THE PRAETORIAN GUARDTHE PRAETORIAN GUARD
I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn’t very difficult.
—Playwright Arthur Miller
A natural tension exists between all new secretaries of state and the career Foreign Service officers who run Foggy Bottom’s bureaus and its embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions around the world. That tension is normally smoothed over by incoming secretaries who show a decent respect for the opinion of the permanent bureaucracy and ask for help to find their way around.
Not so Hillary Clinton.
On her first day on the job in January 2009, Hillary came striding confidently down the State Department’s seventh-floor gallery, which was hung with oil portraits of her predecessors going back to the first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. She looked for all the world, as one staffer recalled, “like the capo di tutti i capi, the boss of bosses, trying to intimidate everyone in sight.”
Her heels clicked in unison with two made members of her political family—Huma Abedin, her deputy chief of staff, and Cheryl Mills, her chief of staff—who marched in lockstep behind Hillary and flanked her on the right and left.
Mills was Hillary’s Tom Hagen, the Godfather’s consigliere. She represented her boss in all matters.
A Stanford Law School graduate, Mills had earned a place in the Clinton inner circle when, as associate White House counsel, she delivered a passionate legal defense of Bill Clinton during his 1999 impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. She was a senior adviser to Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign, was a member of the board of the Clinton Foundation, and was a key player in some of the Clintons’ cover-ups.
As Hillary’s chief of staff at the State Department, according to the Wall Street Journal, Mills “told State Department records specialists she wanted to see all documents requested on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and later demanded that some be held back.”
“In another case,” the Journal also reported, “Ms. Mills’s staff negotiated with the records specialists over the release of documents about former President Bill Clinton’s speaking engagements—also holding some back.”
The seventh-floor staff soon learned to expect big trouble whenever Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin were summoned to Hillary’s inner sanctum. These two women—along with Hillary’s attack-dog press secretary Philippe Reines and her chief policy adviser Jake Sullivan—made up Hillary’s praetorian guard at the State Department. They understood that Hillary viewed her term as secretary of state as a stepping stone to the White House, and they did everything in their power to shelter Hillary from controversy.
“Important policy papers that had been worked on for months before Hillary took over and that ran the slightest bit of risk were ignored, gutted, or tossed out without explanation by her staff,” said a longtime Foreign Service officer who was interviewed for this book. “It soon became apparent that Hillary’s people were going to turn the place upside down and try to micromanage everything to save Hillary’s ass.”
In the past, most secretaries of state presided over large inclusive meetings where major issues were on the table and members of the senior staff were encouraged to express their opinions openly.
Not so Hillary Clinton.
Only Huma, Cheryl, Philippe, and Jake were in on everything. And Hillary outsourced politically risky assignments to special envoys. Veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke was in charge of winding down the war in Afghanistan by cobbling together a political settlement with the Taliban. And former U.S. senator George Mitchell was sent to the Middle East to knock heads and make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Both missions failed.
While Hillary was at Foggy Bottom, she usually worked from ten in the morning until ten at night. Like the policy wonk that she was, she often got lost in minutiae. She read every paper down to the last dreary detail and went over and over the most routine memos until she drove her staff to distraction.
“She clearly didn’t think the career Foreign Service officers took her seriously,” a diplomat said in an interview for this book. “And that went double for the White House. Hillary had a giant chip on her shoulder and was furious that she wasn’t treated fairly by the Obamas.”
Hillary’s biggest beef was with Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the president, and the woman who, after Michelle Obama, had President Obama’s ear. Obama would make important foreign policy decisions, and Jarrett—the real power behind the presidential throne—would implement them, without bothering to pass them by Hillary or give her a heads-up.
In a typical case, Hillary discovered that the White House was conducting secret back-channel discussions with the Castro brothers in Cuba in an effort to normalize relations with that Communist country. Hillary called Valerie Jarrett and complained that the State Department was once again being left in the dark.
Jarrett wouldn’t let Hillary get a word in edgewise. Finally, in frustration, Hillary held the telephone receiver at arm’s length so that everyone in the room could hear Jarrett talking. While the staff listened, Hillary silently mouthed Jarrett’s words, mimicking her agitated behavior.
On most nights after work, Hillary would ask an aide to bring her a Michelob Ultra, her favorite low-carb beer. Then she’d put her feet up on her desk, take a swig from the bottle, and start imitating the voices of world leaders.
She was a talented impersonator. Her specialty was the swaggering Vladimir Putin. And she did a wicked impersonation of Bill Clinton, down to his seductive croak.