The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (39 page)

HH: Jon, I almost blew right past, and I’ve got to go back on Russia. You detail Hillary’s deep involvement in the New START Treaty, including how she worked Corker and Johnny Isakson, Senators from Tennessee and Georgia respectively, and it makes it sound like Corker could just be bought for the nuke industry in Tennessee. But here’s the problem. New START’s a disaster. It turns out that the Russians have been lying to us on the development of their intermediate nuclear weapons. Jon Kyl was right. I mean, New START’s not something she’s going to be able to walk around tattooed on her forehead, is it?

JA:
I think she’ll try to do that. I think they’ll talk about it. We’re already seeing her minions, the Super PAC group, Correct The Record, has put out stuff on the New START Treaty. But you know, as is the case with all foreign policy, it’s very fluid. And the thing that looks good for you today could very
much look bad for you tomorrow. I think the START Treaty is certainly one of those things. It’s something that I think, while she probably cared about it, it was really something that Barack Obama wanted desperately. He had campaigned on doing nuclear non-proliferation in a bipartisan way in the Senate, with Dick Lugar, the former senator from Indiana, and I think he wanted to put his money where his mouth was. And so I think it only works if the Russians are allowing us to verify, not just trust.

HH: Yeah, Ukraine and New START together, plus the red button’s reset button, that’s, it’s a bad… here’s a few more quotes about Hillary. Governor Scott Walker on my show talking about Hillary:

SW: I have a hard time pointing to many successes. I mean, you look at, you mention the problems around the world, I mean, she was good at flying around and traveling, but I have a hard time seeing any major victories for this country.

HH: Here’s Bill Kristol talking to John Heilemann on
Morning Joe
about Hillary, cut number 14:

BK: What achievement of Hillary, I’m serious, what achievement, one sentence, what has Hillary Clinton done? What’s her achievement in politics that qualifies her to be president of the United States?

JH: I’m not going to do a Hillary Clinton ad… I think they will say that she did a big, she repaired, had a big role in repairing America’s battered image around the world through all of her travels around the world.

HH: And here’s Chuck Todd, no apologist for anyone, on again, Hillary’s accomplishments on NBC:

CT: I think that they wouldn’t try to do it as one issue. I think they would say that she was pushing her passions of expanding women’s rights, she’d talk about what happened in Burma. She’d talk about the de-escalation that they had in Gaza preventing at the time when they thought that there was going to be an escalation in Gaza between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and getting Egypt to back off. So, but look, there isn’t, is there a one, big, crowning achievement where you see her right there and then in a crisis moment as secretary of State,
especially compared to, for instance, John Kerry? I mean, in many ways, the problems she’s got about her four years as secretary of State is the comparison to John Kerry, who’s been, he throws himself into every controversy. And Secretary Clinton, she’d get involved, but she played a much more quiet role. She never liked to play as public of a role as John Kerry. So I think that that comparison is going to be something she has to deal with on the campaign trail.…

HH: I’m going to get sued by Jonathan Allen’s employer, because I’m going to ruin his voice by keeping him one more hour to talk politics and Hillary Clinton. I want to finish the foreign policy conversation with Jon Allen, the co-author of
HRC
,
New York Times
bestseller, by playing Hillary on stage with Thomas Friedman, cut number 16 from a couple of weeks ago:

HRC: Look, I really see my role as secretary, and in fact, leadership in general in a democracy, as a relay race. I mean, you run the best race you can run, you hand off the baton. Some of what hasn’t been finished may go on to be finished. So when President Obama asked me to be secretary of State, and I agreed, we had the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We had two wars. We had continuing threats from all kinds of corners around the world that we had to deal with. So it was a perilous time, frankly. And what he said to me was, look, I have to be dealing with the economic crisis. I want you to go out and represent us around the world. And it was a good division of labor, because we needed to make it clear to the rest of the world that we were going to get our house in order, we were going to stimulate and grow and get back to positive growth and work with our friends and partners. So I think we did that. I’m very proud of the stabilization and the, you know, really solid leadership that the administration provided that I think now leads us to be able to deal with problems like Ukraine, because we’re not so worried about a massive collapse in Europe, and China trying to figure out what to do with their bond holdings, and all the problems we were obsessed with. I think we really restored American leadership in the best sense that once again, people began to rely on us, to look at us as setting the values,
setting the standards. I just don’t want to lose that because we have a dysfunctional political situation in Washington. And then, of course, a lot of particulars, but I am finishing my book, so you’ll be able to read all about it.

HH: Now Jonathan Allen, put aside the Alice In Wonderland, allow us to deal with things in Ukraine. When she writes about, when she says she had a good division of labor with the president, that is at odds with
HRC
’s account of her first year, year-and-a-half when the White House just didn’t trust her as far as they could throw her. He didn’t turn the world over to her. They basically tried to keep placing people in her inner circle.

JA:
Yeah, I mean, one of the very first staff decisions that was made was to make Jim Steinberg her deputy secretary of State. And her people accepted that. He’d worked in the Clinton administration, but that was not who she would have chosen. I think she would have chosen Holbrooke, perhaps, for that job, certainly wouldn’t have gone with Steinberg. I think you know, the foreign policy, generally speaking, was run by the National Security Council. Now I don’t think that’s all that unusual. I think in most presidencies, that really is the case, that the NSC gives the Secretary of State as much latitude as it wants to, as much of a leash as it wants to, but is really the master of that. With Hillary Clinton in particular, they kept a pretty tight rein on her early on. I think it’s one of the reasons that she really cozied up to Gates and Petraeus and some of the other military leaders, because that allowed her to get their support for things that she cared about. And we sort of go through that in the book, too.

HH: Oh, in great detail. I’m just saying that her line to Tom Friedman, and he didn’t follow up, and maybe he hadn’t read
HRC
, yet, it’s just not factual.

JA:
Right. It does not hold up.

HH: It does not hold up at all.

HH: Today, I want to talk about politics. And Jon Allen, I want to begin with a funny place. I want to begin with a purse. Now you and I, not that there’s anything wrong with that, do not carry purses. But women do. And you have a little anecdote in
HRC
about Hillary and the purse gambit which I think people just, you’ve got a bad voice, you’ve been out promoting the book, but tell people this story, because it’s why she’s so good, and why Republicans especially had better be prepared for a masterly retail politician.

JA:
Well, there was a woman who was interviewing for a job in Hillary Clinton’s Senate office, and was very, very nervous about it. She was meeting Hillary Clinton for the first time, and whatever you think of her, just like anybody else you’ve seen on television a lot, but don’t know, you get a little nervous the first time you meet them. So this woman’s in and she’s interviewing for a job, so even more so. So Hillary Clinton walks in, shakes her hand, and immediately picks up her purse and says this is such a wonderful purse, look at this beautiful purse, turns to him and says look at this great purse. And where do I get one like this? Can you fine me one, makes a big deal about this woman’s purse. Well, the effect of that is to make the woman feel at ease. The effect of it is that the person who is interviewing for the job suddenly feels like oh, okay. She’s a normal person, like I can have a normal conversation about something like purses rather than deep policy intrigue and things like that. And then the woman, who ultimately takes the job watches Hillary Clinton do this time and again with people.…

HH: Yeah.

JA:
… that this was, and you know, it wasn’t a one-off thing where she loved the woman’s purse. She’d pick out a purse, a necklace, a tie—make a big deal about how much she liked it. And so it’s calculated, but also something that makes people feel good. And I think Hillary Clinton’s kind of the master of calculating those things that are intended to make people feel a certain way, positively inclined to her, generally speaking.

HH: There is nothing like saving someone who you could crucify to make them grateful towards you, and there’s nothing like sympathizing with people. And there are a couple of anecdotes in
HRC
that I want to call out. One, Jon Favreau is the president’s chief speechwriter, and he gets in his cups. And he gets photographed—dumb kid move—cupping the breast of Hillary on a cut-out. And she calls him up and says I haven’t seen the picture, yet, but I hear my hair looks great. Great story, page 61 of
HRC
. Another story, young Tommy, is it Vietor?

JA:
Vietor.

HH: Vietor, breaks his arm, or dislocates his shoulder when she breaks her arm. She, you know, he’s young and he’s intimidated. He sees her in the West Wing, and she’s got a sling with a State Department seal on it. And he’s nervous and makes small talk. Your sling is so much cooler than mine. Two days later arrives a State Department sling for Tommy. These are the sort of things, the forgiveness of Favreau, the sling for Tommy, these are very artful details of a masterful politician. Bill gets all the credit, but she’s awfully good.

JA:
Yeah, he’s got that mass charisma, and even the one-on-one charisma. He doesn’t have to do that kind of stuff. He doesn’t have to say thank you to people. They watch him, and they’re like excited to see him. She’s the exact opposite. She has to work people that way. I think she likes to do it as well. I mean, I think she sees it as being polite, good company, good manners. But she needs to show people that little extra bit of attention, that little extra bit of affection for them to really grow on them. And I think some of it’s genuine, all of it’s strategic, but people, even when they’re being worked over that way, tend to appreciate it. I mean, it’s just like you get a thank you note from somebody. It may be political, and it may be them trying to get something from you, but at the same time, you appreciate they made the effort to write the thank you note. A lot of people would try to get something from you and not do that.

HH: Yeah, there’s a very great difficulty in
HRC
of keeping score between Hillaryland, the Planet Bill and Clintonworld, and the overlapping territory between them. Doug Band, for example, lives in Billworld. Huma Abedin lives in Hillaryland. How do those worlds get along right now?

JA:
I think better than they have in a while, in part because Doug Band is gone. He was the longtime gatekeeper to Bill Clinton, and I think he caused a lot of irritation within Hillaryland about the way that Bill dealt with the Hillary staff. And I think him being pushed out of the picture, and in part, that occurred simultaneously with Chelsea Clinton coming into the Clinton Foundation. I think that’s had an improvement on some of the relations, but they’re still pretty scrambled. I mean, it is three different entities. It is Hillaryland. It is the Billworld, and it is the Clinton universe, which is the conjunction of those two things. There are people who have worked for both, and there are people who are loyal to one or the other and not the other, and it is a very hard thing to unscramble, not just for us as viewers, as observers, as voters, but also for the people who are involved in it.

HH: Now at the middle of the web, and I called my friend to compliment this person, is Cheryl Mills. Now Cheryl Mills is Hillary’s Haldeman. She is really the center of her political, she’s the consigliore. She ran Benghazi night. She keeps her informed. She’s brilliant, and I don’t know that anyone’s really reported on her much other than
HRC
.

JA:
Yeah, the other time that she was in the news, she was defending Bill Clinton in the Senate during the impeachment. And she gave, she was very young at the time, early 30s, and gave an impassioned defense of him. And she was in the news then in the late 90s. And the most people that pay much attention to her, she was brought into the 2008 campaign when it was sort of going overboard to help rein it back in. She was brought into the State Department not just in one top job, but two. She combined the jobs of chief of staff and counselor, which were the two top jobs on the secretary’s personal staff. She did both of them. There’s nobody who is more important to Hillary Clinton than Cheryl Mills in terms of her political future, and in terms of her ability to manage when she’s in government.