The Secretary (3 page)

On the other side of the mezzanine, down a hallway with blue linoleum floors and a
picture of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, the occupants of Room 2206 were eagerly awaiting
their first conversation with the woman who was the new subject of their reportage.
Room 2206 housed the permanent State Department press corps: all of the major American
newspapers, radio stations, and television networks had desks here (and a seat on
the secretary of state’s Boeing 757). International news agencies like the Associated
Press (AP), Reuters, and Agence France-Presse (AFP) were also part of the pack, telegraphing
news from the American capital to the outside world. Thanks to its international reach,
the BBC was admitted into this exclusive travel circle in 1993. The room was a large
rectangular space overlooking a 1960s bronze sculpture—
Man and the Expanding Universe
—that presided over one of the department’s two inner courtyards. Cubicles lined the
walls and occupied the center of the room. A couple of us were lucky enough to have
windows. The rest typed away in semidarkness surrounded by gray walls and gray carpets.
With only a few minutes’ notice on a drab, cold Tuesday morning, a few days after
her grand entrance in the Building, the secretary arrived at our threshold, and we
scurried out of our holes to shake her hand.

We were all seasoned reporters—some of us had covered several secretaries of state—so
no one applauded, though most of us couldn’t help feeling slightly starstruck, grinning
widely and trying to think of something clever to say other than hello to make a lasting
impression. But we were also wary, unsure about how the political machine Hillary
had brought with her from the Senate and her campaign would coexist with the content
and detail-obsessed world of foreign policy. The national media had clobbered Hillary
during the primary race, ready to pounce on her at every corner. Americans loved her
or hated her with equal passion. She said she’d felt like a piñata. Now, she slowly
sized up her new press pack, about fifteen of us, probably wondering how we would
treat her, whether we’d continue the battering. We introduced ourselves, and she repeated
each of our names, shaking our hands, nodding mechanically with a semi-smile. She
was guarded and seemed cold behind her smile, a politician on duty. She looked around
at our grim quarters and said, with no trace of irony, “Your digs are better than
those of the press at the White House.” Ouch. We had been hoping for an upgrade.

Clinton sat down at the head of the large conference table on one end of the room
in between two rows of cubicles and faced a torrent of questions.

“Madame Secretary, what about North Korea?”

“Madame Secretary, what about Iran?”

“What about Middle East peace?”

Everything was a priority, but one task mattered most to Clinton and Obama.

“There’s a great exhalation of breath going on around the world as people express
their appreciation for the new direction that’s being set,” Clinton said. “We have
a lot of damage to repair.”

This had been a key message of Obama’s campaign but hearing it from Clinton’s mouth
at such proximity made it real, as if it could happen. But I also wondered how different
things could actually be under a new administration.

Obama’s campaign rhetoric made it sound like America had lost its way and would now
return to the right path. But it wasn’t as though the United States had been a virtuous
force for good or a perfect superpower for decades that had suddenly and inexplicably
taken a turn for the worse during the Bush administration. The reality was more complex.
The misgivings of America’s critics around the world had only been exacerbated by
the hubris that the Bush administration had displayed. My own ambivalence about America
had started well before the election of George W. Bush. I was a liberal, moderate
secular Lebanese woman with a Dutch mother. In a country where many looked to Iran
or Syria for guidance, I was more at home in the other half of the country, the pro-Western,
pro-American camp. Yet I had often felt let down by the United States, whether the
president was a Democrat or a Republican.

As a young woman living in Beirut, I couldn’t quite explain why and I didn’t know
where to look for the answers amid the uncertainty that seemed to permeate all aspects
of life in the Arab world. Now, I enjoyed living in the United States away from that
chaos, though I struggled to reconcile my positive impression of this country, its
people, and its diplomats, with the confusion and frustration I often felt in the
face of American foreign policy. After eight years of the Bush administration, with
its two wars and its “You’re with us or against us” approach to the world, I wondered
if the United States would ever understand the rest of the planet. I was ready to
give up for good. “Maybe America should just stay home” was a common refrain around
me.

But I was willing to give the United States another chance and find out what the new
president would bring to the world. And judging from the headlines around the world
on November 7, 2008, and the parties celebrating his victory from France to Kenya,
people everywhere expected Obama to deliver for them. Now Clinton was his envoy to
the world.

*   *   *

An assembly line of problems was making its way through the Building, bursting into
people’s offices at all hours of the day. Every issue was urgent, every crisis a priority,
like triage in a hospital emergency room. There was also pressure of another kind.
At the White House, when a new president moves in, he finds a mostly empty shell that
he then fills with his team—advisors from the campaign, die-hard loyalists who yearn
to serve, policy experts who share his vision. But at the State Department, when a
secretary of state leaves, he or she takes only a couple hundred political appointees,
leaving a steady cadre of twenty thousand career Foreign Service officers and civil
servants at their desks in Foggy Bottom and at State Department offices across town.
Inevitably, there is friction between the old and the new. With Clinton’s arrival,
it was of a wholly different order.

In the Building, most were willing to overlook Clinton’s faults, forget the acrimony
of the campaign, and embrace her as a rock star because she was now the emissary of
the president of change. But Clinton didn’t arrive alone. There was far less forgiveness
for Hillaryland, Hillary’s often chaotic, chronically late, and occasionally dysfunctional
political machine made up of fiercely loyal friends, campaign advisors, and Senate
staffers, people like Huma, Lissa, or Philippe Reines, Hillary’s gatekeeper and media
advisor. Their job was to serve her as Hillary the woman as much as the secretary
of state, to make sure she had everything she needed to do her job, to make sure she
looked good. But Hillary’s close aides were met with skepticism, suspicion, and occasional
disdain.
What do they really know about foreign policy
, people thought. “Hillaryland” originated from Hillary’s days in the White House,
the first time a First Lady occupied her own offices in the West Wing. The term described
Hillary’s staff, and the name stuck, though the size and lay of the land had changed
over the years. Once again Hillaryland would grow and morph into something new.

When he gave her the job, Obama had agreed that Clinton could choose the political
appointees who would fill the vacant seats in the Building to help her implement American
foreign policy. The president’s team bristled at such latitude: no other cabinet member
was being given such freedom in this administration. Why should a woman who had wrestled
him for the Democratic nomination be allowed to reward her friends with plummy jobs?
Presidential campaigns are divisive, all consuming, and emotional—and the fighting
for the Democratic nomination had been drawn out, malicious, and messy. Obama too
was surrounded by loyalists, and some were never able to lay the campaign mind-set
aside. These key policy positions, they felt, should go to Obama supporters, to those
who had sided with Obama and with change from the beginning, not to the woman who
had challenged him.

Although he had belittled her foreign policy experience during the campaign, Obama
knew that only Clinton came with the built-in international stature and credibility
that allowed her to instantly board a plane and stand in for him while he fixed the
economy at home. He had decided to ask her to do the job well before the election
of November 4. She had not expected the offer, but the call of public service was
strong, and she agreed to support his mission to restore America’s lost face in the
world. You don’t say no when the president asks you to serve, she kept telling her
friends. There were also more narrow political considerations. Obama didn’t want to
risk having her as a critic in the Senate, and she was uncertain how much more she
could rise as a senator. Obama and Clinton decided to trust each other. It would take
them some time to find their groove, but they saw themselves as teammates, even if
their respective squads did not share this vision.

Obama’s advisors formed a close bubble around him in the confines of the West Wing.
The newcomers in the Building were quickly swallowed up by a massive, unwieldy bureaucracy.
It was hard to maintain a coterie around Hillary when the political appointees she
brought with her weren’t in the office next door but housed somewhere in the Building’s
4,975 rooms, down one of the eighty-four hallways, on one of the eight floors, connected
by twelve elevators. Hillary and her team had always worked in small, agile offices
where staffers devoted more time to substance than process. She had never worked in
an office where she didn’t know everyone’s name, and now she was in charge of thousands.
Every paper her team wrote, every memo they issued, seemed to zing around the building
for hours, up and down the hallways and elevators to various floors, before it would
finally be approved. The Building was a place, but it was also a massive operation
that groaned under the weight of dated habits. Dozens of copies of the
New York Post
arrived every morning because this paper had been Colin Powell’s favorite, never
mind that his last day on the job had been in January 2005. Clinton started her workday
at 8:00 in the morning, but her special assistant, left over from the Rice era, had
been showing up every day at the predawn hour of 4:30. That’s how it had worked under
Rice, who showed up at work at 5:00 on most days. Working hours were promptly adjusted.

Hillary’s team had to figure out how best to serve Hillary in her new role, how to
find their way to the cafeteria on the first floor and make it back to their desks
again in the labyrinthine building, how to fit into the system or bend it to their
needs. And every day, they had to ask, “Who do you call?” Who did you call if you
wanted to translate an opinion piece by the secretary of state into dozens of languages
and have it published in 139 newspapers and on websites in sixty countries? Who did
you call if you wanted to plan media coverage of her next speech? Who did you call
if you needed a printer? Who did you call if you wanted to get anything done?

*   *   *

Jake Sullivan wasn’t even certain what needed to be done or where to start. A pale,
blue-eyed, young Minnesotan lawyer, he was a newcomer, arriving at the State Department
a few hours after Clinton’s raucous welcome. He rode the elevator to his new cubbyhole
office on the seventh floor and turned on his computer. Hillaryland was new territory
for him. He had met her only two years earlier, when he joined Clinton’s campaign
as a deputy policy advisor. It sounded like a grand title, but he was just one of
the many players in the massive campaign machine. After Clinton lost the Democratic
nomination, he jumped to the Obama team, helping with the presidential debate preparations
and later working on the transition team. Jake had been planning to head back to Minnesota
when Cheryl Mills, a key figure in the Clinton White House who was going to be Hillary’s
chief of staff, called to say Clinton wanted him with her at the State Department.
He didn’t know Hillary well, but he had liked her instantly when they met for his
job interview at her campaign headquarters on Seventeenth and K Streets in Washington
in March 2007. He found her impressive but down-to-earth, as keen to connect with
people as she was to discuss ideas—a real, three-dimensional person. “Holy cow,” Jake
thought to himself that day. “You make a joke, she laughs; she asks you a question,
she listens to the answer; she makes eye contact.” He did not expect an exalted figure
to behave this way.

Most of all, Jake had loved the way she talked about America on the campaign trail,
and about how and why she wanted to be president of the United States. If there was
one reason why he had ever wanted to serve in government, it was because Jake believed
in America’s ability to be a force for good. The pull of home was strong, Jake was
not a fan of Washington, but when Cheryl, and later Hillary, told him he would regret
not serving at a time of historic change in America, he agreed to be Clinton’s deputy
chief of staff. He didn’t really know what that would involve, precisely. It was a
new position in the building, and he didn’t know how the State Department worked either.
But on this first day, here he was, sitting across the hall from the secretary of
state’s office on Mahogany Row, his e-mail in-box already overflowing.

*   *   *

The phones were ringing incessantly. The world was calling. Countries around the world
had always obsessively and irrationally craved attention from America, but now it
seemed that everybody wanted to be touched by Obama and his secretary of state. European
countries competed for an audience with Clinton at the State Department. The British
and German foreign ministers both arrived for visits on the same day, February 2.
David Miliband got to go first. After the talks, he declared before the cameras that
the United Kingdom admired and respected Clinton as an ambassador of America and “everything
good it stood for.” She lunched with the Germans. Then came the French. They all pleaded
for her to visit the Old Continent on her first visit abroad. The Europeans believed
that a quick visit from Clinton would perfectly seal the reconciliation with America
that had only just started toward the end of the Bush administration after the deep
rift caused by the Iraq War. The reconciliation could only feel real with a proper
visit from the new Democratic administration. No promises were made and most visitors
left with a signed copy of Hillary’s autobiography,
Living History
. Clinton spoke to the Italian foreign minister, Franco Frattini, on the phone.