This article is a Valentine to every Hillary supporter and great new photos.
On the evening of December 13, Hillary Clinton was on stage in the Benjamin Franklin Room of the State Department, introducing Broadway composer Marvin Hamlisch at a holiday reception for the diplomatic corps. That morning, she had risen at 5:00 to fly to Quebec for the North American Foreign Ministers Meeting, which was like taking tea on the tundra. It was minus 4 degrees with the wind chill, and after the meeting, Clinton made small talk about skiing and did a photo call outside without a coat. She flew back to Washington, D.C., got changed, and headed to the reception, where she and President Obama addressed the family of Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, who had suffered an aortic tear in Clinton's offices three days earlier and was clinging to life in a nearby hospital. Holbrooke died that night, and his close friend Clinton, as much a den mother as a diplomat, took his shaken staff to a bar.
"That day looked to be pretty predictable when it started," Clinton recalls in January in an anteroom near her office. "Richard's critical illness was much on my mind, and that made it even more important to me that we stay on schedule, we get back." After her speech, Clinton was heading to a dinner at the White House when she got word that Holbrooke was failing. "We immediately went to the hospital. It was a very long night of anguish and tears, but then we got together and started trading stories," she says. At the bar at the Ritz-Carlton, Clinton presided over an improvised Irish wake. Derek Chollet, principal deputy director of Clinton's policy-planning staff, who was very close to Holbrooke, says, "Everyone in the room that night would take a bullet for her."