HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024984.jpg

27

movies (despite a weakness for anything with Meryl Streep,
especially Out of Africa), reads yet more briefing papers than she’s
already consumed in Washington, scans news on an iPad, and
sometimes manages a few pages of a mystery, but mostly she sleeps,
without any pills, often right through landing. “If she couldn’t sleep
most of the way,” says Philippe Reines, her longtime press secretary,
“she wouldn’t be able to function.”
Some of her best road stories involve Holbrooke, her close friend, a
maestro of diplomacy for more than four decades. (Holbrooke was
meeting with Hillary in her office last December when he collapsed
and was rushed to the hospital, where he later died from a ruptured
aorta.) At his Kennedy Center memorial service, which played more
like a roast, she recalled that Holbrooke was once, in Pakistan, so
insistent on making a point that he followed her all the way into the
ladies’ room. On boarding her plane, he would test every seat to see
which was the most comfortable, then hound whichever official was
assigned to it to trade with him. Hillary especially enjoyed when he
would disappear into the airplane restroom and emerge like an
oversize Easter bunny in his bright-yellow sleeping suit. “On hearing
Winston Churchill’s motto, ‘Never, never, never, never give up,’
[Richard] called Churchill halfhearted,” she said. Hillary thinks this
also perfectly captures her own theory of persistence.
Aloft, the secretary of state can often be found with a black binder
clip in her hair instead of fastened onto classified documents. It helps.
Her stylist, Isabelle Goetz, does her hair in Washington, but on the
road—unless the ambassador’s wife can recommend someone good—
she takes care of herself. For years she’s routinely done her own
makeup, which is easier because she has good skin. And her genes
seem unusually strong. Dorothy Rodham, Hillary’s mother, is 92 but
looks more like 80. Hillary is 63 but seems a bit younger. She is one

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024984