Mara Rudman Oral History

This is the Mara Rudman interview oral history as a part of the [Barack] Obama Oral History Project. This is as close to an “in-the-family” conversation as I think we’ve ever had, given the people who are seated at the table. I’m usually treated as the elder statesman of the outfit. [laughter] That actually isn’t true, and I have an excellent illustration of this point because you [Mara Rudman] hold the James R. Schlesinger Chair Distinguished Professorship here at the Miller Center. And I thought, Let me go back and look because I had recalled—

For various interviews with Schlesinger.

—that James R. Schlesinger, almost exactly 40 years ago—

Wow.

—short a few months, his first affiliation with the University of Virginia—or maybe not. Was he an alum [alumnus]?

He was a grad [graduate] student.

Yes.

But his reaffirmation was through the Miller Center doing his oral history as part of the Jimmy Carter project. And, sure enough, I go back and look, and you’ll see—I can show you this [interview coversheet]—the visiting professor at the table [laughter] was Professor Robert Strong—

He was a child. [laughs]

I was just going to say.

Bob [Robert Strong] had been my predecessor as a research assistant to [James Sterling] Jim Young and the projects.

And the projects.

Wow.

And there is a famous picture internally of the Jimmy Carter interview down at Plains [Georgia], which is populated with all these very familiar faces, save one, and Bob’s face is not in that picture because—

Well, I was taking the picture.

Yes. [laughter]

But there’s actually a funny story.

And it was pre-selfies.

Jimmy Carter said, “This isn’t right,” and he made me give my camera to a Secret Service agent and come up and stand next to him, and they did one more picture.

Wow.

And I have the worst look on my face because the Secret Service agent is pushing this little button that will make the lens fall off [laughter] if he pushes it too hard. So the President has this lovely smile, and I’m going [makes a face]—

That’s great.

So anyway, Spencer [Bakich] has an extended affiliation with us too.

Yes. I was doing a count: I think this is my 14th oral history with you folks. I’m sorry, I have to say, [Bob] you’re a terrific picture-taker of people with presidents because in my office I have President [William J.] Clinton and me, and you’re the picture-taker. So, thank you.

Terrific. Well, that’s more history than I expected to capture. Anyway, we hope that you will treat this as an in-the-family conversation then.

One of the other names on here is Charles O. [Chuck] Jones, and we just lost Chuck recently. Chuck had been a longtime advocate of this kind of work and was particularly interested in what we could do with biography. He felt that there was an omission in the sociology of administrations—who are these people, what brings them together, and so forth. He was an advocate for that kind of coverage in our interviews, so we like to start way back. Tell us a little bit about your family and—

Way back.

—your upbringing. Was politics a standard fixture in your environment, or is this something that comes to you later?

No, it was pretty baked in. Even though neither of my parents was involved directly in politics—my dad was an anesthesiologist and my mom trained as a social worker but isn’t now—from literally as early as I can remember, I recall very robust dinner-table conversations where you were expected to kind of know what was happening in the world and have views on it. I will say that, much later, I was visiting home from law school—my dad had died suddenly when I was 17, right after high school graduation, but my mom was—I had come with a friend from law school. My mom decided to discuss her theory of childrearing with my friend. [laughter]

My friend later recounted to me: My mom has three kids who are—me and my brothers—pretty sarcastic, pretty sharp-edged in our humor. She has none of that. It’s definitely fully inherited from my dad. What she was describing to my friend is they had this theory that they really wanted to raise kids—and my guess is this came more from my dad—who were comfortable questioning authority and didn’t have a problem with doing that, were respectful but knew how to ask the tough questions. And then she looked at my friend with zero irony on her face and said, “My only concern is we may have gone a little too far and now there’s nothing I can do about it.” [laughter] My friend had been in law school with me and was like, “Hm, yeah, sounds on the mark.”

So I would say, part of our family culture was very much that.

And you grew up where?

My dad was actually an Army doctor for the first 10 years, I think, of his medical career, and so we were stationed in—I was born in San Antonio, Texas, at Fort Sam Houston, and then we were in Panama in the Canal Zone for four years, and then moved from there to the [Washington] D.C. area, where my dad was at Walter Reed [National Military Medical Center]. I believe he was at heart operations for I think it was probably Lyndon [B.] Johnson. It was definitely a President, a former President, in that time period.

That he treated?

Yes. He was an anesthesiologist, so he was in the operating room treating in that sense. But it was the height of Vietnam. And doctors, even those with families, were starting to be sent over—I think he had his own views about the war as well, so he left 10 years, about halfway, into his military career. I think he was a little more than halfway into a 20-year commitment and left at that point, which was kind of a big deal for him. That’s when we moved to Cape Cod [Massachusetts].

About what time was this?

It was, I think, 1971, 1972. But also, I will tell you, I remember—and this is, again, a lot about my dad—we watched the Watergate [political scandal] hearings, and we were still in the D.C. area, in Silver Spring [Maryland] then, because we watched them on television and he had us in front of the TV. I remember from him the books you could get out of the library—he was a huge reader—versus the books you were allowed to buy, because you “didn’t buy books from crooks.” So Jeb [Stuart] Magruder’s book he bought, but [H. R.] Haldeman, [John D.] Ehrlichman, anyone who was imprisoned, he still read them but he got them from the library. [laughter]

“No books from crooks.” That’s good.

Yes, don’t buy books from crooks.

That’s great, OK, yes.

And were you living up near Walter Reed at the time or—

I remember we had one car. We’d go pick him up at Walter Reed, but we lived right off of Colesville Road in Silver Spring, so right at the intersection, little far up from the intersection with Sligo Creek Parkway.

I had lived in Takoma, D.C., almost at the peak and very close to Walter Reed, so we would go. We would walk all the time.

Yes, exactly. Yes, yes, yes.

How did you come to choose, or how did your parents come to choose, the Cape [Cod]?

We had actually done a week of summer vacation with—there is a father in that family who my dad had grown up with in Springfield, Massachusetts, and we did family vacations together. I think that was the first time we went to the Cape for a week, and then we went back another summer. I think they were already considering it. My mom was having, for a variety of reasons, a tough time in the D.C. area, so I think my dad’s thought was moving somewhere that was calmer—but they literally didn’t know anybody up there. On one of those trips he had interviews with Cape Cod Hospital, and my parents met, together, met with a couple of families from the Jewish community on the Cape, which is small. But those families also are still family friends.

Did I see in the briefing book it was Hyannis [Massachusetts]?

Yes.

Given your dad’s—and maybe mother’s, too—interest in politics, was there a [John F.] Kennedy layer to any of this?

No. I mean once you get there, it is—Hyannis Port [Massachusetts] is where they’re from and very close by, but chichi, chichi-er. But Hyannis was because my dad felt at that point that it was important to be very close to the hospital, so he could ride his bike there or make it by car in five minutes. That was the reason they chose Hyannis, yes. And the Kennedy stuff later was, you can’t grow up there and not be inundated by it, including answering millions of directions about how to get to the Kennedy compound and all your social studies teachers working as summer cops that help to patrol around the Kennedy compound. Yes, it’s kind of baked into local culture.

You finished school up there?

Public school through high school, yes, and then went to Dartmouth [College].

OK. And why Dartmouth?

It was where I got in. [laughter]

I know better than that.

Well, it was interesting. I had very different—I did a lot of speech and debate in high school, but I also did a Reform Jewish youth group, so I was ultimately deciding between Brandeis [University] and Dartmouth, which for some people may have been like, “Well, it’s automatic. It’s Dartmouth.” But my parents were very hands-off on the whole applying to colleges and where we went. I think they were both public school people. They would have been just as happy with that, so I was deciding between the two.

Amherst [College] is where I really wanted to go, and I was waitlisted there. And I wanted to go there because when I looked around at schools, there was a senior there, and every other school it was probably freshmen that I had met with, so I probably had a very different feel for it. I didn’t know how you gamed waiting lists or any of those things, so I just—I wasn’t going to get in. Then I went to visit both Dartmouth and Brandeis, and I had people I respected from my public high school who were at Dartmouth who made a big case for me. But they were not cheerleaders for Dartmouth. What they said is, “It’s an interesting place, you’ll learn a lot, and they need people like you here.”

Because?

Yes, what did you think that meant?

I think from this guy, named Jed Alger, it was a little bit of the questioning authority, not being “rah-rah” and bringing that into the environment, which was also probably—he also knew how to appeal to me for getting me there.

You may have already said this: in the pecking order of the siblings, you—

I was the middle. Middle, but only girl.

OK, middle, but only girl.

OK. And did your older brother also go to college?

Yes, he did. We have a little sibling competition that’s generally unacknowledged. [laughter] He had gone to Duke [University]. He was at Duke his freshman year. He had been home like three weeks when my dad died suddenly. Without telling anyone, he told Duke he wasn’t coming back, that he felt it was too far away. We had a younger brother. He took the next year off and went to community college on Cape Cod and applied to other places, including Amherst and Tufts [University].

Tufts was the school closest to the Cape. And, again, we had this younger brother who was just starting high school. But he also applied to Amherst, and he got into Amherst, which of course killed me. [laughter] Then that he didn’t go, and he went to Tufts. From his sophomore year on, he was at Tufts, and then he ultimately went to UVM [University of Vermont] for med [medical] school but a little later on.

Forgive me for asking, because this is a very personal question, but were there financial concerns?

Yes.

These are very expensive private schools that you’re talking about.

Oh, yes, yes. That was part of Dartmouth being amazing. And I will say, I think people, if they just look at my initial thing, Oh, father was a doctor, mother was a homemaker, we went to Dartmouth, of course you’re in the—I had professors who treated me that way, which they only did once. [laughter]

Ultimately, from talking to family friends and my older brother, we decided I would go for the first year and see, because I hadn’t gotten financial aid since I had been admitted before my dad died suddenly. I met with one of the financial aid officers, I think it was literally when I was up there before freshman fall semester, and they gave me work-study right away, and I used all of my bat mitzvah savings to pay for first year. That, and my dad had had a boat and we had sold that. I worked as the dorm [dormitory] janitor. Very unglamorous job, but you could—first, I was a freshman girl at Dartmouth and carrying out everyone’s beer bottles. I would usually get a lot of help doing it because people would feel guilty, [laughter] and it didn’t take the full 10 hours a week, and you got paid for 10 hours a week. I was always finding jobs like that.

But then I had a wise freshman advisor who, when I described the situation to her—she was in the admissions office—said, “You need to go into that financial aid office every single semester and find a reason to talk to them because they need to not see you as a piece of paper. They need to see you as a person who’s going to come back no matter what decisions they make about you.” It was a little uncomfortable, a little embarrassing, but I did that. And it really was critical, both for just the difference in the packages and they helped out tremendously for my final three years.

There were also complications because of various things, so I would go in with, “What do I do? I can’t miss this. I’m not going to be able to stay here.” My family could not help out further after freshman year.

And so the Dartmouth financial aid office, I laid it out to them. You had to have a requirement to declare yourself a financial independent. I forget what it was. I didn’t exactly meet it. They said, “Apply as a financial independent.” And then, a year later, when my brother, who was less open with Tufts about the back-and-forth but wasn’t getting anywhere near the support I was—but I talked to Dartmouth about it. They talked to Tufts to make sure that there was—it still wasn’t the same, but it was much better than it had been.

That’s really important to know, so thanks for letting us know.

Yes, yes.

And decent of Dartmouth, on your brother’s behalf.

Yes, so my allegiance to Dartmouth is huge for how they handled all that. And it’s far from like, I have loved everything they have done over the years, but in terms of the degree of taking care of people in their community. Also, I ended up getting this very weird scholarship they had that was part of my going to Harvard [University] for law school. I had been out three years—I was in a fortunate position to be deciding between Yale [University] and Harvard for law school. Harvard had a scholarship that gave you, I forget now, but I think it was like $5,000 a year—it felt like real money in the early ’90s—for a Dartmouth graduate who went to Harvard Law School. They continued—and they funded my first international trip post-college as well. So yes, I still feel like I owe them a lot.

In terms of your academics there or any extracurricular, what’s important to know about your time at Dartmouth?

I was involved in a few different, I would say, extracurricular—I never thought of things outside the classroom as “extracurricular.” I felt like that was a really important part of the learning I was going to do. At some point it dawned on me that the biggest thing I had gotten from my Dartmouth education—I had some great professors. I learned a lot of stuff. I met a much broader spectrum of people than I had been exposed to previously, both from who was on campus and who came to campus, that I was included in discussions with. And I lived my senior year in a senior society that’s since, sadly, been disbanded but was consciously created to bring together people from diverse experiences across the campus. There, also, that was a fantastic opportunity.

But I felt like, by the time I graduated, I could be comfortable holding my own in any room, with any group of people, which was tremendous. Both my horizons had been broadened in terms of what opportunities might be out there for me, and just a sense of how to navigate different types of challenging situations. I joke that it was a “finishing school,” but not in the way that people think of finishing schools.

You mentioned your bat mitzvah and having taken some of the funds that you earned in that process. Tell us about the role of Judaism in your life, given where your career takes you.

My parents were both culturally very Jewish and not religiously so. I think the Jewish community on Cape Cod was part of belonging to a community of people. And it was kind of a small but mighty collection of people, I would say, because compared to big cities—I mean, and giving you just a sense of contrast, when I went to Dartmouth, I thought Dartmouth had a huge number of Jewish people. It was the lowest in the Ivy League, and it was maybe 10 percent Jewish, but I had grown up in classes where there were three of us in my graduating class in high school. And so what I got, for me probably more than my two brothers, was a real sense of identity as a Jewish person that has come up in various ways, and I have some of the learnings from that.

At Dartmouth, the number of tough conversations with people, both because I wasn’t part of Hillel, the official thing—though the rabbi who led Hillel was the older brother of somebody I’d served on a regional youth group board with, so I knew him well. I would go and talk with him and help him out in some situations. But I also had some challenging conversations with my senior society—who were good friends—who were making all sorts of assumptions. I was the only Jewish person in the group when they were recruiting the next year’s class, and I realized they had rejected all candidates who happened to have a Jewish identity. And if they care about the range of people and views—so it led to some challenging conversations.

But also, one of my best professors there, who really did shape a lot of my traveling and work and exposure to international relations, was Ian Lustick, who later became professor at Penn [University of Pennsylvania]. So I studied with him. I ultimately did a thesis with him. He was starting to put together a book on what similarities and contrasts between England’s problems with Ireland; France with Algeria; and Israel, West Bank, and Gaza. This was in the 1980s. My thesis was a thread of that. I later got money from Dartmouth to go—in a leave of absence from my congressional office, which is unusual—to spend three months in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza at what became the beginning of the First Intifada, so 1986, 1987.

I remember describing to my mom that I was going to do this. Well, first, I was describing my studies with Lustick to her. She said, “Aren’t there other parts of the world?” [laughter] Basically, What’s this guy’s problem? There was a certain assumption, If he was Jewish, wouldn’t I—I was like, “Mom, he is way more observant than we’ve ever grown up to be, so just FYI [for your information] on that. You can be Jewish and have a variety of takes on this.”

And then, sure enough, when I was actually going there—it was when I went back again during law school, and I had money from law school to go. I was going to be in Jerusalem and then also in Belfast [Northern Ireland], a little compare and contrast. And the South Africa sanction movement I think was strong at that time. Again, my mom is pretty Left. My parents, at least for that period of time, really had been. And my mom said—other people were concerned I was going into the middle of the intifada because it was still ongoing in the West Bank. She wasn’t concerned about personal violence. She was like, “Again, what about a place like South Africa where it’s not Jews that are involved in doing these things?”

So those kinds of threads came up. I would say my identity had a role, but more in contributing to how I questioned and analyzed situations than in taking particular positions on things. And partly it was the training I had from people like Ian Lustick, who I really learned a lot from even though I don’t agree with him on a lot right now.

Bob?

Well, I did want to come back to things you mentioned, more how it affects your family or your father’s decision. He sat you down to watch Watergate hearings. In your personal life, what’s the first major political event that affects you in a profound way?

I actually remember, and I don’t know where I was giving a talk, but I went back and found it at some point. It must have been my senior year of high school because I actually voted for John [Bayard] Anderson. I threw away a vote, my first vote in 1980. And I recall—I don’t know whether I was in speech and debate—there was somewhere I was giving a talk, and I described the choices. I was so not a Carter person. This guy was not impressing me. Ronald Reagan, no way. And [Edward M. “Ted”] Kennedy, I remember being conflicted because—was Kennedy ’80? Yes, that you weren’t supposed to do that [primary a sitting president of your own party], but I figured if he was, it was for a good reason. So there was some talk I was giving somewhere in high school about what this year was and what we were faced with. But, again, I think those were probably conversations at home, and I couldn’t tell you how my parents voted. I remember being shocked when I got to Dartmouth—because, again, that election was that November, my freshman fall—that there were so many people voting for Reagan. I was like, You’re students! [laughter] What kind of school have I gotten to? But I voted for Anderson. I clearly remember that.

I think that my home was not a warm space for Richard Nixon, from earlier, so the Watergate stuff—I knew my parents were Democrats, but I don’t recall discussing with—I have no idea who my mom voted for. Though, actually, my mom—this also tells you a lot about the relationship. I was working on Hillary [Rodham] Clinton’s campaign in, frankly, both 2008 and then in 2016. I drive home to visit my mom, who lives in a house 200 yards from my brother, and there’s a Bernie Sanders sign in her lawn. [laughter]

At first I thought it was a joke, right? She was in her eighties at that point. And no, she gives me this robust defense for why Bernie Sanders is the best candidate and not Hillary Clinton. I actually walked down the street to my brother’s house: “Someone else is going to have to have that conversation. [laughter] I’m not reentering that again.” That sign stayed up well past the end of the primary season, let me just say.

She was “feeling the Bern” [Bernie Sanders’s campaign slogan].

Yes. Oh, yes, yes.

What about Jimmy Carter was not impressing you, or impressing you in a negative way?

I don’t recall exactly. I can give you the answer, in retrospect, that I didn’t get a sense that he had been particularly effective as President. And I feel like I remember stories about managing the tennis courts and who got to play on them, and just the micromanagement side, and not having a great political pulse. But I don’t know how much of that is affected by dealing with him in the post-presidential, where I know he’s got a robust and rosy reputation.

When I was in my NSC [National Security Council] job with President Clinton, and a little bit with the beginning of [Barack] Obama, when things like the funeral delegations got put together and you had to corral the former presidents, I saw the wear and tear on various national security advisors of having to deal with Carter, and also how he dealt with presidents, whether Democrats or not. And it was not easy.

He’s got image. He’s done a lot of great things, but in the kind of rough-and-tumble, how you get stuff done in politics. But I think that’s a post-vision of it, not being in his administration.

But I’m not hearing any ideological or specific policy differences that you might have had with him.

No, but I’m much more about how you get stuff done.

All right, so anything else from the Dartmouth years we should know about?

I don’t think so. I think that’s a lot more than I expected.

Russell, can I ask? From those years, what did you learn from your thesis, your senior thesis, about Northern Ireland that you could apply or not apply as you moved forward?

The thesis, which again, was the early stages of Lustick working on his book, for me ended up being, What kind of leadership rescues a democracy from possible disintegration over a territorial threat? It was looking at how [David] Lloyd George, in the early 1900s, handled challenges with Ireland, you know, pre-Northern Ireland; how [Charles] de Gaulle managed Algeria for the French Republic; and then, what lessons you could take from that for Israeli leadership. That would have been the early ’80s.

What I recall as one of my conclusions is that it was often kind of a militaristic, security-minded, seemingly sometimes antidemocratic leader, or leading in certain ways, that could actually end up restabilizing the kind of mainland democracy. Positioning yourself in a certain way for your polity that looked, and perhaps was, very tough on security, but you had the ultimate—your horizon was reequilibrating the democracy that was in crisis, and you were ultimately going to separate from the territory in question to do that.

It was interesting. I don’t remember exactly where Yitzhak Rabin was at that point, but if you look at how he emerged to end up accepting the Oslo Principles, and he came—and Israeli leadership often comes from military security backgrounds to do it. He went back and forth between that and politics, but it was not that far from the thesis and the conclusions about it.

And you mentioned the travel award, and this was while you were an undergraduate?

No. Dartmouth had at the time—and my guess is, they don’t still in this way—different kinds of fellowships, as I recall, that you could apply for up to five years after graduation. I had two friends, one of whom had gotten the money to do work in Nepal with Tibetan refugees and another who was on the Thai-Cambodian border. That gave me the thought of, Oh, I could—

I worked hard to get the job with my hometown congressman, but I was still very interested in these issues. I don’t think I got that full scholarship because I remember what I ended up getting was some combination of stuff that included a very low-interest loan, which—a little bit crazily because I still had these loans from undergrad—I took to fund the three months. I worked for a member of Congress who, shockingly, agreed to let me go and write for a hometown newspaper under my own byline while I was there.

And so you graduate, then you finish Dartmouth, and—

Yes, and I had an internship that was supposed to be a six-month internship at the National Wildlife Federation. I got a job with Gerry [E.] Studds, my hometown Congressman, about three months in and took a leave of absence from the six-month internship because it was a temporary job. [laughter]

That is cheek.

Yes, yes. I had guidance from someone inside, who was a former Dartmouth guy, who encouraged me to ask that way, but still. And it was a temporary job with Studds because I was taking the place of someone who had become a speechwriter for Geraldine Ferraro when she was named [as the Democratic vice presidential candidate], and then that person didn’t end up coming back. I stayed, though a favorite line in Studds’s office was, when I got my congressional ID [identification] changed from “temporary” to “permanent,” whatever it was—I had to go to the main administrative office, and somebody looked at me over reading glasses, and I was still pretty close to out of college, and she said, “What makes you think you’re permanent?” [laughter]

I came back to the office to tell them I got the right ID, but for the remaining three years I was in the office, that was the line with anything: “Mara, what makes you think you’re permanent?”

All right, so anything from the travels? No? All right. How long is the interval between undergraduate and law school?

Three years. I had applied to law school before—I took the LSAT [Law School Admission Test] my senior fall of undergrad because the scores would be good for five years, if they were good enough, and I wanted to be taking it while I was still in the mix. I got decent scores, and so I was conscious of that timeline and applied in the fall of the third year, then took three months to go and travel, and had a friend in the office get my acceptances so she would get the results. It was her address that we were using, which also meant that the office, who I hadn’t actually told that I was planning to leave the next fall, knew before I did what was happening for me with law schools. I came back, and then worked another five or six months, and then went to law school in the fall of ’87.

OK. What were your intentions in getting a law degree? You thought, Maybe I’ll practice law, or is this just a tool for something else?

I think a combination. First, I knew I had to pay for it, right? And so I was going to have to figure that out. Part of my thinking was, I’m only going to go to a law school that I know I can monetize. I knew I was interested in a lot of unconventional things as well, so I needed to have a degree from a place that I could both sell in the conventional world to earn the money I needed to pay back law school and that would carry me internationally as well. I was very comfortable with, if I could not get in anywhere, then I would do something else or I would try again later. I would “whatever.” That was my thought. So I applied to six schools, no safeties, and just did it that way.

But also, people had been telling me since I was a kid that I should be a lawyer, again because of the argument stuff. They were thinking very narrowly—litigation. I decided that I needed to have a list of things I wanted to do before I let myself apply to law school. And so I had this list that was basically just different jobs I’d want to have. For some of them you had to have a law degree, for none of them a law degree would hurt, so I met my own standard before I applied in doing that.

What was on your list?

I was going to ask.

Definitely writing, being a teacher, and—I’m trying to think. I was curious about trial law and what it would be like to litigate. And a lot of policy-related jobs.

Running for office ever?

No.

Interesting.

That was never a thought. And I would say in law school, even more so, I was like, Oh my gosh, the number of people who are here to run for office. I remember having these discussions—because I was somebody who had worked on Capitol Hill, and there were plenty of people who had gone straight through—with people who would come ask me, “What do you think I need to do to best position myself here for my run that’s going to be in 5 years or 10 years?” And I would say, “I think maybe getting interested in and committed to something that you want to change might be a place to start.” [laughter] But it was a good exposure to—frankly, I could pretty much track a number of the politicians I’ve worked with or for who were there then. Barack Obama was two years behind me, so he was a 1L [first-year law student] when I was a 3L [third-year law student], I’m pretty sure. No, he was one year behind me. I’m sorry.

Tell us about the Harvard experience, professors you worked with, topics that you worked on, and people you knew and met.

First, I remember 1L fall being very confused. The dean of students was the wife of somebody I had done an internship with in college. I had done a lot of environmental law work, hence National Wildlife Federation. So this guy, [Steven D.] Steve Stark, who also taught legal writing, was married to Sarah [E.] Wald, who was actually the daughter of Patricia [M.] Wald, the judge in D.C. I had known her a little bit before, and she would check in on me. I remember somewhere 1L fall running into her and saying, “I feel like I missed a day of orientation.” She’s like, “What are you talking about?” And I said, “I think I missed how they kill your firstborn if you don’t get an A on every exam, because otherwise I don’t understand the degree of intensity everyone is feeling about grades.”

Now, in truth, I had missed something very real. I definitely hadn’t appreciated how much the law firm pecking order for second-year summer, of what law firms you get interviewed by and the [Harvard] Law Review competition, becomes about what grades you’ve gotten from 1L year on and the distinctions between A, A−, B+. But I honestly came in thinking, This is bonkers, and the kind of hypercaffeinated degree of competition in people there.

And you can say it’s naive. How did I not expect that for who was there? But I remember that coloring a lot. I was really clear that I needed to have an environment and a community outside of my law school classmates. I lived with two people who were schoolteachers, one of whom I knew from friends of friends at Dartmouth, and rode my bike into the campus. I didn’t live on the campus or that close because I also needed a good deal on housing [rent].

I volunteered for the [Michael] Dukakis campaign that 1L fall because the guy who was his main speechwriter, Bill Woodward, who went on to become Madeleine Albright’s speechwriter, was a senior person in Gerry Studds’s office, with a title that you’d never know: he was the staff director of the [House of Representatives] Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee. [laughter] Right? Which used to exist then, right? Because for Studds, that was the most important thing. Bill was actually his senior policy guy. All of my writing, from constituent correspondence to preparation for—I did Studds’s House Foreign Affairs Committee work—all of that was done in context of working for Bill.

He [Woodward] was a tremendous coach, mentor, and very exacting in terms of writing. I learned more from him about compelling writing than anywhere else. He also is the person who did my law school recommendations in his own name because, for whatever reason at that point, I had some issue with Gerry Studds. I wanted the person who’d worked most closely with me to write the recommendations in his own name, so Bill did it. My 1L fall, Bill was in Boston [Massachusetts] working for Dukakis, so it was natural that I would keep working for him.

I was working for Bill and doing what he needed. The person who I had replaced, Vicky Rideout, in Studds’s office, was also working on the campaign, so I was also doing that in 1L fall, which, for me, was like sanity. My classmates at law school were like, Are you crazy? This is where you’re supposed to be all of the time is here and focusing on here.

Summers? Anything particularly important about your summer jobs and the fact that you were kind of opting out of the main course of competition there?

Oh, so summer jobs, both pre-law school and law school—I mean, during college and during law school I had to earn money, right? And Harvard was absolutely not Dartmouth on financial aid. There was no such thing as declaring yourself a financial independent, which is also why the Dartmouth money was key: I was not getting any parental contribution. I was maximizing loans and then money you could make in the summer.

But my first-year summer, I worked—[James Michael] Jim Shannon, who had been a member of Congress from Massachusetts, was the attorney general for Massachusetts, and so I figured first-year summer I’d do the public service job, second-year summer law firm and make a lot of money. And so I did that. One of the assistant attorney generals I worked with closely was Jamie Raskin. At that point, he was like a baby lawyer, I think, coming out of Harvard, and another friend from the Studds staff was working there. Again, the world is pretty small on this stuff. I worked with them, learned a lot, good public interest law opportunity.

What I saw second-year summer [for law firm interviews], which irritated me, was just the kind of pecking order stuff and the degree of competition over it. Second-year summer interviewing would have happened in fall of second year, and I realized how much I was caught up in it. I was competitive, and it mattered to me that I wasn’t getting—I did fine, but I could see the callbacks I wasn’t getting or interview slots I wasn’t getting.

Why do you think that was?

Oh, I think I probably got one B or B+ my 1L year, and I saw the people—again, it was small gradations.

The big corporate firms.

Well, I went to what was then Hogan & Hartson, now Hogan Lovells. But there was a level—my recollection is the Sullivan & Cromwell or Covington [& Burling] in D.C. were the uber “white-shoe” [prestigious law firms] where I was not cutting it. And Hogan, which people describe to me as a law firm that had—where I ultimately went for a couple years post—relatively speaking, the lowest asshole ratio among partners. [laughter] And I could see it. It probably had people who had gotten Bs at various points. It also had, though, John Rogers who was the—

[John G.] Roberts [Jr.].

Roberts, sorry. Rogers is someone else. John Roberts led the summer program when I was there. I think senior associate or junior partner was a woman named [Patricia A.] Pat Brannan.

I went to Hogan for that summer, and Cheryl Mills was actually in my summer class, so Cheryl and I got to be very close then. Ultimately, when I went back to Hogan post-clerkship, it was me, Cheryl, and a woman, [Wilhelmina] Mimi Wright, who was at Harvard the year before me. We worked together in the education practice there, and for various reasons, those ties have continued. But Hogan was where I was.

Just quickly: purely grades? You don’t think gender, or religion, or—

No.

No. You’re not seeing anything like that.

No. The part where religion came up in the law school—I don’t remember if it was part of the—it was part of the interviewing process. I didn’t think it was a mark against me, but what I noticed was how many people assumed I was from New York. I had never lived in New York. I grew up on Cape Cod. I would always say, “No, I grew up on Cape Cod.” And then I realized, and I basically said back, “You know, not every assertive Jewish female is actually from New York. Some of us have taken root in other places too.” So I got that.

And then the summer after law school, when I was studying for the bar, I needed to work at the same time, before my clerkship. I was working at Mintz Levin in Boston. That’s when I realized Mintz Levin had a reputation, which I didn’t know at the time, as the aggressive Jewish firm for Boston. So it was there in those kinds of ways. I never thought that it affected what jobs I got. I really do think that was grades and my not getting—it wasn’t the firstborn, but it was the clerkship opportunities, and the second year summer opportunities that were going to—

Impressions of John Roberts when you were at Hogan?

Largely good. But John Roberts and Pat Brannan were great leaders. It was also the summer that the movie Big came out, with Tom Hanks. And I actually thought, and so did my fellow associates, that John Roberts and Tom Hanks—there was a certain similarity between the two of them at that point. There was some situation or some discussion, where I made that allusion, which all of us had been talking about, and Roberts just looked at me. Like, no sense of humor. [laughter] None. He did not appreciate that comparison.

But we now know the actor who can play him when there’s a biographical movie.

There you go.

Seriously. Yes.

You can kind of see it in the physical, right? But also at the time, yes.

I have a feeling he’ll decline that role. [laughter]

I don’t know, John Roberts on the court we have now is—I actually feel some reassurance with him, compared to—I wouldn’t have expected him to be the center of the court, but—

Did you enjoy your experience in corporate law?

Yes. I was ultimately choosing, at the end of my clerkship, between the honors program for civil rights at the Justice Department and going to Hogan, so two very different—and it wasn’t necessarily a huge money difference.

Hogan, at the time, had this education practice that was run by David Tatel, who now is on the D.C. Circuit. But that practice, which Pat Brannan was also in—I don’t think John Roberts was associated with it, he was part of the appellate practice at Hogan. But that practice was about bringing together parent plaintiffs and school districts on these education desegregation cases to find ways, basically through financing mechanisms, to create magnet schools and things like that as opposed to forced busing. It was a very unusual practice that I think Supreme Court decisions since have wiped out the ability to move forward with. They were offering me a seat in that practice, and so it seemed like an opportunity to be able to do much more public interest–type stuff but in a private law firm setting.

I was glad to be there enough time to know that being a partner in the firm was not going to be a good thing for me. And one of the things with Mimi and Cheryl that was great is, again, fair amount of competition but the competition was like, How do we pay back our loans—we’re not going to change our lifestyle from student lifestyle. We’re going to compete with each other for how much more we can pay back every month, so I paid off my loans much sooner. I ended up getting the opportunity to go to House Foreign Affairs Committee. But I kept paying back way more than I owed every month.

When do you go to the Hill [Congress]?

Post-November of ’93, so post-election. Lee Hamilton had become chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee—Dante Fascell, who had been the long-standing chair of the committee, I think had not run again. Lee was the next in seniority, and so I knew he was going to become chairman. I had stayed in touch with some of his staff people. They had helped me a lot during law school when I had gone to Jerusalem and Belfast.

Again, a funny story because they had reached out on my behalf to the consul general in Jerusalem, who at that point was a guy named [Philip C.] Phil Wilcox [Jr.], and similarly in Northern Ireland, and set me up to have initial discussions. In Northern Ireland, what helped most was a journalist, [Francis X.] Frank Clines, was there and had been in Jerusalem when I was there, so I’d met him.

Working with Phil Wilcox was [R. Nicholas] Nick Burns as a junior political officer. And Wilcox, when he heard what I was going to do—and I was going to be spending a lot of time in the middle of the intifada traipsing around the West Bank—Nick was my friends’ designated call person. If I didn’t get back by a certain time, they had the authority to call him to then figure out where I was and deal with it, which is just a funny kind of small world. But all that came from Hamilton staff.

The counsel position came about because I was going in to work some Sunday afternoon, probably not very happy at that point with being at a law firm. I was tired of it. And Cheryl Mills had already left. She left in the summer to work on the transition team for the [Bill] Clinton campaign, so I was very jealous of her [laughter] that she had gotten this great opportunity. I ran into the guy who was Hamilton’s subcommittee staff director, [Michael] Mike Van Dusen, at a gas station when I was getting my oil changed and—

There you go. My son always asked me, “How do you get these great jobs?” Pumping gas.

Mike started asking me a bunch of questions. I was talking to him, and I did tell him—I may have written a letter to him, or to Hamilton, just on how thrilled I was that he was going to be chairman of the committee. Hamilton had always been the person when I worked for Studds—I like Studds too, but I would counsel others who were job-hunting on the Hill, “You can’t go wrong, when you’re asked who you most respect in Washington, to tell them, ‘Lee Hamilton, and here are all the reasons why.’”

I had written something and—so Mike was asking me a bunch of questions and also how I felt about Hogan, things like that. I didn’t think anything of it other than it was good to run into him. I got to work and later that week he called me. I was pretty sure he was asking me about giving him candidates for the chief counsel position for the committee. I didn’t in a million years think I would be a candidate. I was a third-year associate at Hogan & Hartson. All of the guys who had been in that chief counsel role for Dante Fascell—I joke, but it was true—were old guys with white hair who smoked cigars, and I was pretty far from that in every way.

Do you smoke cigars? [laughter] Neither do I, which is why I ask.

Again, I was 30 at the time, so that colors it. But anyway, at the very end of the conversation—it felt like 30 minutes in—Mike said, “So wondering whether you think you’d be interested.” And I had this panic like I thought I had missed part of what he had said because I was sure he wasn’t asking me. And I think I did say, “Are you talking about the chief counsel position?” And he said, “Yeah.” I said, “Yeah, I’m definitely interested.”

Yes, I was going to say, how long did it take you to say yes?

I was like, I just need to know what the question was. So I went in to interview with Hamilton, I don’t know, a couple days later. And the mantra, by the way, that Mimi—whose office was next door and with whom I “downloaded” right after the phone call—had me invoke to myself is, “What would George Stephanopoulos do?” George, at that point, was a very young aide who I’d known from Capitol Hill working for [President] Clinton. And she said, “Do you think George Stephanopoulos ever stops and asks, ‘Am I right for this job?’ or, ‘Should I be considered for this job?’ [laughter] No. You go in, and George Stephanopoulos needs to be your mantra.” So I had a great conversation with Hamilton. Again, I was talking to my idol.

Can I pause there? What was it about him that you always admired? And then when you come into the interview, what do you see there, as well?

I thought he was really smart and really even-keeled. The word “gentle” comes to mind, but that’s not what I mean. Just very level-headed. Again, he ran the Europe and Middle East subcommittee, and because of my undergraduate work, I would always find excuses to be in those hearings, whether or not my then boss, Gerry Studds, was going to be there. I thought Hamilton was fair because he would navigate these very controversial issues. I did use to joke that if you opened up the dictionary and there was a pictorial illustration of integrity, Lee Hamilton’s face would be there, and anyone who had worked with him would be like, “Yeah, of course.” That was kind of my image of him.

Then going in to meet with him, he’s very conversational. There was no lead-up interview, so it was a little bit of an odd process to me, but it somehow became very clear in talking to him that he consciously wanted to show he was going to be different. He respected Dante Fascell, his predecessor, but he had a very different approach. He wanted a counsel that was going to look and act different than predecessors. And I think there are a lot of people who saw him as, He’s a conservative Democrat from southern Indiana, but I think in a number of ways what the word “progressive” used to mean, which was not necessarily defined by the extremes, I think he was a very progressive thinker in a number of ways. And I think looking at somebody like me for that job was part of that.

When you saw fairness, when you saw him doing his job with fairness, what did that constitute at that time in Congress and on committees?

I would say fairness and also graciousness actually. It was giving a variety of people and a variety of perspectives the opportunity to be heard; not hesitating on coming down, ultimately, on a decision point; not equivocating when you did, but after having heard from a range of views. And I never recall seeing or hearing him on the attack. I came to know from working with him at times when he was very unhappy with either how someone had acted or with the perspective of someone, but I never saw him raise his voice. I never heard him have a kind of cutting edge to what someone said or did.

Ultimately, I would say that I worked for him through—we ended up having only two years in the majority. Then, for the first time in I think it was nearly 50 years, Republicans took over Congress. And [Newt] Gingrich’s “rule” [gestures quotes] was pretty brutal at the front end. We had about 100 staff on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and I think those numbers were roughly two-thirds to one-third: two-thirds majority, one-third minority. We were required in the three weeks before Christmas to fire—no extensions of leave, nothing—two-thirds of our staff to shift the numbers. I think it was even more because I think we had to come down to 20. So there were a number of tough conversations.

We would come to Hamilton with various recommendations on how we cut the staff. I really appreciated how he handled those discussions with us—I think there were probably three or four of us going through that with him—and where he pressed back. Ultimately, when we knew we had to have those conversations that were, I think, all a week before Christmas, he went through the list with us and said, “Well, first of all, I’m ready to sit with you for any of these conversations.” Then he insisted on a certain number because I think that the staff director and deputy staff director wanted to keep him from it. For several of the hardest conversations, I think he had 10 or 12 of those directly [one-to-one with those being laid off], and that is so rare.

I used to joke, or people with whom I worked joked with me, that I had pedestals that I put these different political figures on and people always toppled off at some point. It was just what the time period was before they fell off the pedestal. He still hasn’t. And I’ll say, his 93rd birthday is coming up in April. A huge number of his former staff are flying out to Indiana to have a birthday lunch with him.

I have a question for you. Are you OK to continue for a little bit longer—

Oh, sure.

—and then we’ll take a break maybe in 15 or 20 minutes? It’s about what you’re seeing in terms of issue areas and general institutional behavior. You’re on the Hill at an interesting historical moment, right, because the Cold War has ended, and you’ve got a Democrat in the White House for the first time in a while. Can you think back to that period—maybe given what you’ve just said about what happens in ’94, it’s impossible to see ’93 and the bulk of ’94 without recognizing that the train goes off the track very quickly. Tell us a little bit about your perceptions of what are the major things you’re dealing with.

Yes. Somalia. I remember that pretty vividly. First, there was just the personality of different members who at that point were in the senior, midsenior ranks. I will say also, just looking back, Harry Reid was a member of the committee, I think, during the time when I was there with Studds. I think he was probably in the Senate by the second stint with House Foreign Affairs, but [Gregory] Greg Meeks had just joined as a member. Brad Sherman was a baby member. Howard [L.] Berman I knew for a long time. Sam Gejdenson I used to babysit for, actually. I babysat for his kids when I was working for Studds. So I knew a lot of these guys.

Gejdenson, [Robert] Torricelli, Berman were all in the general age range of Bill Clinton. How do I know that? I vividly remember Bob Torricelli—he wasn’t talking to me, I think he was talking to Hamilton, and maybe a couple others—very early in ’93, and I was the one standing right behind him as the hearings were about to start or go on. He was basically saying, “Can you believe this guy is President? I mean, I’m a year older than him.” [laughter] And you could tell it was like, Why him and not me?

The Harvard Law School competition, in a different way.

Totally, yes. Kind of seeing where the motivators were and in which ways. And I think, to some extent, what Clinton had to deal with was all in the same party, yes, but people are gunning for you in various ways, right?

I remember having a conversation with Hamilton, it was the end of the summer of ’93. I think that’s right. It was before elections. We were still in the majority. For some reason, we were in session when people had expected us to be out, so our staff director wasn’t there, deputy staff director wasn’t there, because they had summer vacation plans. And it was when the crime bill was being debated, and—

It’s probably ’94, then.

Summer of ’94. So I had been at the committee a year and a half. But I was told—and, again, people not comfortable going to Hamilton directly, so came to his senior staff person—it was [Thomas S.] Tom Foley’s guy who said, “Listen, you’ve got to know they’re doing vote counting here.” I think this was on the crime bill, which also had a guns-related provision. And yes, his district is in Indiana. They’re trying to whip the vote, and it’s not clear where Hamilton is; he’s not talking to anyone about it. He said, “You need to tell him that his chairmanship is on the line, in terms of his—we need every vote, and he’s going to need to be with us.”

It’s also interesting with Hamilton: people didn’t go to him directly to have that conversation. So, like Mikey and Life cereal, I went in to go through a bunch of issues with him and then brought this up; it was just the two of us in the room. I just said, “This is what I was told. I’m just letting you know.” And he said, “Thanks for letting me know. It’s not going to affect my vote. They can do what they want with my chairmanship.”

This is part of what I really love about him. He took the next step and he said, “So listen, Mara, the way I look at this stuff is you’ve got [to have] a kind of system of evaluating where you’re going to land on any different vote,” he said, “or an equation.” He said, “So I need to think about what’s important for my constituents, and what matters to them, and what they may be looking for in having elected me. I need to look at and consider what my party is in interested in.” He said, “When the President of the United States is asking [for something for his agenda], there’s consideration to that, and a bit more when he is a member of my party. And I always have to know what my own red lines are, and what I’m willing to lose my seat over.”

And he said, “It’s a combination of those three things. And so where I come out on this is I’m not supporting this, having weighed those things in various ways.” I could see him apply that in other, later situations, which was interesting to me.

Terrific. Any follow-ups on this? So you survive into the minority.

Leading in the minority, right, yes.

Tell us about that experience.

Gingrich, one of the things that he did was to put together this, I believe he called it the “Contract for [with] America.” We called it the “Contract on America.” [laughter] And [Richard A.] Gephardt was then the leader because, of course, Foley lost his seat in that election. Hamilton, by the way, in that election came closer than he’d ever come to losing. Very, very close race, and I think it appeared closer earlier in the night, as I recall, than it ended up being. But it was still interesting to see that calculation.

He had not normally had serious opposition.

At all.

He was a high school basketball star in Indiana.

Right.

You get reelected [laughter] every two years, yes.

Yes, he blew out his knee and then went to Indiana [University] Law School.

But the crime bill was—

Yes, so, interesting in terms of his vote on that. I don’t remember looking at his local stuff to see what had played out.

First, it’s fascinating, he and [Richard G.] Lugar both had these leadership positions on Foreign Affairs, from Indiana, whereas almost the rest of the makeup of the Foreign Affairs Committee, you could see the constituency interest—huge Florida, New York, California—and literally where different populations were and how people voted. There’s an interesting kind of separate thing in how they came up, and my guess is a bunch of that came to roost for him.

They were both freer on those issues.

Yes, for sure, but it probably meant he was also balancing his votes on things like the crime bill at the same time, right?

What was his experience in international relations? Lugar, as I recall, might have been a Rhodes Scholar, as an example.

Rudman Yes, I actually—Hamilton also didn’t like to travel and didn’t like to travel internationally, and so he would send his staff out. He was great at absorbing and then asking the questions and things like that. I think when I asked him—he came in in ’65, and I don’t know that he chose Foreign Affairs. I think that some of the committees, his first choices, he wasn’t experienced enough to get. He was also, I think, probably concerned about the [Vietnam] war and how it was being prosecuted, or somehow that was part of his curiosity. I believe it was more happenstance than you might have thought. I don’t think he was particularly internationally oriented.

All right, so you are in the minority counsel position.

So, yes, the “Contract” happens. Gephardt immediately organizes task forces across Congress, across the Democratic Party, to deal with it. I get detailed with another person from House Foreign Affairs staff to work for Jack Reed, who is in the House at that point, and [Douglas] Pete Peterson, who was at that point a congressman from Florida and later became our ambassador to Vietnam, on the National Security Task Force. Part of our job was figuring out how you held Democratic votes together against the national security portions of the Contract legislation. So I did work with both [co-chairs to develop substitute amendments]—you want to hold votes together on the House floor. It also meant you’re going to go through the committee structure, so I was looking at what was in [House] Armed Services [Committee], what was in Foreign Affairs.

In some ways, it wasn’t great to be in the minority, but it was more enjoyable as a counsel because it was where knowledge of process and politics could really help you achieve the policy outcomes. I would have regular conversations with my Republican counterparts on the committee to say things like, “OK, we have this series of things coming up.” Not only would we have created a substitute, an alternative that gave Democrats’ votes places to land, but I would say—and it became the way we handled markups in committee for the next two years—“Your guys have all the committee assignments now. My guys have very few. They have Foreign Affairs and—”

When you’re in the minority, you lost the number of committees you could sit on. I said, “The plus side of that is they don’t have a lot to do with their time, so their butts are going to be in these seats for the entire period of the hearing, and I’m always going to have the votes I need for whatever we’re putting up. You should just know that. I’m assuming if you want this to be a long markup, if your guys have two or three days, because we have a lot of amendments, if you want to agree to any of our amendments, then you’re going to save a lot of time. Your guys don’t have to be here in the room because we can do it by voice vote. But otherwise, my guys are going to be here.”

The first couple of times they doubted it, and you keep your team together and you show they’re going to show up. Literally we’d have the joke of, “You can have the Jiffy Lube markup, or you can have the full body workup. [laughter] Let’s just decide which one you’re going to do because I’m going to be able to have my guys draw out the time on this.” And so using procedure that way, and we started that with the Contract.

Also, on the national security provisions, we held all of our members together on votes. So again, you weren’t going to win on the floor [final vote], but you were going to show, first of all, that there were never veto-sustainable margins on any of their stuff and kind of set that way of thinking. It became really important training for me for going into the executive branch later.

Are you having much interaction with the White House in particular? I don’t remember, was [Charles] Chuck Brain, the—

Chuck Brain, I think, was White House leg [legislative] affairs. He was somewhere there. I mean, I definitely met him at that point.

Right, I’m trying to remember who the House liaison—

Wendy [R.] Sherman was the legislative person at [Department of] State. [Department of] Defense didn’t have as much contact with—so it’s interesting, I can’t remember who that person was. But yes, particularly a lot of back-and-forth with Wendy. Oh, [William C.] Bill Danvers was actually in the job I ended up taking at the NSC, as the legislative person at the NSC. So yes, I was talking to all of them a lot.

I guess, again, I’m trying to think back. What are the big battles that you have—because a lot of the Contract was domestic-oriented and was sort of procedure and process stuff—other than cuts?

I honestly don’t remember on the Contract because the things I remember back-and-forth over with the White House were Somalia and Haiti, and war powers issues, and funding issues. On Foreign Affairs you’re not an appropriator, but one of the places Hamilton was pretty aggressive was that when there was authorizing language in appropriations, you have the ability to object.

Again, this is what he did when we were in the majority, but it was good training for me later; I got to know the House parliamentarians very well. I think there were various ways to register objections to appropriations bills not going to the floor if they had authorizing language that he hadn’t cleared on, which included doing that to [John P.] Jack Murtha [Jr.], who was an incredibly powerful guy [chairing the Appropriations defense subcommittee]. One of the House parliamentarians told me at one point, he’s like, “I’m pretty sure [at] the Armed Services Committee, they have a bull’s-eye with your picture in the middle. [laughter] You should just know that, in terms of what you’re facing.”

So we did that kind of thing, and it meant that I got to know the appropriators and the appropriations staff pretty well [and the defense authorizers]. On things like money the administration wants or needs to continue X, Y, or Z—that’s why I think so much about the war powers discussions is both esoteric and not grounded in the reality of how you actually stop and start things. The levers to control the funding on various things, in various ways, are much more powerful than whether or not you’re actually going to vote to authorize something or not. But I remember all those things at play in both Somalia and Haiti. So sad in terms of where Haiti is now and thinking back to that time.

I remember, and I don’t know the substance, there were some tough conversations with Wendy and others on Somalia because I felt like they were not—and I can recall the rooms we were in in the Capitol—seeing what was coming at them. Susan Rice was part of those discussions, because she was the relevant staffer at the NSC at that point working with [Richard A.] Dick Clarke. They came across as assuming that their party would rubber-stamp whatever they wanted. It was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen, and you had to just figure out how you could hold together which votes in which ways.

My recollection is that in the first two years—and in some ways, it got worse—they didn’t appreciate what they were up against and what it was going to take to navigate it. And that’s when we were in the majority. It was obviously going to get harder in the minority. I had a fair amount of experience on funding things with Bosnia and then Kosovo, from both working on the Hill and working in the executive branch, and then doing a little bit of back-and-forth between the two.

Is there a significant change in the way that you’re dealing with the executive branch when you’re in the majority versus when you’re in the minority?

No.

No, OK.

No, because you’re still trying to get stuff done for them in various ways. I mean, I think that there’s probably more time explaining what’s procedurally possible and how to navigate. My feeling is I spent a lot more time on the House floor when we were in the minority than I did in the majority. I’m not sure if that’s accurate or not, but it felt like it because I think, again, you were trying to outsmart the other side on procedural stuff.

[Bob], do you have anything on this period?

No.

OK.

We’re more interested in prompting you [Rudman] to come forward with the things we should be paying attention to from that period.

But in a way that relates back to Obama time?

Yes.

Yes.

Not necessarily.

Not necessarily connected.

Just what you’re observing.

Mainly in terms of what you experience navigating the legislative and executive relationships. We’re about to get you into the executive branch, so maybe what we’re trying to do is sort of close this off. We’ll take a break after we finish.

Could I have just one—oh, go ahead, Bob.

Well, here’s one. Hamilton thought a lot about the war powers issue.

Oh, yes. I had a lot of these discussions with him and a lot of memos.

And he had a lot of ideas about—

Yes, he wanted to legislate a “consultation mechanism,” which is what I tried to deploy effectively without legislation once I was in the executive branch. My recollection is that he softened some in the “You must have a vote at all times, in all ways,” and then by the latter time I was there—I haven’t gone back to look recently, but the consultation requirement kind of legislation we put forward was an effort to get closer to what the reality was. Because he also saw—

My recollection is he wanted consultation—the executive [branch] has to tell Congress what they were doing and why they were doing it—and then he wanted triggers within House rules, or legislative rules, so that objectors to this foreign obligation could get something on the floor.

Yes, could get to the floor.

It wouldn’t force a vote in the way the original language of the War Powers Act [War Powers Resolution of 1973] did, but it would facilitate, You tell us, and those of us who have a problem with it will have a mechanism to get a debate.

Yes, and that would come directly from his experience. We joked at the number of times that Hamilton would find a way, from being chairman or ranking member, to bring something to the floor that no one wanted to vote on. And there were members who would talk about being part of—I’m not remembering the right Civil War reference, but basically taking the hill with Hamilton knowing that you were all going to get slaughtered. [laughter]

Pickett’s Charge, probably.

Yes, that was exactly it. And it was actually a conservative Democratic member—one of the many who were with him—who was from the South, who exactly said that. And he would come and say, “Standing up for Pickett’s Charge again, sir.” [laughter] That kind of procedural mechanism came from Hamilton’s strong conviction that sometimes you needed to do what was right and force people to take a vote.

But he never liked working votes. I don’t think he liked to be asked either, and you needed to whip votes beforehand if you wanted to win. So there were times he’d see me over on the House floor in the timing in between votes, and we didn’t have a bill on the floor—which, by the strict rules of the House, I wasn’t supposed to be there—and he’d just kind of look at me and say, “What you working on, Mara?” [laughter] He knew I was there trying to figure out what the vote situation might be for our stuff. But he believed strongly in ensuring votes on the tough issues.

I think there was a vote on Somalia. I’m sure there was a vote—the vote on Haiti I really remember because we joke that there were fewer people on Hamilton’s side on the floor to vote for an authorization for it than it would have taken to win in committee. It was that lonely. I remember because Pete Peterson came up to me and said, “I’m really sorry that I can’t be with your boss on this, and I can’t tell you why,” but it was because he was about to be nominated as the first U.S. ambassador to Vietnam.

But Hamilton knew the truth behind all of the fairly bellicose language on “Congress needs to vote”—most of his colleagues didn’t want to vote. They want to be angry that they weren’t given the opportunity, but they didn’t want to have to take the hard vote, and the rules mechanism in his consultation legislation was a way to try to get at that.

One follow-up, and then let’s take a break. I think I’m representing the literature on this correctly—there’s a sense among political scientists who study this that Clinton was very proactively aggressive in pushing presidential powers on this war powers business in a way that exceeded what Congress wanted to do at the time. In other words, there is even, in the post-Cold War period, a sort of aggressive use of presidential authorities in this realm of war power.

When you’re on the Hill, are you sensing this? Is it the case that you feel that the institution is being pushed beyond where it wanted to be by this Democratic administration? And then I’ll ask you the same question when you’re in the White House.

I don’t think it’s that deliberate. I think what Clinton did carefully, in a way that, frankly, Obama didn’t, was count his votes and not want to bring things if he didn’t have the votes for it.

I think the contrast was made—the high-water mark for how congressional-executive cooperation should work on something like authorization was the first Gulf War, right? But it’s also where you had a Speaker—I think it was Foley, [Thomas P. “Tip”] O’Neill [Jr.] or Foley—who knew that he didn’t have the position that was supporting where the Republican President was going to be, but that the right thing to do was to have a congressional vote on it. He, I think, designated Bob Torricelli at the time, before Clinton was in the mix, and Torricelli knew what the competition would be. But Torricelli organized the Democrats who’d be supporting [George H. W.] Bush and supporting the resolution. So that was the high-water mark, again, for that era.

Now, it would be unheard of—right?—that you were going to get to a vote where the Speaker knew his side was not going to prevail. That Democratic Speaker knew it was a bad thing to bring a vote to the floor where the President didn’t prevail on an authorization, even though that wasn’t his position, and he orchestrated a process that would result in an authorization the President sought. So that was the high-water mark.

I don’t think it’s the same thing as the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos, Rahm [Emanuel], whoever, the guys who were around, were like, We have to assert our power in this. I think more they were looking at how big a majority Democrats held—and even in the first two years I think our numbers were probably—I don’t remember, it was such a debacle in ’94. But what I more recall is that the administration really didn’t yet have its footing on foreign policy, international stuff.

I think for Bill Clinton, it took him a few years to realize he shouldn’t just listen to the foreign policy elite. He realized somewhere into his presidency, I think, that the international side was just like the domestic side: you had to figure out where people’s motivations were and then how you got stuff done. I think he probably realized a lot of his traditional foreign policy guys were not going to give him that.

So those first few years, I think it was more a little bit of a thrashing around inside the administration and with some vote-counting ability that was still strong—they weren’t going to have the votes for things, so you don’t bring things to the House or Senate floor that you don’t have the votes for.

Was Clinton kind of “black-boxing” [cutting off] Congress as if that part of the foreign policy process wasn’t crucial?

No, no, they were up there talking all the time. They were consulting a lot. And again, I don’t think it was that deliberate, but you’re going to avoid having a vote on something if you can’t win it. I think that was more how they were looking at it. It wasn’t shunting Congress aside at all.

OK, let’s take a break now. They’re going to want to change the batteries in our devices. We’ll come back in about 5 or 10 minutes and work until lunch. We’re making good progress. Thank you.

[BREAK]

All right, you ready to keep going?

Sure.

How do you end up in the White House in Clinton’s term?

I worked for Hamilton. I started as counsel with him at the committee when he took over the chairmanship in ’93. Went through the kind of brutal reelection in ’94 and the shift. I think I probably had some thought at that point, and maybe there’s conversation among folks, Would Lee actually run again? And so trying to think of things beyond, I think I had been offered a few different jobs I hadn’t taken because I had landed in my dream job, frankly, a lot younger and sooner than I had expected. I remember some feeling of panic when I realized I didn’t want those other jobs and also what would I do next if he didn’t run. This had all happened so fast.

He did end up running again—and this was also Lee Hamilton competitiveness. I think he probably knew he wasn’t going to stay in much longer, but he wanted to prove that he wasn’t being forced out, so his next election he, again, got the firm footing. He did run again in ’96, but I think it was an I’m going to show you that I’m making my own choice about when and how I’m leaving. I certainly stayed through—he may have let us know in ’96 that he wasn’t going to run again because I feel like somehow I was starting to think about, even though I was the first person to leave the staff—again, these were all people I was talking to all the time.

Wendy Sherman had, at that point, moved to a counselor role at State. I think I probably was having—I actually don’t know if I had conversations with her. She called me. [James] Jim Steinberg, actually, I did see periodically because, going back to that Dukakis time, he was really close friends with the person who I had replaced in Gary Studds’s office, this woman Vicky Rideout, who was living in California at that point, not involved in politics. Whenever she’d come to D.C., I got invited, and I was the kind of younger sibling of their group. I would talk to him about Capitol Hill and what was going on there. He had been a [Ted] Kennedy guy.

Jim would say he’s the one who suggested to Sandy Berger when Bill Danvers—I don’t remember what the impetus was for Bill Danvers moving on from the legislative role at the NSC, but Jim believes he suggested to Sandy that they should talk to me. Sandy was actually my assigned mentor at Hogan when he was there—again, these are all the same small worlds.

I will also say that I was frustrated at Hogan that I got no time or attention from him—he was already immersed in the campaign—that I went to whoever was managing the junior associates and told her I wanted to be reassigned. I was going to send her a letter asking for a reassignment because he was never around. She said, “You’re doing a pretty good job of finding different people to help you. Let me just say that you don’t need to put that in writing. [laughter] There’s really no upside on that.” But Sandy would say that he—knew me from that time.

For whatever reasons, I ended up getting a call to come in and talk to them. I hadn’t pursued that. I feel like I was maybe talking to Wendy about something at State because what happened is, in the same week, they basically both called—Wendy to offer me something that was an assistant to her in the counselor’s office at State, a position that she was creating, and Sandy, with the NSC senior director for legislative affairs job. There was 24 hours where I was thinking about it between the two. Then Wendy called me and said she needed to retract her offer because Sandy had made it very clear that when the White House wants somebody, no one else gets to make an offer. I think, honestly, the White House job is the one that would have made the most sense for me anyway, but I was not choosing between two.

This was early in ’97 or at the beginning of the second term?

The beginning of the second term. It was somewhere in the fall, early fall. The reason I know is because there was legislation that the administration—again, in the minority role in the House—needed us to help them with that hadn’t yet been scheduled for the floor. And Sandy Berger, being Sandy Berger, was like, “You need to be here right away. The White House makes you an offer, you need to show up.” And I said, “In the job I’m going to do for you, I’m telling you I don’t think you want me not to be in the House during this period.” So then I think Hamilton and Berger had a kind of contentious—I mean, it was a funny position. They were negotiating over what my departure time was, which ended up being a week after this, whatever. I don’t remember what the legislation was, but after it was moving to the House floor.

I also further complicated things for them because I had a long-standing trip planned to visit a friend who was working for National Democratic Institute in Georgia, country of Georgia. I remember trying to explain to the then-White House chief of staff—because they were sending me all this clearance material, I was like, “OK, I’m going to be faxing it back from Georgia.” When he realized it wasn’t Atlanta, Georgia, he was like, “Why are you making my life more difficult? [laughter] You already have this clearance process that I’m going to have to move really fast, and you’re filling out forms from there.” I didn’t make things easier for them.

I came over somewhere, I think it was November of ’97, and three weeks after I was there I had to put together a CODEL [congressional delegation] to accompany President Clinton. One of the things Clinton did that I thought was very smart, and it’s interesting to me that I’ve not seen other presidents follow suit in the same way, is that his international trips always had a bipartisan congressional delegation with him, always. This was to Bosnia, and [Robert J.] Bob and Elizabeth Dole were both on the trip, and this was the year after the election. The ones I remember—I’m sure it’s not everyone—Jack Murtha was on the trip; Elijah Cummings, I think; Joe Lieberman, [Joseph R.] Joe Biden [Jr.], Dole, maybe [John] Kerry. It was a collection.

I was in charge of putting together—when you’re the NSC legislative person, you’re running the CODEL for the trip, which came up really usefully on the Middle East trip I did with them later, pre-impeachment vote for Clinton. The congressional delegation basically get to do maybe one or two things daily with the President on his schedule, and then you’ve got to figure out their schedule for the rest of the time. You’ve got to manage personalities that don’t like the fact that they’re waiting in a motorcade for the President’s movements, things like that. It was a great kind of baptism by fire in putting together that Bosnia group.

There was one time when we were in a certain place—I don’t remember where it was—and we had to move people out very quickly. I think there was some cloud cover coming in. Now, Ron Brown’s plane crash [in Croatia, 1996] had already happened at that point, and we needed to move out fast. I had to work to get these guys on a bus from an event, and I literally made them count off when we were on the bus because I couldn’t leave anyone behind, and I couldn’t see far enough back into the bus to know I had everyone. Bob Dole and Joe Biden were the ones who were so helpful, and not standing on ceremony, just helping me get my job done. I was asking these very senior members of Congress to count off like they were campers, but it would have been worse to leave someone behind.

The thing with Dole that was amazing was his sense of humor. And he was a hero to any military people you ran into. The back-and-forth with him was incredible to observe. He was also cheered on the streets of—I think this was Bosnia. I’m trying to remember if it’s Bosnia or Kosovo. I think Bosnia. But cheered on the streets, and he turned around at one point and said, “Clearly I ran for President in the wrong place.” [laughter]

Were you witness to interactions among and between President Clinton on these trips and those from the Hill?

Yes, because I’d be in the meetings.

Can you comment about that?

Sure. Well—

Including his former opponent.

Yes. One of the things that was, again—I became a huge Dole fan on that trip because he was also one, in a very subtle way, who would stop the bad behavior from his colleagues, like the grousing about having to wait for the President, or being late, or not being given due time or space. Usually that grousing would be directed at me, so he was both, without doing it overtly, being protective of me and my role but used sarcasm to kind of put everyone in their place. And if Bob Dole, who had just run for President, was acting that way, what position did you have, often when you were members of the President’s party, to be grousing? That’s the kind of dynamic I remember.

The conversations with the President were always very respectful, but again, I think one of the things that Bill Clinton excelled at was making everyone in a room feel like he had something to learn from them. What came across was a very genuine back-and-forth, which I remember from every trip. The wins from bringing people, even people who disagreed with you terribly, on these trips was amazing because of the kind of close time, the feeling of true consultation—whether or not it was—definitely came across that way.

And even if they were going to vote against you, it’s a different version of the financial aid people and they had to see your face, right? They were going to have to have a conversation with you again, and it was going to be harder because you had exposed them to the facts on the ground, in various ways, and had the time and opportunity to talk back and forth, which I think was part of his strategy for making sure to bring people.

Did you ever get the impression that that was an affected attribute of the President, or do you think he was genuinely interested in hearing other people’s opinions? I’ve heard others describe Clinton this way, but you’ve seen him in action.

Yes, it’s hard to—he did it to me, right? [laughter] You know? So—

You got the “Johnson treatment.”

Yes, I know. I think it is definitely part of his charm. And part of my experience with him was he’d always be filling out crosswords while you’re briefing him on a million things, and he would sometimes ask you the questions. I was terrible at crosswords, and I would never have the answer. I would say, “I am not going to do this. This is embarrassing to me.” And he’d say, “I understand. The thing is you’re just so smart, you’re focused on the substance of what we’re doing. Crosswords are, essentially, beneath you,” which was total BS [bullshit] [laughter] because he was doing three things at once.

I was trying to prep him for a call that he was going to be late for, and he’s busy asking me what the—and he’s hearing everything I’m saying on that. So I think that’s an impossible question to answer.

OK, fair enough.

I think it may be a combination of the two. He’s always got a strategy for—it’s really important to him to win over a room. But I also think he’s a genuinely curious person and probably also always feels there’s something to learn from anyone who’s in the room. It may be because he’s going to use it later down the road in a political way, but that combination of things, I think that’s just part of his being.

On an interpersonal level, could he defang the venom of opponents, political or personal?

Oh, yes.

Yes. OK.

To a stunning degree. I remember, again, timely now with [Benjamin] Netanyahu stuff, when [Ehud] Barak beat Netanyahu in the—and the President, I think, always did calls with both the person who had won and the person who had lost, or certainly we did in this case. But you put the President of the United States on the call last, right? You’re layering a bunch of people, and you have all of your people—I think we probably had some of their people—and then their principal gets on, and then the President gets on, and that’s standard protocol, right? Netanyahu was 20 minutes late for the call, and Clinton was on.

Sandy Berger is fulminating at, How is he doing this? Why is he doing this? It’s so wrong. By the way, we probably had a bunch of Israelis on at that point. And Clinton—this was in the defanging—probably played this role with Sandy more than once like, “Sandy, don’t sweat it. I’m OK timewise. He’s probably pretty sore, and he thinks that we had a role in this even though we didn’t. And I got to tell you something: this guy’s not going away. He’s still young. He’s coming back. Just buckle up, and we’ll wait for him, [it’s] not a big deal.” That’s classic him. He also had a temper, I saw that a few times, so it’s not like he was always the—sometimes he needed the calming down. But that was rarely in the public.

What would trigger his temper?

Seeing something where he thought it was very clear what the right thing to do was and then having to deal with Congress to get it done. Sandy was often uncomfortable about putting me in with him at those times, partly because—

One thing I remember was when the—I think it was a CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] error or a Pentagon error, but it was clearly a mistake on bombing the Chinese embassy in Kosovo [Serbia, 1999] and we needed to offer to rebuild it. First, we were trying to convince them that it really was a mistake, a pretty horrendous mistake but a mistake. Because of various restrictions on funding, Congress had to approve funding specifically for that rebuilding purpose. We were going to need how to figure out the case to them and make those calls, and that was a really unhappy discussion with him, which I had with Sandy first.

Granted, the way I had it with Sandy was I brought in the Constitution and said “Article I,” in terms of how they see stuff, “Article I, Article II. We’re Article II. They come first. This is their stuff because it’s [appropriated] money, so you just need to know.” Because Sandy’s line would always be, “It’s the President of the United States, Mara, who wants this.” I was like, “Totally get it. He’s Article II,” [laughter] just in terms of the guys you have to talk to.

Can I ask a Middle East question that you may not be dealing with directly but I’m sure had thoughts about? It’s in this time period, am I correct, that [Yitzhak] Rabin is assassinated?

Yes. That’s actually when I’m still on the Hill.

Correct, that’s ’95, right?

Yes.

In the fall of ’95, as I recall. Just your thoughts about that. There also is, remember, the flight over, and Gingrich is involved—

That was when Gingrich made a big deal about getting off the staircase in the back, which, by the way, everyone does on those planes, other than the President. Now Biden takes the lower staircase, but—

Anyway, just given your interest in that area, before, during, and after, just your thoughts about that.

I don’t remember a similar time where I felt as devastated by an action. I actually really had a hard time getting myself together to go on the House floor because, ironically, we had legislation that was being pushed by Yitzhak Rabin. We worked closely with his embassy on the Middle East Peace Facilitation Act [of 1993], which is what gave waivers for the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] office in Washington to be able to function, for Congress to be able to give assistance.

PLO was like Hamas’s—not like Hamas, that’s not fair, but had terrorist designations, so waivers were required to deal with them. And where waivers initially had passed as part of some piece of legislation, it was always for time-limited periods. And because of where some lobbying groups in the United States were—AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], despite the fact this was what the Israeli prime minister wanted, was hands-off helping on this. And Zionist Organization of America, which at that point was considered a far-right group, had ginned up a few members, Democrat and Republican.

We ended up having to move this Middle East Peace Facilitation Act by unanimous consent, so we have to find times on the House floor to get this unanimous consent done, always for time-limited periods. We had tried the week before Rabin was killed, and someone had objected, so we couldn’t get it through. We were both, in the week following his death, doing some resolution that was commemorating him and having to get through the legislation that he had wanted.

For me, it was a time when the hypocrisy, which is always there but just was so hard for me to deal with at this time. I remember Hamilton saying, “You can have someone else take your place on the House floor in managing this if you need to.” Basically [he was saying], if you’re there, you’re going to have to suit up. There were times [during that debate] when I just went to the back of the House floor and had someone else in my seat in the direct management because the same people who the week before had done things that were so directly counter to what this guy wanted, in the dark of night, were coming out with this effusive praise at this very public moment.

Gerry Studds, a former boss, was still around, still in Congress. He wasn’t a particularly warm guy—he was a great teacher—but I must have looked—somehow, he came up to me and said, “How are you doing?” And I, in the back of the floor of the House, fully vented with him about how frustrated I was and how unhappy because I was pretty sure that, by killing Rabin, the ability to go forward on peace efforts with the Palestinians was going to be seriously compromised—I felt it in every core of my being.

He described what it was like during both Kennedy assassinations, and I think RFK [Robert F. Kennedy]—he had worked on his campaign and immediately went back to that, and then talked about how he had come back from it. It was the most personal conversation I had ever had with him. I was no longer working for him and had worked with him for three years and had never seen that side of him. Those are the things I remember from that time period.

And then being so moved by the funeral, by how Clinton handled it. I think Gingrich’s behavior was that much more appalling because of the whole context in which it had happened.

There is an interval where, by the timeline, you return to the Hill?

Yes, where Howard Berman told me I was the “living embodiment of the challenge of the separation of branches.”

Do tell.

I was in the NSC senior director for legislative affairs job, and it was great working for Sandy. The way he constructed that job, you were in every deputies meeting and most principals meetings, and so often you were the only person who had the legislative angle. It also meant—NSC staff, in general, are a pretty ambitious, driven group, and everyone thinks they know how to work Congress, and few do. But they are robust in their views of that, so it’s pretty exhausting work in that position.

The person who completely put me over the edge—was about as noncollegial as you could be in a colleague, and it took an extraordinary amount of time and energy to try to not have him do things that were going to be a liability for the President. There was one point where I went to Sandy and said, “You’re going to have to choose. I am not going to continue serving with this guy.” And then it became clear. He said, “Are you really going to—” We had this whole conversation about it. Also, I decided it didn’t make sense—I was not going to make him choose. I was just not going to be there anymore.

At the same time, Sam Gejdenson, who I’d known for a long time, was trying to organize on the Democratic side of House Foreign Affairs, since Hamilton had not run again in 1998, and I was probably in touch with him pretty often anyway. He asked me if I wanted to come back and help them get organized, and so I did. At that point I thought I was completely leaving the White House.

The funny moment, I think, that inspired Berman’s statement, was when I had given notice, the NSC knew I was leaving. I was going back to the committee counsel job, but before I was actually leaving the White House, the committee had to go through its organizational processes, and they literally had no counsel to help them do it. They also have a rule that if you’re in the executive branch, you can’t be up on the committee dais, right? You’re in the testimony role, in front of the committee dais, or in the audience. It unanimously got waived by Republicans as well as Democrats—they knew I was coming to that next job. I was just going to help them do the committee organization, and I was going to be there officially in three or four weeks. That’s when Berman was like, “Oh my God, you are the embodiment—you are basically a constitutional violation right now.” [laughter]

On the going back part, pretty quickly it became clear to me, and I think Gejdenson knew this, that it was hard to come back. Literally, the desk felt smaller at a place I had been so happy, that I’d really grown up professionally. It just felt too small.

Around the same time, [Robert S.] Bob Tyrer at the Pentagon called me—I think I had interacted very slightly with him—and they needed a new assistant secretary for legislative affairs, so I went to interview with him for that job. I said I wasn’t inclined, blah, blah, a bunch of times but went to talk to him. Then Sandy found out that I was doing that, and called me, and was like, basically, “Now I am going to take it personally.” [laughter] I actually did tell him I was leaving because it was my prime childbearing years, and I didn’t think they should be spent continuing to work in the White House in the way that I was working when I’d left before. And he was like, “That’s clearly not the case considering you’re interviewing at the Pentagon.”

So I had these conversations with him and agreed to come back in what was, I think, some created role. I forget what it was called, maybe a counselor role or something. He created a political slot. What I didn’t realize at the time is I think he knew by that summer that [Donald L.] Kerrick was going to be leaving, who was the NSC chief of staff at that point, the other deputy slot. So that was the job I think he was consciously going to work me into, although he didn’t tell me when I first came back.

OK, but the question relates more to what you said a few minutes ago about the friction with a particular NSC senior director. I wondered if it was only in that constrained area or was he managing to be offensive in a broader way?

He was a large presence, so just as a simple way of—the NSC email traffic—and I’ll be very curious, in the 20-year time periods, which comes out. First of all, there was a lot of sarcasm back and forth, [Antony] Tony Blinken being excellent at it because he was a speechwriter at that point for Clinton and then ran the Europe Directorate when I was chief of staff. One person described it as an intense jai alai game, so a lot of back-and-forth, right? But we had a pretty jocular, for the most part—and then different subgroups. It would be fascinating email traffic to analyze just in terms of how different NSC staff works.

This staffer would only respond—if you were outside of his directorate, he would use a blood-red typeface and bold ink. That was his way of communicating with his colleagues. When somebody else came in, a guy named Miles Lackey took over my job at legislative affairs, and when Miles was trying to let him know that X, Y, or Z needed to be done in terms of the Hill on whatever it was he was promoting, this staffer came back to say, “I am not a mere potted plant. I’ll do what I want, thank you.”

Well, if you have some spare time at some point, there are lots of discussions with Bush 43 [George W. Bush] people about this, and those interviews are open, including [Steven J.] Steve Hadley’s and [Condoleezza] Condi Rice’s, and Philip Zelikow talked a lot about this, so you could get their perceptions.

But I think there are certain people who are great at how they use both bureaucracy and politics to build their power center.

I have one of the step-back, general questions we normally ask at the end, but it’s really appropriate right now. Working on Capitol Hill, working in the White House, there’s always politics, there’s always policy, but there’s always personality. Can you make any generalization about the relative importance of those, or perhaps a generalization about the one I think we know less about and understand less, which is that third area?

The personality, yes. I’ve always said I’m both fascinated by and think I’m pretty good at—to get policy done, to be effective at implementing policy, you’ve got to understand politics, process, and people, right? [Stephen] Steve Biegun was one of the people I’ve heard most effectively articulate that in various settings. I think I didn’t used to include “people.” I would talk policy, politics, process, and then heard Steve, and he may have talked about “personnel,” but it’s the same mix. I think the foreign policy establishment is really bad at understanding this: that having the good idea is maybe 10 percent of the equation, and navigating it to implementation is understanding the other three well.

Part of what I tried to get people to think about when they’re doing their prep memos for a deputies or principals meeting is that I don’t need you, NSC staffer in China, to go into the weeds on the intricacies of what PNTR [permanent normal trade relations] is going to do or not do. What Sandy needs is to know where everyone at the table is. What mindset are the people at the table coming to this with? Where do we want to end up, and how do you get from here to there? You want these three options in front of the President. You’re not going to, as some NSC staffers want to do, tell them at the front end, “These are our three options.” You know you want to get there. What are the different kind of constraints on characters to get there?

I felt like that was very much my combination of Lee Hamilton training and Berger, and how the President and Podesta looked at stuff.

I really thought Clinton was masterful. The degree to which his personality and how he could work stuff and work a room was a huge asset for us in trying to navigate through difficult issues. I saw the difference of different personalities leading the different agencies as well and what it took. I think, actually, one of the things that Berger did very well was the “ABC group,” the Albright–[William] Cohen–Berger meetings that happened regularly, and developing—I don’t know it was always a sense of camaraderie, but they were a team working together. It didn’t mean they didn’t get really irritated with each other at times and various things where their different personalities clashed, but they were working together as a team, regardless.

It’s my sense that Hadley and Rice—I was on the outside—tried to do that as well. I don’t know as much about the different personalities. I think they probably had an easier time second term than first term in doing that, maybe partly because of Steve’s personality and also the [Richard B.] Cheney staff factor. Eric Edelman and I haven’t talked about that much, but I’d be interested in learning more about that.

And also, [Donald H.] Rumsfeld’s gone.

Yes, exactly, and how you manage in those ways. So, yes, I see personality having a big impact. The thing is in any White House you, again, get these über-ambitious—it’s like Harvard Law School first year on steroids, right? [laughter] The competition with each other and how you end up with a you’re in the trenches together—

Actually, I feel like, very much, being in the Clinton administration in the last three years—even though I knew who didn’t get along with who, and which points John or Sandy would ask me if the other guy was going to be in the meeting—you see where the rivalries are. But at the end of the day, it’s you together against what you’re facing from the outside. And I think his folks still have that very strong core feeling with each other, the Clinton folks.

I wasn’t in the Obama—I think the Obama inner circle was much smaller.

If I can just jump up on Bob’s question, the way you started out answering that question, it sounded to me—I’ve never heard a D.C. meeting described this way, but there’s almost a sense of vote counting that’s going into this? I don’t want to misunderstand: is that where you were going, or is it more consensus building?

The deputies meeting?

Yes.

It’s not either, in other words, but maybe a combination. What you want to get to the President for decision is something that everyone at the table can feel accurately reflects—remember, you’re sending up the options memo, three options.

You want to make sure, at least my teaching was, that everyone at that table can feel like one or more of the options presented legitimately expressed the views they were bringing to the table and that the President has real choices in front of him but choices that he’s not being politically boxed in by. And so the consensus—it’s not like everyone’s going to agree on the thing, but everyone’s going to agree that there is a fair and full discussion and that what’s going to him for a decision reflects that. They’ve had every opportunity to be able to make their case.

I think that’s a really important point. We’ve talked to a number of people, you read this frequently: the “false three choices,” right? There’s really one—especially critics, who the decision might not go their way: “Oh, they gave us three. There’s really one, and it’s a rigged kind of process to begin with.” You’re actually suggesting something completely different: the three choices actually have representation at the table and around the table.

Yes.

And so this is a legitimate menu of choices, right?

Yes.

That’s the description of a good process—

Yes, yes, yes. Right, right, right.

Yes.

—which you don’t always have.

Again, I’d be curious to go back and look at H. W. Bush stuff because Sandy’s model was definitely [Brent] Scowcroft, and Scowcroft’s deputy.

That was [Robert M.] Gates first.

No, it’s another—who was post-Gates? I can see, and I’m just not—and he died, I think, a year or two before Scowcroft did. I’ll have to go back and look because it was someone—

To the best of my recollection, Gates was with the team the whole time.

I want to say Aaron, but it’s not. It’s an “A”—Arnold Kanter.

Middle East politics is very important late in the Clinton administration. We sort of jumped into discussing terrorism, but I’m curious to get your account of how that emerges, and how involved were you, and how close were we to something really significant in that last year.

I think pretty close in the last year. Until the Obama administration, Middle East work was always a thread but never the main stream of what I was doing. Honestly, it kind of went all the way back to my undergraduate time and interest, and then working with Hamilton.

I, as part of my chief counsel responsibility, followed security and rule-of-law issues, so I took a trip with [Daniel B.] Dan Shapiro, who later became our ambassador there. He was a staffer on the [House Subcommittee on] Europe and the Middle East Subcommittee [House Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia], which was run by Chris Van Hollen’s wife, Katherine, who was staff director.

Dan Shapiro and I traveled to, at that point—the Palestinian Authority, I’m not sure that it was officially the PA yet, was set up in Gaza. I still give Dan a hard time because he had had it with my questions about rule of law and security forces. There were a lot of other things he was interested in and not that. That was the whole reason I was there. It had been a thread for me all the way through.

I also, in my time in the Hill, I got much better about understanding the appropriations process and the importance of the budget side. I would say so much so that I guess in my second iteration at the White House, Sandy somehow decided that I would be the representative for the NSC in place of him at—every morning Podesta had 8:00 a.m. budget meetings. That also showed the emphasis in the Clinton administration was on, You should balance the budget, and you should figure out how you do that in smart and effective ways.

I also had a role at the NSC—some NSCs, I think to their detriment, don’t often do this—but I was the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] person. So I was the one at the NSC that was an overall voice on how you get—so you don’t have separate directorates pushing their agency counterparts’ views. You have an overall, What are we trying to get to on the 050 Defense budget, on the 150 foreign assistance budget? So I was the person, and [Jacob] Jack Lew was the OMB director at the time. Sylvia Mathews [Burwell] was the deputy. I would go with them to the Hill for some of the tough final discussions on numbers, so I always had that angle.

I bring that up only because my role on the Middle East-related stuff was very much through that lens. It was, first, when it was Syria and Shepherdstown [West Virginia; Israel-Syria peace talks, 2000]: what would the Israelis get if there was an agreement there? Then with the Palestinians, what would they get if there was an agreement at Camp David [Summit, 2000]? And then what would they get if they were trying really hard?

Barak, again, consistent with Israeli leaders, had a pretty aggressive appetite for the things that he wanted. Some of those things were an absolute “no.”

And then I was the one who presented at a meeting with the President on an issue that was internally sensitive—State had one position, the Pentagon had another, but the Pentagon would not be represented in the room for discussion with the President on it. That made Sandy nervous, but also I think he didn’t want to be the one to present—basically the things we needed to say “no” to that the Israelis wanted and why we needed to say no, and what we could do and what we shouldn’t do, at least in terms of recommendations to the President for his decision, which the State Department team was not happy about.

The getting close to stuff—what was finally laid out in December was a great deal. What was offered at Camp David was not, and that’s often misrepresented.

I was only at Camp David for one afternoon of discussions on the numbers stuff. I had to withstand the White House staff animosity about why the President’s time was being eaten up in these ways because my recollection is it was like 10 days, and he went to a funeral in the middle of it in Japan and came back and went back there.

I think you’re right. So the question is, who is responsible? Was this the President’s own decision? I mean, surely he wouldn’t do this without Sandy’s affirmation, but you’re trying to figure out, OK, if everybody agrees this is a terrible use of the President’s time—

Yes, clearly everyone didn’t agree. [laughter] I would say—

Well, the President might not. I mean, the President might have thought—

No, I think the President wouldn’t have—listen, the President makes the final call. He had an almost insatiable need to get this done, to try to get this done—to, at all costs, throw everything against the wall. I believe he felt he was uniquely able to do it. He’ll still tell you what his polling numbers were in Israel for both Israelis and Palestinians and how he, for years, was uniquely a person who could win an election on either side there.

I also think what I saw—because I actually traveled with him post-presidency, in his first international trip, when he was giving a speech at something that was an award to [Nelson] Mandela—Mandela, King Hussein [bin Talal], and Yitzhak Rabin I think had an unusual degree of emotional hold on him, all three of them. I think in various ways he looked to them as elder figures, as mentors, as people he needed to do something for. And I think Yitzhak Rabin’s memory was very much that for him, and I think a huge motivating force for him not having died in vain. So I think that’s part of it.

That is, that Dennis Ross had convinced the President of something that he wanted to do anyway.

Yes, yes, good point. Right, eager to do it, that this was a route to solution and that—

And it was, Do it now and in this way.

Right, and both Dennis and Aaron Miller were not process guys. It’s interesting in terms of the role of personality, right? The two of them are very different personalities, also passionately committed to this issue, not process.

Again, because they didn’t have to go through the deputies process, there was always some special arrangement for these issues. I think that also gave them a good amount of sway.

But again, that kind of—I credit to confident personality—a sense of knowing the players, knowing the history in an unparalleled fashion, and knowing what a principal really wants to do. Clinton did want to be there. He did want to make sure he was doing everything possible. I think he probably saw, rightly, that Barak was one of the best hopes you had on the Israeli side. I think he had tremendous confidence in his ability to persuade people to do the right thing. And also, if you’re President, you don’t see the preparation stuff that goes in, so that’s not going to be on your mind that you don’t have stuff in place.

Yes, this is fascinating, isn’t it, Bob? In terms of you always want to have somebody around the President who can say no to him, right?

Yes, and, well, that was often John’s role, or Sandy’s role. There were times when Sandy would make me be the bad news deliverer. Frankly, I think Bruce Riedel, who ran the Near East NSC directorate, asked me—and there were very few times that he went and asked me to be involved in something. I think it was because he didn’t want to deliver the bad news to the Israelis, and he knew someone was going to have to say “no,” and so he’d rather kick that up. I think there’s that combination.

I think Sandy also, though, probably did really want to believe this was possible, right? And so you take the risk. And again, you have a President willing to take the risk. I just think the risk was so huge, given where players—and I think the United States for a long time has been really bad, it’s not just Israelis and Palestinians—at getting what the full motivations are of the variety of people they’re getting into the room, like what everyone’s politics are. I think if we had really spent time on that, then it would not have augured well for the—we weren’t ready yet. We were ready by December.

Sure.

Yes, but if you looked at the paperwork in the Carter administration, before his Camp David [1978], it would have been a clear consensus, Don’t do this. It’s not ready. It was something he wanted—

Interesting.

—and some others, but it was something he wanted.

My sense of that Camp David is that it was really well planned and had been thought through, and—that’s so funny.

No, I think the pre-memos were, This is not going to work, and here’s where the problems will be.

Yes. Wow.

If you have a President who has convinced himself already he wants to do something, what are the chances—who can tell him no?

Yes, fair.

I wonder, was she [Hillary Clinton] senator by then, or she was running at the time?

Running.

She was running, which also—

She’s running, which also raises a question.

No, that was—

She’s running in New York. Given what the two of them had been through, was this a factor, you think?

No, I don’t think, in going to Camp David. To me, some of it is I get the going there—having some off-ramps and knowing what your off-ramps are going to be, at least, as opposed to continuing to stick with it. Where I think that may have been more of a factor, but I also think it’s where Clinton was—the time I came closest to leaving the administration, or really having to ask myself what my red lines were—was when he came out a few weeks after Camp David, in August, basically praising Barak and slamming [Yasser] Arafat in a way that I thought (a) wasn’t accurate in terms of what had happened there and (b) not helpful.

I had some conversations with people who basically said, “If it’s a total red line for you—but can you do more good inside than outside?” And I’m very glad I stayed and then saw the progression through the fall. But I remember that August period. I also think Clinton identified with Barak, and he was right in the sense that Barak was trying to move stuff.

Is it fair to say that the way that this goes off the rails is for two things. One, there’s a legacy factor for Clinton. He really wants this done, he wants to do something big. And two, probably related, it’s not going through normal, rigorous process? Is there a third, fourth, fifth, sixth?

[Pause] I think that that’s it. I think that the lack of process also goes to some of the personalities involved and how they can manipulate it. It’s not like that good process guarantees good outcomes; it’s just that bad process almost always leads to bad outcomes. Though it’s interesting, I want to go back and look at the ’78 Camp David stuff to understand.

So there’s nothing that could have been done—well, I should ask. Was there anything that could have been done at Camp David in real time that would have saved the lack of proper process—and would have saved us all of the heartache since then?

Are you asking could you have gotten people together at Camp David for a different set of things?

No, the same one. In other words, was it dead on arrival?

I think it was too soon, and where we came out in December was not what we were proposing. We didn’t have a plan in mind for Jerusalem and what you were going to do. I honestly don’t remember that much about—my guess is we had a fair amount on parameters, on essentially what borders would be and maybe a little bit on security arrangements, but on refugees and Jerusalem, not—and, again, for the politics of it, those are huge. Ultimately, where we came out on Jerusalem was—so those things needed some time to work out and to have more conversations with key players.

I think there was a sense that Barak was not going to have the mandate for long. He had already—we went with Barak’s approach on doing Syria first, even though many people thought we shouldn’t be doing that, and so we had lost a lot of time there. And then, in terms of where his popularity was or wasn’t—and remember, we had the eye on Netanyahu from early on to see. So there were real pressures pushing it.

Ultimately, for Clinton in the last year, he decided—I don’t remember if it was November or December, but conversations with him—again, Podesta’s approach was kind of “pedal to the metal.” There was no down period where we weren’t going to be that involved post-November. It was how do you maximize getting everything, the stuff you can get done.

We were both pushing hard on North Korea stuff because Wendy Sherman and Madeleine Albright were handling that, and on the Israeli/Palestinian stuff. They had to figure out a schedule, and Clinton had to ultimately decide between the two because I think they were trying to block in if he needed to do one additional foreign trip in January, which is also crazy, right? It was a very tough choice for him, but he decided that he was all in on everything he could do on the Israeli-Palestinian front and so pushed that.

The final calls from the Oval Office, or close to the final calls, were Barak and Arafat. Literally, I have a picture of boxes packed up in the corners and all of us sitting there for those calls.

I have one wrap-up question about Clinton, and that is given your interest in Ireland, was that a piece of your portfolio ever?

It actually wasn’t. Nancy Soderberg was—and then she was out of the administration when I came in, but George Mitchell had that unique role.

It more came up, interestingly, for me when I was working for Mitchell in the beginning of Obama. I thought it was a real mistake, but he pretty consistently brought up his Northern Ireland work with them. Each of these guys needs to feel like their situation is so unique, whether or not it is. As soon as you bring up your comparison stuff, they’re going to find a million ways that it’s not that.

And so I saw that as—I learned something in terms of what not to do. I understood why it was his automatic.

And you say he was bringing up to the parties involved—

Constantly.

—“at my old school, when I was the envoy.”

[BREAK]

Afternoon Session

I thought in the interest of expediting things that we would largely skip your interval outside the executive branch, but I wondered if there’s anything in particular that we ought to take note of in that interval during the Bush years.

I think among the many ties connecting people is the ongoing relationship with McDonough, which we touched upon. He was an intern with Hamilton at House Foreign Affairs. I then argued strongly, though Hamilton agreed, that he should come on a permanent staff role from his internship. Then I was at the Clinton White House when [Thomas A.] Tom Daschle was looking for someone for the national security role. Daschle’s folks contacted me and another guy I’d worked with in the House who was doing legislative affairs, Miles Lackey. We both strongly advocated for Denis for that role.

I think after Daschle left the Senate, Denis went to work for a Democratic senator—I forget from where—but then rapidly became affiliated with the Obama campaign after Obama had been in the Senate. When he left that senator’s office, he had some kind of part-time affiliation with the Center for American Progress, where I was also part-time affiliated. He and somebody else asked me to volunteer with the Obama campaign.

I went with Hillary Clinton, for a variety of reasons, but we were in pretty constant communication, which included well before I was working on the transition team, through that summer. There was a trip that Obama was taking, and I can’t even remember at what point Hillary Clinton was in or out—there were a few months there—but I helped them, informally, on putting together who he might meet with from the Palestinian community in Jerusalem. That was me and Denis talking. Also, I think it was a speech—I want to say the AIPAC conference, but I’m pretty sure it was that summer—in which I gave the same guidance to both Clinton folks and Obama folks.

There was a lot of informal communication because Denis and I were good friends, had known each other for a long time. When I saw animosity building, various elbows being thrown between Obama campaign people and Clinton campaign people, they were all people I’d kind of grown up with professionally. Literally, Denis and I were a few floors apart in the same building when we were both at American Progress.

I remember going and talking to him at different times and having the same conversation with Lee [A.] Feinstein, in the Clinton world, who I think was running the foreign policy part of the campaign, to say, “We’re all in this together come November, so you’ve got to remember that. Frustrating as it may get right now, it’s very short-term. If we don’t manage to maintain the relationships that keep us together, we’re not going to prevail in the thing that we most want in November.”

I was informally—and I’m sure there were other people doing that too—doing that kind of back-and-forth. The fact that Denis and I went so far back, that, I think, is largely why I ended up at this meeting with Obama in I want to say it was October, probably, of 2008. For a variety of reasons, I think, I ended up at the table.

Is this your first meeting with Obama?

It’s the first meeting post-being a student with him at Harvard.

Fair. Right, OK. Yes, thank you.

So you actually knew him at Harvard?

Yes. I mean, he quickly became a celebrity on campus. It was kind of fascinating to watch. He and I had spoken at the same public interest rally my second-year fall. He was a 1L, and the fact that he got asked to speak—I mean, I had been involved in this stuff for a while. I don’t remember precisely the reason for the rally, I think there was a public interest law position that the then-Dean [Robert C.] Clark—wanted to eliminate.

Clark was seen as a very kind of pro-corporate guy as dean, and so there was some rally being put together. I remember in the preparatory phases for it, it was clear that there was this following for this guy who had only been on campus a few weeks at the law school: We’ve got to get Barack Obama to speak. Got to get him. Community organizer from Chicago. He had this buzz around him and definitely a sense of some acolytes he already had cultivated. I was one of several speakers at this rally. He started speaking, and I turned to the person next to me and said, “It is when, and not if, that guy is in national office.” It was that clear. And so he was kind of a star from when he was first on campus.

I have friends who were on law review with him. I wasn’t, but what I did believe, and it became an issue during the presidential campaign, is—I watched him. It’s not like Harvard Law Review is the center of the universe, despite how they think of it. But he navigated unbelievable dichotomies of views on that and came basically straight down the middle with everyone thinking he was on their side. During the presidential election, when you had all of these people, to my mind, putting every view that was theirs onto him, the question about what became—“progressive” really has been hijacked as a term in a way that’s very frustrating to me, to be Far Left at this point. And I didn’t hear anything of that angle in what he said.

My sense of where he was historically, and then following up in conversations I had with Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, who had been his Senate staffer—I had gotten to know Mark because of, again, the Middle East trips when Denis put me in touch with Mark for figuring stuff out there—that he wasn’t where these guys thought. But again, it was the same brilliance—in that sense, for him I think politics is a competitive sport. It’s what you needed to do to move forward an agenda with a variety of audiences. So I feel like I saw glimmers of that early on in his time at law school.

Can I bear down on that? Is it because he knows how to, as people blame politicians all the time, Oh, they’ll just say what they think an audience wants to hear? Or was it the fact of him, and the way you describe him at Harvard, that he is so charismatic that people take their views and put them on him and think he has them?

I think it’s more the second. Again, a huge amount of personal charisma. I think he and Bill Clinton are fascinating compare-and-contrasts. I think it is people projecting all sorts of stuff onto him, but then I would also say the ability to use that, like knowing that that’s happening. My sense with Obama is he always had a pretty firm sense of where he wanted to go on stuff. I think he had a tremendous amount of confidence in his ability to figure out what the right thing was, and a little bit of a—he did not have the need to be liked.

My sense is he was a guy—and I may be wrong—who kind of always had a certain adoring fanbase when he went through life, and I’m not sure that Bill Clinton did. There’s a sense of one guy having to, very much ingrained, You have to work at it to get everyone to like you, and another guy who’s much more accustomed to the “too cool for school” [laughter] kind of mantra that he had. But I think he was brilliant at using that to be able to achieve—I don’t think it’s the same thing as you say, “whatever a room wants to hear.”

I think he had firm views of where he wanted to go and things he wanted to do. I think he’s just very adroit, kind of probably an early adopter of, How do I make my personal brand work for me to accomplish these things?

How did you end up working for—you said you were supporting Hillary.

Yes.

It’s never clear when we’re having these conversations who’s going to be in which network and how that happens. Help clarify that, please.

First, it’s a lot of the same people, and so I was constantly in communication. I was not one of the people—I was very conscious of the folks who were working for one campaign and basically telling each campaign that they were only with them. I was astonished that they didn’t get caught out on that. They were just positioning themselves in a way that, to me, was really transparent, but apparently it works for a lot of people. [laughter]

I knew and respected the Obama people, so I was really clear with them on why I was with her [Clinton]. Literally all the way to, I think, immediately—it must have been close to pre-[Democratic National] Convention—it was very clear she didn’t have the numbers. I was still out there doing media stuff for her, and there was one event at which me and Denis, and Richard Fontaine, who was [John] McCain’s foreign policy guy, spoke.

The three of us were together at this forum for something, and Denis and I had talked beforehand. Frankly, I think I shared my homework with Denis, even though we were there representing two different campaigns. He hadn’t had time because he was busy in the campaign. So the memo on what their issues were, we were doing—it was a former House Foreign Affairs staffer who had been organizing things. We were both doing it as a favor to him.

We had met briefly beforehand and then walked in together, and there were a couple different points where either I referenced, “When I was walking from the [Washington, D.C.] Metro with Denis we talked about that,” or “Denis mentioned that.” At one point, Richard responded to a question, “Clearly the mistake I made was not walking from the Metro with the two of you.” [laughter] So there’s a lot of that back-and-forth, but my assumption was I wouldn’t be involved in the Obama administration in any way.

What happened in October, I got—I think Denis and Mark had probably been talking. Again, there are all sorts of factions inside the Obama world because I got a call from Denis—literally, it was, I think, on a Monday or Tuesday night—that said, “Obama’s going to be in Richmond [Virginia] Wednesday.” It was literally the next day. “It’s a meeting with these foreign policy/national security people. Needs you to be there. Can you be there for it?”

I definitely asked, “Why?”

“No, it’s important for whatever combination of reasons. Can you drive down and be there?”

So I said yes. Again, why would I not? And he had told me Lee was going to be there, Jack Reed, a bunch of people I really respected. I get there and really was pretty naive. I’d like to think I was being asked there for me and what I could bring to the table. I think there was some gaming going on with people who had probably been very aggressive in wanting to be in the likely President’s orbit.

I think Denis and Mark, who were acting as staff—they were not seated at the table—were looking to try to game that differently. I didn’t think that much of it, but I was surprised. This was the first time I saw Obama, again, since law school; and he went around the table to introduce himself to people there. Because he had been well briefed, he mentioned our law school connection, which I’m sure came from Denis or Mark telling him. But then I looked and they had place settings, and I’m in either the seat next to Obama or one seat over. Definitely in the center of the table.

How did that make you feel?

There were a couple things like that. I don’t think I was right next to him—I think someone like Lee Hamilton or Jack Reed was there—but I was in the center of the table. And then it became that much more shocking because I’m at the meeting, and I didn’t tell anyone that I was going, and they have a photo spray at the beginning of the meeting.

This had clearly all been set up, so I should have then realized, OK, these table settings, there’s—and so there’s this photo spray, which, turns out, gets into the online, kind of prime position—this photo is on The New York Times website. I don’t have my phone with me. I don’t realize it’s going crazy during the two hours of this meeting, partly because of how they had blocked this out.

The other thing is there were very few women who were able to be there. I think me and Wendy Sherman were the only—I think Madeleine Albright couldn’t be there. Wendy was on the opposite side, I think towards the middle of the table, but it was her back that was to the camera. The picture that came out in The New York Times was not the entire table; it was the middle section. And because of how different people were blocked out, I was one of three or four people who were in the picture with the President.

So the meeting happened. What I also didn’t realize was, after the meeting, there was some press availability, that Obama was speaking from a podium. Lee Hamilton was there, so I think I was probably seated near him. And the reason I remember this is because they were lining us up. They were lining us up in a very deliberate way to go into this next room. No idea what this is about. I am standing next to Lee in the lineup. Sam Nunn was also there. Lee asked where his briefcase is or can’t remember where his briefcase is, so I run to get it, to figure it out and go get it. Someone’s like, “Mara,” and made some joke, “once a staff, always a staff,” [laughter] and not wanting me to leave the place in line. Someone else from the Obama-world went and found it and came back.

We go into the room, and it’s been set up. It’s some auditorium—I don’t remember where this was in Richmond—and they’ve got the podium, and they’ve got our spots marked. Standing behind the President is me, Lee Hamilton, Sam Nunn, and I forget who the fourth person was. And I’m feeling very uncomfortable.

Sam Nunn looked at me—so I’m standing in between Sam Nunn and Lee Hamilton, which is a lovely place to be. [laughter] Sam Nunn looks at me and he said, “I’ve seen this happen on the Senate floor. If those guys could take a slug at you right now, they would be. Anything to wipe you out.” Because he was watching the fulmination at the corners of this group on, How did this placing get done, and what’s she doing there? I had, obviously, nothing to do with it, but it was one of the simultaneously funniest and most uncomfortable positions I’ve been in.

Denis and Mark pulled me aside after that to say that Obama had a trip. He was doing a rally someplace else, and they wanted me to fly with him. Denis was going to drive my car back to D.C. because I was like, “I’ve got my car here. I drove to Richmond. What are you talking about?”

“No, no, no, we need you to do this, and are you OK with that? And then Denis will drive your car back.”

They clearly had figured it all out in advance and hadn’t told me any of it. And they wanted me to talk to him about NSC structure and process issues, which is what I did. So I’m literally sitting next to him on this plane as he’s going to a rally, which was, yes, quite a weird experience.

Now what was that one-to-one like, as you’re, in effect, briefing him on NSC organization?

I actually feel really strongly about getting process right and how much it matters. I knew there were still some people that had been in the Bush administration that were clamoring for the same kinds of roles. I could see that positioning happening. And so I really talked to him about why every President gets the NSC that they want—it’s one place you have tremendous flexibility in government—and where and how I thought it had been done better or worse. I knew I wasn’t talking to a receptive audience—perfectly polite, but no surprise that I would come away from that without a feeling from him like, This person has to be in my administration.

On the other hand, there had been no talk about me joining—the transition team and staff was already underway, as far as I could tell. I knew a bunch of the people who were involved in it, and I wasn’t, and I hadn’t been asked. I was at CAP [Center for American Progress] with Podesta, who had already been named as the head of the transition team. The day after, though, I did get a call about joining the transition. The NSC transition team was particularly small. It was only five people, which has changed in other administrations since. I think there are a lot of reasons for it to be small and agile that way.

But of the five people on it, Brooke [D.] Anderson was doing all the communications and press stuff for the transition, so that was kind of another job and she was there full-time. Ivo Daalder I think figured out pretty early on that he either wanted to be or was going to be the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] ambassador. Tony Blinken was busy doing Biden’s vice presidential stuff; that was his top priority. So it was really me and Derek Chollet who did more of the day-to-day. And I don’t know, Derek may have been full-time.

I didn’t have the mindset that I was going in, so I kept my day job, which was actually two jobs because I had a consulting firm and I was part-time at American Progress. I had several clients on the consulting side. I would go back and forth, walk back and forth between the two, and I was a volunteer, not paid transition staff.

I worked on the transition, and then I feel like it was very close—it was maybe a week before the inauguration—that Mark asked me to go have coffee with him. He basically said, “We’re not done with the NSC transition.”

I said, “Yes, I can see that.”

He’s like, “We’re not going to be done by the time we go in.”

And I said, “Yes, I see that.”

“We need you to come in.”

By that time they had who their top three—they had [James L.] Jim Jones. They had [Thomas E.] Tom Donilon. I don’t know if Denis and Mark’s roles were determined, but they were all going to be there. But Mark said, “We don’t have anyone senior who’s actually been on an NSC staff, and we recognize that’s a challenge for us, so we need you to come in, at least in the beginning, and get us set up at the front end. Then we can talk from there.”

I remember having this discussion with Sandy Berger because I was like, They’re essentially offering me a job that is lower than what I had before, when you have an exec sec [executive secretary]—because Mark and Denis and who knows what’s going to be in the mix. I want to come and help, and these are my friends asking, and they did the classic, “The President needs you,” which I really doubt. [laughter] It was more like these were good friends who I thought were trying to do the right thing and in the right ways.

I agreed to do it, which was Sandy’s counsel. So I had the same title I had before for this different job, and I think it was less than one week’s notice to basically figure out how to wind up my business, and my clients, and people who were working for me there, and the conversations with folks at CAP, to then go in. I was there on Inauguration Day and for a series of phone calls to the Middle East leaders, and all of that with some funny stories about what it is to come in in the rush of the beginning, which I only found out when I tried to exit a few months later to go to State.

I think it was within my second or third day, I’m sitting in my office at the NSC, which actually, ironically, was the same office I had had two jobs before. The senior director for legislative affairs, special assistant to the President job had this great office space in the [Eisenhower] Old Executive Office Building, and that was what became this office. I’ve also had the unique distinction of both offices that I’ve held have been transformed into situation rooms. In the Clinton White House—it was Henry Kissinger’s old office, which became the sit [situation] room. They increased the size and space of the sit room, so that office no longer exists.

And guess what? The office in the Old Executive Office Building, they built a sit room in the Obama administration, a SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility], that basically is a conference room area that also was my old office space. [laughter] So I know how to pick real estate, I guess.

Yes, I was going to say.

Yes.

Well, we know what to do with this chair. [laughter] Let me pose a question. If there’s something—

I was going to say, there was one just last thing. Because I had moved so fast through the staff, and because I wasn’t expecting and planning on it, and because I’ve known Podesta so well for so long, for a variety of reasons, I just didn’t even think to tell him that I was leaving. I was busy making sure I took care of the people around me, that I’d made a transition plan.

A few days later, I get a call. I’m sitting in this office, and John calls and says, “When did you think you were going to tell me?” And I was like, “Tell you what?” I assumed he knew. He was the chairman of the transition, right? He was like, “It would have been nice to hear from you directly that you were leaving CAP and going over there.”

Did he sound angry?

It was Skippy, yes.

Skippy was back.

Yes, exactly. So, yes, I remember feeling like, Ugh, I should have found a way to have the conversation with him. Honestly, it wasn’t purposeful, but—

You would think he would have known.

I think he probably did know.

My question was about Hillary Clinton. The first question is about the campaign leading up, particularly during the primary season. You get an indication from some people who were associated with Hillary that there was a little bit of frustration—maybe a lot of frustration—with the success that the Obama people were having in pedaling sort of “magic” solutions.

Yes.

I’m wondering if you had any experience with that and if there’s any residue from that kind of resentment after the election.

I don’t think so on the resentment on her part. I’m not sure about her husband, who I think maybe carries more of her grudges than she does. But to me, one of the fascinating things is her relationship with both Obama and Bill Clinton. She’s got two people who have unique communications abilities that there’s no way she can rival, right? There’s just no way. It’s different styles, different ways of doing it.

Why is that, though? What is it about her personality that doesn’t allow for that? Because the few times I’ve seen her one-to-one or in small groups—

Very different than in a large room.

And lots of people have noted that, as opposed to a speaking engagement before a large crowd. What is it?

I don’t know how much it is an innate ability for somebody. It’s certainly an ability I don’t have. I can be very well prepared, I feel like I can speak in public, but it’s rare that I can feel like I’m engaging with a large room. That’s why I don’t know how much of it is an innate ability. I think for [Bill] Clinton and Obama it’s not the same, but they both can be magic in crowds. They can both have off times that way, but there’s a switch that they can flip and get to this higher level that I just think many of us don’t have. And I think she has an enormous amount of talents, but that lacks that particular ability. So when you’re competing against that, either—I don’t know. I’m sure there are ways of finding routes—George W. Bush, right?

I was going to say. Yes, right.

He clearly had the ability to find other tools. Now, he was also up against someone who was pretty wooden in public in various ways—two candidates, I would say, who were not particularly skilled that way. But there are ways of compensating. I think it’s that a combination.

People speak very highly of Bush one-on-one—

Yes.

—and then you look at him in public and you’re like, I’m not seeing it.

Yes, though, I’ve got to say, boy, in the rearview mirror he looks a whole lot better. A whole lot better. [laughter]

Churchillian.

So my follow-on question was, how does that distance get bridged after she’s invited to come into the administration? And is there a residue of resentment on either side—maybe “resentment” is too strong a word, but a sort of residue of reserve on either side—because of their experience?

Maybe some. I don’t think with the principals; I think with their staff. For example, she’s really sharp—again, all these people keep reoccurring. Making Cheryl [Mills] her chief of staff. And Cheryl had been really close to her, I knew, from President Clinton’s administration, and most people were in one camp or the other in President Clinton’s administration.

That is the President’s camp and the “Hillaryland” camp.

Right, and the Hillary camp. Yes. But I actually worked closely with Melanne Verveer, who was her [White House] chief of staff, and so it was a little bit better. But still, my first exposure to her [Hillary Clinton] was really in her [presidential] campaign.

Cheryl was somebody who obviously fought his case on impeachment in the Senate, but from the beginning when she was working on the Bill Clinton transition team, I remember Hillary Clinton was the person she spoke to me about and the high regard in which she held her from early on. And Cheryl’s a fierce advocate. I think the two of them set up a structure for a secretary of state where it was very clear that different rules applied for her than for any other Cabinet member in picking staff, in having sign-off on the staff the President wanted.

How did that work?

I think Denis McDonough and Cheryl Mills actually did well with each other.

That is, the two staffs or—

No, those two individuals, in terms of having a constant channel.

OK, thank you.

I think they developed a very close working relationship. When I went to State, that got negotiated between the two of them, including my title. She fought for me for a title that they were not initially going to give me—I was not George Mitchell’s choice for the job I went to. And when I went to AID, the same, kind of keeping a portfolio that Secretary Clinton had given me even as I was going to AID, and Cheryl’s the one who negotiated those terms with Denis.

Can I step back for just a second? The extraordinary talent that Clinton and Obama have in political communication: is that a skill that can be taught, or is it something in their personal makeup that you can’t fully explain?

I think it’s the second. I think you can improve how people deliver, but there’s a certain part that’s a magic that I would guess they’ve each refined over the years. I recall Barack Obama speaking when he was a 1L because I was seeing that magic. He was a 1L. He had been a community organizer.

And you were already 2L, so you were—

2L, but I figured I knew how to spot talent because I’d worked on Capitol Hill for three years, right? But it was the—

You’re at Harvard where people are not inclined to be impressed with anyone.

Yes, other than themselves. And it stood out from any other student talk I had heard, or probably speaker, period, for some time. It was really striking. My guess is Bill Clinton had some of that before he was in elected office. Well, he ran for elected office when he was in his early thirties.

It’s interesting. I actually more got the sense from her [Hillary Clinton]—and this was definitely from watching her as secretary of state—that actually she really didn’t care about the appearances. That was during the period of time, also, when she would use the scrunchie [elastic hair tie] for her hair. I think people like Huma [Abedin] were there to try to make sure that the outward packaging worked.

But she wasn’t running for anything at that time. And she had to know, while she was secretary of state, she knew she would never run again.

Right, she had long trips and stuff. But no, she didn’t know that because she was running again, and there were probably internal differences of views on that. But I didn’t get the sense that the outward changes were kind of searching for a role or identity as much as someone suggesting, Try this, try that.

And I think there are different standards put on women versus men on the public appearance side. If you go back and look, I don’t know when she stopped wearing glasses and went to contacts, in terms of being the wife of the governor or working at the same time at the law firm and, frankly, earning the money for the family for him to be able to do his political stuff.

I knew this woman who passed away a few years ago, Sara Ehrman, who was Hillary Clinton’s landlord—she lived in Sara’s house when she was doing the Watergate commission staff job. I talked to Sara a lot about—Sara was the one who drove her to Arkansas when she was moving in with Bill Clinton post-Watergate. The entire drive, Sara was trying to talk her out of doing it. Sara was probably in her forties then, a divorced mother with two teenage boys, saying, “You’re throwing your career away—” And Bill Clinton quoted this regularly, I heard him say it because—they threw, I think, a big 80th birthday party for Sara at their house in Washington. Sara was trying to talk her out of doing this. “You have standing in your own right. Why are you throwing this all away for a guy?”

So I think Hillary Clinton, my guess is, had a lot of internal tugs back and forth on fulfilling her own ambitions and somebody she obviously cared about and was in love with, but also I think probably saw he’s got—she may have recognized then, He’s got that magic. I have to work at it.

You said that President Clinton would carry some of the grudges for Secretary Clinton. Do you mean to say that Hillary Clinton doesn’t carry grudges?

Oh, no. [laughter] I think she’s better at hiding it. But I think there’s some stuff he may take more personally than she does.

How good is she at burying the hatchet?

Oh, so I think—

In the ground.

Fair enough.

Yes. I actually think quite good. I think she and Obama genuinely had a good working relationship, no question about it. Did she not have [Samantha] Sam Power’s number? No, I think she did, but I think she knew she needed to kind of make peace, that Obama people wanted Sam to come into the administration, the fold, and she figured out a way to do it.

Could I ask about General [James L.] Jones, your thought about that appointment from the beginning, and then what you saw happening? And Tom Donilon’s role?

As far as I can figure out, some of what happened in Obama making that choice was Obama was seen at that point as not as strong on national security credentials. I think there was a certain cynical—he wanted someone who looked good in uniform. Not that he wanted someone who was not competent, but he wanted somebody who looked the part. He didn’t care what roles and positions people had. I think that the play was always that McDonough and Lippert were going to be his guys and his national security guys, and it didn’t matter what positions they had to do that.

I think Tom Donilon was supposed to be the grown-up in the room, as the deputy. My job in continuing the transition role was things like—the first-year budget that you have for the NSC is what’s left for you by your predecessors, and so you’ve got to make stuff work.

Jones was shocked at the budget—he said his budget at the [U.S.] Chamber of Commerce was bigger than the NSC. I was like, “Well, this is the budget you have. You can have a process for next year, but we’re under Treasury leg affairs. We’re part of the White House budget, so you need to make the argument to Rahm first.” So the basic kind of ways things work.

Jones had a lot of staff he wanted to hire—this was part of the conversation—a bunch of people at the Pentagon. I would say, “We don’t have the spaces. You can detail. Pentagon gets to decide.”

At that point, I knew the guy who was in the—Brad Kiley. I always called him the “mayor of the 18 Acres” [White House complex], but it was something of the key administrative roles across all White House entities. I’d known Brad for a long time. He’d also been an American Progress person. I would go and have candid conversations with him. We would strategize because he would be talking to Rahm and others in the chief of staff’s office—I was just trying to get them to a reasonable place in the first few months, and then I was going to either leave entirely or, as it turned out, go to the Mitchell staff. But it was very challenging.

Meanwhile, you’ve got Iraq, you’ve got Afghanistan that are going on.

Oh, yes, you’ve got stuff happening in the world, and I’ve got various people on the NSC staff who think it’s my job to get them better office space. Yes, so it’s an interesting—how you set up stuff, and make stuff work, and deal in real time, like the [foreign leaders] phone calls on the first day.

I think at some point, probably early on, we knew that I was going to [work with] Mitchell in some form because I did some travel [from my NSC position]. I did the travel—it was both me and Dan Shapiro, which was, I’m sure, hard to explain—the outside world seeing the manifest for the trip and wanting to know why the exec sec from NSC is on this trip. But it was the changeover from [Ehud] Olmert to Netanyahu, which had to be somewhere in the first few months of the administration. So I was still at the White House doing that travel.

When you would have these conversations with General Jones, did he ever try to change—to meet your advice or the reality—or did he not?

Very little. Again, he was always very gracious. I didn’t get the sense that he took me all that seriously. And they were excruciating meetings, especially when the other guys were just opting not to show up. I was like, Come on. I’m taking one for the team in even taking this job. [laughter] I’ve got to get some help here. But I wasn’t surprised when he ended up leaving, and I was more surprised it took that long.

So the outgoing Bush administration seems very pleased with their transition to the incoming Obama administration.

Yes. They were very proud of themselves on that.

Was that feeling reciprocated?

I think there was a very professional transition. I would say that there were lessons learned, but the transition from Clinton to Bush was also extraordinarily professional, despite how it was portrayed in public, and in a much more condensed time period.

Some of what changed—I was astonished on the transition team for Obama because what the Bush guys had done was to build in the legislation to professionalize the process; you could actually get paid for being on the transition. You had office space that was SCIF-ed. I don’t recall any of those things being in place in the Clinton-to-Bush time period, so I think they had done a lot on the structural side.

And they had huge briefing books. The briefing books never get used. I participated in some of the structuring stuff for the transition out from Obama to [Donald J.] Trump, what Obama team was aiming to prepare in which ways. It is funny the amount of work that goes into stuff that is not where it should be.

This is sort of a twofold question. It’s about the issue areas. You depict yourself very much as a process person coming in, but I’m assuming that—particularly when you’re looking at the two campaigns—there are comparisons and contrasts between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama on policy questions too. I’m wondering, were there any particular areas that you were interested in where the Obama “take” [approach] was less comfortable for you?

I think one of the ironies is there wasn’t that much difference. I think this goes to what people were projecting onto him because some of the discussions with Mark and Denis, again, were where things were going to land. I guess Iraq was probably the most visible, and when you talked to and engaged with Iran. But what you want to achieve, the outcome focuses for both of them—and my guess is he knew a lot of that, which was part of wanting her as secretary of state—there wasn’t a lot of daylight. It may have been some differences in processes. My recollection is that with their strategy going at the front end of the administration, we needed to come out of Iraq, and we needed to be in Afghanistan, which is a little bit ironic on a few fronts. But I don’t think there were huge differences on any issues.

The next question is an extension of that. When you left the earlier White House, 9/11 had not happened. You come into this White House basically eight years, not quite eight years, after 9/11 has happened. Can you think back: Were there substantial differences, either in the issue clusters that you’re dealing with or just in the way that you go about doing business, that can be attributed to the fact that we’re in a different world?

Not on the issue clusters because I think, a little contrary to public view, the counterterrorism portfolio was a big one in the last part of the Clinton administration. I think that both the Clinton and Bush administrations were on a similar page on China, and PNTR, and I think if you relook at stuff, it’s what were we not seeing, how were we not accurately understanding what the other guy’s intentions were going to be, and how they were going to use stuff. But that was across administrations.

Coming back eight years later, there was—I’m trying to remember when I had these briefings, whether it was part of the transition or, for some reason, earlier than that. But certainly, at least during the transition, the outgoing folks were very focused on all the ways that they had kind of hardened communication and the amount of time they spent in emergency training and drills on where you would go, what you would do. I’m pretty sure at some point, during Clinton, I participated in something like that, but I think they had vastly expanded. I think that was the trauma of being there in the White House area when that happened.

And then anthrax.

Right. And the other thing that was really different was how much more closed access to the White House was. They had pretty dramatically restricted, to the point where—actually, I remember being in a transition meeting with Bush people, and we were in my old office that was now a sit room in the West Wing. It was a combination of people, many of whom had their permanent offices over in OEOB [Old Executive Office Building]. Someone from our side asked where the ladies room was on a break, and I started to describe, just without thinking, and then realized the Bush folks were kind of looking at me. I said, “Did it move? Because I know this office has been changed.” They said, “No, it’s still there,” but they hadn’t used it. They hadn’t been in the West Wing enough.

So there was this bizarre situation where I had come back after eight years and knew my way around the footprint more than people who had been working there the last four years. That was an access issue and how much more it was controlled, so there were things like that.

Anatoly Dobrynin also knew the layout of the White House better than a lot of the Americans that worked there. [laughter]

So it’s not restricted.

Do you have any recollections from the inauguration?

Yes. Well, first, physically fighting your—I mean, I took the [Washington] Metro [rapid transit system] in, and getting off at Farragut North [station], and the wave of people that are coming against me, and I’ve got to make my way in through this gate. And, remember, I don’t have passes or—know how I’m going to navigate this. And I know there are calls that need to happen, and there are a lot of packages that need to be set up for these calls, so I remember that physical feeling of, Ooh, this is going to be interesting.

I don’t remember how I got in, but I got in. And the badging process—I’m trying to go through it in warp speed because, again, I know these calls that need to happen in the afternoon. Obama was determined to take on the Middle East front end. He felt like other administrations had come to it late, and he was going to tackle it from the beginning. Gaza stuff had been ongoing at that point, that iteration of Gaza stuff. And so my recollection is a huge number of his first calls were Middle East leaders.

I was going through whatever the processing was and got pulled from it part of the way through—I had my badge to go start working on these packages, which becomes relevant only when I’m leaving to go over to State, or [my move to State is] set and we’re just negotiating the date. The administrative director for the NSC comes to me and says, “Mara, I don’t know how to tell you this: I don’t know how we exit you because you’re not officially here.” [laughter] They hadn’t finished my paperwork.

It turned out the next thing that surfaced is that three of us—me, Dan Shapiro, and Dan Restrepo—unbeknownst to us, were still operating on our transitional security clearances and somehow that work hadn’t been done to shift the clearances from transition status. The way we found out was [State’s] Diplomatic Security [Service] was insisting they start from zero with me for the process of clearance, and I was like, “How is this possible?”

That’s how we discovered that, for all three of us, there was supposed to be a handover—I think it was the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] that was handling one to the other—and those tickets just got dropped. Fortunately, my going over fixed stuff for Dan Shapiro and Dan Restrepo. So there was that kind, the rush of the first—and all three of us were first-day people in the door, working on stuff that was moving that first day.

So you went straight to the White House without going to any of the celebrations?

No, I think—actually, I had a friend who was in town who was going to something because I remember it was at the Cosmos Club. I brought a dress and changed in the bathroom and walked over to the Cosmos Club and met him that night. But that was it, yes.

OK. [laughs] Sorry, Bob.

I want to ask a broader question about the beginning of the administration. Obama has this phenomenal ability to communicate, to inspire, to finesse differences. Did anybody talk about a problem with the high expectations you were entering with, How were we going to meet what the huge crowds—

Hope and change.

I don’t recall, but I also don’t know that I would have been in the room for those discussions. I felt like there was a certain amount of arrogance, or the bubble mentality that develops in the White House, from the close circle around him: This is a unique guy. He’s got a special ability. He’s not going to do the things the way everyone else does.

Because part of what I was doing on the NSC side was trying to get them protected process-wise, one of the things I was saying is, “Listen, I know from experience you have majorities in both houses now. That’s not going to continue, or that’s not likely to. You need to make sure you’ve got the processes that protect you in various ways for when one or the other house is controlled by the other side.” And I got a fair amount of the equivalent of, Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, we’ve got this.

I did what I could. I made the arguments, and there were some receptive ears for that, but when I argued for certain people to stay—they were people I was doing the transition with for Obama, who had worked with me on the transition out from Clinton to Bush. The career staffers who were there. And there were some who they were pushing against, the Obama people, and I said, “These people are like treasures. You actually are going to need them.” And the response typically was, “Well no, they do stuff in this way. That’s not going to relate well to him. He doesn’t need that stuff. He doesn’t need that events person who sets stuff up in that way.”

So there was that kind of feeling that may be typical of most first—again, this was the first time I was in the first year of an administration. I did feel like, both from observations from the outside and from being inside with one, that the first year—I have a brother who’s a doctor, and I always hear about July in teaching hospitals. You don’t want to get sick in July in a teaching hospital, when interns transition. And I feel like the first year of an administration, even with a good administration, is July in a teaching hospital.

The administrations that I think are successful are the ones—and I would put Bill Clinton in this category—that could learn from their mistakes. Appoint a different kind of chief of staff. You look at the different ways they changed his setup.

I’ve got several questions. [To Bakich] I don’t know, you’re going to have to take off in a minute, but I don’t—

Yes, I think in about 15 minutes.

OK, do you have things that you want to talk about?

Actually, I’m kind of excited to speak on the Middle East. [To Rudman] You know that President Obama wants to address this relatively early, and you’re the executive secretary of the NSC, and you’re already seeing problems. Are you thinking that there’s going to be a very negative collision of these two things, or is that not quite on your radar?

In January, February, definitely not. In some of the travel with Mitchell—I think pretty early on in Mitchell’s interaction with the White House, I was seeing where there was potential for collision. I was watching key actors maneuver. I was trying to figure out—because Mitchell had been very high on my pedestal, both for what I knew about him as [Senate] majority leader—I was in the last months of the Clinton White House when the Second Intifada was starting. For the Mitchell–[Warren B.] Rudman—I’m not related to Warren Rudman, but I get asked a lot—decision to name them both to run the process, I was part of those discussions. I don’t know that I had unreasonably high expectations of the President. I’m sure I had unreasonably high expectations of George Mitchell.

So there I was seeing the human being, and the person trying to adapt to this role and to the political maneuverings internally that were going to be important, and also what that said about your ability to read the politics of the external actors you were dealing with. I think I had concerns, and I was also trying to figure out in the first six months what was actually going on in the White House lay of the land on this. I felt most comfortable with the secretary [Hillary Clinton], and how she was approaching it, and what she was trying to do. But I also knew she was hearing from a bunch of places.

I think there were different things playing out over those six months, and Mitchell always insisted he was very frustrated about what was in and out of his portfolio. But Mitchell was having those conversations with Jim Jones, and I was trying to say, “That’s not where stuff is going to happen here.” He eventually ended up talking to Denis, but stuff was already in pretty rigid lines at that point.

Is it a doable job, that kind of special envoy? Because it falls between so many cracks and inherits many enemies, with few friends institutionally, is it doomed to fail from the outset?

No, I think it goes to personalities and how well you use the system because there are plenty of assistant secretaries who are never going to have the power that they need to get stuff done. In some ways, navigating between the cracks at a place like State can be a very powerful place to be—if you know the system and how you navigate through it. And I’m sure I’m just not thinking of them right now—they were special envoys for other places. But I also know there’s a reason the Senate made it a confirmable position, because they were trying to get at what you do by bringing someone in from outside the system. I think it probably requires much more dexterity in navigation, but if you’re the right person, it can also give you a lot of flexibility.

[To Riley] I’m serving at the pleasure of the chair, your time.

No, no.

No, please, move ahead.

All right, well, I’ll continue. I’m sort of bouncing back and forth between things that I’ve made notes about. One is about the [2007–8] financial crisis. Did that have an effect on your portfolio or on the President’s ability to deal with some of these foreign policy issues?

Not on my portfolio. I actually think that was a big part of him choosing Hillary Clinton. In other words, I think his view was that he was going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time on domestic issues, and he needed somebody whom he could trust—which goes to, no, there wasn’t a tension between them—who he knew was in, largely, the same place as him to make sure that the United States didn’t miss a beat on the international front. I think that played a role in him choosing her.

Another place I’ve flagged is the issuance of those initial executive orders related to Guantanamo [Bay Detention Camp] and the interrogation techniques and so forth. Are you in the loop on any of this, and do you have an aperture that you can help us understand what was going on there?

Not substantively in the loop, but Mary DeRosa was one of the main “pens” on that; she went in to be the counsel, legal advisor at the NSC, and had had that position at the end of Clinton. I had worked very closely with her for years. I talk with her about it, and I met John [O.] Brennan during that time period, saw him, thought very highly of him. I think he was one of the few guys who understood the importance of good process. He was a huge ally. I worked with him on how you brought the Homeland Security [Council] stuff back under the NSC umbrella.

I remember having conversions with them, and I remember how genuinely moved Mary was by the fact that this was something she got to do. She really, I think, thought this was both important and would make a big [positive] change. I just remember being in her office in the transition space, and going then talking with her about it after the statement was issued. So when I saw how it played out, it felt like maybe they hadn’t done some of the homework they needed on how you execute on stuff.

By the way, Ben Rhodes, Dan Restrepo, Dan Shapiro, Denis McDonough: all Lee Hamilton people from various points in time, so I knew them all. Dan Restrepo had the job that Denis McDonough then took at House Foreign Affairs. Ben had worked on the Iraq Study Group, I think, because I first met him at Woodrow Wilson [International Center for Scholars].

Again, Mary had all the best intents, but for that EO [executive order], did they really think through and listen to—did anyone go back and actually read in-depth whatever memos I’m sure the Bush team prepared? Or did they know that this is where they were going to go, he had made the promise, they were going to do this, and thought sheer force of will could make it happen?

I think it very much must have been the latter. We’ve heard from some of the Bush people that, in an environment where you feel like you’re getting a reasonable take, where they said that they pleaded with the incoming people, that by laying out exactly what the obstacles were going to be—and they were saying that you’re going to bring all kinds of problems on yourself if you make this pledge, but—

I would say the contrast. It was with some of the same people, in the discussions about—because we definitely pushed on the reabsorbing the Homeland Security Council into NSC. They were very candid and said, “Yes, if you can do it, you should. You better do it at the front end because otherwise it will become impossible. But no, the structure that we’re living with makes no sense and creates more problems for you.”

I had a question about the circle. You’ve mentioned several times the “Obama circle,” and those of us who—

This is a general question that I think about a lot, and you mentioned Bill Clinton learning from mistakes, making changes, including in chief of staff, and then the reference to Valerie. Can you think of other presidents who “dance with the people who brung them” to the White House, the people who come—the “Boston mafia” [John F. Kennedy’s inner circle]—

Right. [David] Axelrod was actually someone else.

Yes. Just your vision of what you saw for Obama and then knowing what you know about other presidents: is that a good or a bad move?

I think it’s just a thing. I don’t think it’s good or bad. I think it’s going to happen because it’s not just the people who brought you, it’s the people who were there with you. I think it’s more if someone doesn’t have any of those people, then there’s reason to wonder. If they’ve got no one who’s been with them for years or since the beginning, then I wonder about what they’re like to work for. I don’t think those people get elected President, first of all.

Biden is extraordinary in how long [Michael C.] Mike Donilon and [Steven J.] Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed have been in his orbit, in his circles, even longer than—well, partly, he’s been around for much longer, so that’s also part of it. But there are other people who have run, who you know have had this constant—actually, Florida, I know how Trump says his name all the time—

[Ron] DeSantis?

DeSantis, thank you, is another example of, he’s got no one, right? I think that bringing people into your White House who not just have political know-how, they actually are people you trust. They should be people you trust to give you the real news and not just puff you up—I don’t think that always happens—but who can deliver the tough news, and who have that know-how. It doesn’t mean they should be your chief of staff. I actually think with Clinton, one of the interesting things with—and I’m blanking right now on who his first chief of staff was.

[Thomas F.] Mack McLarty.

Mack McLarty, who’s a lovely guy, right, who probably should have been there as a counselor. He shouldn’t have been chief of staff. But there’s a reason to have someone whom you’ve known since kindergarten in the mix with you. Partly because it’s such a lonely job and a lonely place, and you need people who are going to give you hard truths, who know that their relationship with you is not going to end over that. To some extent, hopefully those are also people who have some political savvy. I think it’s more of a flag if someone doesn’t have anyone like that. Whether they rely just on that person is part of the problem. If that person is a gatekeeper, that’s a problem. [Bakich leaves] Riley: You OK to continue?

Yes, yes.

Questions? [Others indicate no] I have, then, another question about this period. Is there anything to say about the role of women in this White House and how women were treated? The predicate for that is that with most of these projects, we’ll ask, and there is a disparity—

A “bro club”?

—in how men and women are treated in the White House. I’m curious about that within Obama’s White House.

It’s hard for me not to contrast with Clinton. I also kind of grew up professionally at a different time, in a variety of ways, so I didn’t always notice or count in the room particularly who was or who wasn’t.

I would just say, I also had the very good fortune in the first half of my career of feeling like I had both tremendous bosses— which didn’t mean I always agreed with them—who all happened to be men, who all absolutely had my back. So that gave me huge credibility when I had to deliver tough news in different places or had to do things that I might think, I’m 30 years old and a woman, and I’m in a room of all guys. I knew, in that case, Lee Hamilton was going to back me. He might not always agree with me, and he’d tell me after the fact, [laughter] “Let’s adjust A, B, or C.” But that helped hugely.

So that, to me, applied in the Clinton White House. That was totally Sandy Berger. That was all of my interactions with the President, which were nothing but professional. And I got yelled at, along with everyone else, but there was nothing special about my getting yelled at that was that.

I would say the Clinton White House was the first time I saw, Oh, look what happens in this room, when we go from the soft side of international—we go from the development topics, where [Harriet C.] Hattie Babbitt at that point was in deputies for AID, to the sessions where AID is asked to leave the room, which I also experienced in the Obama administration. It’s like the kids’ table leaves and—you’re going to a higher classification level. You’re almost always talking about things that involve military actions, in one way or another. And the composition of the room would change. Then I was often the only woman or, if it was a principals meeting, me and Madeleine Albright, sometimes Sylvia Mathews, because we always had the OMB person in the room. Literally, you would see it that dramatically.

On that Bosnia trip I told you about, it was one of the first times I had been in the same space with Madeleine Albright. I wasn’t inner circle of Madeleine Albright at all, but I knew she was watching out for me on that trip, and she at one point had acknowledged she had had my NSC legislative job.

It was an entirely male group, both the delegation—everything about it. I was working literally around the clock, and there was one point where I got on the bus, I think another time after I had to get everyone to exit fast from somewhere. She put her arm on my shoulder—and she was not a touchy-feely person with me. I just knew she had been watching the entire dynamic and was kind of asking, How are you holding up? And there were certain times in rooms where she would meet my eye and, I think, was—she had been there a generation before. I’m sure it was dramatically different for her than it was for me, and it still wasn’t perfect, but it was a whole lot better.

And the Obama time, I got more of a feeling that people were like, Done, we’ve got that covered. That’s not something we have to worry about.

And that’s the big bro part that you mentioned?

[To Strong] Were you in the [Zbigniew] Brzezinski interview? Did you work the Brzezinski interview?

Yes.

So Madeleine Albright was here in ’81 probably.

Wow. With the legislative affairs job.

Yes.

Yes, exactly. She would have, I’m sure, been the only woman in the room at that interview—

She was. [laughter]

—which is available on our website. You can look at it.

Yes. No, I definitely—I’m going to be a big, avid explorer now of your website.

She used to say she got more work done at the UN [United Nations] because when they’d take a break, there was never a line at the ladies [room]. [laughter]

All right.

Well, on the House floor there was no women’s bathroom on that floor until Nancy Pelosi came in.

Is that right?

Oh, yes. So you had to run three floors—a woman, if you were working on the floor—to get back, staff or member.

Hidden Figures [book and film].

Yes, I was just thinking exactly the same thing. I’m looking to see what else we might ask you before we move you over to your other roles. Are we missing something obvious about your—you were only in the White House for, what?

Just until May, and I was doing both jobs for a while.

I just wrote down the things that had happened: Captain [Richard] Phillips—talk about terrorism—and the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. Anything that you would want to comment about what’s happening in the Middle East, and particularly with Netanyahu?

No, I’m trying to remember. Well, I think on all things countering terrorism I had a lot of confidence in Brennan, both how he ran process and substance. Even though on the enhanced interrogation, it was part of what had kept him from being confirmed at that point for CIA director. But he was just such a fair broker that I think I probably—because I don’t recall immediate stuff, and I think stuff that was in his lane, I generally thought, Don’t need to worry a lot about how it’s playing out because he’s got it. That would be the case of both of those things.

On the Middle East stuff, it’s hard for me to remember exactly what discussions were when we were traveling, when I went over to State for meetings. There were probably a couple months where I knew I was going over but was still at the White House, partly because there wasn’t agreement over who would take the job that I had.

And I actually ended up getting advice from someone who had worked in the Clinton White House because I was like, “I literally can’t get sign-off on a date I’m leaving here, and I can’t do both of these jobs.” He said, “You need to send a very politely worded email that just says, ‘I’m departing on this date. This is the transition plan I’m putting in place, not having heard from you guys about a successor. These are the flags.’ Put it all in email.”

And there were various people who told me they went back to reference that email because things like the budget were still—and I made sure that there were enough people cc’d [copied] on it that it wasn’t just up to the people at the very top that it could get buried, and then I left.

Was the deputy envoy position your preferred exit, or were there other things that you had contemplated that didn’t materialize?

No. Baffling as it is to me, I actually really wanted to do that because Hillary Clinton had proposed to me something that I probably should have taken, which was a budget role working with Jack Lew, who I loved and thought was fantastic. And Jack had violated the Sandy Berger principle: he took a job that was below the job he had previously to be the deputy secretary for management and resources because she asked. And then it was all the reasons I really respect him.

I was so caught up in the Mitchell aura and how much I really wanted to work on the Middle East for once, that I did not make the smartest decision. I think it would have been much better for my career and for various aspects of my professional development if I had taken the job that she was pushing me for. I think I was maybe interested in the assistant secretary of state for Middle East, and I think it was the same meeting where—actually, she was announcing that it was going to be [Jeffrey] Jeff Feltman. Before that, she took me aside and said, I think, “I know you were interested in this.” [Then she proposed the role with Lew.] But yes, I was pretty set on doing the Mitchell stuff.

OK. So what do you find when you go there?

And related to that, what’s your general assessment of the opportunity available for a Middle East peace process?

I think I was unrealistically optimistic about possibilities on the Middle East—I was very excited that Obama wanted to take it on early. His first interview was actually with Al Arabiya—which was purposeful, with a major Arab network. I had known the guy who ran Al Arabiya at that point, who’s a Palestinian guy from Ramallah. So I had a lot of hope.

Also, the Gaza conflict of that era had meant that I was talking a lot to Elliott Abrams. Interestingly, you could ask, “Why me?” Because it was part of the NSC transition work. First of all, Elliott was by far the most candid person on the Bush team in terms of process, what we needed to adjust and in which ways, and just was a joy to work with. I think I was talking to him about the process side at NSC. He introduced keeping me in the loop on the Middle East–related stuff and literally put me on their openside email traffic.

I came out of some White House meeting, and Obama was going to be doing a press thing shortly. Whatever I had learned from Elliott I thought was important to get into that mix.

To me, that was part of a transition working very well, but that was some of how I got in the mix and then watched how some of the decision-making worked. And Denis McDonough had told me—I remember we’re still in the transition offices when he asked me what I thought of Mitchell, and my reaction was, “Oh my God, Mitchell might do this job? That would be fantastic.” That was part of, they were rolling out early and had sized him up and knew that they wanted to announce him. I think his first trip, which I didn’t go on, was literally a couple days after inauguration. So in that way, I clearly thought there was a lot of opportunity at the very beginning.

Why don’t we take a break now and then we’ll come back?

Do the final—

We’re a hard stop at 4:30, so let’s go five, six minutes, and then we’ll come back.

Great.

This is fascinating.

[BREAK]

All right, Russell, bring us home.

What I thought I would ask is just to give us your story of joining Mitchell, and sort of the narrative arc there, if you will, of your early relationship, what you’re finding out about him. It’s clear that that didn’t work the way you had hoped it would. Kind of illuminate for us that story and how it happens.

It’s hard to separate it from the frustrations on the policy front in the sense that—so Netanyahu was, again, the prime minister, though there had been conversations with Olmert that I think I was a part of. I’ve interacted with Olmert in other ways, before and after. Not surprisingly, the Palestinians, after the fact, had wished for what Olmert had offered. How could they then have to deal with Netanyahu on this stuff? And Olmert’s people—I feel like Tzipi Livni maybe transitioned and had some role with Netanyahu. I don’t remember the timing of people changing roles, but we had insight into what was on the table from Olmert.

There was a discussion that probably took inordinate time and attention—I mean, it did, it wasn’t “probably”—on what to do about settlements. A lot of my time ended up being spent, with some of the other staff in the office, on close conversations with Barak and Barak’s military aides, because Barak was defense minister at the time, on what was being planned, in which ways, where things were working and not what the U.S. considered illegal settlements, in ways that were part of constructing the freeze—which actually was largely followed, despite, I think, what is kind of a popular view of it.

Because it was a freeze on new activity, there was the burn for Palestinians that you were still seeing building going on, and the burn on the Israeli side because the freeze on new activity applied equally across the board. So where you have the kind of ultrareligious communities that have lots of kids that are right on the borders of Jerusalem and need space to expand or send their kids to daycare or things like that, none of that was being built—so you had both sides ticked off that it wasn’t enough and that things weren’t happening. They didn’t see it.

But I remember decisions early on. I think Mitchell felt strongly about taking on the settlement freeze.

Those who disagreed argued that we’re going to spend all of our time in monitoring in the back-and-forth, and essentially, that’s not where the action is. There’s going to be no joy in this, and it’s not going to help us move where we want to move.

So there was the settlement issue. I’m trying to remember, there was another kind of major—oh, also, at the front end, I think this was the wrong call by us, though I was firmly on the side that prevailed—I’ve talked to Elliott Abrams about this. It was about ditching the language that Bush had in a letter to [Ariel] Sharon that, I think, was interpreted as allowing development—distinguishing between some of the settlements that were right on the ’67 lines that are basically part of expanded Jerusalem, that in any agreement are going to be part of what’s swapped, and the outer line.

I forget exactly what the Bush language was, but it was a big lean into acknowledging likely permanent border lines—and again, I have a retrospective view that has more appreciation for what Bush was trying to do. And I think Bush and Sharon—this is another place if a guy hadn’t died, hadn’t had a stroke, hadn’t died—because the Sharon 2005 withdrawal from Gaza totally screwed up on not revitalizing the PA [Palestinian Authority] to be able to actually lead in Gaza and instead effectively turned over the reins to Hamas. That was a huge mistake. But the idea of withdrawing settlements from Gaza, and he did it from the northern West Bank as well, was, I think, a sign of—and Sharon, that’s like Nixon to China, right, that he was on that path. I think that’s part of what the Bush guys were working to negotiate.

They were also part of helping to either identify the talent that [former Prime Minister] Salam Fayyad was or figure out some way to help him have a major role. And Salam Fayyad, for the Palestinians—I think you either need to find him or somebody like him going forward, not necessarily to be in the overall leadership role. His whole theory of the case was you create the facts on the ground. You don’t spend all this time negotiating and asking for a state; you show people how you can create it.

I started pretty early on working very closely with him and with an Israeli military position that’s called COGAT, coordinator of government [activities] in the Territories. That position plays the major role in how goods and people can get back and forth between Israel, West Bank, and Gaza. They work very closely with Central Command, the Israeli [Israel Defense Forces] command that controls the West Bank, and Southern Command, which covers Gaza, but the COGAT is the lead person in the day-to-day stuff.

I thought that’s where the interesting work was and—or maybe in reverse order—that’s not where anyone else was. The space around traveling with Mitchell all over the region to various meetings and discussions and negotiations was heavily contested real estate, and I didn’t think I was being put to my, let’s say, best use doing that.

Pretty early on—I want to say probably within six months, certainly by the time Dennis Ross had moved over to the White House—I had staked out that I was going to be the person focusing on what I would call the ground operations. And Tony Blair, at that point, was the main guy for the Quartet [on the Middle East], which was the United States, the EU [European Union], Russia—which is wild now to think of—and the UN. The UN chaired it, so the Office of the Quartet representative was under Blair’s direction. He talked about a bottom-up and top-down approach, and he and Hillary Clinton definitely had a mind meld on how to approach this.

As quickly as I could, I moved to have my focus be there, so I spent a week per month or so on the ground in Jerusalem. But I was out and about a lot more in a kind of week-per-month arrangement and felt like I had the privilege of working with the doers; for a variety of reasons, I wasn’t going to be part of the talkers. I mean, to me, that’s where the greatest optimism was; probably also some significant missed opportunities.

Between 2009 and 2011, largely the heyday of [then Prime Minister] Salam Fayyad being able to move forward and create the facts on the ground, I was able to work in coordinating across the USG [United States government] side, which wasn’t terribly well coordinated. Again, not a lot of change since the rule-of-law work under Lee Hamilton on different parts of the Palestinian governance—it’s amazing to me why it’s so hard for our government, for whom these things are so important, to get it right and be effective in what we do overseas in this space. But I was able to play some role there.

There was a U.S. security coordinator, who was General Keith [W.] Dayton at the time. He worked out of State, and I think he was a two-star—I think now it’s a three-star post—and AID, which had their own agenda that was, if you asked Salam Fayyad, largely unrelated to what actually was needed for Palestinians and various other component parts of State. And part of Hillary Clinton’s idea was, We all need to be on the same page, and we want to maximize how much we can get international actors on the same page. So that was a big part of my job, and that was also the portfolio I carried over to AID.

I will say, what I saw partly on the Mitchell team, I guess, when I was occasionally joining the—they weren’t negotiations, because we were doing a series of bilats [bilateral meetings] all over the place. I was also part of—there was some point at which [Mahmoud] Abbas was brought to Washington. I think there was some Abbas-Netanyahu conversation, maybe, that happened once in Washington. But there was a lot of traveling around the region, and a lot of the basis of the Abraham Accords came from those Mitchell trips.

If you look at the items that formed the basis for the first Abraham Accords agreement, which was the [United Arab] Emirates and Bahrain, I believe, signed on in the beginning and Morocco a little later with Israel, and you went back to look at what Mitchell was shopping to all of those countries, it’s all of those elements. The difference was, under Obama, the construct was that you needed to be making progress on a Palestinian state to get there, which is, by the way, where they’ve come back to now with the Saudis. When it was put forward under Trump, the Palestinians were largely out of the equation, though the Emirates did insist that Netanyahu not go forward with West Bank annexation, which he was then talking about, in exchange for doing it.

There were some elements during that time period that I think were positive. But one of “looking back” [regrets] is, if we had treated that Bush letter differently, if we had analyzed it with less of a “new administration, out with the old and a different party” or whatever but really talked to them about what they were trying to do and why, and considered it that way, I wonder if we would have come to the same conclusions. I think that might have set us up differently.

Your impressions of Abbas?

I would say very gracious, sharp enough, and I think probably grievously underestimated by all sorts of people a lot of the time. He was actually one of the people at Camp David who I think— He ended up stepping out of the Camp David stuff, so I think he saw where the politics of that were going early. I think more appreciation for him as a survivor and a maneuverer would have been wise on our side. I mean literally a survivor. People have been predicting that guy is going to pass for at least 15 years, right? And yet, without thinking in terms of succession as well.

I think what he doesn’t get the credit for—and this is part of Netanyahu’s construct—is genuinely accepting the existence of Israel and figuring out how you try to make stuff work within that. For a while, I think being decent about fighting corruption—I think the problem with his family is part of what contributed to the problems with corruption in the PA—but he was pretty hardcore on the pressing down, having a security force that could control violence, that went through a lot of training from the U.S. I don’t think he gets the credit that he should for all of that.

And I think it’s hard to know. Where he has fallen far short of what the United States would want or need, where the interrelationship is—Was he always destined to? Did he see that he didn’t get from us or from Israel what he needed when he was actually doing much of what was asked of him? I think all that is unfortunate, and I think we’re in a very bad place now because the PA is so discredited. And we really haven’t invested and/or figured out how to get to a next-generation leadership, which, arguably, is also some of our challenge with Israel, in a different form.

I was just going to ask about—so many of the articles in the briefing book were about the conflicts between President Obama and Netanyahu. I mean, anybody who knows anything about Netanyahu and what he has wanted would understand that, but you’re seeing it, I’m sure, from a very different perspective. Your thoughts about it? And could anything have been done differently, particularly since we’ve talked about personalities and Obama’s ability to reach people? What went off the rails and why?

I think the Netanyahu side is pretty predictable. I actually think he’s been remarkably consistent in how he behaves and maneuvers with various American presidents, and he’s obviously an incredibly adroit political animal. I think the Obama team, writ large, underestimated him.

But to me, one of the factors with Obama I tried to figure out, because he was so cool and so unemotional on almost every issue—it wasn’t that publicly he was different than that on this. But in some of how the Cairo [Egypt] trip got put together; and what was in, and what was out, and in which ways; and how much he refused until so late in his administration to do the speech to the Israeli people, refused to go there and do a speech. I almost felt like there was something that emotionally got to him on these issues, that he couldn’t distance himself from, in a way that hurt the policy. And I can’t say what it was.

It was interesting because in Chicago politics, he had support from Lester Crown, from Minow—Martha Minow’s dad, whose name I’m forgetting now, but the—

Newton.

Newton Minow. From some of the long-standing pillars of the Chicago Jewish community, who were center to left but not Far Left. I think substantively what he wanted to do made a lot of sense. I don’t know why it was, but the friction there—first, there’s some basic competitiveness between him and Netanyahu. Again, the kind of “politics as sport,” and I can best this guy with this move or that move or the other move. So I don’t think there was as great an appreciation as there should have been of the skill on the other side.

I think there was something personal about it that I didn’t see with other issues, and I don’t know what was behind that. But I think it ultimately hurt his ability to be as effective as he could have been on this, and it hurt the United States’ positioning. It was fascinating to me just because it was different than other issues, as far as I could tell.

Did he have a sort of leftist sympathy for the Palestinian issue, sort of underlying all of this, that might have caused him to retract a little bit from dealing with Israel on this point?

I think there was some—Condi Rice as secretary of state, you saw as she was there and seeing on the ground and getting frustrated. It’s hard not to be with and among Palestinians and talking to an awful lot of Israelis and feel like, These guys are getting an unfair—I’ve talked to so many people.

The first time you go over—at this point, I’ve been there literally more times than I can count, but I still remember my first couple trips when I was there with Dartmouth funding. It’s so overwhelming, watching the checkpoints that people have to go through and the ways that these very young soldiers are treating these much older people, who are going through checkpoints with their kids watching how they’re being treated and patted down. That stuff has a searing impact on you. Frankly, the more you go back and forth, not that you get used to it, but the more you force yourself to have conversations with people on both sides—in a way that they rarely do with one another and that not enough people do—there’s more of an ability to understand where different people are coming from. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had kind of a similar perspective to where Condi Rice ended up.

And there is a problem with rights and sovereignty, and who gets a nation and who doesn’t, and what daily treatment is like. It’s hard not to see that. I don’t think that meant he pulled back from dealing with the Israelis. Bill Clinton saw the same stuff. The thing I would be amazed about is, I would have conversations when I was over there—I have a lot of friends on both sides. On the Israeli side—and particularly what I saw during the Obama period, because I would be at Shabbat dinners a lot—first of all, I saw this huge challenge that the younger generation was far more to the right than their parents were, and that would happen when I was at meetings with the families of military officers.

The basic question was about whether President Obama’s sort of left-of-center sympathies and his own experience with race creates—

And religion.

Right, race and religion—creates a different kind of awareness of Middle Eastern problems that might have—

Yes, but I don’t think that changes how he acts on executing on stuff. I think it’s a useful—in the same way I said Condi Rice went over, I feel like you could see a difference in her over those eight years. Some of it may have been being in the State Department, but I think a lot of it was seeing and dealing back and forth and relating it to her experiences. But the way that he was seen—

This is why I mentioned the Shabbat dinners. I would have these discussions because people would tell me, “Obama doesn’t like Israel and doesn’t like Israelis, and so for this reason is making us do X, Y, or Z that we can never do, and he doesn’t understand us.” And I would line up, “This is what Bill Clinton’s parameters were that Barak supposedly accepted for all of you, and this is what Bill Clinton was polling at in your country during this time. This is what Barack Obama is asking for,” which in almost every case was far less than what Clinton had put out, side by side, and particularly as Obama went on in his administration.

I mean, we got weaker and weaker, I think, in what we were asking for the Israelis and really backsliding from where Clinton had been, and he [Obama] was still being castigated. I was like, “What’s this about?” And a lot of it came back to, He doesn’t like us. One of the things Bill Clinton did was the full-on embrace, which you see Biden doing, and the hug of Netanyahu when he gets here, and you know he’s whispering in his ear, and it doesn’t stop. Separate issues whether he’s gotten what he needs to from it, but it’s that way of dealing. I think, for a variety of reasons, Obama refused to do that. I think the resistance in going over and having the conversation on it really affected and had an impact on how he was perceived.

I also think there was a racial element. There was one time I was talking to, again, an Israeli military officer who I was close to, who I know liked me and liked dealing with me, and he used the word “schvartze” [sic]. I stopped the conversation and I said, “You know that’s incredibly racist. I don’t care what language you use it in. That’s a racist term, and there’s no—I want to be really clear: this is where President Obama, who is my President, is on these issues. This is what I’m saying and doing as a result. And I need to not have you ever use that kind of terminology with me again, and I really hope you’re not using it anywhere else.” So there’s one example.

What was the response?

He backed off. Yes. Well, he also—I mean, the joke with the two of us, and he would often say when I was in rooms with other Israelis— “She’s got that look on her face. [laughter] Don’t—”

Is that the definition of being “Mara-ed?” [laughter] We read about that in the briefing book.

Yes, yes, yes. Well, I will say I think I brought Israelis and Palestinians together at various points by the fact that I can never play poker. It’s very funny because it’s not—I have very rudimentary Hebrew and less than that in Arabic, and I had seen people respond to kind of—and I don’t even realize I’m showing or thinking it beforehand.

There was one time where especially. It was during Ramadan, which is fitting now, and I was doing water negotiations. The water expert that was with me, American, had the brilliant idea of how the room is set up. She said, “Let’s try something different. Let’s put us on this side of the table, and then array the Israelis here and the Palestinians there, so the lead Palestinian and the lead Israeli”—this was a joint water commission of Israel—“are sitting next to each other, and we’re on the opposite side.” It really shifted the dynamic because we were, frankly, equally tough on both of them. We became the enemy. That’s fine.

I say it was during Ramadan because the Palestinian wanted a break to smoke, and I was like, “No, we’ve got to get through these.” And the Israeli was like, “Come on, Mara. [laughter] It’s Ramadan. The guy hasn’t eaten all day. Let him go out and smoke. We can take a break.”

All right. Bob, anything else on this?

Oh, lots and lots is running through my head, and I don’t want to mess with the chronology, but I’m interested in Obama and Arab Spring, I’m interested in Obama and the Syria decision [the “red line”], and Obama and the Iran agreement. And then, more broadly, what’s the overall assessment of Obama in the Middle East? That’s too much but— [laughter]

Yes, no, that’s what it is.

Yes, we’ve got about 45 minutes. That ought to about cover it.

Missed opportunities.

Missed opportunities, OK.

Some, I think, fair screwups on the administration’s part; some, I think, unfortunate perceptions and missed connections on things. I think that there was too much of an assumption that the Arab world—again, on the opposite of the race issues—would be embracing, as opposed to regretting missing the other guys. And so this ties into the politics of the Arab Spring, right?

I think you could argue that what the USG did, how we handled that, did more to bring—I mean, if we were planning for a bank shot of bringing Israel together with the anti-Iran forces in the Arab world, we couldn’t have executed as effectively as we did by pissing them all off against us. So I think really not appreciating—though I think Hillary Clinton did a little bit more in how to handle, particularly in Egypt, [Hosni] Mubarak to the Muslim Brotherhood winning and how that would be perceived by the Emirates, by the Saudis, by the Jordanians, by the Israelis.

Mubarak was the guy who had been with us on every peace effort in one way or another. Plenty not to like about him, plenty to have problems with in Egypt, but in dealings in Egypt or in how cold or not the Egyptian-Israeli peace was, he was a key actor. He was the first stop or the last stop. The Saudis at that point were not playing that much and were still kind of putting their toes in, in various ways. I think also—King Abdullah [of Saudi Arabia] was still there but maybe fading.

I think there was already some skepticism in the region about—and there may have been some racism. I think there was definitely ageism. This was, remember, before MBS [Mohammed bin Salman] arises, Who is this young guy? It was probably, Who is this young black guy who is not following the regular rules?

I know that Mitchell was taken aback, for him, by how much the role of Iran and what was happening with Iran was changing how these countries were looking at Israeli-Palestinian dynamics. I think that was his biggest takeaway of his first round of conversations in the whatever eight-year period that he had been out of the mix on this. Again, it was a pretty closed group working on Iran, but I know a little bit from my NSC time of the paperwork that was going back and forth. It was clear they were going to make a play on Iran and what became the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] from the very beginning in terms of some communications back and forth.

I’m not sure how much—I mean, it’s not that there was a parallel to the EO on Cuba [Guantanamo], but I do wonder in terms of who was brought into the circles for conversations of what was possible and not, or how those communications were worded. And keep in mind, that’s playing out at the same time the Mitchell team is going to the same countries, who are terribly concerned about Iran, to get their buy-in on what we want to put forward with Israelis and Palestinians.

There were kind of different circles of people doing both. Thinking Dan Shapiro, at that time the NSC senior director for the Near East, was read in in both. Dennis came over to NSC in this role that I think was supposed to be—Dennis Ross—Iran-specific. But there were a bunch of different dynamics at play in the region, even before we got to Arab Spring. Arab Spring was such a missed call on our intelligence side and how much the USG tracks open-source stuff, in which ways.

Then I think we made some pretty bad calls as well in not understanding each of the countries has its own politics, so it’s not going to play out exactly the same way at all in each place. We didn’t have a tailored approach to the politics and the dynamics in each country, and probably again, were on our back foot. I feel like more “Arab Spring policies” than the Tunisia, the Egypt, the Libya focused approaches—or those got lumped together as we were going.

Syria is, in some ways, the biggest example of that. I was at AID at that point. I remember being in parts of endless Syria deputies meetings that just went around and around. Oftentimes I felt like the meeting didn’t have the right combination of people, and those were meetings that AID was at the kids’ table [laughter] and often left when you get to some aspects of the Syria stuff. But there was a lot of frustration. Denis McDonough was the deputy at that point, and so I guess Tom Donilon was the national security advisor. Denis had become White House chief of staff by the time of the red-line decision, and I was out of government then, but I could have predicted that it was not going to be heading in a good direction.

There was a lot of process, but it wasn’t clear what was really going on which way. I wasn’t at all surprised that Denis’s “Rose Garden walk” with Obama is where the sudden shift came from: after you state a red line, and then the bad thing happens, and then you become a “war powers guy.” You can’t do it without Congress, and you have no idea where your votes are. You’re well past the first year of your administration at that point, and so the training wheels are long off to be there.

And the bike’s falling over.

But I just think that, to your point, that’s why I come back to a lot of opportunities missed. This stuff is hard, so it’s much easier in hindsight, like looking at that Bush letter and thinking, Why didn’t we handle it differently?

I don’t know how you get to a point of—that’s where, in terms of transitions being good, the transition on paper from Bush to Obama, and I think the Clinton-to-Bush one, was how you get to a point. I think it’s even worse thinking about this election that might be coming up, where people can actually listen to each other in terms of the work that’s been done and don’t come from a place where they think the other side is gaming them on it.

I had that rare opportunity because of how Elliott handled me when I went in for information. I definitely went in with a chip on my shoulder, I don’t know what this guy is going to be like, but somehow we need to get to more of that trust built in.

You would think that would be fixable because it’s an attitudinal problem, right?

But I also don’t know how much is a personality problem.

Well, yes, that’s true. But part of the whole—our colleagues, who are deeply invested in transition planning and so forth, the central message of all of that is, It’s in your best interest to listen, right? The incoming administration. That, All right, we understand that you’re not going to read a 400-page binder.

But the binders are ridiculous because the binders—Richard [V.] Spencer, which I know is a trigger name here, but the Richard Spencer who was secretary of the Navy in the first Trump administration, I had great conversations with when I was at Business Executives for National Security. I think he had formerly been a member.

He was maybe waiting to go in or had just been confirmed as secretary of the Navy. He said, “These memos have nothing to do with what I’m going to need in running this job, and these are the things I need to know.” And he listed—I think it was very much like a CEO [chief executive officer] coming into a company, which—[snaps] He said it and I was like, That’s totally how they should work, and that is not at all how any of them are structured.

No, and I hear you. I’m not advocating for our colleagues who do this necessarily. I’m advocating for a process that provides the incoming people what they really need. I personally can’t attest to that.

I worry that the partisanship isn’t a scale where you move up and down a line. It has tipping points, and once it has tipped, you have a really hard time going back. I’m not sure I’m expressing this clearly enough.

No, I think you are. It is that you are inclined, once you have determined that your predecessor/opposition is unreliable, then you’ve determined that—

And the enemy.

The enemy.

—your predecessor is unreliable and therefore not to be used as a guide for your own labors. And it’s a very interesting question as to what confidence-building exercises might be produced.

My first exposure to transitions was [Richard E.] Neustadt, who was my first teacher of the presidency. He’s an institutionalist. And the concern was always that he taught transitions under the heading of the “hazards of transition.” Every administration comes in, and his experience with John [F.] Kennedy was Bay of Pigs [Invasion]. How do you avoid the Bay of Pigs? And so if you are properly mindful as an incoming administration, the attitude is, These people can save me headaches.

Right. But you have to assume good faith, which is so—

A modicum of good faith.

Right, and that—so it’s interesting, though, because yes, we’ve become increasingly partisan, but my “but” is until Trump. Clinton to Bush to Obama—I think there are always people who are going to think, They’re on the other team, there’s no way they’re helping us. I don’t think there was that intense partisanship, but it’s still like, They’re on the other team.

I don’t know, it’s hard to describe why you don’t spend more time listening to people who have spent all of their time working on the thing that is now being handed over to you. But the other thing is there’s such career-slash-political tension, and that is with both parties. So you have the career [staff], who stay in position, and it usually takes some people who are also on the political side to vouch for the career people like, There is a reason to have these people in the room, whereas campaign [political] people ask, Who are these guys? They’re going to leak, and they can’t be privy to these conversations.

I had another broad question. Obama’s coolness: Should he have been less cool when Netanyahu goes and speaks to Congress? Should he have been less cool when somebody shouts “liar” at a State of the Union? Should he have been more—

Dramatic?

What harm to American foreign policy would there have been if we had bombed Syria because we said we would when they used chemical weapons? It was a good thing that they gave up a stockpile, but it would have also been a good thing that they paid a price for crossing a red line. The coolness, the calculation—in some instances, is it a fault?

I think those are all different examples.

Yes, they are.

On bombing Syria, I think his problem was in drawing the red line. You never make a threat that you’re not prepared to carry through, and I think when it came down to it, he wasn’t prepared to carry through. I don’t know if that was coolness and calculation. He may have been genuinely concerned about the risk, but if he was, then he shouldn’t have drawn the red line. You have to be really careful on that. And so I think that was more that kind of problem.

I think on the Netanyahu coming to Congress, there’s a problem if you scream too much on something you can’t control. What was he going to do? What were his tools? And I think there, the race card—

Oh, I don’t know whether he would have stopped it. I think he could have taken a public stance that was harsher or done a public stance against the Senate for not taking up his Supreme Court nominee.

Yes. Each of these have different—I see some of what you’re saying.

Yes, they’re all different.

I think for Netanyahu, Obama has to figure out his overall politics. He still has a vote he has to get through on JCPOA, and so he can’t piss off the people who need to vote with him on that. And Netanyahu, more then than he does now, still has a significant majority, has veto-sustainable numbers of support. If Netanyahu needs to, if he’s going to pull something on us, probably he has those numbers or pretty close to it. That’s got to affect the calculation in how you—I knew that Obama was pissed off. I think it was fairly public but maybe didn’t ratchet up as high as he could have for how outrageous it was.

Or for a political audience, he didn’t—

Yes, but this is the bizarre thing on Israeli-Palestinian stuff. It is a political third rail [sudden death] in the United States, it has long been, and yet you have to deal with it in a foreign policy national security way. Even if others are not playing the game that way, if you’re President of the United States, that’s how you have to play the game. That’s what’s in U.S. interests.

On confirmees, on both Merrick Garland and in general—this is on the process side. Not only did Mitch McConnell outmaneuver them on that, but I’m pretty sure if you look, the Obama administration was incredibly slow in getting names up there at almost every turn. In deep contrast to the Trump administration, where they had a strategy—they executed from the beginning, they were going to flood the zone, and they had all those names in advance—I think that was poor preparation.

I don’t know where the internal discussions were on the Obama team, but they were trickling those names into the Senate, and I think that made it that much more difficult for Harry Reid to be able to execute on it. By the time you get to Merrick Garland, which was totally outrageous—so I agree, yes, the decibel level on that could have come up, but they didn’t have a great track record preceding that on when they’d gotten stuff up there.

We could have had many more people in seats, even losing the Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court. Arguably, if we had shown that we’d moved stuff faster, and better, and more effectively, would Mitch McConnell have pulled the same thing? Maybe, maybe not. With McConnell, it was so incredibly outrageous because you saw with Amy Coney Barrett—after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death—he just jams it through because he can.

You celebrate Justice [Antonin] Scalia by taking the plain language of the Constitution and ignoring it. [laughter] How does he get away with that?

Yes.

Well, and again, what you’re pulling us back to is more of the process kinds of issues, not really his own disposition and his own personality in responding.

Yes. I’m trying to think of how much my internal makeup puts a thumb on the scale that way because, again, I don’t think that process is the answer. I just think, often, if you can master—it’s the combination of politics and process—and pay attention where most people are not, like behind The Wizard of Oz, “What’s behind the curtain?” and how you can affect those levers, you can get so much more done. It’s not generally where the most competitive space is in administrations, and I think there are certain presidents who get—it’s not what they’re going to do all the time, but why they need people who are doing that.

John Podesta is a master of being able to work the behind-the-curtain mechanisms and see how you do it. It’s partly why, if you look at Podesta the last year of the Clinton administration, the kind of environmental regs [regulations] that got in that would be really tough to change by Bush. He had that all gamed out. There was a reason he was pressing all of us to maximize on various fronts. He knew what the President wanted to get done, in which ways to do it.

If you look at the year Podesta came into the Obama White House and the Paris Protocol [Agreement], he just spent a year in the White House and completely changed the game on what they were able to do internationally and how they got to Paris, which is the basis for so much stuff now. He is someone, and I’m sure there are others like him, but he’s the one who comes to mind the most as just a master of why behind the curtain matters as much as what’s in front, if not more.

You said “the race card” and then you moved on to something else.

Oh, I wonder how much, with—I was thinking about the Netanyahu Iran speech [2015 address to the U.S. Congress]. I think I saw it more on certain domestic issues. I think President Obama was pretty conscious of not being tagged as the “angry black man” and of a double standard that would apply in a different way than Hillary Clinton had double standards on things. I think part of being a political animal in this space is, again, figuring out your audiences, and how—and who knows whether you kind of self-edit more than maybe you have to. But in some ways you could argue the entire—there are people who have argued that the Trump movement was a reaction to Obama as a black man in the White House and that he got much less space than others, so maybe he wasn’t wrong on those calculations.

I’m not sure I’m a better judge of that than he would be. [laughter] Barbara, you—

I’m just thinking of the—I love The Wizard of Oz as a movie, so I’m thinking of behind the curtain and the levers. And yet we keep choosing Presidents with almost no, or very little, Washington experience, and they use that to get elected because of the age-old view of Americans that power far away is bad power and “that swamp of Washington.” So I’m just thinking through—and then the John Podesta figure—that if you don’t have that understanding of Washington and its levers of power, you better find somebody like a John Podesta who knows that and can get things done.

Right. And Obama had Pete Rouse, remember, who was Daschle’s guy but not in the chief of staff role. My guess is that Pete Rouse had a lot to do with John coming in for that year. Biden has a gazillion of those guys, and yet Afghanistan still happened the way that it did, so it’s not like—

It’s not a guarantee of success.

No, but I think it is one of the kind of “political smarts” things that you know where your strengths are, and you know who you need to have around you to make you stronger overall.

So what’s the story behind your going to AID?

Ugh. [laughter]

You thought you were going to get—you treated that question like, just seconds from a clean getaway in the movies.

I was on the way to—yes, I think I was on the way to Moscow [Russia] for I bet it was a Quartet meeting that was there, because I was coming from Jerusalem. Denis sent me an email that said, “I think we’re going to need you to take this assistant administrator for AID role.” He knew I was unhappy in the Mitchell world, and frankly, everyone in the Mitchell world wasn’t happy, I think including Mitchell. They hadn’t actually managed to nominate anyone in the administration for the AID job yet, so it wasn’t like I was replacing the confirmed person. They were probably also trying to find someone they could get confirmed for it.

I think that one the reasons I can see it making strategic sense is I feel like it was pretty much the beginning of the Arab Spring. The Middle East had the largest amount of regional assistance of any region at AID, despite the fact these were overwhelmingly middle-income countries. And AID is meant to be an instrument of U.S. foreign policy.

I think Hillary Clinton wanted me there because she saw the value of a region that had approximately $1.7 billion at that point annually and having someone intent on how you execute the foreign policy goals of the United States in that role and help maximize the ability of the bureau and the agency to do that. What I had talked to Cheryl about, which Cheryl then negotiated with Denis, was that it was the first time ever that someone in this role at AID was carrying the portfolio of coordinating all Israeli-Palestinian assistance.

I was the representative of the United States at something called the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee meetings, which were the only forum at that point—probably still—that all of Europe, all of the Arab countries, and Israel sit together at a table every six months to talk through who’s doing what on which component parts, essentially to help Palestinians. Fayyad was using that as the forum for getting the sign-off for You are now ready to be a state because look at all the things you’ve done and how you’re doing it, basically.

And so I carried these responsibilities to AID. That was a role that [John] Kerry took on for himself when he came in as secretary of state. I knew I wasn’t going to stay beyond Hillary Clinton and [Thomas R.] Tom Nides, who had taken over Jack Lew’s job, because I was kind of a foreign antibody within the AID system. I kind of knew that when I came in.

I think I managed to get a fair amount done and get career folks to think differently. I think there’s tremendous value that AID can add at deputies’ tables. They were not structured to maximize their value in those discussions. And it was important for me to learn and understand where the challenges are inside that agency that are really endemic across administrations.

What was wrong with it?

First, I think it has a lot of people who probably would prefer to be working at, and sometimes think they are working at, a nongovernmental organization to do direct assistance work, so I think there’s a cultural issue.

You can also see it embodied if you’re State Foreign Service, career Foreign Service at State. If you want to be promoted up, you better find a way to come back to the home station every seven years. At AID, that was 20 years, so you’re effectively telling mission directors—and mission directors often had “clientitis.” They prided themselves on being out and away from Washington longer than 20 years. There’s a structure that I would say gave mission directors at least a seeming sense of undue power that even an ambassador, who had a sense of a shorter accountability time frame, wouldn’t have in the same way.

Then you have the fact that AID is largely a contracting operation at this point, and some of that was put in place by various congressional restrictions. AID careerists have every reason to really hate having to go up to the Hill, or where the back-and-forth is, or how they’re going to be grilled. There were belts and suspenders and all these things that, frankly, only contractors or the NDIs [National Democratic Institutes] of this world, big grant organizations, can maneuver through.

I don’t mean to roll my eyes, but I talked to someone else last week who said that they have a new initiative to do more locally and to get away from the “Beltway bandits.” “And Sam Power is totally with us,” this person said, so I was like, great, and so was Raj Shah, and so was Mark [A.] Green, and I can list—go back and look: every AID administrator said this is what they’re going to do.

There were a lot of structural impediments around there. There are political impediments, there’s legislative, and then there’s a cultural issue. All of that ends up combining to, I think if you asked career people at AID, “What’s your primary focus, and would it be executing, supporting U.S. national security and foreign policy?” they’d look at you aghast—“No, it’s helping the poorest of the poor”—and not seeing how those two come together.

There’s a whole book, and maybe a whole chain of literature, on the “Hillary Doctrine,” about her thoughts of “smart power,” of course, and development is one of those, of the three Ds.

Right.

And a while back, I think before lunch, you referred to the children’s table—of the development people being dismissed for the soft—you didn’t use the term “soft power,” but the softness of how development is viewed versus defense, for example. Feel free to just jump in and talk about that. I also believe there is such a thing as soft power versus hard power, but I’ve had feminist academics take me to task, Power is power; it doesn’t matter what it is. I just thought for someone who’s been there, exercising both—

Yes, I actually think smart power is a sharp way of describing it because I would put it as you have to use all the tools in your toolbox. This goes to some of my frustration with AID. They’re their own worst enemy because I think there’s a number of them who would think it somehow taints them to say that they are a tool of U.S. foreign policy, when there is no altruism [laughs] in why government does what it does.

I think you should be very clear in identifying the interests you’re serving, and to me, if you’re in the national security space, you’re maximizing what’s in the U.S. national security interest. Whether you’re sitting at AID or the Pentagon or the Treasury Department—because I think increasingly national security space, economic security, domestic and international issues are all—you’re serving the U.S. national interest, and you better be pretty clear in explaining.

Some of it may be my Hill experience. You’ve got to be able to go to a town hall meeting and explain why X amount of money going to Y purpose is important for the person sitting in that town hall meeting, and you can’t use the words “liberal international order” [laughter] to describe it.

How about an acronym?

Yes. I think that, to me, is part of the approach. I think it’s fascinating. If you go to Biden’s big climate and economic pieces of legislation, all three of those—that’s an incredible combination of smart power use.

Having a U.S. industrial strategy is going to better position us in the world but not in the public rhetoric, which is part of the reason for a “buy America” emphasis, and I understand the reasons for that. But everyone knows you talk to anyone in the national security community and it’s all about frankly, making more friends to do stuff with, and having supply chains, having various ways for people and countries to work together. I think the foreign assistance development side is one thread of that. I think there’s a lot more before you get to kinetic stuff that’s about smart power, and I think as a country we need to do much better in how we’re integrating our thinking about it.

One of the things Eric Edelman and I have talked about and I think we’re going to push for on the National Defense Strategy Commission, on which we both serve, is that you should force some sort of rotation for career people among all of these agencies so you have more of a universal culture, and a sense of why you’re in it. And you don’t get promoted if you don’t two rotations in other agencies, and those agencies are not just AID, Defense, and State, but certainly those three.

Did you see in your role at AID this vision of the Hillary Doctrine of our security being related to women and development, and particularly in the Middle East?

I think probably what I observed was a variety of views. I heard Hillary Clinton publicly talked about, within senior staff meetings, by the leaders of AID in a way that I would say wasn’t appropriate for the person who was effectively their boss.

That is, she was being critical about—

They were critical of her. And again, AID has this historic “They don’t report to the Secretary of State and the State Department,” but they do. [laughs] If any doubt, where money comes from—and every AID administrator, or almost every one, petitions to have a Cabinet role—but any dynamic in meetings and anywhere else and how you see money flow is, they come through State. So that tension is always there, and I just saw it play out in terms of not giving the deference that I think she deserved in her role and for the policy.

Then there’s also parts of that—again, you had a lot of people at AID who believe they’re there to do, I would say, the development work of NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], even though some of those contractors are for-profit. And many of these AID career folks, those are the jobs they go out to when they retire. They go to the contractors, and then they have an inside angle on how to get this funding. There’s a lot in the machine that’s tough to kind of rewire. I think that goes to more of why I didn’t hear as many people as I would like embracing how she was talking about stuff.

Can I ask a kind of judgment question that is often at the end of these interviews? What do you think the trajectory of Obama’s reputation as a President is likely to be?

Interesting.

It’ll get better because he’s not Donald Trump. That helps all the modern Presidents. [laughter] It helps all the presidents that he’s at the bottom.

The speeches will endure, and they’ll go back and be heard again, read again, and there’s a legacy there. If there is a turn on climate, Paris [Agreement] will be seen as a pivot point. When things are worse in Iran, we’ll look back and wish we had that deal hold longer than it did, et cetera, et cetera.

How do you think—is it going to be flat, decline, rise?

I think it will probably rise a little bit. Not a lot, I would say. Again, he had tremendous strengths that he brought to the table. I’m a hard grader, [laughter] at least even the real grade in my mind versus what I might give students on paper. But I think that’s part of where I’m disappointed, because I could see how much more he could have done. I think he could have been—I think he had a huge number of the tools to be one of the greats, and I don’t think that’s where he’ll land.

Do you have a very broad, simple suggestion about why the gap?

I think he and people around him didn’t appreciate, I would say, the importance of spending time on the gears, on the stuff behind the scenes. They did plenty behind the curtain, plenty of quiet conversations, but not, How do you make government work? How do I spend time with members of Congress that I consider tedious? What would it mean to bring them on trips with me? In which ways? How can I block and tackle in ways beyond sending my vice president to the Hill to do the work that I really don’t want to do?

He never did that on overseas trips—

Not in any kind of regular way.

—as Bill Clinton did.

Yes, and Bush may have. It would be interesting to see whether Bush continued that. I think so. It’s just an amazing opportunity. Yes, that’s where I see the gaps, and people willing to spend time on the gears behind making the machine work.

One question for you is you said that you were effectively drafted into this position at AID. All right, there is kind of an inference that you “did the administration a solid” there. And then in April of 2013, you leave and go back to the private sector. There’s still three-plus years of a presidential administration at that point. Was there an opportunity that you declined, or were there jobs that you thought maybe you would be in line for that didn’t happen?

No, and I didn’t try to be in line for anything. I think there were a few things going on. One is I was pretty exhausted. I am really good at fighting for causes and fighting for policy and substance that I care about and figuring out how to do it. I’m really terrible at fighting—not fighting for myself, I can get plenty of respect—but I’ve definitely underestimated strategic planning for my own career. The time and attention the people who have 10-year plans, or 5-year plans or—[laughter] The judge I clerked for actually asked me what my 10-year plan was, and I laughed at him. I said, “Do you want me to make something up?” Then I realized he was 42 and on the federal bench; he had had a 10-year plan. [laughter] So there are people who are really good at that maneuvering.

I’ve seen these people over the course of their careers, and I’ve watched how they’ve done that, and it’s a skill set I lack. And so I mostly was done. More of the way I was looking at it was, Listen, the people who have my back, who get me through, in doing the stuff I’m doing are Hillary Clinton, Cheryl Mills, Tom Nides. They’re all going to be gone. Why am I continuing to do this?

There was no sense of, Oh, if I leave now, I will pave the way for that opportunity. And I’ve actually seen people in this administration who I marvel at, who left jobs and then I watch and they’ve gotten nominated six months on for something else. Actually, I talked to one of these people who basically said, “Yes, I’m not going to get through the nomination process, but it’ll set me up much better for the second term. I’m out of government. I recognize that. I’m playing along with them, and it’s good because now I’ll only be considered for this position that’s that much higher.” And this is somebody who’s probably in her early forties. That’s impressive strategizing. [laughter]

Well, would you go back in?

I think there are fewer and fewer jobs that it would make sense for me. I think one of the things I learned about going in at the beginning of Obama, even though, again, grateful for the privilege and for the experience and for all I learned, was that just because your friends ask you—because they really care about the stuff—it doesn’t mean you have to say yes. You can think about it and figure out. So, yes, still, there’s a handful of things that I would have a hard time saying no to. Watching how things happen, I feel confident that there is very little chance I would be asked to do any of those things that I’d have a hard time saying no to.

Well, let me just say that you found yourself a very good niche as an explainer and explicator of that which you have observed. So even if you never go back in, you’re still doing a public service by helping those of us on the outside understand all of these mysteries that happen behind these closed doors.

Thank you.

And who think you’re very successful. [laughter]

Yes, yes.

Thank you.

But I did want to ask, a while back you had said about the possibility of having gone to the State Department in the budget realm.

Yes.

And you actually said, “In retrospect, I wish I would have done that”?

Yes.

How do you think your career would have been different if you had done that?

Separate from the substance, I would have been with someone who had my back, who I could trust, who was reliable, and who I could learn a lot from. That had been, frankly, some of my mantra from the first half of my career that worked out pretty well—

And that would have been Cheryl Mills—

And Jack Lew.

—and Jack, and—

Jack is just—

And Secretary Clinton.

Yes, but it would have been directly with Jack, who I really still think just is phenomenal and a rarity in politics. I don’t think he’s one of those guys who’s actually maneuvered for himself at each step at all. It gives me a good feeling to know it’s still possible for people. Even the fact that he went to—

He’s a mensch.

Yes—that he went to Israel for this ambassador role, a terrible time. He’s a true public servant. And so that would have served me better in the beginning of the administration.

I have become even stronger in my belief about how much the back of the House architecture and having a command on that. So budget processes, financing processes—make more of a difference in where policy options are than anything else. It wasn’t necessarily the next job that I would have gone to from there, but having that experience I think would have put me in that much more solid place for advocating from the outside for changes or for other similar opportunities further up, and at spaces that less people want to be in from the foreign policy/national security world. It also probably would have been smarter strategically that way.

But there is this fundamental continuity here—there’s this long tradition of public servants who are not household names, or people nobody would recognize, particularly in the area of foreign affairs in the post-World War II—

Or they’re household names for the one or two really bad things that they said or did, in a grossly unfair fashion.

Yes.

But what I’m trying to make an elevated point about is the—

Oh, is like the behind-the-scenes—

—value in our system that rewards celebrity and chaos and so forth, of the mechanics behind the scenes, who are competent and who are there for all the right reasons, whether they are Republicans or Democrats.

And the presidents who know that and see it that way—H. W. [Bush] or Biden—from long years and from a genuine sympathy for public service.

Exactly.

Yes, I think that’s right. I actually had thought—and it’s one of my many book ideas that never happened, but you make me think I want to go back to it—there are people like that all over the world. I think that they’re like a secret society. I mean, I—

Oh, you’re in the right place at UVA [University of Virginia] for that. [laughter]

So Salam Fayyad’s person I called when I was in Israel in December, Manal Zeidan, she was unbelievable. General Eitan Dangot was one of the military guys I worked with. I could see chapters on people like that around the world as well as people here.

And in Ireland. I’m sure in Ireland, same thing.

Yes, totally.

I encourage you do the book. It would have a big popular readership, as well as a value in the profession, that we’re in an age of hypercelebrity, and so we’re largely in the business of celebrating functioning presidential administrations.

Interesting.

But we had the whole of this Forum Room packed. I think you’d find it interesting and inspiring to keep going with this topic.

Oh, good. No, I will. Well, thank you.

We’ve reached our appointed hour. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

We are grateful. You’ll get a transcript at some point. You can make your decisions then about what you want to hold onto.

I know I’ll probably cringe as I’m reading through it.

This is one that will last for the ages, and we’re appreciative.

Oh, well, thank you.

Thank you.

And not only that but the help in instruction to students who will read this about making decisions in careers, and just what to do or what not to do, or how we all look back and say maybe if we had done this, but—

Just know that, as Russell said, you’re again doing public service, but we are so grateful for the public service before today.

Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]