What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

My predecessor in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, used to say, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”

But I would have relished the chance to move beyond the rancor of the campaign, reach out to all Americans regardless of who they voted for, and offer a vision of national reconciliation, shared opportunity, and inclusive prosperity. It would have been an extraordinary honor to be the first woman to take the oath. I won’t pretend I hadn’t dreamt of that moment—for me, for my mother, for my daughter, her daughter, everyone’s daughters—and for our sons.

Nouwen sees another lesson in the parable of the Prodigal Son: a lesson about gratitude. “I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment,” he writes. “I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly. I can choose to listen to the voices that forgive and to look at the faces that smile even while I still hear words of revenge and see grimaces of hatred.”

Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” —Eleanor Roosevelt

The truth is, everyone’s flawed. That’s the nature of human beings. But our mistakes alone shouldn’t define us. We should be judged by the totality of our work and life. Many problems don’t have either/or answers, and a good decision today may not look as good ten or twenty years later through the lens of new conditions.

I did it because when you clear away all the petty and not-so-petty reasons not to run—all the headaches, all the obstacles—what was left was something too important to pass up. It was a chance to do the most good I would ever be able to do. In just one day at the White House, you can get more done for more people than in months anywhere else.

I did not want to be President because I want power for power’s sake. I wanted power to do what I could to help solve problems and prepare the country for the future.

Six A.M.: I wake up, sometimes hitting the snooze button to steal a few more minutes. Snoozing leaves you more tired—there are studies on this—but in that moment, it seems like such a great idea.

I spend a few minutes in contemplation, organizing my thoughts and setting my priorities for the day.

But I’ve never gotten used to how much effort it takes just to be a woman in the public eye.

A uniform was also an anti-distraction technique: since there wasn’t much to say or report on what I wore, maybe people would focus on what I was saying instead.

Some people like my clothes and some people don’t. It goes with the territory. You can’t please everybody, so you may as well wear what works for you. That’s my theory, anyway.

Winning, we realized, would mean hitting hard (since he couldn’t bear it), staying cool (since he often resorted to viciousness when cornered), throwing his own words back at him (since he couldn’t stand hearing them), and making my own arguments with clarity and precision (since he couldn’t do the same for himself).

The pressure you feel when you’re about to walk onstage is almost unbearable—almost, but not quite. You bear it by working hard to get ready. You bear it by having good people by your side. You bear it by not just hoping but knowing you can handle a lot, because you already have.

I never figured out how to tell this story right. Partly that’s because I’m not great at talking about myself. Also, I didn’t want people to see me as the “woman candidate,” which I find limiting, but rather as the best candidate whose experience as a woman in a male-dominated culture made her sharper, tougher, and more competent. That’s a hard distinction to draw, and I wasn’t confident that I had the dexterity to pull it off.

For the record, it hurts to be torn apart. It may seem like it doesn’t bother me to be called terrible names or have my looks mocked viciously, but it does. I’m used to it—I’ve grown what Eleanor Roosevelt said women in politics need: a skin as thick as a rhinoceros hide.

Throughout the 2016 campaign, my staff would come to me wide-eyed. “You’ll never believe what Trump said today. It was vile.” I always believed it. Not just because of who Trump is but because of who we can be at our worst. We’ve seen it too many times to be surprised.

Some of this has to do with my composure. People say I’m guarded, and they have a point. I think before I speak. I don’t just blurt out whatever comes to mind. It’s a combination of my natural inclination, plus my training as a lawyer, plus decades in the public eye where every word I say is scrutinized. But why is this a bad thing? Don’t we want our Senators and Secretaries of State—and especially our Presidents—to speak thoughtfully, to respect the impact of our words?

In any case, this whole topic of “being real” can feel very silly. I wish we could just dismiss it and go about our business, whoever we are, without worrying about whether we are satisfying some indefinable standard of realness. As the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes, “It’s not your job to be likable. It’s your job to be yourself.”

Ultimately, I’m pro-choice, pro-family, and pro-faith because I believe that our ability to decide whether and when to become mothers is intrinsic to our liberty.

Friendships between women provide solace and understanding in a world that can be really hard on us. The pressure to be a perfect wife, mother, and daughter can be unbearable. What a relief it is to find people you can share it all with and be reassured that you’re doing just fine.

This kind of work isn’t glamorous. But my experience with CDF convinced me that this is how you make real change in America: step by step, year by year, sometimes even door by door. You need to stir up public opinion and put pressure on political leaders. You have to shift policies and resources. And you need to win elections. You need to change hearts and change laws.

If you want to get something done, you have to find a way to get to yes.

The decline of serious reporting on policy has been going on for a while, but it got much worse in 2016. In 2008, the major networks’ nightly newscasts spent a total of 220 minutes on policy. In 2012, it was 114 minutes. In 2016, it was just 32 minutes. (That stat is from two weeks before the election, but it didn’t change much in the final stretch.)

Joe Biden likes to say, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

Most of the press was too busy chasing ratings and scandals, and Trump was too slippery to be pinned down. He understood the needs and impulses of the political press well enough that if he gave them a new rabbit every day, they’d never catch any of them. So his reckoning never came.

It’s easy to ridicule ideas that “fit on a bumper sticker,” but there’s a reason campaigns use bumper stickers: they work.

because when any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone. When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.”

Trump encouraged a zero-sum view of life where if someone else is gaining, you must be losing.

Our Founding Fathers believed that one of the most important defenses would be an informed citizenry that could make sound judgments based on facts and reason. Losing that is like losing an immune system, leaving a democracy vulnerable to all manner of attack. And a democracy, like a body, cannot stay strong through repeated injuries.

Trump doesn’t think in terms of morality or human rights, he thinks only in terms of power and dominance. Might makes right. Putin thinks the same way, albeit much more strategically.

In early January, the Intelligence Community reported back to President Obama and published an unclassified version of its findings for the public. The headline was that Putin himself had ordered a covert operation with the goal of denigrating and defeating me, electing Trump, and undermining the American people’s faith in the democratic process.

Outside interference may help explain why enough votes shifted in the final days to give the Electoral College to Trump. But it doesn’t explain why the race was close to begin with, close enough that late movement in a few states could make the difference.

And a pervasive loss of trust was undermining the democracy de Tocqueville had celebrated 130 years before. Reading his observations helped me realize that my generation didn’t need to totally reinvent America to fix the problems we saw and find the meaning we sought, we just had to reclaim the best parts of our national character.