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

didn’t, the calculus flipped. At first it looked like Obama was on the verge of scoring a coup by getting Hillary to join a “team of rivals” cabinet. But with the public latched on to that story line, it became clear it would be an equally jarring embarrassment for Obama if she turned him down. That meant her own reputation was suddenly on the line, too—there could be a backlash if fellow Democrats read a rejection as a deliberate attempt to sabotage her former rival.
    Hillary had been concerned about those optics from the moment she left Obama’s transition headquarters. She instructed aides not to talk publicly about the offer, so that if she turned Obama down it wouldn’t reflect badly on either one of them.
    For several days, Hillary remained unsold. She was just getting used to the idea that her next act would be in the Senate, where a player with extraordinary contacts and political muscle could make a career as a serious legislator, even after a failed presidential campaign. Ironically, the model was Ted Kennedy. The cultural differences between Obama’s camp and Hillary’s raised serious doubts about whether they could all get along, and the candidates themselves had clashed some on foreign policy approaches during the campaign. While they had more in common than not, the contrast between them was real. During the primary, Obama had repeatedly knocked Clinton for voting to authorize the war in Iraq. Clinton had portrayed Obama as a naïf who would wilt in the face of troublemaker nations like Iran.
    As the days crawled by, Hillary kept leaning no. Several of the women closest to her, including Williams and Mills, urged her to reject the offer, according to one adviser familiar with the discussion at the time.
    But there was also a committed cadre who pushed her to get to yes throughout the weeklong flirtation. Reines pushed every button he could to get her to reconsider, and then asked others to do the same. “If you think she should be secretary of state, you better send an e-mail to her right now, because she is saying no,” he told one colleague late one night.
    Ellen Tauscher, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, was among those who reached out to Hillary in the final days before the decision. A Wall Street wunderkind who wandered into Democratic fund-raising after moving to California with her then husband, Tauscher had chaired Senator Dianne Feinstein’s first two campaigns for the Senate. Running as a Clinton-style centrist, she then edged out a Republican incumbent to win a Bay Area House seat, as Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996.
    She was tall and warm—and as tough as a Trident missile. Tauscher had befriended the first lady, and Hillary had helped talk her through a tough divorce from a husband who had admitted to extramarital activity at the same time Bill Clinton was on trial over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. After Hillary won the Senate seat, the two women grew closer when they worked together on military issues as members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees.
    Tauscher believed that Obama, who had limited foreign policy experience, needed gravitas on his national security team. She had urged Defense Secretary Robert Gates to hold over from the Bush administration to help Obama sort out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and she considered Jim Jones, the incoming national security adviser, a close personal friend. As chairwoman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Tauscher not only liked the idea of having three allies in the Situation Room, she thought Hillary’s skills, expertise, and relationships around the world could help restore America’s battered reputation and focus attention on serious policy issues that the Bush administration had neglected. And Hillary wouldn’t have to spend much time getting up to speed.
    Tauscher got her on the phone. “You’ve got to do this,” she said. Hillary laughed her familiar chortle and stammered a bit in