The Secretary (2 page)

—Fuad, Palestinian CIA informant, in David Ignatius,
Agents of Innocence

1

WHO DO YOU CALL?

The armored black Cadillac stood waiting in the horseshoe driveway outside 3067 Whitehaven
Street, in northwest Washington. Inside the three-story Georgian house, last-minute
preparations were under way ahead of a first day at work. Two women talked through
their schedule, checked that their BlackBerries were in their handbags, applied a
last dab of lipstick. For the umpteenth time, Fred Ketchem went over the route for
his package in his head. In his left ear, he could hear the chatter of his team along
the way: the road was still clear. He checked alternative routes again, just in case.
Until just a few weeks ago, he had been responsible for the safety of three thousand
people implementing American foreign policy in one of the world’s most dangerous diplomatic
missions—Baghdad. Now, he was charged with the security of America’s top diplomat.
He had to remind himself that this wasn’t Iraq. There would be no hair-trigger checkpoints,
no bearded gunmen, no roadside bombs planted along the way; the only hazards here
were fire trucks and car accidents. Even so, he wanted the first day, the first drive,
to be as smooth as possible. Standing in the crisp January cold, Fred kept his eyes
on the portico. A few miles away, in a building that looked like a remnant of Soviet
architecture, the crowd was gathering.

It was just a few minutes past nine in the morning on January 22, 2009, when the dark
door between the two white columns swung open and a middle-aged woman with short ash-blond
hair, wearing a coffee-brown woven wool pantsuit and kitten heels, emerged. She walked
down the steps to the car, a young statuesque woman with flowing jet-black hair following
closely behind her.

“Good morning, Fred!” said Hillary Clinton.

“Good morning, Madame Secretary.”

“Thank you for being here on our first day. We’re going to be very busy in the coming
few years.”

Fred opened the rear right door for his new boss before getting into the front passenger
seat. Huma Abedin, Hillary’s longtime aide, got in on the other side. Otis, the trusted
government driver who had ferried Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell around the city,
was at the wheel. The package, the now-full Cadillac sandwiched between a black SUV
leading in front and two following, headed down the hill to Foggy Bottom. When the
Department of State chose the area as its home in 1947, the swampy fog had long since
dissipated from the banks of the Potomac. As the government redeveloped the area,
the industrial slum, smoke stacks, and tenement dwellings at the southwestern edge
of the nation’s capital gradually gave way to more government offices, luxury residential
buildings such as the curved Watergate complex, and the boxlike white marble Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts. But the area’s name had stuck, an inadvertent reminder
of the fog of information that American diplomats often had to swim through to make
their decisions.

That morning, the skies were a bright blue, and Hillary’s mind was clear. She felt
excited about her new job, expectant about the contribution she could make to her
country, and determined to tackle the daunting challenges facing America around the
world. The chatter of National Public Radio’s
Morning Edition
news program provided a background hum as she went over the day’s schedule with Huma
one more time.

Clinton had spent the past few weeks preparing for her Senate confirmation hearing
as secretary of state in Barack Obama’s cabinet. She had to lay out her vision for
American diplomacy and leadership around the world while demonstrating her loyalty
to the new president, her former rival. But she also had to absorb vast amounts of
information to prove she knew all the issues. It was like preparing for the bar exam
again. On the campaign trail, Obama had reduced her foreign policy experience to sipping
tea with foreign leaders as a First Lady. She was not exactly a neophyte but neither
was she a seasoned diplomat, so the learning curve was steep. But Hillary had always
known how to be a star pupil. She nailed questions about the more obscure, dry pet
subjects of her former Senate colleagues and brought them to life as though she’d
spent years thinking about Arctic policy and mineral-rich countries. She talked about
cruise ships sailing past Point Barrow because of melting ice and Botswana’s great
stewardship of its diamond riches. She outwonked all the wonks in the Senate room
by mastering all the details. Clinton also explained how she envisaged the exercise
of American power: it had to be “smart.” Not just soft diplomacy, with a focus on
development or just hard military power, but a combination—an updated, global version
of the Marshall Plan. “Smart power” was a concept coined by political scientists like
Joseph Nye but had never been implemented methodically before.

Hillary couldn’t remember the last time she’d had some real time off. She had gone
from being First Lady to running for senator, then jumped from the daily business
of the Senate to the campaign trail to her new, unexpected job. The race for the Democratic
nomination had been bruising, hurtful, and ugly. She had been defeated and discredited
by her loss despite the millions of loyal voters who had backed her. Campaigning for
Barack Obama on the shoulders of such loss had just added to her exhaustion. Obama
had urged her to accept the job with unusual candor, telling Clinton he needed her,
but serving her former nemesis involved a bracing lesson in humility. Clinton didn’t
know how the relationship with Obama would work out, but she knew what a president
needed—team players. Her Girl Scout instincts kicked in. She was on the team and she
wanted the whole team to look good. She wanted America to look good again. Hillary
was ready to play, but she was also ready for some red-carpet treatment, some respect,
and some camera attention to soothe her campaign wounds. New challenges invigorated
her. The adrenaline had kicked in, and she felt and looked energized, ready for her
grand entrance.

*   *   *

The package pulled up outside the main entrance of the State Department. Fred opened
the car door for the secretary of state. The crowd erupted in cheers.

“Hello, hello,” she said in her booming voice as she stepped out of the limousine.
She held her hands above her head, clapping, smiling, and began to shake hands with
the senior officials who stood on the red carpet to welcome her. Clinton walked the
rope line, greeting her new staff, shaking hands with some of them. One man screamed
“Yeah, Yeah!” as though he’d just won something. She shook hands with the two guards
standing by the glass doors before walking into the Harry S. Truman building and being
engulfed in a crowd of hundreds of State Department employees. Colin Powell, a deeply
respected and personable former general, had been greeted with applause in the State
Department lobby when he arrived in 2001, and even Condoleezza Rice had received an
unexpectedly warm welcome in the midst of the Iraq debacle in 2005.

But no one could pack a room almost half the size of a soccer field like Hillary.
A polarizing, controversial politician, she was also a celebrity with the ability
to elicit fervent support and admiration. The three-story-high lobby of the State
Department echoed with rapturous applause, punctuated with cries of “We love you,
Hillary!” Across the whole floor and the steps leading to the mezzanine on either
side, dozens of people craned their necks, stood on their toes, or leaned over the
glass-and-aluminum railing to catch a glimpse of her. People waved their cell phones
to snap pictures, and camera crews beamed the event to television networks around
the country and beyond. Hillary waded through the human mass pressed against thirty-foot-tall
marble and granite columns. Three diplomatic security agents cleared the way in front
of her, Fred and another agent following behind. Even a friendly crowd of overexcited
Foreign Service officers could crush the secretary. She smiled, excited but poised,
shook hands, paused to speak to those who didn’t let go quickly enough.

In the State Department lobby, there were young women who had voted for her in the
primaries and older women who’d always admired her as a trailblazer for women’s rights
and a fighter who had defied the odds and overcome adversity in her personal life.
There were those who always voted for a Democrat. And then there were all the others
too—American diplomats and civil servants, men and women, who had felt sidelined during
almost eight years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and were demoralized by the damage
that the Bush administration’s high-handed foreign policy had inflicted upon America’s
image. When Clinton made it to the landing of the steps leading to the mezzanine,
Steve Kaskent, a representative of the Foreign Service union, introduced her to some
of her twenty thousand new employees, joking that it looked like they were all crammed
in the space below them. No one even tried to hide their relief that the country was
moving on.

“Both you and the president have decried the neglect that the Foreign Service and
the State Department have suffered in recent years,” he said. “No one knows better
than the people in this room and our colleagues around the world how true that is.
We are thrilled to have you here.”

In the crowd below, Lissa Muscatine looked around her and smiled, pleased to see her
longtime friend bathed in affection and appreciation, a welcome change after almost
two years of searing battles and disappointments. Muscatine had been Hillary’s speechwriter
at the White House when she was First Lady, and she had once again agreed to craft
Hillary’s speeches to the world.

Clinton waved and bowed her head, smiling. Fred, with a long, serious face and round
cheeks, stood guard behind her, his dark hair parted neatly to the side, his eyes
darting around.

“I believe with all my heart that this is a new era for America,” Clinton said into
the microphone. In front of her, the northern glass wall of the lobby was lined with
the flags of all the countries where the United States had an embassy and where she
would deliver the Obama administration’s message of engagement with the world over
the coming four years. She warned the crowd that it wasn’t going to be easy. She asked
her new staff to think creatively about old problems. She said she welcomed debate,
and she waved her right hand to emphasize each point. It sounded like a political
stump speech, but this was a new campaign to lift the spirits of those who kept the
American foreign policy machine running. She announced to wild cheers that President
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden would be visiting the State Department, or as Clinton
called it, “this organic, living creature called the Building.”

“This is a team, and you are the members of that team. There isn’t anything that I
can get done from the seventh floor or that the president can get done from the Oval
Office, unless we make clear we are all on the American team. We are not any longer
going to tolerate the kind of divisiveness that has paralyzed and undermined our ability
to get things done for America.”

Then it was time to get down to work. Hillary had been in the building many times
before, as a First Lady during her husband’s presidency and, more recently, during
the transition period between Bush and Obama. Like everybody else, she rode in one
of the main elevators. But now, as secretary of state, she had access to a private,
wood-paneled elevator that took her straight to the foyer of her quarters on the seventh
floor. She walked down Mahogany Row, a carpeted hallway that was home to the top tier
of State Department officials, one of the rare plush hallways in a building that otherwise
reminded some of its occupants of a psychiatric institution, all stark white corridors,
white fluorescent lights, and linoleum floors. Though it was her first day at work,
it was a normal workday in the building and Hillary stopped in each office along the
way, shaking hands and meeting her staff. Then she walked into her light-flooded outer
office with its elegant living room furniture and fireplace, and stepped into her
darker, smaller study. In a drawer of the desk, a welcome note awaited her. Signed
“Condoleezza Rice,” it had almost been thrown out the day before by staffers clearing
the office of all things Condi, saved at the last minute by a staffer who noticed
the name on the envelope in the drawer. Neither Rice nor Clinton ever revealed what
the note said.

The two women had first met in August 1996, when Rice was provost of Stanford University.
Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea, was deciding which university to attend, and Rice welcomed
mother and daughter at the start of their tour of the university campus. The two women
had spoken occasionally during the eight years and three weeks that Clinton spent
in the Senate, but they were backing different teams. Clinton, like most Democrats,
was a harsh critic of the Republican administration. Now Clinton found herself in
Rice’s position, occupying her old office. There may have been a new president inside
the White House who was all about change, but outside, it was the same unruly world
that Rice had faced. Clinton had consulted all her living predecessors, but it was
over a long dinner at Rice’s Watergate apartment in Washington a few weeks after the
presidential election that she got the most up-to-date information about all the players
on the international scene and the lowdown on every issue in her in-box. It would
be the first of many conversations between the two women over the next four years.

On the second floor of the Building, around the corner from the mezzanine, Fred settled
into his professional quarters. His job guarding the secretary put him in charge of
a large team of Diplomatic Security agents who would protect Clinton during every
move she made, both in the United States and around the world. A thin-built, meticulous
man with an aquiline nose, he looked more like a banker than a security official.
He kept his surroundings uncluttered—on one wall, a world map; on another, a flat-screen
television; on a table, his parting gift from Iraq, the flag that had flown over the
Iraqi Republican palace that had housed America’s diplomats before the new embassy
was inaugurated. The flag was now folded into a triangle, resting in a flag box with
a plaque thanking him for his services.