Secretary Hillary Clinton: Team Player

In some ways, Hillary Rodham Clinton hasn’t changed. When the U.S. secretary of state gears up for her major diplomatic forays, she does it the same way she prepared to run for the Senate seat from New York, and for her presidential bid: with a listening tour. The former senator who used to nod earnestly and have her aides take copious notes at county fairs as farmers in upstate New York waxed on about the complexities of the local apple trade, prefaced her 11-day trip across Africa this month with a similar bout of listening. Shortly before leaving, she brought together some 15 Africa specialists from in and out of Washington to a ceremonial room on the eighth floor of the State Department headquarters. “It was extremely well organized, a very pleasant dinner in which she did most of the listening and had a number of questions,” recalled attendee Princeton Lyman, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa under presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Lyman said he was surprised by how little Clinton interrupted. “She did not moderate the meeting and that allowed her to be a real listener. She seemed to want to hear what people thought,” he told Maclean’s. “Interestingly, she is not flashy. She is very organized and substantive.”