I read Hillary Clinton’s recent book about last year’s presidential campaign, “What Happened,” more as an act of defiance than a search for enlightenment. I read it because people told me I shouldn’t. Because commentators told her she shouldn’t have written it. Because would-be successors to Democratic leadership told her to shut up, get off the stage, go away and disappear.
One friend, spotting it on my table as we met for lunch, admonished me. “Why are you doing that to yourself?” he demanded, vowing never to read it himself. “I can tell you exactly what happened: she had no plan, and no execution. End of story.”
I began to respond, but then thought better of it. While his curt dismissal hardly did justice to Clinton’s 464-page account, he unintentionally illustrated much of her problem. After nearly 50 years in public life, people have formed opinions about her behavior, motives, and character entirely independent of facts and evidence. They know what they know, or think they know, and for too many people, it’s uncertain at best and evil at worst.
I did not expect to learn anything new about “what happened.” For those who followed the election avidly through a wide range of credible news outlets, it should have been plain enough at the time. As far as the campaign itself, readers will find no revelations, just a clear compendium of the known facts through the late spring of this year, and cautious speculation about future events.
We do, however, gain fresh insights to the inner life pulsing beneath Clinton’s tightly composed and steely exterior. She revisits, often with embarrassment, pain and regret, some of the major gaffes and press kerfuffles that dogged her throughout the year: the e-mail controversy, her comment about putting a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of the business, her infamous “basket of deplorables” remark. She vividly evokes her bafflement and frustration at the slanted press coverage; at the public’s tolerance for—even embrace of—Trump’s lying, bullying, bluster and worse; at the accusations (even from her campaign surrogate and VP Joe Biden) that she and the Democrats “had no message” for anxious white working-class voters when, as she recounts in detail, she clearly did, and Biden was even among those carrying it to them.
Despite misleading press accounts that accused her yet again in the book of shifting blame and failing to own her mistakes, Clinton repeatedly accepts responsibility, confesses her disappointment for all the people she let down by her defeat, and refuses to blame even a single staff member or campaign strategist for disappointing outcomes. She embraces Huma Abedin, her longtime aide and confidant, whose errant husband Anthony Weiner caused so much pain to his family and grief to her campaign, noting that after the 11th hour FBI announcement about Anthony’s laptop, “some people thought I should fire Huma or ‘distance myself.’ Not a chance. She had done nothing wrong and was an invaluable member of my team. I stuck by her the same way she has always stuck by me.”
Those are not the words of a cold and calculating Lady Macbeth.
If there are revelations to be had, they can be found in Clinton’s most extensive and least guarded comments to date about the journalistic failings of the media, her undisguised bitterness and contempt for Donald Trump, her fury at former FBI director James Comey, her profound worries about Russian interference and Putin’s malevolent designs on the West, and her frustration at her inability to connect with voters whom she sincerely cared about and sought to help.
After some post-election soul-searching and healing, as Clinton comes to terms with the loss and prepares to move forward, she ends on a note of redemption and hope, accepting an invitation to deliver the 2017 commencement speech at Wellesley as she had done as a student so many decades before. Gathering strength from the student speaker preceding her—a poised and accomplished daughter of Syrian immigrants who exhorts her classmates to go proudly and confidently into the world in pursuit of their dreams—she addressed the question on everyone’s mind, “What do we do now?” There is only one answer, she writes. “Keep going.”
