‘ HUMILITY OF THE DEFEATED’
A FORMER TOP CLINTON ADVISER SEARCHES FOR ANSWERS AFTER CRUSHING LOSS
IF FILL-IN-THE-BLANK REPUBLICAN HAD WON, I WOULD FEEL LIKE THINGS WERE PRETTY GOOD FOR ME. BUT, THE TRUMP FACTOR MAKES IT HARD. I AM STILL LOSING SLEEP. I’M STILL THINKING ABOUT WHAT I COULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY. — JAKE SULLIVAN WE WERE ALL DEVASTATED BY THE ELECTION.
If all had gone as planned, and most in Washington had expected, Jake Sullivan would be hard at work just steps from the Oval Office.
He was the elite of the Washington elite: Rhodes scholar, Yale Law School graduate, clerk to a Supreme Court justice, the person at Hillary Clinton’s side when she circled the world as secretary of state, a steady voice in the Situation Room for president Barack Obama.
The conventional wisdom held that Sullivan was a lock to be the national security adviser in a Clinton administration. At 40, he would have been the youngest to hold that position in U.S. history.
Instead, Donald Trump won the presidency, and Sullivan says he sometimes feels like a “ghoulish reminder” to friends of an election that shook the Washington establishment like no other in decades.
On a recent evening, he was pushing open a battered orange door, climbing stairs covered with fraying carpet and striding into a dimly lit apartment where two dozen Yale Law School students were waiting to hear from him. Most of them were desperate for some version of the life he had led in Washington.
Sullivan, t hough, has never felt less certain about where both he and his country are headed. He divides his time between an empty think-tank office in Washington, and Yale, where he lectures one day a week on law and foreign policy. Almost everything about his professional life is transitory, uncertain, unsettled.
“I feel a keen sense of responsibility for the outcome,” he wrote in an email to a friend in the immediate aftermath of Clinton’s defeat. Months later, the feeling had not faded.
Clinton and others in her innermost circle of advisers often speak of the election as if it had been stolen from them.
They rage against Russian interference, complain about the last-minute disclosures by former FBI director James Comey, and criticize Obama’s unwillingness to take a more forceful line with Russian President Vlad- imir Putin.
Sullivan, more than most in the Clinton orbit, has begun to shoulder blame for the loss and his role in it. He wants to understand his mistakes and figure out how to fix them. “I have the humility of the defeated,” he says as if it were a mantra.
On this night, Sullivan settled into a ragged, handme- down chair at the front of the Yale student apartment and looked around at the room full of smart, ambitious young people. He balanced a plate of greasy pizza on his lap. Someone handed him a beer.
“You all know Jake Sullivan,” a second- year law student said by way of introduction.
Everyone i nvolved in Washington policy knew Jake Sullivan, or at least they knew of him.
For years he had been discussed as the next in a long line of grey- suited Washington wise men dating back to the end of the Second World War. The late diplomat Richard Holbrooke insisted that he had all the makings of a future secretary of state. Clinton confided to friends that she thought he could be president.
Sullivan gazed out the window down Hillhouse Avenue, a stretch of road that Mark Twain had called “the most beautiful street in America,” and in the direction of the apartment — three blocks away — where he had lived as a law student in the early 2000s. The students were clad mostly in jeans and sweatshirts. Sullivan wore the uniform he favours when outside of Washington — suit pants, a solid button-down dress shirt and no tie. His hair was combed in a ruler-straight part.
He ran through a list of his early mentors who had helped him find purchase in Washington: There was Leslie H. Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, where Sullivan had spent time as a summer intern, assigned by happenstance to Gelb’s office.
There was Strobe Talbott, who runs the Brookings Institution. There was Hol- brooke, who on Gelb’s recommendation had suggested Sullivan to Clinton when she was running for president the first time. And finally, there was Clinton herself, who adored and trusted Sullivan and had made him part of her innermost circle of advisers.
“It’s about seizing opportunities and saying ‘ yes,’ ” Sullivan said of his career and two unsuccessful Clinton presidential runs. He paused and added wryly: “If you do that, you can take part in not one but two election catastrophes.”
Clinton tapped him in 2012 to help start secret talks with Iran over its nuclear program, and when she left government, Obama took him to the White House, where he was part of the small group in the Oval Office each morning for the president’s daily intelligence briefing.
The students peppered Sullivan with questions about the Iran negotiations. Those questions, though, were largely a prelude to the subject that was really on the students’ minds: the election, its aftermath and the longterm prospects for people like them in Washington.
“We were all devastated by the election,” a third-year law student said. “Have you bounced back?”
“If fill- in- the- blank Republican had won, I would feel like things were pretty good for me,” he replied. For the first time in a decade, he has weekends off. He loves teaching. He is newly married. “But, the Trump factor makes it hard,” he said. “I am still losing sleep. I’m still thinking about what I could have done differently.”
Another law student pressed harder on t he wound. “Do you have a theory about what happened?”
“I don’t know,” Sullivan said. He paused and stared at the ceiling.
“You don’t have to … ” the student added, fearful that he had pushed too far. Sullivan considered his answer for a few more awkward seconds. “It’s a conversation for better pizza,” he replied.
In other forums and at other dinners Sullivan was sometimes willing to wrestle with a version of the student’s question. At the Harvard Faculty Club a few weeks earlier, a former British parliamentarian, who in 2015 had lost his seat to a 20-year-old Scottish Nationalist, described the problem as he saw it.
“It’s a fight between politicians with answers and politicians with anger,” he had said.
“I get PTSD just hearing that,” Sullivan had replied.
Sullivan’s post- traumatic stress disorder that night led him to flash back to an argument with Clinton on her campaign plane. He was her senior policy adviser but was worried that her prescription-heavy speeches were missing the point of the election.
“Maybe we should just focus on diagnosing the problem and relating to people’s pain?” he recalled suggesting to her during her primary battle with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
“No,” Clinton had replied. “This is a job interview. People want to know how I am going to fix it.”
Now Sullivan wonders whether he should have pressed Clinton harder to dial back the policy prescrip- tions in favour of empathy or possibly even a little outrage. “I mean, ‘ Build the wall’ is not really a policy solution,” he said. “It’s a statement that gets to the heart of people’s concerns about immigration and … identity.”
But, before he goes too far, a defensiveness of Clinton and his role in the campaign takes hold. “It’s all about telling people that you get what they are going through and Hillary was certainly capable of that and had some incredible moments and displays of that,” Sullivan continued. He played down the significance of his exchange with Clinton on the plane.
“That’s more of campaign tactics issue,” he said.
Sullivan was going on about the “growing” and “scary” divide in the country when a law student from a rural town in Kentucky interrupted his monologue: “Coming from a flyover state, it is difficult for me to even be on the same wavelength as the people I grew up with.”
The student’s confession brought Sullivan back to his own upbringing in Minnesota. He was 13 when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. A few months later, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, eager to meet with average Americans, visited a home in Sullivan’s Minneapolis neighbourhood. Sullivan remembered Latvian and Estonian Americans protesting for Baltic independence along Gorbachev’s motorcade route. He felt a sense of what America could mean to the world.
As a candidate, Trump had rejected the very idea of American exceptionalism as an unnecessary burden. “I don’t think it’s a very nice term. We’re exceptional. You’re not,” Trump said at a Tea Party rally in Texas. “I want to take everything back from the world that we’ve given them. We’ve given them so much.”
Sullivan thought that the antidote to Trumpism was a full- on embrace of American exceptionalism of the sort he had felt in Minnesota. “We need something audacious that’s rooted in our national DNA; who we are as a people,” he said. “There needs to be a call to arms that can motivate people.”
Sullivan often insisted that he had developed his views about the world at “a public high school in Minneapolis.” But he is also unquestionably a product of Washington’s insular foreign-policy elite.
Sullivan embodies many of these elites’ courtliest qualities. He does not shout down opponents or even tweet. Many Republicans have kind words for him. “He has a huge amount of integrity,” said Mark Dubowitz, an outspoken critic of the Iran nuclear pact.
For years, the foreignpolicy establishment has preached the importance of sustaining the U. S.- led, rules- based, international order — an exhortation that, at best, was meaningless to most Americans. At worst, it smacked of soulless globalism.
To Sullivan, the most striking example of the establishment’s intellectual exhaustion was the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that Trump officially abandoned earlier this year.
Republican and Democratic national security analysts for years had touted the pact as essential to U. S. national security and containing China. Sullivan had supported it, too.
But few of those experts, he said, paid any attention to the details of the pact and its potentially negative effects on American workers. The elite had lost touch with the concerns of the very people it was supposed to serve and defend.
The gulf, Sullivan insisted, was symptomatic of a much larger problem. “How do we solve for this basic and growing division in our society that gets to issues like dignity and alienation and identity?” Sullivan asked. He caught the eye of the young law student from Kentucky, sitting just a few feet away from him. “How do we even ask the question without becoming the disconnected, condescending elite that we are talking about?” Sullivan asked.
The question hung in the air.
Sullivan began to think recently that he could more easily answer these questions if he moved away from places such as Washington, Harvard or Yale.
“That’s not a value statement about who constitutes the good people of the land,” he said i n an i nterview. “I don’t think that by going to live in Minnesota or New Hampshire or Tulsa, all of a sudden you’re gaining wisdom you can’t gain elsewhere. But you do gain a perspective. You’ l l see things from a different vantage point, and that matters.”
The plan is to leave Washington next year and settle someplace where he can put down roots. He imagines becoming involved in community projects where the results will be more real, immediate and tangible. Minnesota is one option. New Hampshire, where his wife grew up, is another.
The Yale students meanwhile, fretted about the opportunities still available to people like them in Trump’s Washington.
“Is this the death knell of the technocracy and the elite?” one student asked, summarizing the thesis of a recent widely read article in Foreign Affairs magazine.
Sullivan wasn’t the sort to succumb to the prophecies of doom that had taken hold in some sectors of Washington and academia. Even Trump still depended on his own version of the Washington elite, Sullivan told the Yale students.
“So there will always be a demand for expertise.”
Sullivan’s evening with the Yale students was nearing its end. The sky outside had grown dark. His slice of pizza was cold on his plate.
“I still believe passionately in finding a home outside of D.C.,” he said.
“Virginia or Maryland?” one of the Yale students joked.
“Maybe,” he continued, “the best service I can render right now is outside of Washington.”
I DON’T THINK THAT BY GOING TO LIVE IN MINNESOTA OR NEW HAMPSHIRE OR TULSA, ALL OF A SUDDEN YOU’RE GAINING WISDOM YOU CAN’T GAIN ELSEWHERE. BUT YOU DO GAIN A PERSPECTIVE. YOU’LL SEE THINGS FROM A DIFFERENT VANTAGE POINT. — JAKE SULLIVAN