.

A few days later, when she and aide Huma Abedin traveled to Chicago for a secret meeting with Obama, however, she learned that the rumor was accurate. Only minutes after they sat down in the transition office, he asked her to consider becoming secretary of state because, as he put it, she was “the only person” who could handle the job (although his short list also included John Kerry and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson). He needed someone who could run the nation’s foreign affairs immediately and competently, Obama explained, while he revived the ruined economy.

Hillary’s first impulse was to turn him down, and she did, saying she wanted to return to the Senate. She would do her utmost to support him there. But he prevailed on her to agree to consider the offer, insisting he needed her in the cabinet. She agreed to think it over and went home.

Sometime after she returned to New York, amid clamorous speculation in the press, a call came from Rahm Emanuel saying she had seventy-two hours to respond: yes or no. With a touch of sarcasm, Doug Band reminded Emanuel of a recent interview in which he had confessed to taking two weeks to decide whether he would join Obama’s White House staff.

During the week that followed, Hillary leaned heavily on her hus
band and his staff, while reaching out to many friends and several of her Senate colleagues. She was truly and deeply conflicted. Bill Clinton’s attitude was negative but equivocal—he would support whatever decision she made. Band and Mills both were outspokenly opposed to her accepting the nomination. Apart from whether she was inclined to shoulder the exhausting responsibilities of leading the State Department, there loomed the issue of how such a decision would affect her husband’s work.

As soon as news of her possible appointment leaked, journalists and commentators began to revive dormant questions about the sources of Clinton’s income, the donors to the foundation and the library, the sponsors of his speeches, and his relationship with Burkle, among others. How Bill Clinton earned, raised, and spent money had been media obsessions for a long time.

In this instance the questions were appropriate, even if many of the underlying assumptions were wrong. Unquestionably, conflicts could arise between the State Department and the private interests of the secretary’s spouse—and the same might be true for anyone in the job. The new administration’s procedures had to ensure probity in dealing with such issues, whether real or merely apparent. Having vowed to restore integrity to the government, and to rebuild American relationships around the world, Obama had to demand transparency from every appointee, especially Clinton.

So while the president-elect and a few of his aides attempted to persuade Hillary to join him, teams of lawyers discussed what the new administration would require from Bill Clinton and the foundation. Everything would have to come together, including Hillary’s final decision, by December 2.

Leading the Clinton side in the negotiations was Cheryl Mills, the longtime trusted aide best known for her impassioned defense during the Senate impeachment trial, along with Band, Lindsey, and former communications aide Jim Kennedy. On the Obama side were Podesta, former Clinton White House deputy Todd Stern, and Thomas Perrelli, a transition team attorney who had worked in the Clinton Justice Department.

It was a sign of how much Obama trusted Podesta—and desired Hillary’s assent—that he put someone so close to her in charge of the
process. Podesta had worked with Mills and the rest of the Clinton team for years; he had even taught Band law at Georgetown University when the young White House aide was studying for his degree at night.

Yet the initial positions set forth by Obama’s side seemed rigid: Bill Clinton must “step down” from his foundation and stop hosting CGI every year; the White House would vet and possibly veto every paid speech and business relationship. As more than one internal Clinton memo noted, the impulse to “walk away” in response to such imposing demands was strong.

Bill Clinton wasn’t about to leave the foundation, but neither he nor Hillary felt any grave concern about the financial disclosures that might be imposed on them. They had revealed the sponsors of his paid speeches and his business partnerships every year on Hillary’s Senate disclosure forms. They had disclosed their joint income tax returns for many years, too, dating back to his tenure as attorney general in Arkansas, and released still more during the 2008 campaign.

Nor would Clinton object to revealing the names of future donors to the foundation—a requirement that made perfect sense to him, at least going forward. CHAI in particular depended heavily on subsidies from foreign governments—almost all close U.S. allies such as Canada, Norway, and the United Kingdom—a situation that could raise questions for the secretary of state. The foundation had long publicized the major Clinton Global Initiative sponsors. Much more vexing was Obama’s insistence that they reveal every
past
donor to the foundation and the library, people whose gifts had been made with a guarantee of privacy.

No such disclosures had ever been demanded from any of Clinton’s predecessors, although every recent president had raised money from foreign sources for the construction of their presidential libraries and other post-presidential endeavors. When George W. Bush ran for president, nobody had insisted that his father reveal the millions of dollars in donations from foreign potentates that he had collected to build the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas. Clinton had come to expect such disparate application of the rules, however.

On November 18, while Joe Biden, Senate majority leader Harry Reid, and New York’s senior senator Chuck Schumer sought to persuade Hillary to take the job, her team prepared a memo outlining “issues and proposals” regarding her possible nomination. Its theme was
how to preserve Bill Clinton’s “robust set of activities” without compromising her.

“There has, at various times, been considerable pressure to release the list of donors to the Clinton Foundation,” the memo acknowledged. “The sensitivity about doing so is that donors understood that their donations were private.” The memo sought to preserve that confidentiality by letting the Obama transition team “vet” any donors who declined to permit public release of their identities, with all donors disclosed in the future.

It also proposed to set up the Clinton Global Initiative as “an entity separate from the Foundation,” with Clinton himself as emeritus chairman but continuing as “the principal host and master of ceremonies” for the annual conference. He would not solicit financial support for CGI, nor would CGI accept contributions from foreign governments. The first CGI conference outside the United States, scheduled to open in Hong Kong on December 2, would also be the last, at least for the duration of Hillary’s government service.

As for CHAI, the Clinton team argued that to cut off financing from foreign governments would endanger millions of impoverished people who relied on the initiative for treatment. They proposed “no change with regard to existing donor countries,” unless those donors increased their contributions substantially. In that case, and with new donor countries, the proposed donations would be reviewed by the State Department’s ethics officers and perhaps by White House counsel as well. The Clinton Climate Initiative, whose only foreign nation donor was Australia, would follow the same protocol.

The memo foresaw no problem with Clinton continuing to write and publish books. Noting that all of his speeches were “a matter of public record,” and that he delivered no paid speeches to foreign governments, the memo suggested a review procedure for his speeches to other overseas entities: His office would submit a list of planned speeches to the State Department ethics officer for review, with further possible review by the White House counsel. They would articulate any concerns, “with the expectation that appropriate action would be taken.” (The ethics office only ever flagged one speech, in Shanghai, which Clinton canceled.)

Finally, the memo noted that Clinton had exited his consultancy
with Vin Gupta’s infoUSA firm in October 2007—and that he had begun the process of disentangling himself from Ron Burkle’s ventures around the same time. “Going forward, President Clinton intends to continue to provide consulting advice, but not to enter into any further partnerships.” Any proposed consultancy, including a “green construction venture” he was then discussing with Steve Bing, would be submitted for the same kind of review and potential action as his speeches.

After several loud, heated discussions, the negotiators found ways to accommodate Obama’s concerns without eviscerating the foundation. The Clintons had no need to conceal anything and wouldn’t let disclosure become the obstacle to her appointment. Band and Lindsey began to reach out to the foundation donors, mostly via letters, letting them know that their donations might be disclosed publicly. (Not one of the more than 200,000 individuals and entities that had donated to the foundation ever objected.)

The negotiators also reached agreement about two issues Hillary had raised. She wanted to be certain of regular access to the president, and she needed reassurance that his apparatus would help to retire her campaign debt.

By November 18, however, those points of agreement appeared moot, with Hillary leaning strongly toward returning to the Senate. That afternoon, Mills circulated a letter to Podesta that she had drafted, laying out the reasons why Hillary had decided to reject the president’s offer. “We need the best rationale that we can share with others,” she explained. “We also will need talking points.”

The draft letter began, “I am glad we were successful in developing a plan to ensure that many of the activities of the Clinton Foundation can continue and not create conflicts, or the appearance of conflicts, if Senator Clinton were to serve as Secretary of State.” But those protocols, said the letter, would likely hinder the growth of the foundation’s HIV/AIDS programs—“programs that have saved millions of lives.” Although “honored to consider service in his Cabinet,” she had “concluded that it was best . . . to continue her lifetime commitment to public service as the Senator from New York.”