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

to serve as secretary of state and thus was uniquely positioned to offer counsel both about what the job entailed and about whether Hillary should take it. Albright pulled off onto a side street in Georgetown for what she correctly suspected would be a long conversation.
    “She knew I’d liked the job,” Albright said. “We talked about what the job was about, what you could do with it, how much travel there was, what the building was like.”
    What her friend was really driving at, Albright knew, was whether Hillary would enjoy being at State. “I told her obviously that I thought the job was terrific, that she’d be wonderful at it, and that it was something that she could take great pride in doing,” Albright recalled. “Often people think foreign policy has nothing to do with domestic policy, and they’re part of the same spectrum. So I just knew she would be good at it.”
    Mark Penn’s knee-jerk reaction was that she shouldn’t go to work for Obama. But ultimately he had a clear-eyed view of what was best for Hillary—especially when it involved plotting for a second presidential run.He came to see the political benefits that could accrue to Hillary if she took the job. Among them, it would bolster her credibility as a foreign policy expert; it would prove again that she was a good Democrat, not an out-for-herself freelancer; it would once and for all liberate her from Bill’s shadow; and it would please the Democratic primary voters who wanted to see her and Obama join forces.
    Penn had been so iced out of Hillaryland by that point, according to longtime Clinton hands, that his advice probably didn’t matter much. But his personal ambivalence exemplified the divide withinHillaryland. “Our office was kind of split because a lot of people didn’t want her to do it,” said one of Hillary’s Senate aides. “A lot of people wanted to retain their jobs—they were kind of negative about Obama and bitter. Then there were others who thought this was a good opportunity for her.”
    Obama put on the full-court press. Working on his behalf, a long list of high-profile Democratic players urged her to take the post, and it became clear that Bill was willing to do anything to ease that path, including adjusting the nature of his charitable work and sharing his donor list with the new White House team. But he was sensitive to the criticism he had received during her campaign. While he made clear that he thought she should take it, he didn’t pressure her.
    Podesta became the key go-between for Obama and Hillary.He had suggested Hillary for the job during meetings in the summer of 2008 only to find that Obama had already given it thought. Podesta urged Hillary to take the gig and advised Obama on the strategy and tactics of getting her to yes.
    For a week, news reports went back and forth on the question of whether she had actually been offered the job and whether she would take it. Behind the scenes, some Clinton and Obama aides worked hard to make a match. Reines and Andrew Shapiro, an adviser on national security matters, came up with a gambit for lobbying Hillary indirectly. Joe Biden’s birthday was coming up in a few days, and they urged her to call the vice president–elect a couple of days early, knowing that once they were on the phone, Biden would apply friendly pressure. He did his part. Emanuel made his own appeal to Hillary.
    But while the Clinton allies within Obama’s high command worked back channels to persuade her, much of the rest of his team was unsettled by the prospect of trying to assimilate the Clinton universe into the Obama world.
    “The majority of people, and I mean this not at the top echelons, but up and down the campaign, would not have suggested that she and her people become part of” the administration, one Obama insider said. “The majority of people who I knew were not for it.”
    As these subterranean fights played out between those whowanted Hillary at State and those who