The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (41 page)

HH: Moldova, yeah.

HH: I want to cover just a couple more things with him. On page 180 of the book, you quoted Glenn Kessler of the
Washington Post
interview where he asked Hillary about 2016, and she says please, I will be so old. You detail her broken elbow, which you said was a metaphor for her first year. You detail her concussion. You detail her explosion before the Senate Benghazi Committee. Is age a factor here? I mean, she seems relentless. She seems a force of nature. At the end of
HRC
, as I told you, I called an old Clinton hand and said wow, she’s just as tough as leather. But I mean, 69 is 69, Jonathan Allen.

JA:
It is. You know, you’ll recall President Reagan was running for president at 69-years-old, I believe. It’s, I think it’s more of a factor for the American voter than it is for Hillary Clinton herself. I don’t think she’s going to make that decision based on age. I think she might make a decision based on health if there’s some health issue that makes it difficult for her to run. But I don’t think age is going to stop her. I do think that it might in voters’ minds. If she gets up on stage, and she looks old, or she looks infirmed, or she looks like she’s not all together there, then yes, age will be a factor for voters. If she seems vibrant and capable, then you know, I think that’ll recede in most voters’ minds. But that’s the important place, and it’s one of those things that’s I think almost impossible to poll. How many people want to tell a pollster they feel like they’re not going to vote for the person because they’re too old? I mean, you know, there are worse things to say to a pollster, but I don’t know that you would get real read on that in polling.

HH: Yeah, when she said that, I will be so old to Kessler, I thought maybe at that moment she was thinking that. But in the background here, there are two very strong women–Huma Abedin and Chelsea Clinton. And Chelsea, of course, you treat her very gently, and I think appropriately so. She’s not an official person. She’s a child of. Huma is a public figure, and you deal with her less gently, though not, you know, sledgehammer or anything like that. And you leave the worse charges against her out. What do those two women want her to do?

JA:
That’s a great question. You know, we did not talk to Huma for this book, or to Chelsea Clinton for this book, so I can’t speak, and can’t claim to know their mind. But you know, I think generally speaking, the people around Hillary Clinton want her to do what she wants to do. I mean, and I don’t think many of them think that they’re going to be able to talk her out of doing whatever she wants to do. I think most of them think she’s already two feet into a race. You know, the way we put it in the book, and I think we lay out the case for this in the book over the course of the chapters, is she’s been running ever since the 2008 campaign. And it’s just a matter of whether she says stop at some point, and I don’t see that happening right now.

HH: Let’s go back to what will be the most famous clip used in the 2016 campaign if she get in, cut number 1:

Sen. Ron Johnson: 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: Now Jonathan Allen, you reveal on page 349 that Philippe Reines plants this seed at a briefing. “Everyone is briefed or testified as wanted to stand up and scream what the hell difference does it make,” he said during a prep session. Well, it made a lot of difference to her political future. That is a damning quote.

JA:
It is. It’s, you know, I think people watched that and they thought, look at this reaction. Somebody got under her skin, and she got angry, and it’s raw emotion. And to some extent, that’s good for Hillary Clinton, because there’s so many people who see her as robotic. So even if it’s not the reaction
that they would like to see, generally speaking, the show of emotion can be a good thing for her. But in this case, what Philippe is telling, is saying behind closed doors to her is an acknowledgement that this was preplanned, or at least it was something she was thinking about ahead of time. And it gives it a manufactured feel once you know that.

HH: And it also, but it makes it more damning, because it was such a bad strategic choice. Let me ask you about…

JA:
That’s it. Right, that, too.

HH: Yeah, I mean, just, yeah, okay, preplanned. Preplanned like the red button’s button was preplanned, and that was another Philippe question. Bill Clinton–Page 249. Bill offered his opinions for Obama. It was too much for Obama, who said he could only take Bill in doses. Can they contain him? I mean, the whole Clinton rewrite speech, we talked about it yesterday, he took her concession speech, rewrote it without telling her. He goes places, he does things. He is a force majeure in American history. People, as you write, she got great advice about her numbers will plummet the moment she starts running. His whole eight years come back. He left with that endless press conference with the pardons of Marc Rich. I mean, there’s so much. Can they contain Bill Clinton?

JA:
You know, it’s one of those great questions, and I think it’ll be, if she runs, I think we’ll get the answer to that. I think it’s hard to contain him, and I think it’s particularly hard to contain him if you’re Hillary Clinton. She’s shown no aptitude for that in the past, although I do think during her years at the State Department, he did recede a little bit. I think he’s starting to learn how to be if not secondary, at least not sort of tromp all over the scenery behind her and take all the attention of the public. Al Gore in 2000 distanced himself from President Clinton, and that was a terrible mistake. President Clinton’s approval ratings were pretty high. He should have found a good way to use him.

HH: Now you write in here that when Osama bin Laden was killed, the president called Bill Clinton. I think it was the President. Maybe it was Panetta, to tell him, and he said I don’t know what you’re talking about, implying that Hillary had not told him that the raid was going down. Do you believe that?

JA:
I do believe it. Maybe that’s naïve of me, but yeah, I can believe. Look,
the two of them have kept a lot from each other and from the public over the years, so the ability or the desire to keep a secret doesn’t necessarily surprise me. And the other thing is one of the things that Hillary Clinton was very worried about behind closed doors was how many people had been informed that we were seeking out a potential bin Laden raid, and that we were doing all the preparations for it. She was very concerned that if it didn’t happen soon, it was going to leak out. So there’s something to be, there’s something to be said for there being a little bit of evidence at least that that was her feeling, that it should be shared with fewer people, not more. But who really knows what goes on in the conversations?

HH: It’s a fascinating bit of reporting, one of the many. One last segment with Jonathan Allen.

HH: I want to thank my guest, Jonathan Allen, who along with Amie Parnes, have produced really a terrific book,
HRC: State Secrets And the Rebirth Of Hillary Clinton
. I want to close, Jonathan, by going to an obscure part of the book, page 151. When Hillary got to State, she knew about the QDR, which Defensenicks know about—the Quadrennial Defense Review. And she wanted to produce, and got organized, the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which has turned out to be, and I’m quoting now, “In the end, they had a 242-page blueprint for elevating diplomacy and development as equal partners with military force in the conduct of American foreign policy. The first QDDR’s goals included making ambassadors CEOs for American agencies in foreign countries, bolstering soft power tools like economic assistance, improving the lives of women and girls around the world, reorganizing the Department’s bureaus to better reflect modern challenges, insuring that diplomats had up to date computers and handheld devices, reforming the Foreign Service exam to bring in sharp, new diplomats, increasing diplomat direct-engagement with the people of their host countries, not just their governments, and using technology such as social media platforms for diplomacy. The exercise was aimed at strengthening the institution, even if the medicine tasted bad going down.” And my margin note is that’s it? They did a strategic review, and they came up with handheld devices? And it goes to my biggest critique. I don’t think she has a strategic vision.

JA:
Yeah, I think of her biggest problem in 2008, I would agree with you. I
think her biggest problem in the 2008 campaign is she didn’t make an argument for why she should be president. And Barack Obama went around the country and he gave speeches, and he would give out his policy prescriptions. And then at the end, he would say and that’s why I’m running for president. And the people believed that he had a vision, and I think not only Democrats, I think there were independents and even Republicans who didn’t agree with him or agree with his vision, would say look, this guy… and a lot of people would say he didn’t live up to it in the presidency. But I think you know, in 2008, people looked at him and said here’s a guy with a vision. Here’s a guy with a way that he wants to do things that is different than what we are doing. And he can make some sort of explanation of how you get from where we are to his vision. And she failed at that in 2008.

HH: Well, my last comparison, I wrote a column in the
Washington Examiner
that made this argument.
She’s George Herbert Walker Bush.
She’s the one who was bested, who comes back eight years later, gets hit on the vision thing, but wins 40 states and 424 Electoral Votes, because after a revolutionary figure, Reagan, the Republican case, and Obama in the Democrats’ case, you want a consolidator. You want a pro’s pro, and they’re not exhausted. They still have the team.

JA:
Hugh, I’ll tell your listeners. I sent you a note when I read it. It’s a brilliant column. I think it made eminent sense. There’s a really great parallel there. It is a, George H.W. Bush was somebody who had been entrusted with a lot of jobs in the past, was a pretty competent manager of them, did not have a big vision for where he wanted to take the country, and in a lot of cases, disagreed with his own party where he wanted to take the country. And so it was a great column. I think everybody should read it.

CHAPTER 42

An Interview with
The New York Times
’ Nicholas Kristof, March 5, 2014

HH: Now yesterday, former Secretary of State Clinton compared the Russian aggression to actions taken by Hitler in the run up to World War II. What do you think of her assessment?

NK:
In the narrow sense, I mean, there is some analogy to the seizure of Sudetenland in 1938 in the sense that, you know, it was with the excuse of protecting the Germans in the case of Sudetenland and Russians in the case of Crimea. So that parallel in terms of the excuse holds. I don’t think the parallel holds in terms of where this is going to go. I mean, I don’t think that the seizure of Crimea is the first step toward Russia waltzing into Western Europe, for example. But it is, you know, absolutely a violation of Russia’s international obligations. And it also bodes ill for Russian-American cooperation in all kinds of things. I mean, it’s going to make it harder to, Russia is going to be less cooperative, even though it hasn’t been very cooperative, on Syria, on Iran. It may work a little more closely with China. And ultimately, I think this is going to be bad for Putin, because he doesn’t want a pro-Western success on his borders, and I think ultimately this is going to mean that Ukraine is going to be more of an anti-Russian force on his borders, and ultimately, it may take a while, but it is going to be a success, and that is going to undermine the Putins or the Putin successors in Russia.

HH: Well now there are two lines, then, that follow. One is geopolitical, and one’s political in the United States. Let me take the latter first. For former Secretary of State Clinton to use that language, she’s the one that presented the reset button.

NK:
Right.

HH: It’s sort of like Samuel Hoare condemning the Hoare-Laval Pact five years after he signed it. Isn’t that odd for her to be doing this?

NK:
Well, I mean, I think the Russian reset may have been, I don’t know that there was a huge downside in trying to reset things. We do need to work with Russia. I do think it’s important even now to continue to talk to Russia about Iran, about Syria, about North Korea. It kind of depends on how much faith she had that it was going to work or that she could trust Putin. And I just don’t have a sense of that.

HH: When she made that declaration five years ago and gave the reset button, your colleague, Peter Baker, told me yesterday, Nicholas, that the Russians simply do not have much respect for President Obama and his team. Do you agree with that assessment?

NK:
You know, I just don’t know. It’s hard to know. I do, I mean, the only time I met Putin I was just struck by the fact that he really seemed to be kind of in his own world, and living in his very kind of strong ideological world. Very, very smart guy, but getting information from his advisors, and with a very kind of skewed view of the world, so I think it probably is fair to say, though, that Russia and China and in the Middle East, there is a sense that Obama has focused inward and focused on American domestic problems, and I think that there is some feeling there. I don’t think that would have changed Putin’s judgments about whether to grab Crimea. I mean, after all, he grabbed parts of Georgia on George W. Bush’s watch, and Bush was very engaged worldwide. But there may be something to that.