Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign has been all the buzz in Washington. The book, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is full of stories that probably never would have been told if Hillary had eked out an Electoral College win. Not just because a victorious campaign tends not to air its dirty laundry, but because President Hillary Clinton would have been in a position to punish anyone caught being disloyal. And if there was anything the residents of Hillaryland knew, it was not to run afoul of the boss’s obsessive demands for loyalty.
Hillary had her ways of knowing whose devotion could be counted on: Among the most eye-grabbing revelations in a book full of eye-grabbing revelations is that Hillary—convinced disloyal staffers were to blame for the failure of her 2008 campaign—set out, Queeg-like, to prove it. According to Shattered, she “instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.” She set about reading her team’s correspondence. Why did she stoop so low? She was driven to it, “Prizing loyalty most among human traits.”
Loyalty can be beneficial, a glue that holds people together in a common endeavor—and indeed it did work at a time of crisis for the Clintons. Never mind what the truth was about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, when impeachment loomed, “It had been Hillary, who, at the darkest moment, while others were floundering, had assigned a fanatically loyal entourage of men and women to report Sunday mornings to plan for the battle,” Carl Bernstein wrote in his book A Woman in Charge. “Hillary surrounded herself with people who were loyal to her cause.” And how was that loyalty demonstrated? They were people who “would do her bidding.”
The Clintons had an expansive concept of who should be doing their bidding, expansive enough to include every Democratic member of Congress. In another of Shattered‘s gobsmackers, Allen and Parnes write that Hillary and Bill devised their own loyalty scale and used it to weigh, systematically, lawmakers’ fidelity to the Clintons: “After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress.” According to Allen and Parnes, the scale ranged from one to seven: “one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery.”
For politicians, loyalty isn’t just a tool for binding people together, it is also a rough measure of power—the obsequiousness of others being proof that one is powerful enough to be feared. By the same measure, suffering disloyalty can be seen as a humiliating demonstration of one’s impotence. Hillary was so obsessed with what loyalty said about her power that she made that rough measure into a precise gauge of her status. “As long as she was seen as the prohibitive favorite to win the primary and the election, Democrats would fear being branded traitors or leakers,” Allen and Parnes write. But how, after losing the 2008 nomination, would she inspire—or compel—loyalty? If “she wasn’t going to be in a position to reward or punish them, they had no reason to worry about whether they were rated as ones or sevens on her loyalty scale.”
That’s where Bill earned his keep—as an enforcer. He “campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office,” the authors of Shattered report. “The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.”
What does it mean to be loyal to a politician? Lyndon B. Johnson had a clear concept of what he wanted from anyone who worked for him: “I don’t want loyalty,” LBJ once said of what he was looking for in an aide. “I want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.” That corrupt sort of loyalty may get people to do what you demand, but it is a fatal weakness in an organization. LBJ demanded that his aides proclaim to be true things they knew to be false and in the process deprived himself of the information he needed to save his presidency from disaster. (Johnson, for example, was particularly enamored of Robert McNamara’s willingness to tell him how well things were going
in Vietnam.)
When truth-telling comes to be seen as an affront to loyalty, lying becomes a bizarro-world sign of good faith. Psychiatrist Jerome H. Jaffe, head of drug abuse policy for the Nixon administration, diagnosed the core problem in that doomed White House: “To dissent was to be disloyal.”
Instead of learning from that, Hillaryland became Nixonville. Loyalty, taken to extremes, ceased to be a source of virtuous strength and instead became a hobbling vice.
Leaders need their subordinates to tell them the truth if they are to have any hope of making sound decisions. The kind of truth-telling the Clinton campaign desperately needed was candor about what wasn’t working, both in strategy and execution. But candor, in Hillaryland, was taken as a sign of unreliability: “Most of the people around her were jockeying to get closer to her,” Allen and Parnes write, “not to make her wonder about their commitment.”
That was especially the case when it came to assessing the performance of the candidate herself. Everyone knew the campaign’s biggest problem was Hillary, but “no one who drew a salary from the campaign would tell her that. It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary’s competence—to her or anyone else—in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld.” Her staff was so busy telling her she smelled like roses, she believed it too.
The demands of loyalty were so stifling that not only couldn’t aides be candid about the candidate, they couldn’t speak their minds about the failings of their colleagues. Take chief speechwriter Dan Schwerin. When he proved unable to come up with a narrative for the campaign (a problem that, of course, had its source in Clinton herself), communications director Jennifer Palmieri wanted to give the task to a hired gun. But Schwerin was a made man. “If she undercut him and outsourced his job, she risked making an enemy out of a protected citizen of Hillaryland,” according to Allen and Parnes. “Though some of Hillary’s aides were both competent and loyal, the candidate favored the latter over the former, which is one major reason the campaign’s gears often got stuck.”
This was how Hillary Clinton had worked for years, according to Allen and Parnes. When it came to staffing the State Department, Madame Secretary “prized loyalty to a degree that sometimes overshadowed competence and sound judgment.” As they had reported before the campaign, “If there was one person who played best to Hillary’s demand for loyalty, it was Huma [Abedin].” The trusted longtime personal assistant was the great example of how high a third-rater could climb in the Clinton hierarchy if fully devoted to toadying. Imagine a White House run on that same principle.
Loyalty is a fine thing—without it there can be no love, no friendship, no community. But of the virtues, it is the one most likely to be abused, the most likely to curdle into vice. Beware those who demand absolute loyalty. Chances are it isn’t love and friendship they’re after, but ongoing participation in shabby little conspiracies (or worse).
By the same token, though loyalty can be empowering, taken to extremes it becomes debilitating. The loyalty that Hillaryland prized was so extreme as to be cartoonish, which goes a long way toward explaining the catastrophe that befell the Clinton campaign. It’s a delicious irony that in telling their tales to Allen and Parnes, Hillary’s former loyalists are racking up solid sevens on the Clinton betrayal scale. ¨
Eric Felten is managing editor of The Weekly Standard. His most recent book is Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue.
