Even a paranoid has some real enemies.
—Henry Kissinger
Despite the best efforts of her praetorian guard, Hillary never felt secure in her role as secretary of state. She suspected that everything she said was leaked to the media. She was convinced that Valerie Jarrett had installed moles in the State Department and that these spies were ratting her out to members of the White House staff, who were still nursing a grudge against Hillary from the bitterly fought days of the 2008 Democratic primary campaign.
Her paranoia often got the better of her. She would order high-ranking deputies and undersecretaries to leave the room in the middle of meetings because she suspected them of being spies.
She was tense and irritable most of the time, and there were frequent eruptions of her famous temper, just as there had been when she was a U.S. senator and indulged in shouting matches with Chuck Schumer, her colleague from New York. Loud arguments became the norm at the State Department, not only during Hillary’s staff meetings, but while she was walking down the corridors and riding in the elevators. You could hear her coming a mile away.
“I’ve been at State since the mid-1980s, and I’ve never seen such acrimony,” said a Foreign Service officer. “I had heard stories about Hillary’s problems with anger management, but I didn’t believe them until I saw them with my own eyes. After a telephone argument with Valerie Jarrett, Hillary threw a heavy water glass across her office and sent shards flying.
“Another time,” this person continued, “after a telephone argument with President Obama, she took her right arm and cleared off her small working desk, sending pictures, glasses, everything crashing to the floor.
“The two times when she fainted [while boarding a plane in Yemen in 2011 and working in her office in 2012] were periods of stress brought on by furious arguments.
“After the episode with President Obama, I heard her tell Huma, ‘I don’t want Bill to hear anything about this.’”
Before she became secretary of state, Hillary had spent a great deal of time discussing with Bill the pros and cons of Obama’s offer. She was suspicious of Obama’s motives and skeptical that he would allow her to put her stamp on foreign policy.
“I don’t want to be a pantsuit-wearing globetrotter,” Hillary told Bill in the presence of several friends.
To allay her fears, Bill asked his right-hand man, Doug Band, to negotiate an agreement with the White House. A “memorandum of understanding” was drafted and signed by both Clintons and by the White House counsel. The memorandum stipulated that Hillary would have a free hand to choose her own deputies and run the State Department as she saw fit. In return, Hillary agreed that the Clinton Foundation would not accept contributions from foreign donors as long as she was at Foggy Bottom, and that Bill would seek the Obama administration’s approval of all his speeches.
Bill agreed to these stringent conditions because he saw the State Department job as an important station on Hillary’s march to the White House. It would allow her to remain in the public eye during Obama’s term in office and give her an opportunity to fill in her résumé as a woman who had the grit to deal with the world’s toughest male leaders.
Bill had grandiose plans for Hillary: she would make peace between Israel and the Palestinians, open a dialogue with North Korea, bring pressure to bear on Iran, and force the ayatollahs to end their nuclear program.
Who knew? She might even end up with the Nobel Peace Prize.
There was only one problem with Bill’s vision for his wife. It turned out that Hillary’s paranoia about her enemies in the Obama White House was well founded.
Chief among the enemies were members of the triumvirate that ruled from the Oval Office—Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and Michelle Obama. They never intended to let Hillary run foreign policy.
In her confrontations with Hillary, Jarrett had a formidable army to back her up: Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and chief political adviser David Axelrod. Denis McDonough, a foreign policy adviser who ultimately replaced Emanuel as the president’s chief of staff, referred to Hillary as “the principle implementer” of policy, not its architect.
Hillary was forced to assume the role she had most wanted to avoid—a pantsuit-wearing globetrotter. As one official told Politico, Hillary practiced “odometer diplomacy,” with “a focus on globetrotting to bolster America’s relationships abroad coupled with attempts to cope with an array of pop-up crises.”
When Caroline Kennedy was appointed ambassador to Japan, she asked Hillary what she could expect when she took up her post in Tokyo.
“Don’t expect to get your real marching orders from State,” Hillary told Caroline. “The way the Obama government works, everything important in foreign policy comes from the White House. And Valerie [Jarrett] pretty much runs the show down there. You’ll feel Valerie breathing down your neck all the way to Tokyo. She’s going to have a lot to say about how you represent our country in Japan, and believe me, she won’t be shy about it.”
Hillary had extracted a promise from Obama that she would be free to choose her own deputies, but that was not how things worked out.
With Obama’s approval, Jarrett insisted that Hillary hire James Steinberg as her deputy secretary of state. Although Steinberg had once worked in the Clinton administration, Hillary did not like him. But the White House left her no choice, and she brought Steinberg on board as her deputy.
Hillary and Steinberg often clashed on major issues of policy. He seemed to enjoy thumbing his nose at Hillary. In the end, however, she won the bureaucratic wrestling match. The unhappy Steinberg lasted just two years at Foggy Bottom before he handed in his resignation and became dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
The Steinberg episode was just one in a multitude of humiliations inflicted on Hillary by the White House.
For example, Hillary would be summoned to the White House for a meeting only to discover when she arrived that the meeting had been canceled without anyone bothering to tell her.
“I arrived for the 10:15 mtg and was told there was no mtg,” she e-mailed aides in 2009. “This is the second time this has happened. What’s up???”
Other times, she was left in the dark about the timing of cabinet meetings.
“I heard on the radio,” Hillary wrote in an e-mail on June 8, 2009, “that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?”
Old State Department hands said they had to reach far back in their memory to recall a relationship between the White House and State Department that was so one-sided in favor of the president. They concluded that only Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, William Pierce Rogers, had been shafted as badly as Hillary.