President Obama said Tuesday "one of the best decisions" he made in office "was to ask Hillary Clinton to serve as our nation’s secretary of state." "I’ll always be grateful for her extraordinary leadership representing our nation around the world," he said at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. “And I still have a lot of debt to pay" to his former secretary of state because her frenetic schedule -- the State Department said she traveled 956,733 miles in the position -- kept the Clintons apart.