What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Writing this wasn’t easy. Every day that I was a candidate for President, I knew that millions of people were counting on me, and I couldn’t bear the idea of letting them down. But I did. I couldn’t get the job done, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. In this book, I write about moments from the campaign that I wish I could go back and do over. If the Russians could hack my subconscious, they’d find a long list.

We can’t understand what happened in 2016 without confronting the audacious information warfare waged from the Kremlin, the unprecedented intervention in our election by the director of the FBI, a political press that told voters that my emails were the most important story, and deep currents of anger and resentment flowing through our culture.

Deep breath. Feel the air fill my lungs. This is the right thing to do. The country needs to see that our democracy still works, no matter how painful this is. Breathe out. Scream later. I’m standing just inside the door at the top of the steps leading down to the inaugural platform, waiting for the announcer to call Bill and me to our seats. I’m imagining that I’m anywhere but here. Bali maybe? Bali would be good.

This trend didn’t start with Trump. Al Gore wrote a book called The Assault on Reason in 2007. In 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness,” inspired by how Fox News was turning politics into an evidence-free zone of seething resentments. And the Republican politicians whom Fox propelled to power had done their part, too. Republican strategist Karl Rove famously dismissed critics who lived in “the reality-based community”—words intended as a slight—saying they failed to grasp that “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Since November, more than two dozen women—of all ages, but mostly in their twenties—had approached me in restaurants, theaters, and stores to apologize for not voting or not doing more to help my campaign. I responded with forced smiles and tight nods. On one occasion, an older woman dragged her adult daughter by the arm to come talk to me and ordered her to apologize for not voting—which she did, head bowed in contrition. I wanted to stare right in her eyes and say, “You didn’t vote? How could you not vote?! You abdicated your responsibility as a citizen at the worst possible time! And now you want me to make you feel better?” Of course, I didn’t say any of that.

That morning, Bill and I both wore purple. It was a nod to bipartisanship (blue plus red equals purple). The night before, I had hoped to thank the country wearing white—the color of the suffragettes—while standing on a stage cut into the shape of the United States under a vast glass ceiling. (We had really gone the distance on the symbolism.)

After I finished speaking, I hugged as many people in the ballroom as possible. There were lots of old friends and devoted campaign staffers, many of their faces wet with tears. I was dry-eyed and felt calm and clear. My job was to get through this morning, smile, be strong for everyone, and show America that life went on and our republic would endure. A life spent in the public eye has given me lots of practice at that. I wear my composure like a suit of armor, for better or worse. In some ways, it felt like I had been training for this latest feat of self-control for decades.

I doubt that many people reading this will ever lose a presidential election. (Although maybe some have: hi Al, hi John, hi Mitt, hope you’re well.)

I reminded them about the losing campaigns I’d worked on in my twenties, including Gene McCarthy in the 1968 Democratic primaries and George McGovern in 1972—and the beatings Democrats took until everything changed in ’92. We had stuck it out. I was counting on them to keep going too.

Goldwater in 1964.

Over the next few weeks, I dropped any pretense of good cheer. I was so upset and worried for the country. I knew the proper and respectable thing to do was to keep quiet and take it all with grace, but inside I was fuming. The commentator Peter Daou, who worked on my 2008 campaign, captured my feelings when he tweeted, “If Trump had won by 3 million votes, lost electoral college by 80K, and Russia had hacked RNC, Republicans would have shut down America.” Nonetheless, I didn’t go public with my feelings. I let them out in private. When I heard that Donald Trump settled a fraud suit against his Trump University for $25 million, I yelled at the television. When I read the news that he filled his team with Wall Street bankers after relentlessly accusing me of being their stooge, I nearly threw the remote control at the wall. And when I heard he installed Steve Bannon, a leading promoter of the “Alt-Right,” which many have described as including white nationalists, as his chief strategist in the White House, it felt like a new low in a long line of lows.

The White House is sacred ground. Franklin D. Roosevelt hung a plaque over the fireplace in the State Dining Room inscribed with a line from a letter that John Adams sent to his wife on his second night living in the newly built White House: “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.” I hope Adams would have been okay with a wise woman. I can’t imagine what he would say if he could see who was walking those halls.

Friends advised me on the power of Xanax and raved about their amazing therapists. Doctors told me they’d never prescribed so many antidepressants in their lives. But that wasn’t for me. Never has been.

As I watched Charlotte and her friends laugh and fall down and get up again, I felt a twinge of something I couldn’t quite place. Then I realized what it was: relief. I had been ready to completely devote the next four or eight years to serving my country. But that would have come with a cost. I would have missed a lot of dance recitals and bedtime stories and trips to the playground. Now I had those back. That’s more than a silver lining. That’s the mother lode.

President Obama knew the challenges facing Democrats. He never took his reelection for granted, and while it was a resounding win in 2012 (the legitimately resounding kind), he knew that his legacy depended to a large degree on a Democratic victory in 2016. He made it clear that he believed that I was our party’s best chance to hold the White House and keep our progress going, and he wanted me to move quickly to prepare to run.

high expectations. The controversy over my emails quickly cast a shadow over our efforts and threw us into a defensive crouch from which we never fully recovered. You can read plenty more about that later in this book, but suffice it to say that one boneheaded mistake turned into a campaign-defining and -destroying scandal, thanks to a toxic mix of partisan opportunism, interagency turf battles, a rash FBI director, my own inability to explain the whole mess in a way people could understand, and media coverage that by its very volume told the voters this was by far the most important issue of the campaign. Most people couldn’t explain what it was really all about or how the allegations that I was a threat to national security squared with the support I had from respected military and civilian national security experts, including Republicans and Independents, but they understandably came away with the impression I had done a big, bad thing.

In 2008, critics had slammed me for not being accessible to voters and avoiding traditional grip-and-grin campaigning. This time they went the other way and ridiculed my intimate listening sessions. “Where are the rallies? Why can’t she draw a crowd?” they’d ask. That “enthusiasm” question never really went away, even when we drew large crowds.

Other than Iowa and Nevada, where we built extensive organizations, I struggled in caucuses just as I had the last time. By their structure and rules, caucuses favor the most committed activists who are willing to spend long hours waiting to be counted. That gave the advantage to the insurgent left-wing candidacy of Bernie Sanders. My advantage came in primaries, which have secret ballots and all-day voting, like a typical election, and much higher turnout. The difference was most clear in Washington State, which held both a caucus and a primary. Bernie won the caucus in March, and I won the primary in May, in which three times as many people voted. Unfortunately, most of the delegates were awarded based on the caucus. Ultimately, none of this mattered much after I built up a large delegate lead in March. What did matter, and had a lasting impact, was that Bernie’s presence in the race meant that I had less space and credibility to run the kind of feisty progressive campaign that had helped me win Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2008.

I totally reject the notion that it was an unusually flawed or dysfunctional campaign. That’s just wrong. My team battled serious headwinds to win the popular vote, and if not for the dramatic intervention of the FBI director in the final days, I believe that in spite of everything, we would have won the White House. I’ve been criticized harshly by political pundits for saying that, and even some of my supporters have said they agree with me but I shouldn’t say it. If you feel this way, I hope you’ll keep going and give my response a fair reading.

This was the first election where the Supreme Court’s disastrous 2010 Citizens United decision allowing unlimited political donations was in full force but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn’t because of another terrible decision by the court in 2013. I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment. I was giving speeches laying out how to solve the country’s problems. He was ranting on Twitter. Democrats were playing by the rules and trying too hard not to offend the political press. Republicans were chucking the rule book out the window and working the refs as hard as they could. I may have won millions more votes, but he’s the one sitting in the Oval Office.

Pandas just live their lives. They eat bamboo. They play with their kids. But for some reason, people love watching pandas, hoping for something—anything—to happen. When that one baby panda sneezed, the video became a viral sensation. Under Philippe’s theory, I’m like a panda. A lot of people just want to see how I live. And I do love spending time with my family and getting some sun, just like a panda—and while I’m not into bamboo, I like to eat.

One of the best things about our campaign logo (the H with the → arrow) was that anyone can draw it, even little kids. We wanted children to spread out poster boards on their kitchen tables, grab markers and glitter pens, and go to town. They sent a lot of homemade H art to our campaign headquarters. We covered the walls with it.

There is no stopping the selfie. This is now how we mark a moment together. And to be clear, if you see me in the world and want a selfie and I’m not on the phone or racing to get somewhere, I’ll be glad to take one with you. But I think selfies come at a cost. Let’s talk instead! Do you have something to share? I want to hear it (provided it’s not deeply insulting—I have limits). I’d love to know your name and where you’re from and how things are going with you. That feels real to me. A selfie is so impersonal—although it does give your wrist a break from autographs, now obsolete.

Bernie Sanders attacked me for raising money from people who worked in finance. But I reminded him that President Obama had raised more money from Wall Street than anyone in history, and that didn’t stop him from imposing tough new rules to curb risk and prevent future financial crashes. I would have done the same, and my donors knew it.

I grew up in a white middle-class family in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago. My dad served during World War II and left every morning for his small business in the city along with all the other fathers in our neighborhood heading to their jobs. My mom stayed at home to take care of my brothers, Hugh and Tony, and me, like all the mothers in our neighborhood. And my life looked like the lives of all the girls I knew. We attended excellent public or parochial schools, where first-rate teachers had high expectations for us. I went to our local Methodist church for Sunday services and youth activities all week long. I was a Brownie, then a Girl Scout. I got my first summer job when I was thirteen, working at a park three mornings a week. My hangouts were everyone’s hangouts: the public library, the local movie theater, swimming pools, skating rinks. My family watched TV together at night. When the Beatles performed for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, my friends and I gathered together around the screen, alternately silently captivated and shrieking with glee.

I was born right when everything was changing for women. Families were changing. Jobs were changing. Laws were changing. Views about women that had governed our lives for millennia were changing—finally! I came along at just the right moment, like a surfer catching the perfect wave. Everything I am, everything I’ve done, so much of what I stand for flows from that happy accident of fate. The fact that the women’s movement happened alongside the civil rights movement—indeed, was entwined with it in many ways, compelling America to reckon with entrenched notions of human value and opening doors of opportunity that had previously been sealed shut to millions—made it that much more thrilling and meaningful.

But the biggest reason I shied away from embracing this narrative is that storytelling requires a receptive audience, and I’ve never felt like the American electorate was receptive to this one. I wish so badly we were a country where a candidate who said, “My story is the story of a life shaped by and devoted to the movement for women’s liberation” would be cheered, not jeered. But that’s not who we are. Not yet.

I’m not sure how to solve all this. My gender is my gender. My voice is my voice. To quote Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the U.S. Cabinet, under FDR, “The accusation that I’m a woman is incontrovertible.”

She told me that if there was one thing she wanted everyone to know from her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, it’s this: the data show that for men, likability and professional success are correlated. The more successful a man is, the more people like him. With women, it’s the exact opposite. The more professionally successful we are, the less people like us.

It’s not easy for any woman in politics, but I think it’s safe to say that I got a whole other level of vitriol flung my way. Crowds at Trump rallies called for my imprisonment more times than I can count. They shouted, “Guilty! Guilty!” like the religious zealots in Game of Thrones chanting “Shame! Shame!” while Cersei Lannister walked back to the Red Keep.

I think all this may help explain why women leaders around the world tend to rise higher in parliamentary systems, rather than presidential ones like ours. Prime ministers are chosen by their colleagues—people they’ve worked with day in and day out, who’ve seen firsthand their talents and competence. It’s a system designed to reward women’s skill at building relationships, which requires emotional labor. Presidential systems aren’t like that. They reward different talents: speaking to large crowds, looking commanding on camera, dominating in debates, galvanizing mass movements, and in America, raising a billion dollars.

This also explains why Rishi Sunak is the UK PM while a Hindu would never be elected as U.S. president.

It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit Pause and ask everyone watching, “Well? What would you do?” Do you stay calm, keep smiling, and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye, and say loudly and clearly, “Back up, you creep, get away from me, I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.” I chose option A. I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off. I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard.

“Hillary’d.” Arianna Huffington was recently interrupted in a meeting of the Uber board of directors when she was making a point about—of all things—how important it was to increase the number of women on the board! And the man who talked over her did so to say that increasing women would only mean more talking! You can’t make this up.

Later in life, I started to see myself differently when I took on roles that felt deeply and powerfully womanly: wife, daughter to aging parents, girlfriend, and most of all, mother and grandmother. These identities transformed me yet somehow also felt like the truest expressions of myself. They felt both like pulling on a new garment and shedding my skin. I don’t talk a lot about these pieces of my life. They feel private. They are private. But they’re also universal experiences, and I believe in the value of women sharing our stories with one another. It’s how we support each other through our private struggles and how we find the strength to build the best possible lives for ourselves.

There’s just something about daughters. From the very beginning, I felt a rush of wisdom that I wanted to impart to her about womanhood: how to be brave, how to build real confidence and fake it when you have to, how to respect yourself without taking yourself too seriously, how to love yourself or at least try to and never stop trying, how to love others generously and courageously, how to be strong but gentle, how to decide whose opinion to value and whose to disregard quietly, how to believe in yourself even when others don’t. Some of these lessons were hard-won for me. I wanted badly to save my daughter the trouble. Maybe Chelsea could skip all that and arrive more quickly at a place of self-assurance.

On our first date, we went to the Yale University Art Gallery to see a Mark Rothko exhibit. The building was closed, but Bill talked our way in. We had the building entirely to ourselves. When I think about that afternoon—seeing the art, hearing the stillness all around us, giddy about this person whom I had just met but somehow knew would change my life—it still feels magical, and I feel happy and lucky all over again. I still think he’s one of the most handsome men I’ve ever known. I’m proud of him: proud of his vast intellect, his big heart, the contributions he has made to the world. I love him with my whole heart. That’s more than enough to build a life on.

Sybrina and her ex-husband had to listen to their son’s killer tell the press they “didn’t raise their son right” and later make a small fortune auctioning off the gun that killed Trayvon.

When I finished my edits to the final page of this manuscript one warm midsummer afternoon in 2017, I put down my pen and walked straight out the door. It was sunny and beautiful in our backyard, and as I stood with my face turned toward the sky, I said a prayer—nothing fancy, just a wish sent into the universe. I prayed that all the dangers I had painstakingly detailed in the book—the attacks on our democracy by a foreign power, the flood of fake news filling our screens, the staggering corruption of the Trump administration—would abate. Maybe my fears for our future would turn out to be overblown. Maybe America would find its way back to a stable balance. Almost a year later, that hasn’t happened. Not even close. So I’m picking up my pen again to try to capture some of what’s happened since this book was published and to offer my thoughts on what we need to do now.

I won’t ever forget the sight of white supremacists carrying torches through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” One yelled, “Dylann Roof was a hero!” about the racist killer who slaughtered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. A young woman named Heather Heyer, who was there to protest the white supremacists, was killed when a man plowed his car into a crowd. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.” Even though I had warned during the campaign about the rise of the Alt-Right and Trump’s ties to white nationalists, seeing this still shocked me.

Trump’s obsession with undoing all of President Obama’s accomplishments has been on display from the beginning, but perhaps the most dangerous example was his decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran, opening the door to greater chaos and crisis in the Middle East. As Secretary of State, I twisted a lot of arms around the world to tighten sanctions and force Iran to negotiate over its nuclear program. I sent one of my closest aides to start the secret talks that ultimately led to the agreement. The final plan wasn’t perfect—perfect plans don’t exist, especially in statecraft—but it made America and the world safer. Throwing that all away, and breaking America’s word, was an enormous mistake.

My jaw dropped when I watched Admiral Michael Rogers, then director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command, tell Congress that Trump never asked him to do anything to deter future Russian cyber attacks. Imagine if after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt had told his generals to just “let it go”—or if after 9/11, George W. Bush waited a year before holding his first cabinet-level National Security Council meeting on terrorism. Americans didn’t die in Russia’s attack on our democracy, but it was an attack. Yet the administration has been extremely slow to enforce the sanctions that Congress enacted to punish Putin.

While the President denigrated the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed once again that Putin’s goal was to elect Trump and defeat me. One rainy day in February, Mueller indicted thirteen Russians and three Russian companies for waging a massive disinformation war against the United States. New details helped fill in gaps in the story we already knew, like how Russian trolls stole identities and posed as Americans and how they fanned flames by inciting both sides of hotbutton issues like immigration and racial justice. It was mind-boggling to see the instructions the Russian spymasters gave their trolls spelled out in the black and white of a criminal indictment: “Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them).” Yes, that’s what it said.

We also learned more from Facebook, which finally admitted it had found around 200,000 posts or other content created by Russian trolls that were viewed by 146 million people on either Facebook or Instagram. That’s not even counting thousands of paid advertisements seen by millions more. As Tristan Harris, a former Google executive who has become an important voice on the challenges facing social media, put it, “Facebook is a living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election.” Twitter also notified 1.4 million users in the United States that they had followed, retweeted, or liked content from at least one of thousands of Russia-linked accounts during the election. All this was accompanied by the explosive revelations about Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm backed by Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon that worked for Trump during the campaign. The firm obtained the personal data of 87 million Facebook users under false pretenses and weaponized that information on behalf of the Trump campaign. Facebook knew what Mercer’s firm was up to as far back as 2015 but didn’t alert users or ensure that the data was secured or deleted. In fact, Facebook’s vast trove of personal data has been far more open to manipulation and abuse than most people realized.

In fact, a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the kind of automated Twitter bots used by the Russians likely influenced enough Americans to represent more than three percentage points of Trump’s vote, which was more than enough to tilt all the key states.

Comey admitted that his decision to announce the reopening of the email investigation just days before the election might have been influenced by polls that predicted I would win. He suggested he might have viewed things differently had the race appeared closer. That wasn’t his call. It shouldn’t have been anybody’s. He substituted his “political” judgment for well-established standards of fairness. His actions changed the outcome—and history. As the leading statistician Nate Silver reaffirmed this summer, “it’s extremely likely that the Comey letter and the subsequent media coverage of it cost Clinton the election.”

The dangerous possibilities came into stark relief this spring when it was widely reported that the Chinese government is providing $500 million in loans to prop up a construction project in Indonesia that includes Trump-branded hotels, condos, and a golf course. Just seventy-two hours later, seemingly out of the blue, Trump decided to ease penalties on ZTE, one of China’s largest telecommunications companies, for repeatedly violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The FBI has warned that ZTE’s products may allow China to spy on American consumers and the Pentagon has said they “may pose an unacceptable risk to the department’s personnel, information and mission.” Trump came to the company’s rescue. The “America First” President declared he was suddenly concerned about saving Chinese jobs—even though it meant putting our national security at risk.

In 1995, one out of every sixteen Americans was open to the idea of military rule in our country, which I find to be a shockingly high number. In 2014, one in six Americans felt that way. Even harder to believe, the numbers are worse for young people. According to Yascha Mounk, a lecturer on government at Harvard, nearly a quarter of millennials think democracy is a “bad” or “very bad” way of running the country. In 2011, almost half said they thought that a political system with a strong leader who did not have to bother with Congress or elections was a “fairly good” or “very good” idea.

Congress should repair the damage the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act and restore the full protections that voters need and deserve, as well as the voting rights of Americans who have served time in prison and paid their debt to society. We need early voting and vote-by-mail in every state in America, and automatic, universal voter registration so every citizen who is eligible to vote is able to vote. As I wrote earlier, we need to overturn Citizens United and get secret money out of our politics. And it won’t surprise you to hear that I passionately believe it’s time to abolish the Electoral College. During the past five presidential elections, the person who won the popular vote lost the election twice. That’s flatly undemocratic. As I noted, the Electoral College gives disproportionate power to less populated states and makes a mockery of the principle of “one person, one vote.”