WASHINGTON ON A SNOWY Thursday shortly before her weekly meeting with President Obama last month, Hillary Rodham Clinton got a distressing phone call: her husband, Bill Clinton, was in a hospital with chest pains and needed an urgent heart procedure.

Mrs. Clinton kept her appointment with Mr. Obama in the Oval Office, and the two talked about her coming trip to the Persian Gulf .

“No one had any idea” that she might have had a personal worry, said a senior White House official who was present. Afterward, Mrs. Clinton raced for a shuttle flight to New York to see her husband.

But the fact that she first spent 45 minutes plotting Iran strategy with the man who beat her in a divisive primary campaign shows just how far Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have come since the bitter spring of 2008, when he sniped that her foreign-policy credentials consisted of sipping tea with world leaders, and she scoffed that his consisted of living in Indonesia when he was 10.

Sixteen months after Mr. Obama surprised nearly everyone by picking her as secretary of state, the two have again surprised nearly everyone by forging a credible partnership. Mrs. Clinton has proved to be an eager team player, a tireless defender of the administration, ever deferential to Mr. Obama and careful to ensure that her husband, the former president, does not upstage her boss.

Mr. Obama has been solicitous of Mrs. Clinton, yielding to her at times in internal debates, even showing signs of adopting some of her more hawkish world views. They now joke about their “frenemies” status.

“Hillary Clinton is the secretary of state,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official . “The question now is whether she becomes a real adviser, and whether he trusts her.”

Mr. Obama has guarded his prerogatives as the architect of American foreign policy, concentrating decisionmaking on crucial issues like Iran, Iraq and the Middle East in the White House. And Mrs. Clinton has yet to stake a claim to a core foreign-policy issue.

Of course, they would have to make history first. So far, the administration’s foreign-policy ambitions have been marked more by frustration than fulfillment, from a stubborn Russia and a defiant China to the standoff with Iran over its nuclear program and a deepening conflict with Israel, where Mrs. Clinton has loudly given voice to the president’s dissatisfaction. Mr. Obama’s dominant foreign policy concern ? the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan ? is still a work in progress.

Interviews with more than a dozen senior White House and State Department officials, and friends of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, suggest that the president and his top diplomat are still easing into their alliance. .

For Mrs. Clinton, a successful stint in the State Department could add to her luster if she decides on another run for the presidency. For Mr. Obama, keeping Mrs. Clinton satisfied helps ensure that she will not emerge again as a rival .

“We’ve developed, I think, a very good rapport, really positive back and forth about everything you can imagine,” Mrs. Clinton said . “And we’ve had some interesting and even unusual experiences along the way.”

To White House officials who might have worried that Mrs. Clinton would establish a shadow government of sorts in the State Department, she quickly offered reassurance. She embraced the president’s message of engagement, crisscrossing the globe to mend fences with Russia, mollify Pakistan and cheer up European allies. In China, she soft-pedaled human rights, even though she had championed the cause at a Beijing women’s conference in 1995. She volunteered to defend Mr. Obama when he came under fire from the right for abandoning President George W. Bush’s plans for missile-defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic.

But it is not clear that she has played a pivotal role in larger matters. On the Middle East, traditionally the heart of the secretary of state’s portfolio, Mrs. Clinton has seemed more of an enforcer of Mr. Obama’s vision than a policy maker. Day-to-day diplomacy in the region is handled by a special envoy, former Senator George J. Mitchell. And the administration’s first major venture into the peace process ? a fruitless effort to persuade Israel to freeze construction of Jewish settlements in return for Arab gestures toward Israel ? was devised largely by Mr. Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

On Afghanistan, Mr. Obama heeded Mrs. Clinton’s counsel to deploy more American troops, but she was echoing the recommendation of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. And on Iraq, he handed responsibility to Vice President Joseph R. Biden.

“You ask people who’ve been in government for a long time, and they would say this is one of the most centralized policy-making operations ever,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Administration officials insist that Mrs. Clinton joins in all major debates and voices her opinion. And they point out that she has taken the lead in rallying support for tougher sanctions against Iran. Iran’s leaders have spurned Mr. Obama’s olive branch, forcing the White House to pivot to the pressure campaign that Mrs. Clinton long believed was all but inevitable.

The president’s national security adviser, General James L. Jones, insisted that Mrs. Clinton had made some issues her own, citing her effort to make foreign aid a more integral part of American foreign policy. “She’s on to something there,” General Jones said.


President Barack Obama has taken advice from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on matters like toughening the policy toward Iran and sending more troops to Afghanistan. / PETE SOUZA/WHITE HOUSE