The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (36 page)

JA:
Between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m? I mean, I don’t have a minute by minute timeline of what she’s doing. What I do have is pieces of that timeline. I know there were conversations with foreign officials. I know that she was on these teleconferences with American officials. I know she called Petraeus. I know she called Donilon. But it’s true, like, it’s not like there’s a transcript of every minute that is available. I do know the State Department put together a timeline for people who had to testify on this, and nobody was willing to make it available to me or my co-author. So there is a timeline that exists. I don’t know how much more detailed it is than what we got into the book. But I presume that there’s probably more detail into her account.

HH: This is the most detailed timeline of the most important night of her Secretary of State tenure. And you did the best job of reporting it. That’s why I like
HRC
, including the fact she called Gregory Hicks at 8 pm in DC, and she never called back. Does that strike you as odd, Jon Allen, that she never called Hicks back that night?

JA:
I think there was a lot going on. It doesn’t necessarily strike me as odd, but again, without knowing what she was doing minute by minute, you’re
having to figure out what are the priorities. And if somebody else is in contact with him, is able to handle that end of the discussion and she’s needed for something else, then it might make sense. If she’s kicking back and drinking lemonade by the poolside and not calling him back, I think it does sound odd. And without that full timeline, it’s hard to know. I do know that of the public, of the major public officials involved in that incident, we know more about her timeline than anybody else’s.

HH: We certainly know more about hers than the President’s. But I have always asked the question out loud to people both involved with the investigation and not, your number two is in the middle of Tripoli. They’ve got the axes out. It’s like a scene from
Argo
. They’re smashing up the computers in Tripoli. Benghazi’s under attack, Stevens is missing, you talk to Hicks at 8 pm, he gets the okay to retreat to their CIA annex. A few hours later, SEALs are dead, another attack is underway, and you never call back your number two on the ground. It just seems like a massive leadership default.

JA:
It’s a good question, Hugh. I mean, you’re right. You’re right that as Chris Stevens is missing, the head person in charge there, and de facto, because Chris Stevens is in Benghazi, but if he wasn’t missing, you know, Greg Hicks is the one that’s in charge. And I think it’s reasonable to ask that question and it’s not one that I have an answer to. If she runs for president, I think it’s one she’ll get.

HH: Again and again… We’ll move on from Benghazi fairly quickly. But this does not spare Hillary. She goes home at 1a.m. She checks in with Cheryl Mills, her chief-of-staff, at 2:30 a.m., and it is not a flattering portrait. You bluntly state the attack at the annex begins, officials were shocked by the second-round attack, you quote. Administration officials didn’t anticipate the second strike. People got fairly frantic. You know, at one point, I wrote in my notes, I wonder if they sent Hillary home. Do you think she stressed out, and they just said go home?

JA:
I don’t. I think at that point, they, and remember, this is now, by the time she goes home at
1:00
in the morning, we’re talking about, forgive me, after putting together that timeline, it’s escaping me right now. But I think it’s about 7:00 in the morning, 7:30 in the morning in Benghazi. They know that Chris Stevens is dead by that point. I mean, they’re waiting for the official confirmation, but at that point, they know that he’s dead. They know about
the second attack at that point. And so my guess is that they were pretty confident, there were no other American outposts to attack. The group that had been at the CIA annex was on its way to the airport or had arrived at the airport by the time she left. So I don’t think it’s a matter of them shooing her out of the building so much as her role in being able to affect anything at that point was probably somewhat minimal. I will say this, though. I think it’s shocking, as you do, that nobody in the American government anticipated that there might be an attack on the CIA annex a mile or so from the diplomatic compound. It never occurred to them that this could be more than a one-off. I mean, I think it’s a startling admission that they were caught flat-footed. And obviously, we know that, obviously.

HH: And you do not spare that. And I want my listeners to realize that’s why
HRC
is like crack cocaine for political junkies, but this is also very, very good reporting.

[Tape transcript of congressional hearing]

Senator Ron Johnson, (R-WI): We’ve ascertained that that was not the fact, and the American people could have known that within days, and they didn’t know that.

HRC: And with all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans.

RJ: I understand.

HRC: Was it because of a protest? Or was it because of guys out for a walk one night or decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?

HH: That, of course, is Hillary Clinton sparring with Senator Ron Johnson, an exchange which is deeply detailed and backgrounded in the brand new book,
HRC: State Secrets And the Rebirth Of Hillary Clinton
, co-authored by Jonathan Allen,
Bloomberg
’s White House correspondent, Amie Parnes of
The Hill
. It is a
New York Times
bestseller, and with good reason. It is absolutely riveting on the entire tenure of Hillary at State, not just Benghazi. But I do want to finish up that conversation about Benghazi. Your book opens, and no one noticed this, Jon Allen. I did. With Hillary watching videotape with senior staff, including the very controversial figure of Pat Kennedy, in early April, 2010, this was 30 months before the Benghazi incident, and the video she’s watching is about embassy security in Peshawar, Pakistan, where the compound was almost overrun. And so at the very beginning and the end of the book, you open with her duty as the steward of the professional FSOs, and being aware of the problem, and then not having acted in a way to prevent the murder of four Americans.

JA:
Yeah, I was shocked that people didn’t make more of a big deal out of that when the book came out. And maybe it’s because it’s in the introduction, and people sometimes skip the introductions to books. But yes, she’s, in 2010, an attack at the Peshawar compound in Pakistan sort of, like Benghazi, one of these outposts sort of in the middle of nowhere with a lot of terrorist activity around, it comes under attack. The attack was thwarted by some of the defenses of the compound which were better than what we had in Benghazi, and she wants all of her aides to watch this, to see what happened, to know that the diplomats were in these places, are in peril, to know that safety measures can thwart attacks, but to be aware of the general situation, because in Washington, I think it can be easy to forget that a lot of the diplomats, a lot of the people in the Foreign Service are, you know, under threat. They’re in places that don’t like us, and necessarily sometimes in places that don’t like us. And I was a little befuddled that that wasn’t one of the big headlines coming out of the book.

HH: Jon Allen, I actually don’t think conservatives have read your book, yet. And I’m trying to urge them to do so, because I think it is so fascinating and detail-filled. And they may not have read it, because the
New York Times
reviewed it favorably. They said it’s a largely favorable portrait of Hillary. I just think it’s a largely objective portrait of Hillary. And you, like me, have been a partisan in the past, and so maybe conservatives don’t think you’re bringing the dish. But I mean, the dish is here, starting with the story that did get a lot of play, the enemies list. And I love this line. “Special circle of Clinton hell, reserved for people who had endorsed Obama or stayed on the fence after Bill and Hillary had raised money for them, appointed them to a political post, or written a recommendation to ace their kid’s application to an elite school.” It includes Rockefeller, Casey, Pat Leahy, I love seeing him on that list, Chris Van Hollen, Baron Hill, Rob Andrews. There’s even a sub-basement in hell, and that’s for Claire McCaskill.

JA:
Yeah, she’s never getting out of there.

HH: (laughing)

JA:
She’s like the walking dead to the Clintons. Put her in the basement and don’t ever let her out.

HH: There is a quote. “Hate is too weak a word to describe the feelings that Hillary’s core loyalists still have for McCaskill.” But I must say, the arc of the story of Jason Altmire, which begins on page 16 and ends on page 274 that was a creative decision that you and Amie Parnes made. You use him as a sort of a totem of what happens when you cross Team Hillary.

JA:
Yeah, we loved the idea of drawing that out and sort of, because one of the big themes of this book is the way in which Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton interact, and how their operations support each other and are integrated with each other.

HH: She drops the F-bomb. And that, by the way, is itself a story. Hillary seems fairly comfortable with the use of that term.

JA:
Yeah, I think she uses it a lot.

HH: And see, that’s going to, you know, when Nixon’s tapes came out and all the expletives were deleted. They should have left them in, because they weren’t the F-bombs people thought they were… Let’s go out with a little [of
The New York Times
’] Nicholas Kristof on what he thought of her accomplishments:

NK: You know, the… the gains were in many ways fairly modest. You had, you know, the success at Burma, which as you say, sort of pales next to some of the difficulties. On the other hand, we did de-escalate, we did move down from a mess in Iraq. And for now, it’s a somewhat better mess than it was. That may also be true of Afghanistan. And the crisis in the Middle East was, I don’t know that it was handled brilliantly, but it was a mess for anybody who would have been dealing with it. Likewise China, North Korea, I don’t think that those are shining successes.

HH: Look in the dictionary under faint praise and you’ll see Nicholas Kristof on Hillary.

HH: Jon, I have made a habit over the last few months of asking a variety of people, and I’ll play some of these clips for you today, what they thought of Hillary’s tenure… the last segment with Nicholas Kristof damning with faint praise. Here’s Jonathan Alter of
Bloomberg
, one of your colleagues there, and a pretty good historian himself:

JA: It’s a really good question. You know, I traveled around the world with her when she was secretary of State for an article that I wrote about her for
Vanity Fair
. And I gave her, you know, decent marks for essentially for being a goodwill ambassador. You know, she was met very enthusiastically every place she went. She did these town meetings that were very effective in building goodwill for the United States in many countries around the world. That’s an important part of the Secretary of State’s job. It is not, however, fair to call her an historic Secretary of State. Now part of that is not her fault. You know, the stars were not aligned properly for her to make peace. The truth is that you have to go back to Richard Holbrooke, who wasn’t even secretary in the Clinton Administration to find an American diplomat who was actually, really brokered peace in a real way, which he did in the Balkans. So I have a feeling that when we look back on it, if John Kerry catches a break and his persistence pays off in one of these areas, that we will see him as being a more historic Secretary of State than Hillary Clinton.

HH: And Jonathan Allen, one more for you to comment on, Mark Leibovich of
The New York Times
, a shorter one, cut number 8:

ML: Geez, look, I think, I don’t cover the State Department. Look, you have that look on your face like you expect me to duck this question.

HH: No, I expect you not to be able to say anything, because she didn’t do anything.

ML: I actually didn’t, I don’t, here’s the deal. I have not written any stories on Hillary Clinton since 2008. About, what’s like the graceful way to duck a question?

HH: Not even ducking, just this is, we’re playing Jeopardy!

ML: Yeah, I honestly don’t know.

HH: Nobody can come up with anything, Mark.

ML: Yeah, let’s see, what did she do? Yeah, I mean, she traveled a lot. That’s the thing. They’re always like, well, she logged eight zillion miles. It’s like, since when did that become like, you know, like diplomacy by odometer?

HH: Jonathan Allen, this is where your book is a great assist they think, because you chronicle what she did. But boy, the conventional wisdom, Kristof, Alter, Leibovich, it’s pretty settled that it was an undistinguished four years.

JA:
Yeah, she’s no Thomas Jefferson or James Monroe when you look back historically. So you know, I agree with you. We put together what she did do. I think there are things you do as a diplomat that are important that are not a marquis peace deal creating a harmonious Middle East. Obviously, everybody goes in wanting that. I think averting problems is a big part of the Secretary of State’s job. I think advising the President is a big part of the job. I think being a goodwill ambassador for the United States is part of the job. All those things are part of the job. But let’s not forget making big strides on big issues are also an important part of the job. And you know, for that, there is no big deal. There’s no Clinton doctrine, not that Secretaries of State really have doctrines. They’re usually the President’s. But there’s no doctrine, there’s no big deal to create peace, to extend peace. A lot of what she did was to, I think, you know, particularly in war-torn areas, was to keep partnerships going, to try to keep the Pakistanis on board so that our intelligence community could work in Pakistan. But again, yeah, it’s fair to criticize her or fair to look at her record and say there’s no big agreement there.