Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday morning gave her version of how she came to work for the man who bested her in last year's bitter primary battle, and what she thinks of him now. She comes out looking great, natch, and so does he.

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PD toolbar!Clinton chose to make her first Sunday show appearance since the campaign -- and since becoming President Obama's secretary of state -- with her husband's former White House aide, George Stephanopoulos, on ABC's "This Week."

You won't be surprised to hear what has happened to Clinton's onetime doubts about Obama's ability to protect the nation, famously aired in her primary-season TV ad saying it's "a dangerous world" and asking voters whom they want to answer that 3 a.m. phone call at the White House. The doubts are "absolutely" all gone, she said.

"The president, in his public actions and demeanor, and certainly in private with me and with the national security team, has been strong, thoughtful, decisive. I think he is doing a terrific job. And it's an honor to serve with him," she told Stephanopoulos.

When Obama named a series of envoys to global trouble spots, some of them as high-profile as former Senate majority leader George Mitchell and former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Clinton's role appeared to some to be diminished. On Sunday she told Stephanopoulos it was all her idea.

"You've got envoys for Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea. How do you fit in?" he asked, laughing. She said her role is "chief diplomat" and "when I agreed to do this job, I made it very clear to the president that ... I wanted special envoys, because we were inheriting so many hot-spot problems that I knew you could never have one person possibly address all of that."

Clinton says she initially had no plan to join the Obama administration and had dismissed as "absurd" press accounts that he was considering her. "I was looking forward to going back to the Senate and, frankly, going back to my life and representing New York, which I love. And I had no idea that he had a different plan in mind," she said.

When Obama did call her in to talk about being secretary of state, she says, she suggested other names to him. "But he was quite persistent and very persuasive," Clinton said. "And, you know, ultimately it came down to my feeling that, number one, when your president asks you to do something for your country, you really need a good reason not to do it. Number two, if I had won and I had asked him to please help me serve our country, I would have hoped he would say yes. And finally, I looked around our world and I thought, you know, we are in just so many deep holes that everybody had better grab a shovel and start digging out."

The number one clash between Clinton and Obama last year was over Iran. The positions Clinton presented today reflected a melding of both candidates' campaign-trail rhetoric. Clinton said last year that an Iranian attack on Israel "would incur massive retaliation from the United States." She repeated today that "were Israel to suffer a nuclear attack by Iran, there would be retaliation," though she declined to answer whether that retaliation would come from the United States.

Clinton last year attacked Obama as naive in saying he'd engage with Iran without preconditions -- that is, without Iran first agreeing to stop its nuclear program. Today Clinton talked up the value of engagement.

"The idea that we could have a diplomatic process with Iran means that for the first time, we would actually be sitting at a table across from Iranians authorized by the supreme leader to talk with us about a whole range of issues. That gives us information and insight that we don't have," she said. If Iran wants access to peaceful nuclear energy, "there are ways of accommodating that do not lead to a nuclear weapon."

Clinton also told Stephanopoulos the administration is considering putting North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Here's a Reuters story about that. You can read the whole "This Week" transcript here.


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