Book #210 of 2017:

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

This book represents a deeply personal reflection from Hillary Clinton on her loss in the 2016 presidential election. She knows full well that many people are tired of relitigating the campaign, and that some would even like her to disappear from public life forever, but this book is proof that she still has valuable insights and leadership to offer our country.

There are some stumbling blocks here, to be sure; if you weren’t convinced by her critiques of opponents like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the election, you’re not likely to find their latest repetition any more meaningful. And despite her promise to take responsibility for aspects of her loss, in practice this often reads as her wishing she could have better predicted which campaign issues would become critical rather than acknowledging any strategic missteps on the part of her campaign.

Nevertheless, the former candidate is remarkably clear-eyed in discussing the impact of foreign interference and James Comey’s politicizing of his FBI post on the outcome of the election, noting correctly that there was a late swing in support toward Trump and third-party candidates when Comey grandstanded about Clinton’s private server and Russian agents released hacked campaign emails just before Election Day. (Neither of these stories was particularly damning of Clinton, but they rekindled the lingering miasma of her nebulous email scandal and focused media attention away from Trump’s own controversies.) As the author observes, the race was close enough that these late-breaking incidents helped propel Donald Trump to his electoral victory over her.

The most effective – and affecting – parts of this book come when Clinton discusses the sexism that she has faced throughout her career and when she relates her personal struggles in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election to reckon with what it means for America and the people who were counting on her to win. It’s a welcome intimate look at a politician who is often guarded in her public interactions, and a poignant reminder of the person at the heart of the headlines, who has done her best to serve her country and must now carry the knowledge that millions of people hate her for it.

I imagine this book was cathartic for Clinton to write, and there are moments when it provides a similar feeling to her readers. But it’s also a call to action: to “resist, insist, persist, and enlist,” as Clinton says, in the ongoing movement for progressive values and reasonable government that her campaign was built around. Underlying everything, of course, is our common wish that such a book never needed to be written in the first place.

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter