Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (61 page)

On a Thursday evening, five days before the election, the campaign sent Clinton to Cuyahoga County Community College, just outside Cleveland, for a special event. Waiting backstage as he spoke was Bruce Springsteen, so he wisely kept his remarks shorter than usual, just half an hour. “We love Ohio,” he said, referring to himself and Hillary. “And now I’m here to tell you something important. When you were down, President Obama had your back. You’ve got to have his back now.” He talked about student loan reform—“one of the most important things President Obama has done that nobody knows about”—and the benefits of Obamacare.

“This is the first time in my life I ever got to be the warm-up act for The Boss,” he quipped. “I’m qualified for it, because I was ‘born in the USA.’” He gazed out at the overflow crowd, nearly all white, knowing that he had to sell the African American president, at least a little. He shook hands along the ropeline, stepped backstage to greet the waiting rock star, and then returned to the stage in his shirtsleeves.

“It is my honor to introduce one of the most important voices in American music in the last 50 years, and a man who has always stood for true American values, the incomparable Bruce Springsteen.” But he couldn’t stay to listen as Springsteen broke into his anthem, “We Take Care of Our Own.” Clinton was out the door and hustling to the next stop, in a remote corner of the state near the West Virginia border.

On election eve, with the Republicans claiming that Pennsylvania was still in play, the campaign had scheduled Clinton for a giant rally at the University of Pennsylvania campus gym in Philadelphia to push Democratic turnout. Everywhere he had gone, the crowds had been too big to be contained in the booked venue; sometimes, as at a suburban college rally, the event had simply been moved outdoors, with a
makeshift stage. That wasn’t possible at Penn, where the big gym was filled beyond capacity. The best guess was sixteen thousand inside, and a couple thousand more lined up around the superblock.

“I want you to vote your hopes, not your fears,” shouted Clinton, trying to be heard above the echoing din of the crowd. “I want you to imagine what America can be like ten years from now. And I want you to go out tomorrow and make Barack Obama president for four more years.” He saluted and left the stage, wild cheering in his ears.

The election wasn’t close, despite all the Republican chatter. Obama carried Pennsylvania with 52 percent of the vote; he took Ohio, too, with 51 percent. And in Cuyahoga County, where whites outnumbered minority voters by two to one, the Democrats carried 70 percent of the vote.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

With the advent of the thirteenth year of the new millennium came a momentous change for the Clintons and their works, as Hillary made her long-promised departure from the State Department.

Rather than the fond and orderly farewell she had earned after four years of ceaseless toil at the State Department, Hillary’s return to private life was just as tumultuous as her husband’s exit from the White House had been a dozen years earlier. She had spent New Year’s Eve in a room at New York Presbyterian Hospital, imbibing blood thinners to dissolve a clot in a blood vessel just behind her right ear and dangerously close to her brain. The clot had appeared after she contracted a stomach virus on a trip to Egypt, and then, fainting from dehydration, fell and injured her head in mid-December.

With her public approval rating close to 66 percent, most of the country sympathized with Madam Secretary in distress. But Republicans in Washington, stricken with fear that she might run for president again, couldn’t decide how to spin her illness: Was she actually far sicker than the official story suggested, disabling any presidential ambitions she might still harbor? Or was she merely faking, so she wouldn’t have to testify in Congress about the September 2012 consular attack in Benghazi, Libya, that had left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead?

Her usual antagonists, from Rush Limbaugh to John Bolton to Karl Rove, had skipped any expression of concern over her medical condition to promote theories contradicting the doctors’ explanation. Bolton bluntly accused her of malingering with a “diplomatic illness,” while Rove insisted that she was actually much sicker than advertised. The
National Enquirer
ran a screaming front-page “Breaking News” headline—“Brain Cancer Drama”—over an unflattering photo. To conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, the chorus of callous doubters revealed a “viciousness” that was “disheartening and disgusting.”

Hillary effectively quelled the conspiracy mongers by showing up on the Hill to answer questions about Benghazi from Senate and House members on January 23, assuming responsibility for what had happened on her watch while sharply rebutting the worst insinuations about her supposed negligence. And although she had suffered a previous blood clot in her knee many years earlier, she wasn’t deathly ill. After 401 days spent traveling to 112 countries, logging 956,733 air miles or the equivalent of three full months airborne, she was simply very, very tired.

“I just want to sleep and exercise and travel for fun and relax. . . . I’d like to see whether I can get untired,” she had told the
New York Times
. On February 1, John Kerry took over as secretary of state.

Hillary’s new civilian life had been the subject of careful planning for months. Fresh from maternity leave, Huma Abedin had resigned as her deputy chief of staff in June 2012 and settled down in New York City, where her status as a “special government employee” of the State Department allowed her to work simultaneously for the Clinton Foundation (and for Teneo, where Doug Band hired her temporarily to work on special events, mostly as an act of friendship). Abedin’s multiple jobs were legal but complicated, and the Republicans dogging Hillary on Capitol Hill would later question her arrangements. But they were never able to show what she had done wrong or demonstrate any conflict of interest that had arisen between her public and private employments.

As she departed the government, Hillary had declined several lucrative opportunities to join corporate boards. Instead, when she felt sufficiently rested, she planned to deliver speeches booked by her husband’s representatives at the Walker agency, for the same fees that she frankly considered “ridiculous.” Reporting that the agency had signed her, the New York
Daily News
quoted prices no less than $200,000 in the U.S. and as high as $750,000 in “the high-priced Asian and Middle Eastern markets.” The same article quoted the head of the National Speakers Association predicting she would earn somewhere on “the lower end of her husband’s speeches, but she’ll be incredibly desirable.”

Independent experts said that at $250,000 or even more, Hillary’s projected fees would not exceed those of comparable speakers. Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary-general, commanded $170,000 per appearance; Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, asked $270,000; Ben
Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chair, got $200,000 at home and $400,000 abroad; and to book former treasury secretary Timothy Geithner required up to $200,000. She may have been the first woman expected to command speaking fees of that magnitude, but then she was also considered more likely than any other woman to become the first female president of the United States.

Unlike her husband and many of his fellow top-level lecturers, however, Hillary would not be available for appearances in the high-rolling overseas venues. Somewhat naively, she believed that by rejecting the dozens of foreign speaking offers, and accepting only stateside invitations, she could avoid any political backlash. It was a policy she had adopted just in case she should ever decide to seek public office again.

At that moment, Hillary wasn’t obsessing over another run for the presidency—as the rest of the world already appeared to be doing on her behalf—but she surely didn’t want to foreclose her candidacy. Within days of leaving the government, her aides had set up a new website, hillaryclintonoffice.com, and blasted out a mass email from Bill and Chelsea to the foundation’s list.

“She inspires us every day—and we hope she inspires you, too. Please take a moment to send Hillary your personal note of thanks,” it said, providing a convenient link. The site collected the names and email addresses of everyone who did.

Whatever her ultimate decision, she would be ready to run in 2016. And that looming possibility would inexorably affect elite and public opinion about the foundation. While Hillary served in office, her approval ratings hovered at high levels; the Gallup Organization had identified her in its surveys as America’s “most admired woman” for seventeen years in a row, a status usually reserved for first ladies. But whenever she ran for office, her popularity would drop rapidly amid the partisan clash. No longer would the foundation remain insulated from that political turbulence.

Before settling into a corner office at the foundation’s new Midtown headquarters that spring, Hillary had briefly considered starting her own nonprofit, focused on issues affecting women and girls. It soon became clear that would make little sense with her family already toiling together, and substantial funding in place, at the foundation. She preferred to be with her daughter, which offered a chance to inquire regularly, in person,
as to when Chelsea and Marc Mezvinsky planned to produce a grandchild. (To the inexpressible delight of both Bill and Hillary, they would deliver the first, Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky, on September 26, 2014. The second, her little brother Aidan Clinton Mezvinsky, would be born almost two years later, on June 18, 2016.)

By spring, Hillary had begun to construct her niche, hiring former aide Maura Pally away from the Bloomberg Foundation to serve as the executive director of her foundation office. Pally had started as an assistant in the White House counsel’s office when Clinton was president, later working in Hillary’s 2008 campaign, and then rising at State to become a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Pally’s job would be to build and operate Hillary’s signature programs, most notably the No Ceilings initiative—a partnership with the Gates Foundation to measure female progress worldwide over the previous two decades, and encourage “full participation” by women in all spheres of economic, social, and political life. Its name echoed Hillary’s Democratic convention speech in 2008, where she boasted of leaving “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” that had kept women from winning the presidency. And although it was officially part of the Clinton Foundation, No Ceilings built its own website, noceilings.org.

Another signal of Hillary’s renewed authority in her husband’s world was the choice of a replacement for Doug Band, who had drastically wound down his involvement in 2012. Tina Flournoy, a former American Federation of Teachers official with long-standing ties to both Bill and Hillary—but especially the latter—became the chief of staff in his presidential office. Flournoy would be the new gatekeeper.

And there was still another change heralding Hillary’s arrival. Once she decided to join her husband and daughter, a decision was reached to reflect her arrival—and Chelsea’s increasingly high profile—by adopting a new corporate name. What had been the William J. Clinton Foundation would henceforth be known as the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

The renaming of the Clinton Foundation set off renewed chatter about Chelsea’s instant rise to power in her family’s philanthropic enter
prise, both inside and outside. More than a few staff and friends of the foundation believed that she would be more welcome—and morale would be improved—if she had “paid some more dues,” as one former high-ranking staffer said. But her parents manifested complete confidence in her, and encouraged her to pursue the objectives that she felt were important. Indeed, her indulgent father often mentioned in public that she “is a lot smarter than I am.”

Certainly Chelsea’s influence as a member of the Millennial generation was positive in modernizing her parents’ attitudes on technology, culture, and social issues. When her mother announced in March 2013 that she had changed her views about homosexual marriage—in support of full equality for gays and lesbians—she credited Chelsea as a powerful influence. When her father accepted an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, an important media sentinel, he spoke extensively about how his daughter’s friendships with gay and lesbian couples had provided a “model” for him to change his own outlook. Neither he nor Hillary could fairly be described as bigoted, and as president he had fought hard to appoint the nation’s first openly gay ambassador, James Hormel. Having signed the Defense of Marriage Act as president in 1996, however, he had come around to urging that states legislate full marriage rights—and that the Supreme Court should strike DOMA down.

Chelsea’s impact on the operations of the foundation was also striking. A self-proclaimed nerd, she enjoyed working with pivot tables and other powerful data processing tools commonly used in business and finance, but that most people would consider impossibly arcane. While her father had always liked to talk about “keeping score,” she had encountered some of the most sophisticated statistical methodology while working at McKinsey and Avenue Capital, and earning her academic degrees.

Very soon after arriving at the foundation, as she told reporters, she had sought to “harmonize the tracking of data” across all of its initiatives—and to make sure that all of the programs were operating on the same computer platform. Without any unified database, the managers couldn’t compare the costs and efficiencies of the various initiatives or encourage “best practices.”

It was not long before she sought to impose a different vision of how the foundation should operate.

As U.S. senator and then as secretary of state, Hillary had participated many times in the Clinton Global Initiative annual September conference in New York, where she had delivered plenary speeches and participated on panels devoted to international issues. In June 2013, she spoke for the first time at CGI America, the annual spinoff conference devoted to domestic issues and originally designed as the foundation’s answer to the loss of jobs and fraying social cohesion caused by the Great Recession. Held in her hometown of Chicago, CGI America presented a prime opportunity for her to highlight the social and economic issues—childcare, education, family leave, and women’s equality—on which she had made her reputation.