Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (16 page)

But not everyone hailed Clinton as the new Cicero.

“I actually thought parts of the Clinton speech were eerily anti-Obama, if you just listened to the subtext,” former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich observed. “I mean, here is Clinton saying, ‘I reformed welfare because I worked with the Republicans, you didn’t, Mr. Obama.’ He didn’t say it that way, but think about it. ‘I had the longest period of economic growth in history, you didn’t, Mr. Obama. I got four balanced budgets by working with Republicans, you didn’t, Mr. Obama.’”

And Charles Krauthammer, with his usual penetrating insight, put it this way: “Look, it had all the classic Clinton elements—it was engaging, it was humorous. In some cases, it was generous: I think there were more mentions of the Bushes than I heard in three days in Tampa [at the Republican National Convention]. But on the other hand, it was also vintage Clinton in that it was sprawling, undisciplined and truly self-indulgent. . . . It was a kind of amalgam between a State of the Union address, a policy wonk seminar, and what sounded to me like a campaign speech for a third Clinton term. Obama was sort of incidental. He’d be shoved every once in a while in the speech as a way to say, ‘Well, he thinks as I do.’”

Barack Obama had listened to the first twenty minutes of Clinton’s speech in his presidential box in the convention hall. Then the president’s Secret Service detail moved him to a holding room backstage. And there, along with Michelle and Vice President Biden and a gaggle of aides, Obama waited, and waited, and waited for Clinton to finish speaking.

The Clinton haters among Obama’s retinue—especially Valerie Jarrett—were furious with his long-windedness, and they vented their anger with nasty asides.

“Clinton likes the spotlight,” Jarrett said. “You can’t get him off the stage. Where’s the hook to get him off?”

But the two Davids—Axelrod and Plouffe—recognized that Clinton had done Obama a great service by swathing him in Clintonian nostalgia. They were especially grateful for Clinton’s defense of Obama’s economic stewardship.

Clinton had said: “No president—no president, not me or not any of my predecessors—no one could have repaired all the [economic] damage that [Obama] found in just four years.”

“After Clinton finished his speech,” recalled Antonio Villaraigosa, the chairman of the convention, who was standing backstage with the Obamans, “the president and the vice president were giddy. There was electricity in the air. The president was clearly pleased by Bill Clinton’s rousing speech.”

Flouting a tradition that a presidential nominee does not appear at his own convention until the night of his acceptance speech, Obama bounded out onto the stage and joined Clinton at the dais. When Clinton spotted Obama, he performed an elaborate Oriental-style bow. Some saw it as a bow of obeisance to the president. Others saw it as Clinton taking a well-earned bow for fulfilling his part of the deal with Obama.

And indeed, Clinton had delivered the goods. By comparison, Obama gave an underwhelming acceptance speech the following night. But thanks to Clinton’s star turn, the Obama campaign got a post-convention bounce that was worth two or three points in the polls—enough to allow Obama to pull decisively ahead of Romney.

PART THREE

THE DECEPTION

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE BENGHAZI DECEPTION

L
ate on the afternoon of September 11, 2012—six days after Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic convention—Hillary was back in her seventh-floor office at the State Department. She had just returned from a grueling week-and-a-half-long trip that took her to the Cook Islands, a remote island chain in the South Pacific, to attend a Pacific Islands Forum, a gathering that drew representatives from nearly sixty nations. The goal of her trip was to promote America’s pivot—or “strategic rebalance”—away from the Middle East and toward the Asia-Pacific area, a policy that had so far proved to be more rhetoric than reality.

With this trip, Hillary had run up nearly a million miles as secretary of state, a record second only to that set by former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who was seven years younger
than Hillary and, unlike Hillary, a fitness buff. Hillary’s punishing eighty-hour workweeks, frequent hops across multiple time zones, and meetings that lasted well past midnight had left her looking pale and haggard. She had let herself go: her hair was limp and lifeless, and her body was running to fat. She looked so awful that her two top aides—Cheryl Mills, her chief of staff, and Philippe Reines (pronounced RYE-niss), her personal spokesman—privately worried that Hillary was working herself to death.

And all for what?

The consensus among foreign policy experts was that Hillary had little to show for her Herculean efforts. According to the
New York Times
Hillary wanted to define her legacy as more than a “pantsuit-wearing globe-trotter.” Aaron David Miller, a seasoned Middle East negotiator, summed up Hillary’s time as secretary of state as “not consequential.” And Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, put it this way:

          
The simple consensus about Hillary Clinton’s tenure at state is: Meh. By her own standards, she accomplished little and in the areas she highlighted as most important to her—rights for women and religious minorities, Israeli-Palestinian peace and halting Iran’s nuclear weapons program—she batted zero. Women and religious minorities now have fewer freedoms across the Middle East and North Africa. In Afghanistan, where they might have enjoyed hope, the Obama administration is committed primarily to a “scheduled” exit. Israel-Palestine? Need you ask? And Iran is now closer
to a nuclear weapon than ever before, notwithstanding ongoing efforts to talk them out of it.

Though Hillary’s latest trip had done little to advance America’s pivot to Asia, she was in high spirits, thanks to the glowing media coverage of Bill’s electrifying convention speech. Along with the rave reviews for Bill, the mainstream media concluded that Bill’s full-throated endorsement of the president signaled a major shift in the Clinton-Obama relationship. Liberal columnists wrote that the Clintons and Obamas had called a truce to their long-running feud and found common ground. Under this armistice, Bill Clinton was making speeches and appearing in TV commercials for Obama and acting like a booster rocket for the Democratic ticket in the remaining eight weeks of the presidential campaign. The Democratic Party was united again, and all was well in the progressive world.

It was a pretty picture, but it quickly lost its appeal. For on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, as Hillary was recuperating from her Asian trip and dealing with run-of-the-mill business in Foggy Bottom, an event took place 5,205 miles away from Washington, D.C., that would throw American foreign policy into disarray, threaten Barack Obama’s chances for reelection, tarnish Hillary’s reputation, and reopen all the old wounds between the Clintons and the Obamas.

Shortly after 4:00 that afternoon, the Operations Center at the State Department alerted Hillary’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills,
that the United States mission in Benghazi was under attack by scores of armed men.

Cheryl Mills was known in Washington as “Hillary’s guardian angel.” An attractive African American graduate of Stanford Law, she was a veteran of the Clinton wars who was best known for her impassioned defense of Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial. “I stand here before you today,” she said from the well of the Senate, calling attention to her race and sex, “because President Bill Clinton believed I could.” Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was “not attractive,” she argued, but his “record on civil rights, on women’s rights, on all our rights, is unimpeachable.”

Her loyalty had earned Cheryl Mills pride of place in Hillary-land. “Mills endeared herself to the Clintons with her never-back-down, share nothing, don’t-give-an-inch approach—it’s their favorite approach of all,” the
Washington Post
wrote.

Two hours after the first alert, the Operations Center sent out a second notice, which Mills read, then immediately carried into Hillary’s office. This one noted that “Villa C,” where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was hiding in a safe room, had been set on fire by Ansar al-Sharia, an al-Qaeda-linked terror group that had claimed credit for the attack.

Hillary’s later statements that officials “at the assistant secretary level or below” had failed to keep her informed about requests for beefed-up security at the Benghazi diplomatic post were patently false. To give just one example: Hillary signed a cable acknowledging that Christopher Stevens’s predecessor as ambassador, Gene Cretz, had formally asked for additional security assets.

Given Hillary’s personal management style, her I-wasn’t-kept-in-the-loop excuse didn’t hold up. She was not a delegator; she was a hands-on manager who didn’t like to be blindsided. With the assistance of Cheryl Mills, Hillary got involved with issues that had normally been handled in the past by the State Department’s Security Office or Consular Office. According to a former secretary of state, who spoke with the author of this book on the condition of anonymity, Hillary was actively involved in details at all levels of the State Department.

“Though she wasn’t strong in the strategic management of foreign policy,” this ex-secretary said, “she ran State better than I’ve ever seen it run before.”

In the months leading up to the attack, Cheryl Mills and her deputy, Jake Sullivan, had made Hillary aware that the American mission was highly vulnerable to assault from the bands of heavily armed Islamic militiamen roaming the mean streets of Benghazi. Mills and Sullivan told Hillary that Benghazi—the birthplace of the Libyan revolution that overturned the regime of strongman Muammar al-Gaddafi—had descended into anarchy.

In addition, Hillary had received briefings from the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research that clearly indicated al-Qaeda had “metastasized” from its core in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan to not just the Arabian Peninsula but, increasingly, northern Africa. Benghazi, a major oil-shipping port on the Mediterranean Sea, was particularly vulnerable given its chaotic conditions.

“We believed al-Qaeda had simply transferred operation capabilities to these affiliates, knowing how much communications
were being monitored,” a senior intelligence official told the
Washington Times
. “But they still were determined to strike us, mostly through these affiliates.”

In view of Hillary’s active participation in the day-to-day running of the State Department through Cheryl Mills, it was inconceivable that she was ignorant of the series of violent incidents that had rocked Benghazi in recent months:

          
•
   
In April, terrorists threw an explosive device at a convoy carrying United Nations envoy Ian Martin.

          
•
   
In May, a rocket-propelled grenade hit the offices of the International Red Cross.

          
•
   
In June, an improvised explosive device (IED) exploded outside the American consulate compound, blowing a hole in the perimeter wall. The militia responsible for the IED left leaflets at the scene claiming the attack was in retaliation for the death of Abu Yahya al-Libi, the number-two al-Qaeda leader in Libya.

          
•
   
In June, armed men affiliated with Ansar al-Sharia, a group closely associated with al-Qaeda, stormed the Tunisian consulate in Benghazi.

          
•
   
In June, an abortive assassination attempt with rocket-propelled grenades on the life of British ambassador Sir Dominic Asquith prompted the United Kingdom to pull its personnel out of Benghazi.