How on earth could Hillary Clinton have gotten herself into this e-mail mess in the first place? Yesterday, my EPPC colleague, Yuval Levin, raised what he called the big-picture question about the scandal: How could Hillary have decided to run all of her communications as Secretary of State through an unsecured private server, and how could her advisors have gone along with the system without warning her of its dangers?
The answer to the first part of the question is obvious and widely recognized: Hillary set up a private server because of her paranoid desire for secrecy. (I’ve traced the trail of Hillary’s dangerous penchant for secrecy and shown how it regularly leads to administrative chaos here.) But the answer to the second part of Levin’s question is not so well understood. Her advisors failed to open her eyes because Hillary cannot brook contradiction. She surrounds herself with yes-men (actually, more often yes-women), and everything about her administrative style discourages advisors from telling her what she’s reluctant to hear.
One of the biggest problems of the Clinton White House—and of every Clinton presidential campaign before and since—has been the existence of two separate staffs, one directly responsible to Bill and one to Hillary. The competition between the two groups, and the sheer existence of separate high-level staffs with different leaders, made for frequent confusion and mistakes.
Hillary’s strength was her ability to inspire loyalty from her staffers. She “went deep” with them, reading and studying the issues alongside them, making them feel they were on a mission with her. The result was a powerful esprit de corps. Her aides wore special “Hillaryland” lapel pins and derided Bill’s staff, which they famously dubbed the “White Boys.”
Clinton biographer Sally Bedell Smith has described the “starry-eyed” devotion of Hillary’s staffers as “almost cultlike.” Here is Smith on the heart of the problem:
Her subordinates were all true believers, so she seldom heard a dissenting view. They might advise her to “do something about those bags under your eyes,” but they avoided crossing her about significant issues. “If she wanted your opinion, she would ask,” said one of her friends. “You didn’t volunteer your opinion. Hillary had good, bright, hard-working, and devoted staff, but they wouldn’t have a view of their own. The problem was they were all afraid to say no to her.”
Much has been written—and now forgotten—about Hillary’s harshness with staffers, not just Bill’s, but her own. Although many of Hillary’s Arkansas friends served in the Clinton White House, few would become part of her staff. According to Bob Woodward, Hillary could reduce close aides to tears. But unlike Bill, who would make up afterwards, Hillary would simply withdraw in silence.
Here is Smith again on the recollections of one of Hillary’s old Arkansas friends: “I couldn’t work for her and keep our friendship. She is too dogmatic. She gets so into it that she ends up being mean. That is why she has to have such a young staff. They take it, and they bow and scrape. With Hillary, it’s not intentional. It’s just that she is so intense. She is a really nice person if you don’t push her too far.”
Hillary’s more famous outbursts were against Bill’s aides, whom she frequently dressed down in humiliating ways in front of others, and against the president himself, which often left surrounding staffers in dumbfounded silence and embarrassment.
Stories of Hillary’s profanity-laced tirades against aides are peppered throughout memoirs of former Clinton staffers, and are plentiful even in sympathetic Clinton biographies written by Democrats. Hillary’s public humiliation of aides is a another frequent theme. Commentators may be reluctant to bring all this up for fear of being charged with sexism.
So is Hillary of victim, even in these sympathetic memoirs and biographies, of a double standard? Would a male boss be held to account for the same behavior? Even if there’s a grain of truth to this line of criticism, the overall pattern is too striking to be ignored, especially when the testimony comes from Hillary’s friends. To get psychological for a minute, Hillary’s treatment of staffers is reminiscent of her father, who was by all accounts a tyrannical and demeaning former Marine drill instructor.
The upshot of it is that Hillary’s overall management style drives away advisors who could stand up to her, attracting fiercely-loyal followers unwilling or unable to contradict her, instead. So given their knowledge of Hillary’s penchant for secrecy, it’s easy to see why her aides didn’t dare challenge her when the private server idea emerged. They knew there’d be hell to pay.