US presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton struggled to fit into the government of US President Barack Obama after being appointed US secretary of state in 2009, according to e-mails released by the US Department of State on Tuesday.
They showed Clinton turning up for meetings that had been canceled and worrying about how much time she had with her new boss, revealing growing pains in the relationship between her and former election rival Obama in the early months of her time as the nation’s top diplomat.
In an e-mail to two aides on June 8, 2009, Clinton was unsure if the White House had held a Cabinet meeting and whether she should attend.
Photo: AFP
“I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?” Clinton wrote.
A State Department official wrote back that the government was holding a meeting, but not a full Cabinet meeting that she needed to be at.
As Clinton sought to navigate her relationship with the White House, she corresponded with several former aides and advisers to her husband, former US president Bill Clinton.
They included former White House speech writer Sidney Blumenthal, former US National Security adviser Sandy Berger, and Mark Penn, who served as a political adviser to both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton’s White House bids.
As the Obama administration was conducting a review of its policy in Afghanistan, for example, Penn e-mailed her and advised her not to ignore the threat posed by the Taliban.
While they were fierce competitors on the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton and Obama eventually struck up a cordial working relationship in the four years she spent as secretary of state.
As she runs for the White House again in next year’s election, Hillary Clinton’s relationship with her fellow Democrat will come under further scrutiny.
While she has aligned herself with the Obama administration on issues that are popular with the base of Democratic supporters, she has also tried to make her own mark by distancing herself from Obama on trade.
In 2009, there were a few misunderstandings, according to an e-mail Hillary Clinton sent about what she thought was a meeting at the White House.
“I arrived for the 10:15 mtg and was told there was no mtg,” she wrote to aides. “This is the second time this has happened. What’s up???”
The e-mails released on Tuesday are among about 30,000 work e-mails relating to Hillary Clinton that a judge has ordered to be released in batches after controversy broke out earlier this year when she acknowledged using a personal e-mail account rather than a government one for State Department business.
As she began her tenure, Hillary Clinton worried about perceptions that she was not meeting enough with the president, given that former US president Richard Nixon used to see former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger daily.
“In thinking about the Kissinger interview, the only issue I think that might be raised is that I see POTUS at least once a week while K[issinger] saw Nixon everyday,” she said in an e-mail to a spokesman, using an acronym for the president of the US.
“Do you see this as a problem?” she asked spokesman Philippe Reines.
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