Free HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Allen, Amie Parnes

had offered his counsel to both Obama and Hillary as they battled it out across the country.
    “The president was looking for what the vice president was going to say,” Kaufman recalled. “The vice president was a strong supporter of Hillary.”
    When Obama went around the room to count the yeas and nays—his personal choice evident already—the decision was unanimous.
    On November 13, four days after Obama’s call to the Clintons, Mitchell reported that Hillary had been spotted on a flight bound for Chicago. Later that day reporters staking out the Obama transition office at a federal building downtown caught sight of a motorcade that didn’t belong to the president-elect, raising the question of which other dignitary was visiting. Still, the two camps weren’t talking about it publicly. The operation was so hush-hush that when Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau ran into Abedin at the office that day, he assumed Huma was being interviewed for a job in the administration; the thought that Hillary was in the office listening to Obama’s sales pitch never crossed his mind.
    Obama and Clinton huddled in a bland conference room, face-to-face without any aides.
    Obama said he wanted her for the job.
    “I’m really flattered, Mr. President-elect,” Hillary replied, “but I’m going to go back to the Senate. That’s what I really want to do. You’ve got great people to choose from to be secretary of state.”
    She offered up two names: veteran diplomat Richard Holbrookeand retired general Jim Jones, a former commandant of the Marine Corps.
    “I can help you in the Senate, because it’s going to be challenging to get your agenda through,” she told Obama. “You’ve got the economic crisis to deal with.”
    But Obama had given it a lot of thought, he told her, and she was the woman for the job. While he was tied down in Washington with the financial collapse, he needed a star-power diplomat to represent him across the globe.
    Hillary said no again.
    Go home and give it some thought, Obama instructed her, as only a newly elected president could. He wasn’t taking no for an answer. They could talk about it later, he said.
    Hillary had plenty of reasons to reject Obama’s first entreaty. She was coming to grips with returning to the Senate; she didn’t want to run an agency full of Obama appointees; her husband’s international dealings could become an unwanted distraction for Obama; and she wouldn’t be able to pay off the$6.4 million debt that her campaign still owed to vendors if she held a post in the executive branch. Besides, why would she want to work for the upstart who beat her and look at his portrait every day in her office? And—never stated but obvious to anyone in politics—playing coy with Obama gave her leverage to extract a better deal if she ended up accepting. It all added up to a demurral.
    Until their face-to-face meeting, all but a few insiders in each camp had been kept in the dark. But the
Huffington Post
reported the next day thatObama had offered her the job, citing two Democratic officials. Suddenly it felt more real. It was a lifeline for Hillarylanders who had once imagined themselves in the West Wing only to snap back toward Capitol Hill. The State Department represented a soft landing in between.
    As Hillary began researching the job and soliciting opinions, she soon found out that her closest friends and advisers were divided on whether she should take it.
    Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, was drivingin heavy traffic on M Street in Washington when Hillary called to get her thoughts. A dozen years earlier Hillary had urged Bill to make Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, his second-term secretary of state. The two women had traveled abroad together during the Clinton administration, and their bond was enhanced by the common experience of a Wellesley education. Not only was Albright a friend of Hillary’s, she was the only Democratic woman ever