Hating Hillary

Election 2016

Hating Hillary

America’s probable next president is deeply reviled. Why?

Oct 22nd 2016 | NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON, DC | From the print edition

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TO UNDERSTAND how well-regarded Hillary Clinton was as a senator and then as secretary of state, forsake those closest to her. A coterie of longtime retainers, such as her factotum Huma Abedin and Maura Pally of the Clinton Foundation, appear to worship her with a protective fury that admits no fault. But then also discount the views of those sometime Clinton associates who earn their bread by trashing the Democratic nominee—such as Dick Morris, inventor of the phrase “triangulation” to describe Bill Clinton’s political method. When not writing anti-Hillary polemics, he is chief political columnist of the National Enquirer, a tabloid which describes the 68-year-old candidate as a predatory lesbian on the edge of death.

For a more dispassionate critique of Mrs Clinton, who is reckoned to be the second-most-unpopular presidential nominee ever, after her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, listen to some of the less partial operatives and politicians who have worked with her over the past 25 years. Less favoured Clinton retainers offer more nuanced praise of their boss than the gilded coterie. A workaholic, she is relentlessly demanding of her employees’ time and loyalty and can be icily critical, sometimes unfairly, says an aide who has been drawn into playing a much bigger role in Mrs Clinton’s campaign than she wanted: “Hillary’s not always warm and fuzzy.” But by the standards of most politicians she considers Mrs Clinton a decent boss—one who calls her staffers on their birthdays and when they are bereaved: “Not many senators do that.”

Mrs Clinton’s former congressional colleagues—including the Republicans she wooed assiduously on Capitol Hill, though they had sought to destroy her husband’s presidency, and her, in the 1990s—speak even more admiringly of her. “I got on very well with her, she’s a likeable person. When it comes to dealing with Congress, she’d be a big improvement on Barack Obama,” says Don Nickles, a former Republican senator from Oklahoma who helped wreck the health-care reform Mrs Clinton tried to launch in 1993, and with whom she then worked to extend unemployment benefits. “She’s hard-working, true to her word and very professional,” says Tom Reynolds, a former Republican congressman who collaborated with her in upstate New York. “That’s not just in the Senate. She’s been like that all her life.” 

This, to put it mildly, is not a characterisation supported by Mrs Clinton’s ratings. Around 55% of Americans have an unfavourable view of her; about the same number do not trust her (see chart). Yet, among those who know Mrs Clinton, even critics praise her integrity. She is a politician, therefore self-interested and cynical at times—yet driven, they say, by an overarching desire to improve America. More surprising, given the many scandals she has been involved in, including an ongoing furore over her use of a private e-mail server as secretary of state, not many of those who have dealt with her seem to think her particularly shifty. Even some of her foes say the concern about her probity is overblown. “People can go back decades and perhaps criticise some of the judgments that were made,” Michael Chertoff, who was the Republican lead counsel in one of the first probes into Mrs Clinton, the Senate Whitewater Committee, but has endorsed her, told Bloomberg. “That is very, very insignificant compared to the fundamental issue of how to protect the country.”

What then explains the depths of Mrs Clinton’s unpopularity, which on November 8th will drive millions of Americans to justify voting for a man whom they have heard boast of groping women? Having opened up a six-point lead in recent weeks, she is nonetheless likely to prevail. Yet she would return to the White House as its most-reviled new occupant of modern times. Mr Trump has suggested she could even be assassinated—and the experience of his rallies suggests he might be right. Neck veins thrumming, his supporters call Mrs Clinton “evil”, and a “killer”.

Yet the antipathy to Mrs Clinton is not merely a right-wing hate fantasy: she is also mistrusted within her party. Almost a third of Democrats said they disagreed with the FBI’s recent decision not to prosecute her—their presidential candidate—over her e-mail arrangements. It is hard to think of another politician whose public image is so at odds with the judgment of her peers.

For Mrs Clinton’s cheerleaders, the disparity is enough to prove she has been traduced. Yet politics is about winning over the public, as well as colleagues, and the fact that Mrs Clinton is much less good at this is partly her fault. For such a practised politician—she delivered her first major address, on graduating from Wellesley College, almost half a century ago—she is a dreadful public speaker. Her speeches are mostly wonkish and dull, workaday constructions of a politician who appears to view human progress as a series of nudging policy improvements. Mr Obama’s vision is not dissimilar; but where the president elevates it with magical rhetoric, Mrs Clinton’s performance is so hammy as to annoy. “She sucks the life out of a room,” groans a member of her husband’s separate (and in fact rival) adoring coterie.

This hurt her during her first presidential run, in 2008, when the public mood was less radically against the establishment politics that Mrs Clinton encapsulates almost to the point of parody. With trust in the federal government now at the lowest sustained level ever recorded, the damage was bound to be worse this time. Indeed, on the left, Mrs Clinton is especially unpopular among younger voters, who are most mistrustful of the government and most liable to demand radical change.

Hence their voluble support for Bernie Sanders, whose outsiderish credentials were confirmed by the fact that he had only recently joined the party whose nomination he sought. By pillorying Mrs Clinton as an apologist for a predatory elite—to which effort her lucrative past speechmaking on Wall Street provided ammunition—the Vermont senator assisted in her vilification. Over the course of the primaries, her favourability ratings worsened especially among millennials; 60% voted for Mr Obama in 2012, but by the time Mr Sanders threw in the towel, only 31% had a positive view of Mrs Clinton.

This was not only true of millennial men but also of women; the latter have proved largely unmoved by the prospect of America’s first woman president. Older women, who backed Mrs Clinton in the primaries by big margins, are often enraged by this. Madeleine Albright, a previous secretary of state, warned of a “special place in hell” for women who do not support other women. Yet it seems younger women do not see the logic of this, perhaps because they are less likely to have experienced maternity leave and gender-related pay disparities, two areas where women are most likely to report sexism.

In short, it is also hard to think of a politician less suited than Mrs Clinton to combating America’s rock-throwing mood. But as an explanation for the strength of America’s antipathy to her, this is inadequate—not least because she was until recently one of America’s most popular figures. When she left the State Department, in 2013, 65% of Americans had a favourable view of her. Why do almost as many now feel the reverse?

Hill-Billy elegy

Two bits of context are important. First, Mrs Clinton has been here before. Almost from the moment she came to national attention, in 1991 during her husband’s first presidential campaign, people took against her. “Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the elite and lumpen,” read a profile of the by-then beleaguered First Lady in the New Yorker in 1996. The second bit of background is that no one quite knew why.

That Mrs Clinton kept getting mired in scandals—including, by 1996, an alleged conflict of interest over a rotten property investment the Clintons had made in Arkansas—plainly didn’t help. They left an impression of her that was often unflattering. She came across as secretive and perhaps not quite punctilious in her observance of the law. There were suggestions she had overcharged clients of her legal practice (though she broke no law). But the most serious allegations, including several pursued by Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who uncovered Mr Clinton’s dallying with Monica Lewinsky, were dismissed as unproven or baseless.

A better characterisation of the antipathy to Mrs Clinton, which doubts about her probity reflected, was a vaguer sense that there was something inappropriate about her. This dogged her in Arkansas, where she was considered too independent-minded to be the First Lady of a southern state. It was unfair; even her reluctance to take her husband’s name was controversial. Yet sympathisers struggled with the way the personal and professional seemed to overlap with Mrs Clinton.

The wellspring of that concern was the Clintons’ marriage. To their detractors, it has always seemed a cold-hearted professional agreement, mainly to the advantage of Mrs Clinton. Yet those who saw her as cynically piggybacking on her husband’s success underrated her accomplishments; by her mid-20s, she was a Yale legal scholar and social activist of national repute; her speech at Wellesley had been widely covered in the press. Moreover, the Clintons were always upfront about their collaboration; Mr Clinton promised a “two for the price of one” presidency. And if that could help explain why Mrs Clinton never forsook her adulterous husband, something her critics also object to, there have been stranger marriages.

Even now—though it is reported Mr Clinton’s philandering never ended—friends of the couple convincingly describe their mutual affection. “They’re often holding hands,” says an aide to Mrs Clinton. Yet if their partnership was deeply rooted , that didn’t mean America had to like it. Indeed, there were reasons not to.

During her husband’s first presidential run, Mrs Clinton was allegedly involved in trashing the reputations of women who had claimed to have had affairs with him. It was the sort of allegation that might be forgiven in a jealous wife, or in a professional campaign manager. But in a woman who claimed to believe her husband’s protestations of innocence, and an avowed feminist, it seemed obnoxious.

As the most powerful First Lady there had ever been—with an office in the West Wing and responsibility for reforming a health-care system that represented 15% of the economy—she faced stiffer attacks. Again, these were often exaggerated responses to errors for which she was only partly to blame. “Hillarycare” was too complicated and pursued too secretively. But though the unelected Mrs Clinton was partly to blame, so was her husband. Yet it was she who got it in the neck. At a speech she gave for the reform in Seattle, protesters waved “Heil Hillary” placards and invited her to “Fly yo’ broom”.

Both Clintons were flawed. Yet the ferocity of such barrages reflected something more: the deep fault-lines the couple were straddling. The first baby-boomer president and his pushy wife represented a cultural shift that much of America feared. “She was not only a baby-boomer but a strong woman, which was felt by some to be a threat,” says Robert Reich, labour secretary in Mr Clinton’s administration. The obvious inference, that Mrs Clinton’s unpopularity was fuelled by sexism, has always annoyed her critics almost as much as she has. But it is otherwise hard to explain the gap between the measured criticism Mrs Clinton’s behaviour has sometimes invited and the unbridled loathing that has shown up in its place.

It was also apparent in the fact that Mrs Clinton’s standing improved after the revelation of her husband’s canoodling with Ms Lewinsky. Recast as a wronged woman, a less threatening female archetype, she seemed more likeable. Moreover, the criticisms most often levelled at Mrs Clinton are plainly sexist. She is said to be “shrill”, “ambitious” and, in the gutter where Mr Trump fills his opposition files, deviant.

Whenever she has sought power, including in her two Senate and first presidential campaigns, such criticisms have been aired, and in the latter case her ratings plunged. That she was in for another pounding this time was predictable—yet the pitch of loathing is unprecedented.

The press had a hand in that. An analysis by researchers at Harvard’s Kennedy School of eight mainstream outlets, including CBS, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, found they were more critical of Mrs Clinton than any other Republican or Democratic candidate. In the first six months of last year, she was the subject of three negative statements for every positive one; Mr Trump received two accolades for every carp. “Whereas media coverage helped build up Trump,” the researchers concluded, “It helped tear down Clinton.”

An obvious explanation is that Mrs Clinton’s strengths, including the most detailed platform of any candidate, do not make interesting news. Compared with the surprising enthusiasm for Mr Sanders, they were therefore hardly covered. (Maybe that was a good thing; the Harvard researchers found Mrs Clinton was the only candidate whose platform received net negative coverage.)

And, as so often, she was also quickly enshrouded by scandals. These concern her alleged culpability for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in 2012; her lucrative speechmaking; the governance arrangements at the Clintons’ foundation; and her private e-mail server, which was revealed in March 2015, shortly before she announced her run. Within weeks, Mrs Clinton the super-qualified front-runner had been recast as a scandal-dogged fading star. In the first year of her campaign, her net favourability fell by 20 points.

Also characteristically, Mrs Clinton was partly to blame. However reasonably she must fear harassment, her e-mail arrangements and protracted efforts to deny there was anything wrong with them warrant criticism. Or as Joe Lieberman, a former Democratic senator and vice-presidential candidate, puts it: “The Clintons have been through a lot, they’ve had a lot of people searching through their garbage, but even so…” All the same, the weakness of her candidacy and the seriousness of her alleged offences have been exaggerated.

The predominant journalistic take on Mrs Clinton’s primary campaign was that she risked losing to a wacky socialist no-hoper. In fact, she crushed Mr Sanders so utterly—by almost 4m votes, in the end—he clearly never stood a chance. Coverage of the scandals has been even more misleading. On Benghazi, which bothers Mr Trump’s supporters especially (at his rallies, people reel off lists of witnesses they say Mrs Clinton has had killed) seven official investigations have shown she has no case to answer. Her speeches and activities at the foundation have also been exaggerated; both were politically fatheaded but, on the evidence available, not corrupt.

Then do it again 20 years later

Because she was culpable over her “damn e-mails”, in Mr Sanders’s phrase, it is a more complicated case. Yet the prevailing view of the scandal, promulgated by the media and Mr Trump, that her misdeeds were serious enough to warrant an FBI indictment, always looked fallacious, and so it proved. A 250-page FBI report into its investigation into the affair, describes Mrs Clinton inheriting an institution with shambolic communication procedures, which she and her too-pliant aides perpetuated. It suggests her e-mail arrangement was motivated chiefly, as she maintained, by her desire to send private and personal e-mails from a single device, her BlackBerry. That was partly because Mrs Clinton is so technophobic she does not know how to use a desktop computer. It is also reasonable to assume the arrangement was intended to give her maximum privacy. Either way, it was permitted.

The problem was that 193 e-mails containing classified information were exposed to Mrs Clinton’s private server, which was not permitted. Yet the FBI, predictably, concluded Mrs Clinton’s offence was not premeditated, a usual condition for a prosecution in such cases. In the annals of political misdeeds, future historians will not pause on Mrs Clinton’s e-mails long. But they will marvel at how an exaggerated belief in her malfeasance almost created the conditions for Mr Trump to seize the White House.

What, in the end, is fuelling that belief? Mrs Clinton’s political failings and the insurgent mood are plainly contributing. Yet, even if you are inclined to judge Mrs Clinton harshly, it is hard not to conclude that latent sexism is a bigger reason for her struggles. With his feel for America’s worst instincts, Mr Trump sought to arouse a misogynist repulse to Mrs Clinton from the start. When she left a debate stage during the primaries to use the lavatory, he called it “disgusting”. A tweet reading “If Hillary can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” was retweeted from his Twitter account (naturally, he said he knew nothing about it).

He now suggests his opponent and former wedding-guest (“a terrific woman,” he used to call her,) is guilty of murder and adultery. His supporters wear T-shirts reading “Trump that bitch” and “Hillary sucks, but not like Monica”. More than half of white men, the engine-room of Hillary hatred, say they have a “very unfavourable” view of her—20 percentage points more than said the same of Mr Obama, whom they did not care for, in 2012.

They are responsible for the pitch of Hillary-hatred in this election. It always seemed likely that women would, in the end, rally against that assault. And so, belatedly, they have, with a wave of women voters now breaking for Mrs Clinton. She leads among women by 20 points, while Mr Trump leads with men by seven. If that gender gap holds, it would be the biggest ever. According to simulations by Nate Silver, a data guru, if only women voted, Mrs Clinton would win with 458 electoral college votes to Mr Trump’s 80. If only men voted, he would win.

This indicates the vast and countervailing social pressures, towards and against change, colliding in this election. Mrs Clinton, who has never felt able to protest against the chauvinism she has encountered, must feel vindicated, in a sense. But she is lucky, too. In Mr Sanders and Mr Trump, she has faced two opponents who could scarcely have been better designed to exaggerate her weaknesses and denigrate her strengths. Yet they were also, perhaps, the only plausible opponents that Mrs Clinton could actually beat.

News & Politics

How Did the Clintons Become So Rich?

The real scandal is not that the former president and first lady are so wealthy, but how they got that wealthy.

By Zaid Jilani / Al Jazeera
 

June 30, 2014

Photo Credit: JStone / Shutterstock.com 


NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 24: Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton and Bill Clinton attend the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting at The Shertaon New York Hotel on September 24, 2013 in New York City.

“Is Hillary our Mitt Romney?” asked MSNBC’s Krystal Ball in a recent segment of her TV show. Ball’s statement came on the heels of several comments by Clinton that made her seem completely out of touch with ordinary Americans — that she is not “truly well off,” that she and her husband were compelled to give speeches for six figures apiece because they were “dead broke” upon leaving the White House.

Indeed, considering that Bill and Hillary Clinton have made more than $100 million since leaving the White House in 2000, it’s not surprising that many Americans see the former first couple as hopelessly detached from the problems of ordinary Americans despite presenting themselves as going through the very same struggles as other Americans.

“We had no money when we got there [to the White House],” explained Hillary Clinton in comments to ABC’s Diane Sawyer. “And we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea’s education. It was not easy. Bill has worked really hard. And it’s been amazing to me. He’s worked very hard.”

Yet many Americans have also worked very hard, and they have not amassed the same kind of wealth as the Clintons, with multiple homes and over $100 million of earned income in the past decade. But underneath the social distance their wealth creates, there is a much deeper and more troubling truth. The real scandal is not that the Clintons are so wealthy but how they got that wealth.

Poor rascal

In 2009, Bill Clinton addressed the Campus Progress National Summit, a gathering of progressive students in Washington, D.C. “I never made any money until I left the White House,” he told the students. “I had the lowest net worth, adjusted for inflation, of any president elected in the last 100 years, including President [Barack] Obama. I was one poor rascal when I took office. But after I got out, I made a lot of money.”

Clinton didn’t just make “a lot of money” when he left the White House. Together, the Clintonspulled in $111 million from 2000 to 2007 — far more than what most people would consider a lot.

Thanks to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), which compiles personal financial disclosures from federal public officials, and the ethics laws governing the U.S. Senate, we know a little bit about how the Clintons made their money. Federal disclosure laws require not only officeholders to disclose their finances but also their spouses, since spousal income is shared. Thus Hillary Clinton’s disclosures both as a U.S. senator and as secretary of state are a window into this shared fortune, one that was gleaned from the very same interest groups and corporations over which the Clintons had authority.

In 1999, Bill Clinton made repealing the Depression-era Glass-SteagallAct — which separated commercial and investment banking — a priority. He commanded a bipartisan push in repealing the law, which was primarily advocated for by Wall Street lobbyists. Not long after his pen hit the paper to repeal the law, Citigroup, a top beneficiary of the repeal, recruited Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to join as an executive at the firm. Rubin went on to be one of Citigroup’s highest-paid officials, pulling in $115 million in pay from 1999 and 2008.

While Rubin was made rich from Wall Street deregulation, his boss went on the lecture circuit. In February of 2001, Clinton had been out of the White House for less than a month when he gave his first paid speech, to none other than Morgan Stanley — another beneficiary of and advocate for Clinton’s Wall Street deregulation — for$125,000. His next address in Manhattan was at Credit Suisse First Boston, which gave him an additional $125,000. His paid speaking arrangements took him around the world, from Canada to Hong Kong, speaking to a variety of interest groups with major public policy interests, including the American Israel Chamber of Commerce and the investment banking giant CLSA. Clinton had also made passing the North American Free Trade Agreement a priority during his presidency, so it is no surprise that major Canadian firms such as the Jim Pattison Group ($150,000) were happy to pay to hear a few remarks from him as well.

The Wall Street payments were significant in that they represented a form of gratitude not only for Bill Clinton’s deregulation of Wall Street. That year Hillary Clinton, now a senator from New York, voted for a bankruptcy bill that made it much harder for people to qualify for Chapter 7 bankruptcy; the bill was backed primarily by banks and credit card issuers.

Bill Clinton in his spree of speeches repeatedly returned to two of the banking giants at the heart of political power in Washington: Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. In 2004 he took home a quarter-million dollars for a Citigroup address in Paris; Goldman Sachs gave him $125,000 for a New York City address. That address must have been a real hit for the former president, because Goldman invited him back for a series of lectures the next year, at Kiawah Island, South Carolina ($125,000); Paris ($250,000); and Greensboro, Georgia ($150,000). The next year, Citigroup Venture Capital invited him for a $150,000 speech, and the Mortgage Bankers Association — representing the folks at the very heart of the financial crisis — gave him $150,000 for a speech in Chicago.

Goldman and Citigroup repeatedly paid Clinton for the next few years, and a number of other major corporate interest groups — such as the National Retail Federation ($150,000) and Merrill Lynch ($175,000) — also joined in the fun.
After Hillary Clinton lost her presidential bid and was appointed to the State Department, she and her husband had brought in more than $100 million from books and speeches. By any measure, they had far more wealth than they needed to pay debts and to take care of their daughter’s future — the reasons Hillary Clinton cited to Diane Sawyer.

Friends and enemies

In June of 2010, months after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law and the regulatory battle over the health overhaul was set into motion, the former president took $175,000 from the main health insurance lobbying organization, America’s Health Insurance Plans. A year after Hillary Clinton called Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his family “friends” of her family, Bill Clinton was paid $250,000 to speak to the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which was closely tied to the Mubarak regime. As Hillary Clinton grappled with foreign policy issues in Pakistan, Turkey and the Middle East, Bill Clinton took home $175,000 from the Middle East Institute, a think tank that does work in those areas. In 2011 she filmed a video congratulating Kuwait on its independence; a few months later, he was paid a $175,000 honorarium from the Kuwait America Foundation.

Shortly after stepping down from her post, the she then embarked on her own spree of paid speeches, which don’t have to be disclosed because neither Clinton is a public official anymore. But from voluntarily disclosures and press reports, we know that she gave at least two paid speeches to Goldman Sachs for $200,000each. Although she has not disclosed her full remarks at these events, a number of attendees talked to Politico about her tone and content. “Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish,” read the article. We won’t know the full extent of payments for speeches unless Clinton chooses to release them or she officially declares for president and has to release her personal financial documents since 2013.

Common people

What has been laid out here is only a small sample of the vortex of wealth that Hillary and Bill Clinton have received from corporations, foundations, foreign organizations and others with an interest in U.S. public policy. No one with any knowledge of politics believes these payments to be disinterested or impartial; they are part of a larger political system that rewards politicians for fealty and obedience. The Clintons were simply following a path laid by other politicos, such as former U.S. Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, who raked in millions of dollars as a drug lobbyist after crafting an industry-friendly Medicare overhaul, and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who has leveraged his experience in government to enrich himself influence-peddling for a variety of corporate clients without ever having to officially register as a lobbyist.

Given their immense wealth and how they got it — politicized kickbacks from the most powerful political forces in Washington, on Wall Street and around the globe — the Clintons would do well to admit that they are unusually wealthy and stop trying to pass themselves off as ordinary folks. If they don’t, their fate may very well resemble Romney’s, as mounting public anger over growing income and wealth inequality could prevent them from returning to the White House in 2016.

Zaid Jilani is an AlterNet staff writer. Follow @zaidjilani on Twitter.

The New York Times Magazine

How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk

Throughout her career she has displayed instincts on foreign policy that are more aggressive than those of President Obama — and most Democrats.

BY MARK LANDLERAPRIL 21, 2016

Hillary Clinton sat in the hideaway study off her ceremonial office in the State Department, sipping tea and taking stock of her first year on the job. The study was more like a den — cozy and wood-paneled, lined with bookshelves that displayed mementos from Clinton’s three decades in the public eye: a statue of her heroine, Eleanor Roosevelt; a baseball signed by the Chicago Cubs star Ernie Banks; a carved wooden figure of a pregnant African woman. The intimate setting lent itself to a less-formal interview than the usual locale, her imposing outer office, with its marble fireplace, heavy drapes, crystal chandelier and ornate wall sconces. On the morning of Feb. 26, 2010, however, Clinton was talking about something more sensitive than mere foreign affairs: her relationship with Barack Obama. To say she chose her words carefully doesn’t do justice to the delicacy of the exercise. She was like a bomb-squad technician, deciding which color wire to snip without blowing up her relationship with the White House.

“We’ve developed, I think, a very good rapport, really positive back-and-forth about everything you can imagine,” Clinton said about the man she described during the 2008 campaign as naïve, irresponsible and hopelessly unprepared to be president. “And we’ve had some interesting and even unusual experiences along the way.”

She leaned forward as she spoke, gesturing with her hands and laughing easily. In talking with reporters, Clinton displays more warmth than Obama does, though there’s less of an expectation that she might say something revealing.

Clinton singled out, as she often would, the United Nations climate-change meeting in Copenhagen the previous December, where she and Obama worked together tosave the meeting from collapse. She brought up the Middle East peace proc­ess, a signature project of the president’s, which she had been tasked with reviving. But she was understandably wary of talking about areas in which she and Obama split — namely, on bedrock issues of war and peace, where Clinton’s more activist philosophy had already collided in unpredictable ways with her boss’s instincts toward restraint. She had backed Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recommendation to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, before endorsing a fallback proposal of 30,000 (Obama went along with that, though he stipulated that the soldiers would begin to pull out again in July 2011, which she viewed as problematic). She supported the Pentagon’s plan to leave behind a residual force of 10,000 to 20,000 American troops in Iraq (Obama balked at this, largely because of his inability to win legal protections from the Iraqis, a failure that was to haunt him when the Islamic State overran much of the country). And she pressed for the United States to funnel arms to the rebels in Syria’s civil war (an idea Obama initially rebuffed before later, halfheartedly, coming around to it).

That fundamental tension between Clinton and the president would continue to be a defining feature of her four-year tenure as secretary of state. In the administration’s first high-level meeting on Russia in February 2009, aides to Obama proposed that the United States make some symbolic concessions to Russia as a gesture of its good will in resetting the relationship. Clinton, the last to speak, brusquely rejected the idea, saying, “I’m not giving up anything for nothing.” Her hardheadedness made an impression on Robert Gates, the defense secretary and George W. Bush holdover who was wary of a changed Russia. He decided there and then that she was someone he could do business with.

“I thought, This is a tough lady,” he told me.

A few months after my interview in her office, another split emerged when Obama picked up a secure phone for a weekend conference call with Clinton, Gates and a handful of other advisers. It was July 2010, four months after the North Korean military torpedoed a South Korean Navy corvette, sinking it and killing 46 sailors. Now, after weeks of fierce debate between the Pentagon and the State Department, the United States was gearing up to respond to this brazen provocation. The tentative plan — developed by Clinton’s deputy at State, James Steinberg — was to dispatch the aircraft carrier George Washington into coastal waters to the east of North Korea as an unusual show of force.

But Adm. Robert Willard, then the Pacific commander, wanted to send the carrier on a more aggressive course, into the Yellow Sea, between North Korea and China. The Chinese foreign ministry had warned the United States against the move, which for Willard was all the more reason to press forward. He pushed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, who in turn pushed his boss, the defense secretary, to reroute the George Washington. Gates agreed, but he needed the commander in chief to sign off on a decision that could have political as well as military repercussions.

Gates laid out the case for diverting the George Washington to the Yellow Sea: that the United States should not look as if it was yielding to China. Clinton strongly seconded it. “We’ve got to run it up the gut!” she had said to her aides a few days earlier. (The Vince Lombardi imitation drew giggles from her staff, who, even 18 months into her tenure, still marveled at her pugnacity.)

Obama, though, was not persuaded. The George Washington was already underway; changing its course was not a decision to make on the fly.

“I don’t call audibles with aircraft carriers,” he said — unwittingly one-upping Clinton on her football metaphor.

It wasn’t the last debate in which she would side with Gates. The two quickly discovered that they shared a Midwestern upbringing, a taste for a stiff drink after a long day of work and a deep-seated skepticism about the intentions of America’s foes. Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence analyst who conducted Obama’s initial review on the Afghanistan war, says: “I think one of the surprises for Gates and the military was, here they come in expecting a very left-of-center administration, and they discover that they have a secretary of state who’s a little bit right of them on these issues — a little more eager than they are, to a certain extent. Particularly on Afghanistan, where I think Gates knew more had to be done, knew more troops needed to be sent in, but had a lot of doubts about whether it would work.”

As Hillary Clinton makes another run for president, it can be tempting to view her hard-edged rhetoric about the world less as deeply felt core principle than as calculated political maneuver. But Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.

“Hillary is very much a member of the traditional American foreign-policy establishment,” says Vali Nasr, a foreign-policy strategist who advised her on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department. “She believes, like presidents going back to the Reagan or Kennedy years, in the importance of the military — in solving terrorism, in asserting American influence. The shift with Obama is that he went from reliance on the military to the intelligence agencies. Their position was, ‘All you need to deal with terrorism is N.S.A. and C.I.A., drones and special ops.’ So the C.I.A. gave Obama an angle, if you will, to be simultaneously hawkish and shun using the military.”

Unlike other recent presidents — Obama, George W. Bush or her husband, Bill Clinton — Hillary Clinton would assume the office with a long record on national security. There are many ways to examine that record, but one of the most revealing is to explore her decades-long cultivation of the military — not just civilian leaders like Gates, but also its high-ranking commanders, the men with the medals. Her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as Bush once put it, into “any dark corner of the world.” Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race.

For those who know Clinton’s biography, her embrace of the military should come as no surprise. She grew up in the buoyant aftermath of World War II, the daughter of a Navy petty officer who trained young sailors before they shipped out to the Pacific. Her father, Hugh Rodham, was a staunch Republican and an anticommunist, and she channeled his views. She talks often about her girlhood dream of becoming an astronaut, citing the rejection letter she got from NASA as the first time she encountered gender discrimination. Her real motive for volunteering, she has written, may have been because her father fretted that “America was lagging behind Russia.”

Political conversion came later, after Vietnam and the ’60s swept over Wellesley College, where she spoke out against the establishment at her graduation. But even in the tumultuous year of 1968, she was still making her transition from Republican to Democrat, managing to go to the conventions of both parties. As a Republican intern in Washington that summer, she questioned a Wisconsin congressman, Melvin Laird, about the wisdom of Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalating involvement in Southeast Asia.

It was after law school that she had her most curious encounter with the military. In 1975, the year she married Bill Clinton, she stopped in at a Marine recruiting office in Arkansas to inquire about joining the active forces or reserves. She was a lawyer, she explained; maybe there was some way she could serve. The recruiter, she recalled two decades later, was a young man of about 21, in prime physical condition. Clinton was then 27, freshly transplanted from Washington, teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses. “You’re too old, you can’t see and you’re a woman,” he told her. “Maybe the dogs will take you,” he added, in what she said was a pejorative reference to the Army.

“It was not a very encouraging conversation,” Clinton said at a lunch for military women on Capitol Hill in 1994. “I decided, Maybe I’ll look for another way to serve my country.” 

Some reporters have cast doubt on the veracity of this story, which she repeated in the fall of 2015 over breakfast with voters in New Hampshire: certainly, there’s no concrete evidence that it happened, and Bill gave a different account of it in 2008, substituting the Army for the Marines. Why would a professionally minded Yale Law graduate, on the cusp of marriage, suddenly want to put on a uniform? It’s impossible to decipher her possible motives, but Ann Henry, an old friend who taught at the university after Clinton moved to Little Rock, offers a theory: During those days, she recalls, female faculty members, as an exercise, would test the boundaries of careers that appeared closed to women. “I don’t think it’s made up,” she says. “It was consistent with something she would have done.”

Clinton’s next sustained exposure to the military did not come until she was first lady, almost two decades later. Living in the White House is, in many ways, like living in a military compound. A Marine stands guard in front of the West Wing when the president is in the Oval Office. The Mili­tary Office operates the medical center and the telecommunications system. The Navy runs the cafeteria, the Marines transport the president by helicopter, the Air Force by plane. Camp David is a naval facility. The daily contact with men and women in uniform, Clinton’s friends say, deepened her feelings for them.

In March 1996, the first lady visited American troops stationed in Bosnia. The trip became notorious years later whenshe claimed, during the 2008 campaign, to have dodged sniper fire after her C-17 military plane landed at an American base in Tuzla. (Chris Hill, a diplomat who was onboard that day and later served as ambassador to Iraq under Clinton, didn’t remember snipers at all, and indeed recalled children handing her bouquets of spring flowers.) But there was no faking the good vibes during her tour of the mess and rec halls. With her teenage daughter at her side, she bantered and joked with the young servicemen and women — an experience, she wrote, that “left lasting impressions on Chelsea and me.”

When Clinton was elected to the Senate, she had strong political reasons to care about the mili­tary. The Pentagon was in the midst of a long, politically charged process of closing military bases; New York State had already been a victim, when Plattsburgh Air Force Base was closed in 1995, a loss of 352 civilian jobs for that hard-luck North Country town. New York’s delegation was determined to protect its remaining bases, especially Fort Drum, home of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, which sprawls over a hundred thousand acres in rural Jefferson County. In October 2001, a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Clinton traveled to Fort Drum at the invitation of Gen. Buster Hagenbeck, who had just been named the division’s commander and would be deployed to Afghanistan a month later. Like many of the officers I spoke with, he had preconceptions of Clinton from her years as first lady; the woman who showed up at his office around happy hour that afternoon did not fulfill them.

“She sat down,” he recalls, “took her shoes off, put her feet up on the coffee table and said, ‘General, do you know where a gal can get a cold beer around here?’ ”

It was the start of a dialogue that stretched over two wars. In the spring of 2002, Hagenbeck led Operation Anaconda, a 16-day assault on Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in the Shah-i-Kot Valley that was the largest combat engagement of the war to date. When the general came back to Washington to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Clinton took him out to dinner on Capitol Hill for her own briefing. They also spoke about the Bush administration’s preparations for war in Iraq, something which Hagenbeck was following anxiously. The general, it turned out, was more of a dove than the senator. He warned her about the risks of an invasion, which was then being war-gamed inside the Pentagon. It would be like “kicking over a bee’s nest,” he said.

Hagenbeck excused Clinton’s vote in 2002 to authorize military action in Iraq. “She made a considered call,” he says. And “she was chagrined, much after the fact.” For him, what mattered more than Clinton’s voting record was her unstinting public support of the military, whether in protecting Fort Drum or backing him during a difficult first year in Afghanistan.

Clinton’s education in military affairs began in earnest in 2002, after the Democratic Party’s crushing defeat in midterm elections moved her up several rungs in Senate seniority. The party’s congressional leaders offered her a seat on either the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the Senate Armed Services Committee. She chose Armed Services, spurning a long tradition of New York senators, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jacob Javits, who coveted the prestige of Foreign Relations. Armed Services deals with more earthbound issues, like benefits for veterans, and it had long been the preserve of Republican hawks like John McCain. But after 9/11, Clinton saw Armed Services as better preparation for her future. For a politician looking to hone hard-power credentials — a woman who aspired to be commander in chief — it was the perfect training ground. She dug in like a grunt at boot camp.

Andrew Shapiro, then Senator Clinton’s foreign-policy adviser, called upon 10 experts — including Bill Perry, who was defense secretary under her husband, and Ashton Carter, who would eventually become President Obama’s fourth defense secretary — to tutor her on everything from grand strategy to defense procurement. She met quietly with Andrew Marshall, an octogenarian strategist at the Pentagon who labored for decades in the blandly named Office of Net Assessment, earning the nickname Yoda for his Delphic insights. She went to every committee meeting, no matter how mundane. Aides recall her on C-SPAN3, sitting alone in the chamber, patiently questioning a lieutenant colonel. She visited the troops in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day in 2003 and spoke at every significant military installation in New York State. By then — 30 years after she recalled being rejected by a Marine recruiter in Arkansas — Hillary Clinton had become a military wonk.

Jack Keane is one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq surge; he is also perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues. A bear of a man with a jowly, careworn face and Brylcreem-slicked hair, Keane exudes the supreme self-confidence you would expect of a retired four-star general. He speaks with a trace of a New York accent that gives his pronouncements a rat-a-tat urgency. He is also a well-compensated member of the military-industrial complex, sitting on the board of General Dynamics and serving as a strategic adviser to Academi, the private-security contractor once known as Blackwater. And he is the chairman of an aptly named think tank, the Institute for the Study of War. Though he is one of a parade of cable-TV generals, Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He doesn’t shrink from putting boots on the ground and has little use for civilian leaders, like Obama, who do.

Keane first got to know Clinton in the fall of 2001, when she was a freshman senator and he was the Army’s second in command, with a distinguished combat and command record in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. He had expected her to be intelligent, hard-working and politically astute, but he was not prepared for the respect she showed for the Army as an institution, or her sympathy for the sacrifices made by soldiers and their families. Keane was confident he could smell a phony politician a mile away, and he didn’t get that whiff from her.

“I read people; that’s one of my strengths,” he told me. “It’s not that I can’t be fooled, but I’m not fooled often.”

Clinton took an instant liking to Keane, too. “She loves that Irish gruff thing,” says one of her Senate aides, Kris Balderston, who was in the room that day. When Keane got up after 45 minutes to leave for a meeting back at the Pentagon with a Polish general, she protested that she wasn’t finished yet and asked for another appointment. “I said, ‘O.K., but it took me three months to get this one,’ ” Keane told her dryly.

Clinton exploded into a raucous laugh. “I’ll take care of that problem,” she promised.

She was true to her word: The two would meet many times over the next decade, discussing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranian nu­clear threat and other flash points in the Middle East. Sometimes he dropped by her Senate office; other times they met for dinner or drinks. He escorted her on her first visit to Fort Drum and set up her first trip to Iraq.

They generally agreed to forgo talk of politics, but at a meeting in Clinton’s Senate office in January 2007, Keane tried to sell her on the logic of a troop surge in Iraq. The previous month, he had met with President Bush in the Oval Office to recommend that the United States deploy five to eight Army and Marine brigades to wage an urban counterinsurgency campaign; only that, he argued, would stabilize a country being ripped apart by sectarian strife. His presentation angered some of Keane’s fellow generals, who feared that such a strategy would deepen Iraq’s dependency and prolong America’s involvement. But it had a big impact on the commander in chief, who soon ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.

Clinton was another story. “I’m convinced it’s not going to work, Jack,” she told him. She predicted that the American soldiers patrolling in Iraqi cities and towns would be “blown up” by Sunni militias or Al Qaeda fighters. “She thought we would fail,” Keane recalls, “and it was going to cause increased casualties.”

Politics, of course, was also on her mind. Barack Obama was laying the groundwork for his candidacy in mid-January with a campaign that would emphasize his opposition to the Iraq War and her vote in favor of it — a vote that still shadows her in this year’s Democratic primaries. Obama was setting off on a fund-raising drive that would net $25 million in three months, sending tremors through Clinton’s political camp and establishing him as a formidable rival. Although she disagreed with Keane about Iraq, Clinton asked him to become a formal adviser. “As much as I respect you,” he replied, “I can’t do that.” Keane’s wife had health problems that had moved up his retirement from the Army, and he did not, as a policy, endorse candidates. Sometime during 2008 — he doesn’t remember exactly when — Clinton told him she had erred in doubting the wisdom of the surge. “She said, ‘You were right, this really did work,’ ” Keane recalls. “On issues of national security,” he says, “I thought she was always intellectually honest with me.”

He and Clinton continued to talk, even after Obama was elected and she became secretary of state. More often than not, they found themselves in sync. Keane, like Clinton, favored more robust intervention in Syria than Obama did. In April 2015, the week before she announced her candidacy, Clinton asked him for a briefing on military options for dealing with the fighters of the Islamic State. Bringing along three young female analysts from the Institute for the Study of War, Keane gave her a 2-hour-20-minute presentation. Among other steps, he advocated imposing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria that would neutralize the air power of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with a goal of forcing him into a political settlement with opposition groups. Six months later, Clinton publicly adopted this position, further distancing herself from Obama.

“I’m convinced this president, no matter what the circumstances, will never put any boots on the ground to do anything, even when it’s compelling,” Keane told me. He was sitting in the library at his home in McLean, Va., which is lined with books on military history and strategy. His critique of Obama was hardly new or original, but much of it mirrors the thinking of Clinton and her policy advisers. “One of the problems the president has, which weakens his diplomatic efforts, is that leaders don’t believe he would use military power. That’s an issue that would separate the president from Hillary Clinton rather dramatically. She would look at military force as another realistic option, but only where there is no other option.”

Befriending Keane wasn’t just about cultivating a single adviser. It gave Clinton instant entree to his informal network of active-duty and retired generals. The most interesting by far was David Petraeus, a cerebral commander who shared Clinton’s jet-fueled ambition and whose life stories would mix heady success with humbling setbacks. Both would be accused of mishandling classified information — Clinton because of her use of a private server and email address to conduct sensitive government business, a decision that erupted into a political scandal; Petraeus because he had given a diary containing classified information to his biographer and mistress (he was eventually charged with a misdemeanor for mishandling classified information).

On Clinton’s first trip to Iraq in November 2003, Petraeus, then a two-star general commanding the 101st Airborne Division, flew from his field headquarters in Mosul to the relative safety of Kirkuk to brief her congressional delegation. “She was full of questions,” he recalls. “It was the kind of gesture that means a lot to a battlefield commander.” On subsequent trips, as he rose in rank, Petraeus walked her through his plans to train and equip Iraqi Army troops, a forerunner of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. It worked to their mutual benefit: Petraeus was building ties to a prominent Democratic voice in the Senate; Clinton was burnishing her image as a friend of the troops. “She did it the old-fashioned way,” he says. “She did it by pursuing relationships.” When Petraeus was sent back to Iraq as the top commander in early 2007, he gave every member of the Senate Armed Services Committee a copy of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which he edited during a tour at Fort Leavenworth. Clinton read hers from cover to cover.

Although Clinton’s reservations about the surge were valid — the stability that the additional troops brought to Iraq didn’t last — her opposition to it, like her vote for the war, came back to haunt her. This time, it was her ally Bob Gates who summoned the ghost. In his memoirs, Gates wrote that she confessed to him and the president that her position had been politically motivated, because she was then facing Obama in the Iowa caucuses. (Obama, he wrote, “vaguely” conceded that he, too, had opposed it for political reasons.) Clinton pushed back, telling Diane Sawyer of ABC News that Gates “perhaps either missed the context or the meaning, because I did oppose the surge.” Her opposition, she told Sawyer, was driven by the fact that at that time, people were not going to accept any escalation of the war. “This is not politics in electoral, political terms,” Clinton said. “This is politics in the sense of the American public has to support commitments like this.”

‘They knew that if they walked into the Situation Room and they had her, it made a huge difference.’

The next time she found herself in a debate over sending troops into harm’s way, she voiced no such reservations.

“We need maps,” Hillary Clinton told her aides.

It was early October 2009, and she had just returned from a meeting in the Situation Room. Obama’s war cabinet was debating how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan, where the United States, preoccupied by Iraq, had allowed the Taliban to regroup. The Pentagon, she reported, had used impressive, color-coded maps to show its plans to deploy troops around the country. The attention to detail made Gates and his commanders look crisp and well prepared; the State Department, which was pushing a “civilian surge” to accompany the troops, looked wan by comparison. At the next meeting, on Oct. 14, the team from State unfurled its own maps to show the deployment of an army of aid workers, diplomats, legal experts and crop specialists who were supposed to follow the soldiers into Afghanistan.

Clinton’s fixation with maps was typical of her mind-set in the first great war-and-peace debate of the Obama presidency. She wanted to be taken seriously, even if her department was less central than the Pentagon. One way to do that was by promoting the civilian surge, the pet project of her friend and special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke. “She was determined that her briefing books would be just as thick and just as meticulous as those of the Pentagon,” a senior adviser recalls. She also didn’t hesitate to get into the Pentagon’s business, asking detailed questions about the training of Afghan troops and wading into the weeds of military planning.

She resolved not to miss out on anything — a determination that may have been rooted in a deeper insecurity about her role in what was to become the most White House-centric administration of the modern era. On the morning of June 8, 2009, she emailed two aides to say: “I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?” On Feb. 10, 2010, she dialed the White House from her home, but couldn’t get past the switchboard operator, who didn’t believe she was really Hillary Clinton. Asked to provide her office number to prove her identity, she said she didn’t know it. Finally, Clinton hung up in frustration and placed the call again through the State Department Operations Center — “like a proper and properly dependent secretary of state,” as she later wrote to one aide in a mock-chastened tone. “No independent dialing allowed.”

The Afghan troop debate, a three-month drama of dueling egos, leaked documents and endless deliberations, is typically framed as a test of wills between the Pentagon’s wily military commanders and an inexperienced young president, with Joe Biden playing the role of devil’s advocate for Obama. While that portrait is accurate, it neglects the role of Clinton. By siding with Gates and the generals, she gave political ballast to their proposals and provided a bullish counterpoint to Biden’s skepticism. Her role should not be overstated: She did not turn the debate, nor did she bring to it any distinctive point of view. But her unstinting support of General McChrystal’s maximalist recommendation made it harder for Obama to choose a lesser option. (McChrystal was later fired by Obama after his aides made derogatory remarks about almost every member of his war cabinet to Rolling Stone magazine; she was the exception. “Hillary had Stan’s back,” one of his aides told the reporter, Michael Hastings.)

“Hillary was adamant in her support for what Stan asked for,” Gates says. “She made clear that she was ready to support his request for the full 40,000 troops. She then made clear that she was only willing to go with the 30,000 number because I proposed it. She was, in a way, tougher on the numbers in the surge than I was.” Gates believed that if he could align Clinton; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen; the commander of Central Command, David Petraeus; and himself behind a common position, it would be hard for Obama to say no. “How could you ignore these Four Horsemen of national security?” says Geoff Morrell, who served as the Pentagon press secretary at the time.

Just as Clinton benefited from her alliance with the military commanders, she gave them political cover. “Here’s the dirty little secret,” says Tom Nides, her former deputy secretary of state for management and resources. “They all knew they wanted her on their side. They knew that if they walked into the Situation Room and they had her, it made a huge difference in the dynamics. When she opened her mouth, she could change the momentum in the room.”

David Axelrod recalls one meeting where Clinton “kicked the thing off and pretty much articulated their opinion; I’m sure that’s one that they remember. There’s no doubt that she wanted to give them every troop that McChrystal was asking for.” Still, Clinton didn’t prevail on every argument. After agreeing to send the troops, Obama added a condition of his own: that the soldiers be deployed as quickly as possible and pulled out again, starting in the summer of 2011 — a deadline that proved more fateful in the long run than a difference of 10,000 troops. Clinton opposed setting a public deadline for withdrawal, arguing that it would tip America’s hand to the Taliban and encourage them to wait out the United States — which, in fact, was exactly what happened.

In the final days of the debate, Clinton also found herself at odds with her own ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry. He, too, held different views than she did on the wisdom of a surge, which he put into writing. On Nov. 6, 2009, in a long cable addressed to Clinton — and later leaked to The New York Times — he made a trenchant, convincing case for why the McChrystal proposal, which she endorsed two weeks earlier in a meeting with Obama, would saddle the United States with “vastly increased costs and an indefinite, large-scale military role in Afghanistan.”

Much of Eikenberry’s analysis proved prescient, particularly his warnings about the threadbare American partnership with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. It carried an extra sting because he was a retired three-star Army general who was the commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. Clinton, who had not asked for the cable, was furious, fearing it could upset a debate in which she and the Pentagon were about to prevail.

What the cable made clear was the degree to which the Afghanistan debate was dominated by military considerations. While Clinton did raise the need to deal with Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan, her reflexive support of Gates, Petraeus and McChrystal meant she was not a powerful voice for diplomatic alternatives. “She contributed to the overmilitarizing of the analysis of the problem,” says Sarah Chayes, who was an adviser to McChrystal and later to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen.

In October 2015, the persistent violence in Afghanistan and the legacy of Karzai’s misrule forced Obama to reverse his plan to withdraw the last American soldiers by the end of his presi­dency. A few thousand troops will stay there indefinitely. And for all of Clinton’s talk about a civilian surge, it never really materialized.

For Clinton, the Afghanistan episode laid bare a vexed relationship between her and Eikenberry, one of the few generals with whom she didn’t hit it off. A soldier-scholar with graduate degrees from Harvard and Stanford, Eikenberry was brilliant but had a reputation among his colleagues for being imperious. Clinton had a similarly chilly relationship with Douglas Lute, another Army lieutenant general with a graduate degree from Harvard, who also fought with Holbrooke. “She likes the nail-eaters — McChrystal, Petraeus, Keane,” one of her aides observes. “Real military guys, not these retired three-stars who go into civilian jobs.”

“There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton’s more muscular brand of American foreign policy is better matched to 2016 than it was to 2008,” said Jake Sullivan, her top policy adviser at the State Department, who plays the same role in her campaign.

It was De­cem­ber 2015, 53 days before the Iowa caucuses, and Sullivan was sitting down with me in Clinton’s sprawling Brooklyn headquarters to explain how she was shaping her message for a campaign suddenly dominated by concerns about national security. Clinton’s strategy, he said, was twofold: Explain to voters that she had a clear plan for confronting the threat posed by Islamic terrorism, and expose her Republican opponents as utterly lacking in experience or credibility on national security.

There were good reasons for Clinton to let her inner hawk fly. After the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., Americans’ concern about a major attack on the nation spiked. A CNN/ORC poll taken after Paris showed that a majority, 53 percent, favored sending ground troops to Iraq or Syria, a remarkable shift from the war-weary sentiment that prevailed during most of Obama’s presidency. The Republican candidates were reaching for apocalyptic metaphors to demonstrate their resolve. Ted Cruz threatened to carpet-bomb the Islamic State to test whether desert sand can glow; Donald Trump called for the United States to ban all Muslims from entering the country “until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses.”

Yet such spikes in the public appetite for mili­tary action tend to be transitory. Three weeks later, the same poll showed an even split, at 49 percent, on whether to deploy troops. Neither Trump nor Cruz favors major new deployments of American soldiers to Iraq and Syria (nor, for that matter, does Clinton). If anything, both are more skeptical than Clinton about intervention and more circumspect than she about maintaining the nation’s post-World War II military commitments. Trump loudly proclaims his opposition to the Iraq War. He wants the United States to spend less to underwrite NATO and has talked about withdrawing the American security umbrella from Asia, even if that means Japan and South Korea would acquire nuclear weapons to defend themselves. Cruz, unlike Clinton, opposed aiding the Syrian rebels in 2014. He once supported Pentagon budget constraints advocated by his isolationist colleague, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Thus might the gen­eral election present voters with an unfamiliar choice: a Democratic hawk versus a Republican reluctant warrior.

To thwart the progressive insurgency of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Clinton carefully calibrated her message during the Democratic primaries to align herself closely with Barack Obama and his racially diverse coalition. But as she pivots to the general election, that balancing act with Obama will become trickier. “There’s going to be a huge amount of interest in the press to score-keep,” Sullivan says. “It just so easily can become a sport that distracts from her ability to make an affirmative case.”

In showing her stripes as a prospective commander in chief, Clinton will no doubt draw heavily upon her State Department experience — filtering the lessons she learned in Libya, Syria and Iraq into the sinewy worldview she has held since childhood. Last fall, in a series of policy speeches, Clinton began limning distinctions with the president on national security. She said the United States should consider sending more special-operations troops to Iraq than Obama had committed, to help the Iraqis and Kurds fight the Islamic State. She came out in favor of a partial no-fly zone over Syria. And she described the threat posed by ISIS to Americans in starker terms than he did. As is often the case with Clinton and Obama, the differences were less about direction than degree. She wasn’t calling for ground troops in the Middle East, any more than he was. Clinton insisted her plan was not a break with his, merely an “intensification and acceleration” of it.

It’s an open question how well Clinton’s hawkish instincts match the country’s mood. Americans are weary of war and remain suspicious of foreign entanglements. And yet, after the retrenchment of the Obama years, there is polling evidence that they are equally dissatisfied with a portrait of their country as a spent force, managing its decline amid a world of rising powers like China, resurgent empires like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and lethal new forces like the Islamic State. If Obama’s minimalist approach was a necessary reaction to the maximalist style of his predecessor, then perhaps what Americans yearn for is something in between — the kind of steel-belted pragmatism that Clinton has spent a lifetime honing.

“The president has made some tough decisions,” says Leon Panetta, who served as Obama’s defense secretary after Bob Gates, and as director of the C.I.A. before David Petraeus. “But it’s been a mixed record, and the concern is, the president defining what America’s role in the world is in the 21st century hasn’t happened.

“Hopefully, he’ll do it,” he added, acknowledging the time Obama has left. “Certainly, she would.”

This article is adapted from “Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power,” published this month by Random House.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 24, 2016, on page MM28 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: H Is for Hawk. Today's Paper|Subscribe