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.
Leon E. Panetta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton, recalls that one person in those meetings would often speak the truth when others hesitated: Maggie Williams.
"She would raise it and she would deal with it directly," Panetta said of Williams, who was then the first lady's top aide. "I never got the sense that she was holding back."
More than a decade 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 reinvigorate her campaign.
The first step, Clinton supporters say, is for the new campaign manager to truthfully assess the operation's weaknesses. And those who have worked with Williams say no one on the New York senator's 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 assess the trouble. Clinton won in New Hampshire but then lost traction in subsequent weeks, and pressure grew for a shake-up.
High-stakes primaries
Williams' task now is to try to ensure that Clinton wins decisively in the high-stakes March 4 primaries in Ohio and Texas, each of which has well over 100 delegates at stake.
"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 advisor under 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 of the Children's Defense Fund and Williams was the advocacy group's communications director.
Since then, 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 press secretary to Clinton as first lady and who is informally advising the Clinton campaign.
