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he was a 23-year-old political operative. They have lunch once a week, where sometimes—as on the details of Af-Pak escalation—they cordially disagree but know the president will decide anyway. Donilon believes you have to go back to George H. W. Bush’s era to find such “alignment” among national-security principals. “She’s a great team player,” he says.
The biggest problem between State and the White House used to be that Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s chief of staff, clashed with Denis McDonough, the deputy national-security adviser, who is close personally to the president. Now the two remind staffers of an old married couple that quarrel harmlessly. A more significant source of tension is that Hillary has long wanted the president to do more outreach to heads of state. If she had her way, the White House would have held three times as many state dinners and bilateral meetings with foreign leaders in the last two years. That might have helped with all the fence-mending and coalition-building to come.
Smart Power
Being secretary of state isn’t as much fun as it sounds. Imagine having to spend your days saying things like “We must also renew our efforts toward a settlement in Nagorno-Karabakh based on basic principles elaborated under the auspices of the Minsk Group.” That’s Hillary’s life.
Once she accepted the post, she consulted all the living secretaries of state and lots of experts on what she could get done at Foggy Bottom. I ask her what they advised, hoping to get a little closer to how she defines success. “They told me, ‘You can either concentrate on a few big issues that will really make your mark, like China policy, or you can try to better manage the State Department and USAID’”—the United States Agency for International Development, the department’s famously dysfunctional development arm that administers civilian foreign aid—“‘so that everything that’s done is

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