The State of Hillary: A Mixed Record on the Job

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talks with aides before a joint press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow

Callie Shell / Aurora for TIME

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"That was the greatest trip, just unbelievable," Clinton says now. We were sitting in her hotel suite the day after her Jerusalem gaffe, the Secretary in an electric-blue shift rather than her usual formal jacket and pants. She was wearing glasses and appeared rather freckly without her makeup. "I guess that trip has animated and informed everything I've done since," she said. She emerged from the trip reinvigorated, with a new mission. By the end of 1995, at the U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing, the First Lady had propounded a new Clinton Doctrine: "Women's rights are human rights."(See pictures of Beijing's changing skyline.)

Clinton is not an easy interview. She is preternaturally cautious, a consequence of her Methodist propriety and 20 years of insane public scrutiny. She does not like to talk about herself, but she did tell me one interesting story about Bhutto. When her husband was governor of Arkansas, she and Bill and Chelsea visited London and stood on the sidewalk outside Bhutto's hotel, waiting for the then Pakistani Prime Minister to arrive. "She was wearing a yellow embroidered shalwar kameez with a chiffon scarf. I was just a fan, standing on the sidewalk with everyone else. It was the only time I ever did anything like that," Clinton says.

When Clinton and Bhutto met formally, on the first day of the 1995 trip, they hit it off immediately, in part because Bhutto was also obsessed with the impact the Islamist tide was having on women and children. I remember asking Bhutto that day what the biggest change in her country had been over the past 25 years, and she said, "I used to be able to walk down the street wearing jeans, without a headscarf. Now I can't." When I asked her why, she said — bluntly — "The Saudis," who had been aggressively funding religious schools. Of course, Bhutto's acquiescence to, and participation in, the general corruption of the Pakistani government was part of the reason public schools were so inadequate and madrasahs became popular. (See pictures from the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's assassination.)

Ironically, the rise of Sunni extremist groups like al-Qaeda has brought Clinton's interests — microfinance, education and health care — to the center of national-security policy for the first time. The impetus came not from the State Department but from the military, where counterinsurgency doctrine demanded that social services in war zones — schools, justice, economic development — reinforce the military's efforts to secure the population. As a result, there was immediate chemistry between Clinton and General David Petraeus, author of the Army's counterinsurgency manual, who became one of her prime military mentors when she served on the Senate Armed Services Committee. At one point, well before Obama made his presidential intentions known, I asked Petraeus if there was any potential Democratic candidate who understood how his mind worked, and he said, "You mean, aside from Hillary?"

It was Clinton who brought together Petraeus and Holbrooke ("my two alpha males," she calls them) for the first time — at her home in Washington on the Friday before the Obama Inauguration. The affection and respect she gained for the military while serving in the Senate has helped make the relationship between State and the Pentagon less fraught than usual — although Defense Secretary Gates' insistence on the need for bigger State Department budgets hasn't hurt. In fact, relations with the Pentagon have gone smoother, at times, than Clinton's relationship with the White House staff. Clinton was particularly irritated by the ridiculously strict vetting process that thwarted her favored candidate for USAID director, Paul Farmer, from getting the job. "It was all sorts of niggling things," says a Clinton adviser, "like, Farmer had at one point brought more than $10,000 in cash into Haiti. The money was for a needle-exchange program, but the amount was illegal."

Another of Clinton's military mentors, retired General Jack Keane, once told me, "I'm a Republican. I disagree with her about practically everything, but she'd make a hell of a Commander in Chief." There is a palpable toughness to the woman, a hard edge that contrasts with the President's instinctive impulse toward conciliation. One of the sharpest exchanges of the presidential campaign came when Obama accused Clinton of echoing the "bluster" of George W. Bush after she said the U.S. would be able to "obliterate" Iran if it used nuclear weapons against Israel. Clinton's edgier tone has been evident from the start of the Administration: she took a sharper position than the President on an Israeli settlement freeze by claiming, in May, that Obama wanted "to see a stop to settlements. Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions." And then, in Jerusalem, her use of the word unprecedented seemed a rhetorical leap beyond the No Drama ground rules.(Read "Clinton's Collateral Damage.")

The White House was not entirely thrilled with either statement. But then the White House staff is several steps removed from a negotiating process. The Palestinians are weak and divided. The Israelis have been difficult, as always: whenever Mitchell raises East Jerusalem in talks with the Israeli Foreign Minister, the Israeli stands up and walks out of the room. Despite Netanyahu's momentary, tactical enthusiasm for peace talks, his Likud Party has always favored the de facto incorporation of Palestinian lands into the state of Israel.

Hillary's Choice
The tensions between the White House and State raise a fascinating question going forward. Obama and Clinton are in substantive agreement on the President's diplomacy-first philosophy and on most policy issues — although neither is willing to disclose the content of their private conversations — but style often predicts substance in foreign policy; neither Obama's gauziness nor Clinton's inconsistent bluntness overseas seems particularly solid. There is a growing perception that the Administration's policies have been thwarted across the board: Afghanistan is a mess, Iran seems ready to scuttle the nuclear negotiations, there's no progress in the Middle East, the Syrians and North Koreans remain recalcitrant, the Russians have been offered a freebie on missile defense, and the Chinese have been given a pass on human rights with no apparent quid pro quos.

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