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

personnel promise, Hillary tallied the power to appoint political aides by the score.
    Reines, the Senate office spokesman who had been shunted to the side by Doyle during the campaign and ended up traveling with Chelsea Clinton, was named senior adviser and retained informalcontrol over Hillary’s interaction with the media. In addition, Hillary brought in Melanne Verveer, her chief of staff at the White House, as an ambassador for global women’s issues, an office given the designation “S” to indicate it was under the secretary’s direct purview and budget. Likewise, Hillary tapped hit list architect Kris Balderston to be the force behind a new global partnerships office—a State Department mirror of the Clinton Global Initiative that sought to bring together money and expertise from inside and outside government to address international problems.
    Hillary would take criticism, both internally and externally, for her use of “S”-class offices to appoint special ambassadors, envoys, and representatives, as well as senior advisers, who exercised tremendous power to circumvent the department bureaucracy on various issues of concern to Hillary. But this same model, also used by some of her predecessors at State, has become standard operating procedure for the White House, which has built up economic and national security teams with hundreds of people who are loyal to the president and occupy jobs that do not require Senate confirmation.
    The construction of Hillary’s staff reflected lessons learned from the campaign trail, especially when it came to those who had caused difficulty or embarrassment. For a variety of reasons, the ambitious, highly combustible advisers who made her campaign war room so contentious—Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson, and Phil Singer among them—didn’t accompany Hillary to State. During the course of her campaign postmortems in the summer and fall of 2008, Hillary had shaken out a number of aides like Penn even before she made the decision to go to Foggy Bottom. While a certain number of dependable, close-knit advisers—including Senate chief of staff Tamera Luzzatto and campaign manager Maggie Williams—chose not to follow Hillary to State, she brought with her those who had served her well in the Senate and during the campaign.
    Loyal, but wiser, Hillary engaged some of her old friends off the books to draw on their intellect and information while keeping them out of her decision-making structure. “She has a group of people around her that have been incredibly strong, smart, and loyal,” saidone longtime Hillarylander who did not take a job at State. “Sometimes we have to figure out ‘Does that person go into that slot or does that person go into this slot?’ You have to make tough choices, and I think that prepared her to make tough choices in the State Department—and it certainly prepared her to make tough choices going forward if she decided to do anything.”
    Yet the difficulty of making personal staff decisions paled in comparison to that of the myriad challenges she found in transitioning into official State Department business. In short order, she needed to put together a leadership roster that mixed Democratic Party stalwarts with veterans of the nonpartisan foreign service, get up to speed on nuances of foreign policy, devise a plan to implement Obama’s vision for the world, and start building relationships with key players on the president’s national security team who would be valuable allies in bolstering State.
    Hillary walked into the transition facing four major interdependent challenges. First, the president had picked her, he said, because he believed she was the best person to represent the United States abroad as it tried to regain its standing in the international community. President George W. Bush’s pursuit of the Iraq War, his policies on the treatment of detainees, and his polarizing rhetoric had turned international sympathy for America in the wake