Clinton Adopts Low-Key Style at State Department

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton won a small diplomatic victory here recently. Few Americans are likely to have heard about it.

The issue was Cuba, and the details were arcane. Clinton and her team, in negotiations on the sidelines of the Organization of American States assembly, persuaded 33 other governments not to allow Cuba back into the OAS without a process that respects the group's charter language on democracy.

It wasn't easy. Most of the assembly, frustrated with the USA's desire to isolate Cuba, wanted to lift the 1962 suspension without conditions. Ted Piccone, a Latin America expert at the Brookings Institution, called it "a great win for the State Department."

Clinton wasn't around to mark the occasion, however. She left before the deal was reached for Cairo, where she sat in the audience applauding President Obama's address to the Muslim world. Media coverage of that speech eclipsed the few news accounts about Clinton's efforts in Latin America.

If that sort of dynamic bothers Clinton, she hasn't let it show. A year after conceding the Democratic nomination to Obama, and four months after becoming his secretary of State, the former first lady and New York senator has settled into her next act: a supporting role as the top diplomat for a president who is his own global ambassador.

"I feel very much in the center of helping to devise the policies, carry out the policies, pick the people who will implement the policies," Clinton tells USA TODAY during an interview in El Salvador. "I see the president every week. We spend a lot of time talking."

Clinton says she had no inkling Obama would ask her to be secretary of State. She resisted, "but the president is very persuasive." The decision was "a difficult transition in some respects, because I never even dreamed of it."

She took the job in challenging times, to say the least: Among her tasks is to stop Iran's nuclear program, curb Pakistan's Islamic insurgency, preserve post-war Iraq as U.S. troops leave there, and help new U.S. forces in Afghanistan with civilian projects. Clinton also has to deal with an unpredictable, nuclear-armed regime in North Korea, which sentenced two U.S. journalists to 12 years hard labor this week and continued saber-rattling in the face of new U.N. sanctions.

How Clinton and the Obama administration will fare in dealing with those thorny problems is unclear. But so far, even Republicans give Clinton high marks for tackling management challenges at the State Department, using her political skills to boost the USA's image abroad and avoiding signs of tension between her circle and the White House. The "team of rivals" story line, much discussed when Clinton was first appointed, hasn't played out.