HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024980.jpg

23

weak” or merely projecting his anger over allegations in the Italian
press about his relationship with a teenage Moroccan belly dancer
suspected of prostitution. Either way, he unloaded on Hillary during
an awkward one-on-one in Astana, Kazakhstan.
According to a firsthand account I heard an hour afterward in a
hallway near the conference room, Berlusconi told Hillary, “The
press is all over me. They think the U.S. is saying that I’m vain and
stay out all night. I’m tired, Hillary, very tired. I had such a good
relationship with ‘Beel,’ ‘George,’ and ‘Barack’—how can they say
this about me?” Hillary explained that, as Berlusconi knew perfectly
well, the cables were written by mostly lower-level people. “Look,
Silvio, you and I have been friends for 15 years. I’ve been there.
Nobody has had more things alleged—true or untrue—than me.”
Mostly she let him vent. Her background as a politician and long
history with Berlusconi and others wounded by the cables helped
ease the tensions.
Even as she navigates these choppy waters, Hillary’s own vessel is
solid and surprisingly leakproof. One of the least-noticed changes in
American public life is how she has been transformed from a subject
of constant gossip and calumny into a figure of consequence and little
controversy. There are structural reasons: secretaries of state always
exist in a zone slightly above grubby politics, which is meant—in
theory, at least—to stop at the water’s edge. The right-wing attack
machine can apparently concentrate only on one or two villains at a
time, and since 2008 it has been Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s turn in
the barrel, not Hillary’s. I tried for months to find people willing to
lace into her. None would, not even politicians and TV blowhards
who had once catalogued her distortions and dined out on despising
her.
Hillary Clinton is now in her ninth straight year as the Gallup poll’s
“America’s Most Admired Woman,” but being a great secretary of

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024980