HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024992.jpg

35

The secretary runs a brisk, no-nonsense meeting. “We present and she interrogates, in the best sense of the word,” says Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management. Received wisdom gets eviscerated. “Jeff, you’ve got to do better than that,” she told Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, one day when he presented a shopworn idea. With USAID undergoing an overhaul, she listens to every reform report, down to the details of how chlorine tablets for clean drinking water can be transported by truck in Honduras. “She’s looking at the guts of how we work,” says Dr. Raj Shah, who runs USAID.
According to old State hands, Hillary represents some of the better qualities of her predecessors. She has Baker’s obsession with preparation, reaches out like Colin Powell (who advised her to resist the efforts of bureaucrats to strip her of her BlackBerry), and offers continuity with Condi Rice’s policy on aids and Africa. But she might most resemble Ronald Reagan’s second secretary of state, George Shultz, a canny pragmatist who made significant progress in several areas without being associated with a single momentous event. Shultz was known for valuing the “career people” (foreign-service officers) and casting a wide net for advice. Hillary does that, too, though she’s still surrounded by a Praetorian Guard of loyalists from her Senate office who are too political for the taste of some diplomats in the building. (They preferred the military veterans around Powell or academics around Rice.) Her great weakness over the years was too often choosing subordinates based more on loyalty than competence. She has been better about this since moving to State, but still slow to extend her trust.
When she travels, Hillary manages to be simultaneously remote from the media (joint press conferences with foreign ministers are limited to two questions for each) and accessible to the public. Unless a crisis obliterates her schedule, she routinely subjects herself to what Reines

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024992