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Mark Landler - Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power

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The deeply reported story of two supremely ambitious figures, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton--archrivals who became partners for a time, trailblazers who share a common sense of their historic destiny but hold very different beliefs about how to project American power
In Alter Egos, veteran New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler takes us inside the fraught and fascinating relationship between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton--a relationship that has framed the nations great debates over war and peace for the past eight years.
In the annals of American statecraft, theirs was a most unlikely alliance. Clinton, daughter of an anticommunist father, was raised in the Republican suburbs of Chicago in the aftermath of World War II, nourishing an unshakable belief in the United States as a force for good in distant lands. Obama, an itinerant child of the 1970s, was raised by a single mother in Indonesia and Hawaii, suspended between worlds and a witness to the less savory side of Uncle Sams influence abroad. Clinton and Obama would later come to embody competing visions of Americas role in the world: his, restrained, inward-looking, painfully aware of limits; hers, hard-edged, pragmatic, unabashedly old-fashioned.
Spanning the arc of Obamas two terms, Alter Egos goes beyond the speeches and press conferences to the Oval Office huddles and South Lawn strolls, where Obama and Clinton pressed their views. It follows their evolution from bitter rivals to wary partners, and then to something resembling rivals again, as Clinton defined herself anew and distanced herself from her old boss. In the process, it counters the narrative that, during her years as secretary of state, there was no daylight between them, that the wounds of the 2008 campaign had been entirely healed.
The president and his chief diplomat parted company over some of the biggest issues of the day: how quickly to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; whether to arm the rebels in Syria; how to respond to the upheaval in Egypt; and whether to trust the Russians. In Landlers gripping account, we venture inside the Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Ladens compound, watch Obama and Clinton work in tandem to salvage a conference on climate change in Copenhagen, and uncover the secret history of their nuclear diplomacy with Iran--a story with a host of fresh disclosures.
With the grand sweep of history and the pointillist detail of an account based on insider access--the book draws on exclusive interviews with more than one hundred senior administration officials, foreign diplomats, and friends of Obama and Clinton--Mark Landler offers the definitive account of a complex, profoundly important relationship. As Barack Obama prepares to relinquish the presidency, and Hillary Clinton makes perhaps her last bid for it, how both regard American power is a central question of our time.
From the Hardcover edition.

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Contents
As of the time of initial publication the URLs displayed in this book link or - photo 1
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As of the time of initial publication, the URLs displayed in this book link or refer to existing websites on the Internet. Penguin Random House LLC is not responsible for, and should not be deemed to endorse or recommend, any website other than its own or any content available on the Internet (including without limitation at any website, blog page, information page) that is not created by Penguin Random House.

Copyright 2016 by Mark Landler

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Landler, Mark, author.

Title: Alter egos : Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the twilight struggle over American power / Mark Landler.

Description: New York : Random House, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016002132 | ISBN 9780812998856 (hardback) | ISBN 9780812998863 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Obama, Barack. | Clinton, Hillary Rodham. | United StatesForeign relations2009 | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Process / Elections. | HISTORY / United States / 21st Century. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Political.

Classification: LCC E 907 . L 364 2016 | DDC 327.73009/05dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002132

ebook ISBN9780812998863

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Eric White

Cover photograph: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

v4.1

a

Now the trumpet summons us againnot as a call to bear arms, though arms we neednot as a call to battle, though embattled we arebut a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle.

JOHN F. KENNEDY, INAUGURAL ADDRESS, JANUARY 20, 1961

Contents
Prologue
The Warrior and the Priest

Barack Obama turned up unexpectedly in the press cabin of Air Force One as the plane was high above the South China Sea, about to begin its descent into Malaysia on a flight from South Korea. The president was not one for casual in-flight visits, saving these encounters for the trip home to Washington, when he would ruminate with reporters, off the record, about what he had accomplished overseas. So when he appeared on the afternoon of April 26, 2014, in the middle of a weeklong tour of Asia, something clearly was up. Wearing an open-necked blue shirt, gray slacks, and an unsmiling expression, Obama shook hands with the journalists on board that day: reporters from the four major news agencies; a network producer from CBS News; a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Before he reached the third row of seats, where I was standing with a hand outstretched, the president wheeled around, returned to the front of the cabin, and propped himself, arms crossed, against a gray bulkhead, next to a flickering television screen.

It was hard to know if Obama had ignored me intentionally: I was the last in a scrum of reporters, and the president likes to keep these pleasantries to a minimum anyway. But when he swatted away my opening question about China, a chill wind was clearly blowing.

Ill answer that in a minute, the president said, but first I want to say a few things.

Obama, it turned out, was angry about two articles that had run in The New York Times the previous day. One, by me and a colleague, Jodi Rudoren, declared that his trip had already been marred by a pair of setbacks: the failure to strike a trade deal with Japan and the collapse of his latest effort to negotiate a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. The other said his administration had underestimated the bellicose nature of North Koreas new ruler, Kim Jong-un. Obama wanted me to know he never expected to sign a trade agreement on that trip, nor, for that matter, did he bear any illusions about North Koreas boy dictator. The impromptu visit was meant to set the press straight about our coverage of his foreign policy. Obama viewed it as shallow, mistaking prudence for fecklessness, pragmatism for lack of ambition.

Ben and I have been talking about giving a speech that lays out my foreign policy, he said, stealing a glance at his foreign policy amanuensis, Benjamin Rhodes, who had slipped quietly into a seat behind the reporters, next to the press secretary, Jay Carney, and seemed as unsure of what his boss was going to say as the reporters were.

I can sum up my foreign policy in one phrase, Obama said, pausing a beat for his punch line. Dont do stupid shit.

Americas problems, he said, stemmed not from doing too little but too much, from overreach rather than inaction. The countrys greatest disasters had come from blundering into reckless military adventures, whether in Vietnam or Iraq. The key to managing a sound foreign policy was to avoid entanglements in places where Americas national interests were not directly at stakeSyria, for example, which was caught up in a sectarian war that would defy outside efforts to end it; or Ukraine, victimized by a predatory Russia but a country with which the United States conducted a negligible amount of trade. Warming to his theme, Obama offered a brisk tour of places his White House had not started new conflicts: the Middle East, Asia, eastern Europe. Historic achievements in foreign policyNixons opening to Chinawere once-in-a-generation occurrences, he said. He might yet get one if the West negotiated an agreement with Iran to restrain its nuclear program. But in a world of unending strife and unreliable despotic leaders, hoping for more than that was simply not realistic. In such a world, Obama was content to hit singles and doubles, hewing to his foreign policy version of the Hippocratic oath.

As we touched down outside Malaysias capital, Kuala Lumpur, Obama kept talking, bracing himself against the bulkhead as the tires squealed and ordering those who were standing in the aisle to sit down. (Im the only one whos allowed to stand, he said. I dont want that liability.) Before returning to his cabin, where he would put on a jacket and tie and jog down the stairs to another red-carpet welcome in another distant land, Obama turned to the reporters and asked, Now whats my foreign policy philosophy?

Dont do stupid shit, we replied sheepishly, like schoolchildren taught a naughty rhyme by a subversive teacher.

Obama smiled and then was gone as abruptly as he had come. His credo hung in the air, though. At one level, it seemed crude, almost juvenile, particularly coming from a man who cared deeply about words and believed in the power of language to convey ideas. And yet it had the ring of authenticity. More so than his shimmering oratoryhis references to the arc of history or the spark of the divinethose four words seemed to capture what was for Obama the irreducible truth of being commander in chief of the worlds remaining superpower.

As a White House correspondent for The New York Times, I had traveled to a dozen countries with the president over four years, from a state visit to Buckingham Palace, arriving in a thirty-car motorcade, to a secret mission in Afghanistan, flying at night over the Hindu Kush in Black Hawk helicopters. I questioned him at news conferences in the East Room and the Great Hall of the People, listened to him elaborate his worldview in speeches in London, Jerusalem, and Brisbane. And yet it was during a salty Saturday afternoon encounter in the back of Air Force One that Obama uttered what would become perhaps the signature slogan of his presidencythe foreign policy equivalent of Its the economy, stupid.

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