WASHINGTON — When crisis would strike the Clinton White House, senior staff would meet at 7 a.m. in a kind of war-planning session. Sometimes an uncomfortable truth would waft silently about the room, like steam from the coffee mugs.
As Leon Panetta, a former chief of staff for President Clinton, remembers, one person in those meetings would often speak the truth while others hesitated: Maggie Williams.
"She would raise it and she would deal with it directly," Panetta said, recalling Williams, who was then the first lady's top aide. "I never got the sense that she was holding back."
Fifteen years later, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to win the Oval Office for herself, and this week she turned to her former chief of staff to revive her faltering campaign.
The first step, Clinton supporters say, is for the new campaign manager to truthfully assess the campaign's weaknesses. And those who have worked with Williams say no one on the campaign staff is better suited to that role.
"People know that when Maggie says something, it's because she believes it and she doesn't have another agenda," Panetta said. "In politics, that's a very unusual set of traits."
Williams did not start out working full-time on the campaign, but after Clinton lost the Iowa caucuses, she started making calls to Clinton supporters outside the campaign to try to assess the trouble. Despite an unexpected win in New Hampshire, Clinton's campaign continued to lose traction in subsequent weeks, and pressure grew for a shake-up.
For Clinton to clinch the Democratic nomination, Williams must now find a way for her to win decisively in the upcoming big-delegate contests in Ohio and Texas.
"I don't think she intended or expected to be part of the campaign," said David Gergen, who worked with Williams when he served as a political adviser to President Clinton. "It's clearly a sign of distress that they reached out and brought her in."
Clinton has known Williams since the early 1980s, when Clinton was on the board and Williams was communications director for the Children's Defense Fund, an advocacy group. In the time since, the two have developed an intense personal loyalty, but not a blind one -- Williams is known as someone who is able to tell Clinton what she doesn't want to hear.
"She is a consigliere to Hillary and always has been," said Lisa Caputo, who was the former first lady's press secretary and is informally advising the Clinton campaign.
