Hillary Rodham Clinton needs little introduction and I felt some trepidation in reviewing her 2017 book What Happened, published the year after her second failed bid for the US Presidency to vitriol from both sides of the US political divide. However, when the audiobook became available, I thought I would give Hillary the chance to tell me, in her own words, What Happened. So here we are, with her post-action report about what went wrong, who messed it up for her and what could have been done better.
Hearing Clinton tell her own story about the process of gaining the Democratic Nomination, the call to Donald Trump to concede, give her concession speech and then finally go home to mourn her loss is such a far cry from anything I had read before. She was eminently more qualified than her opponent, she had made it to the final night as the frontrunner, thought she had it in the bag, won the popular vote by a wide margin and yet still lost and I found that fascinating!
As the London Evening Standard said at the time:
âTwo decades after her husband humiliated her with his affair with Monica Lewinsky, she lost the prize she most coveted to a self-proclaimed âpussy-grabberâ. She lost as an elitist against a second-generation New York real-estate tycoon who lives in an apartment gilded in gold. She lost as a devout Methodist among conservative evangelicals to a man who had rarely set foot inside a church. She lost as an expert on every big political issue, to an opponent who preferred big, blousy slogans to detail, and who got all his news from cable television.â
Clinton spends a bit of the book devoted to blame. Hacking authorised by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders for not supporting her sooner, imbalanced media coverage, misogyny, Mitch McConnellâs partisan politics, a late bombshell from then-FBI Director John Comey and plenty of others. However, she also reserves a chunk of the blame for herself, detailing how she feels she might have acted in that Presidential debate with Trump looming behind her, or her complete unwillingness to feed into the fear, hate and resentment that Trump revelled in, plus a chapter on those emails! She says: “every time I hugged another sobbing friend â or one stoically blinking back tears, which was almost worse â I had to fight back a wave of sadness that threatened to swallow me whole. At every step, I felt that I had let everyone down. Because I had.”
The little sly asides and comments about others from the political landscape are where this book really shines. Something that an ordinary civilian, miles from those conversations would never hear, and the emotion that they land with has heft even years later. Among my favourites, immediately after calling Trump to concede, she called Obama to say âIâm sorry I let you down.â At Trumpâs Inauguration, she gritted her teeth and repeated her mantra, âSmile now, scream laterâ. On a happier note, George W. Bushâs suggestion that they should go out for burgers at some point. âI think thatâs Texan for I feel your painâ She quipped.
I enjoyed Clinton talking about policy that she had planned to implement on divisive issues like gun control, how to prevent police shootings and how to improve immigration rules, among many others. All things that stand in stark contrast to the current incumbentâs policies. The wistful feelings continued throughout the book as I considered what a Hillary Clinton White House might have been. While I thoroughly enjoy a talk about government policy in this depth, and it is a topic that Clinton clearly revels in, I could see many readers finding it boring and worth skipping, and thatâs something that Clinton herself recognises. She says that she more closely resembled a âspoilsport schoolmarmâ compared to a Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders, who she said promised big with Universal Healthcare and didnât have the budgets to back it up as a generous Santa.
My problems with this book are complicated. There were a few times I was listening to it and rolling my eyes or scoffing at the incredible privilege and hubris that Clinton must often forget she has, to be able to find it surprising that certain groups didnât vote for her or didnât turn out to vote at all, or her own grudging annoyance at the âbad opticsâ of getting paid millions for corporate speeches to Wall Street banks. “What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss.” But while I see these as clear errors in her judgment; the assumption of victory, already having bought the house next-door to cope with the extra secret service staff, the last-minute edits to her victory speech, they add to the pathos in the story and add more threads to the tapestry of this failed Presidential candidate. It built to such a great height that when it all comes crashing down she was even more broken for it.
Hillary Clinton is an incredible dichotomy with all of the experience and expertise that make her a great candidate for the Presidency. Yet who she is and what she represents to the American people precluded her from being the candidate that enough people in key states wanted to get her over the line. Since the woman herself cannot split those two parts of her, What Happened makes for a fascinating listen!
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