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CONTENTS
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Author’s Note
World Map
PART ONE: A FRESH START
1 | 2008: Team of Rivals
2 | Foggy Bottom: Smart Power
PART TWO: ACROSS THE PACIFIC
3 | Asia: The Pivot
4 | China: Uncharted Waters
5 | Beijing: The Dissident
6 | Burma: The Lady and the Generals
PART THREE: WAR AND PEACE
7 | Af-Pak: Surge
8 | Afghanistan: To End a War
9 | Pakistan: National Honor
PART FOUR: BETWEEN HOPE AND HISTORY
10 | Europe: Ties That Bind
11 | Russia: Reset and Regression
12 | Latin America: Democrats and Demagogues
13 | Africa: Guns or Growth?
PART FIVE: UPHEAVAL
14 | The Middle East: The Rocky Path of Peace
15 | The Arab Spring: Revolution
16 | Libya: All Necessary Measures
17 | Benghazi: Under Attack
18 | Iran: Sanctions and Secrets
19 | Syria: A Wicked Problem
20 | Gaza: Anatomy of a Cease-fire
PART SIX: THE FUTURE WE WANT
21 | Climate Change: We’re All in This Together
22 | Jobs and Energy: A Level Playing Field
23 | Haiti: Disaster and Development
24 | 21st-Century Statecraft: Digital Diplomacy in a Networked World
25 | Human Rights: Unfinished Business
Epilogue
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About Hillary Rodham Clinton
Index
Photo Credits
For America’s diplomats and development experts, who represent our country and our values so well in places large and small, peaceful and perilous all over the world.
and
In memory of my parents:
Hugh Ellsworth Rodham (1911–1993)
Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham (1919–2011)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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All of us face hard choices in our lives. Some face more than their share. We have to decide how to balance the demands of work and family. Caring for a sick child or an aging parent. Figuring out how to pay for college. Finding a good job, and what to do if you lose it. Whether to get married—or stay married. How to give our kids the opportunities they dream about and deserve. Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become. For leaders and nations, they can mean the difference between war and peace, poverty and prosperity.
I’m eternally grateful that I was born to loving and supportive parents in a country that offered me every opportunity and blessing—factors beyond my control that set the stage for the life I’ve led and the values and faith I’ve embraced. When I chose to leave a career as a young lawyer in Washington to move to Arkansas to marry Bill and start a family, my friends asked, “Are you out of your mind?” I heard similar questions when I took on health care reform as First Lady, ran for office myself, and accepted President Barack Obama’s offer to represent our country as Secretary of State.
In making these decisions, I listened to both my heart and my head. I followed my heart to Arkansas; it burst with love at the birth of our daughter, Chelsea; and it ached with the losses of my father and mother. My head urged me forward in my education and professional choices. And my heart and head together sent me into public service. Along the way, I’ve tried not to make the same mistake twice, to learn, to adapt, and to pray for the wisdom to make better choices in the future.
What’s true in our daily lives is also true at the highest levels of government. Keeping America safe, strong, and prosperous presents an endless set of choices, many of which come with imperfect information and conflicting imperatives. Perhaps the most famous example from my four years as Secretary of State was President Obama’s order to send a team of Navy SEALs into a moonless Pakistani night to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. The President’s top advisors were divided. The intelligence was compelling, but far from definitive. The risks of failure were daunting. The stakes were significant for America’s national security, our battle against al Qaeda, and our relationship with Pakistan. Most of all, the lives of those brave SEALs and helicopter pilots hung in the balance. It was as crisp and courageous a display of leadership as I’ve ever seen.
This book is about choices I made as Secretary of State and those made by President Obama and other leaders around the world. Some chapters are about events that made headlines; others are about the trendlines that will continue to define our world for future generations.
Of course, quite a few important choices, characters, countries, and events are not included here. To give them all the space they deserve, I would need many more pages. I could fill a whole book just with thanks to the talented and dedicated colleagues I relied on at the State Department. I have enormous gratitude for their service and friendship.
As Secretary of State I thought of our choices and challenges in three categories: The problems we inherited, including two wars and a global financial crisis; the new, often unexpected events and emerging threats, from the shifting sands of the Middle East to the turbulent waters of the Pacific to the uncharted terrain of cyberspace; and the opportunities presented by an increasingly networked world that could help lay the foundation for American prosperity and leadership in the 21st century.
I approached my work with confidence in our country’s enduring strengths and purpose, and humility about how much remains beyond our knowledge and control. I worked to reorient American foreign policy around what I call “smart power.” To succeed in the 21st century, we need to integrate the traditional tools of foreign policy—diplomacy, development assistance, and military force—while also tapping the energy and ideas of the private sector and empowering citizens, especially the activists, organizers, and problem solvers we call civil society, to meet their own challenges and shape their own futures. We have to use all of America’s strengths to build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries, more shared responsibility and fewer conflicts, more good jobs and less poverty, more broadly based prosperity with less damage to our environment.
As is usually the case with the benefit of hindsight, I wish we could go back and revisit certain choices. But I’m proud of what we accomplished. This century began traumatically for our country, with the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the long wars that followed, and the Great Recession. We needed to do better, and I believe we did.
These years were also a personal journey for me, both literally (I ended up visiting 112 countries and traveling nearly one million miles) and figuratively, from the painful end of the 2008 campaign to an unexpected partnership and friendship with my former rival Barack Obama. I’ve served our country in one way or another for decades. Yet during my years as Secretary of State, I learned even more about our exceptional strengths and what it will take for us to compete and thrive at home and abroad.
I hope this book will be of use to anyone who wants to know what America stood for in the early years of the 21st century, as well as how the Obama Administration confronted great challenges in a perilous time.
While my views and exp
eriences will surely be scrutinized by followers of Washington’s long-running soap opera—who took what side, who opposed whom, who was up and who was down—I didn’t write this book for them.
I wrote it for Americans and people everywhere who are trying to make sense of this rapidly changing world of ours, who want to understand how leaders and nations can work together and why they sometimes collide, and how their decisions affect all our lives: How a collapsing economy in Athens, Greece, affects businesses in Athens, Georgia. How a revolution in Cairo, Egypt, impacts life in Cairo, Illinois. What a tense diplomatic encounter in St. Petersburg, Russia, means for families in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Not every story in this book has a happy ending or even an ending yet—that’s not the world we live in—but all of them are stories about people we can learn from whether we agree with them or not. There are still heroes out there: peacemakers who persevered when success seemed impossible, leaders who ignored politics and pressure to make tough decisions, men and women with the courage to leave the past behind in order to shape a new and better future. These are some of the stories I tell.
I wrote this book to honor the exceptional diplomats and development experts whom I had the honor of leading as America’s sixty-seventh Secretary of State. I wrote it for anyone anywhere who wonders whether the United States still has what it takes to lead. For me, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” Talk of America’s decline has become commonplace, but my faith in our future has never been greater. While there are few problems in today’s world that the United States can solve alone, there are even fewer that can be solved without the United States. Everything that I have done and seen has convinced me that America remains the “indispensable nation.” I am just as convinced, however, that our leadership is not a birthright. It must be earned by every generation.
And it will be—so long as we stay true to our values and remember that, before we are Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, or any of the other labels that divide us as often as define us, we are Americans, all with a personal stake in our country.
When I began this book, shortly after leaving the State Department, I considered a number of titles. Helpfully, the Washington Post asked its readers to send in suggestions. One proposed “It Takes a World,” a fitting sequel to It Takes a Village. My favorite was “The Scrunchie Chronicles: 112 Countries and It’s Still All about My Hair.”
In the end, the title that best captured my experiences on the high wire of international diplomacy and my thoughts and feelings about what it will take to secure American leadership for the 21st century was Hard Choices.
One thing that has never been a hard choice for me is serving our country. It has been the greatest honor of my life.
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PART ONE
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A Fresh Start
1
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2008: Team of Rivals
Why on earth was I lying on the backseat of a blue minivan with tinted windows? Good question. I was trying to leave my home in Washington, D.C., without being seen by the reporters staked out front.
It was the evening of June 5, 2008, and I was heading to a secret meeting with Barack Obama—and not the one I had hoped for and expected until just a few months earlier. I had lost and he had won. There hadn’t been time yet to come to grips with that reality. But here we were. The Presidential primary campaign was historic because of his race and my gender, but it had also been grueling, heated, long, and close. I was disappointed and exhausted. I had campaigned hard to the very end, but Barack had won and now it was time to support him. The causes and people I had campaigned for, the Americans who had lost jobs and health care, who couldn’t afford gas or groceries or college, who had felt invisible to their government for the previous seven years, now depended on his becoming the forty-fourth President of the United States.
This was not going to be easy for me, or for my staff and supporters who had given it their all. In fairness, it wasn’t going to be easy for Barack and his supporters either. His campaign was as wary of me and my team as we were of them. There had been hot rhetoric and bruised feelings on both sides, and, despite a lot of pressure from his backers, I had refused to quit until the last vote was counted.
Barack and I had spoken two days earlier, late in the evening after the final primaries in Montana and South Dakota. “Let’s sit down when it makes sense for you,” he said. The next day we crossed paths backstage at a long-scheduled conference for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington. While a bit awkward, it gave our closest aides a chance to begin discussing details about a meeting. For me, that was my traveling Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin, the savvy, indefatigable, and gracious young woman who had worked for me since my time in the White House. For Obama, it was Reggie Love, the former Duke University basketball player who rarely left Barack’s side. Huma and Reggie had kept open a line of communication even during the most intense days of the campaign, a hotline of sorts, in part because after every primary, no matter who won, either Barack or I called the other to concede and offer congratulations. We exchanged calls that were cordial, sometimes even lighthearted, since at least one person on the line had reason to be in a good mood. But more than a few calls were curt, just checking the box. Football coaches meet midfield after a game, but they don’t always hug.
We needed a place away from the media spotlight to meet and talk, so I called my good friend Senator Dianne Feinstein of California to ask if we could use her Washington home. I’d been there before and thought it would work well for us to come and go without drawing attention. The ruse succeeded. I slid around in the van’s backseat as we took the sharp left turn at the end of my street onto Massachusetts Avenue, and I was on my way.
I got there first. When Barack arrived, Dianne offered us each a glass of California Chardonnay and then left us in her living room, sitting in wing chairs facing each other in front of the fireplace. Despite our clashes over the past year, we had developed a respect for each other rooted in our shared experiences. Running for President is intellectually demanding, emotionally draining, and physically taxing. But crazy as a national campaign can be, it is our democracy in action, warts and all. Seeing that up close helped us appreciate each other for having gotten into “the arena,” as Theodore Roosevelt called it, and going all the way.
By the time of our meeting I had known Barack for four years, two of which we spent debating each other. Like many Americans, I was impressed by his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Earlier that year I had supported his Senate campaign by hosting a fund-raiser at our home in Washington and attending one in Chicago. In my Senate office, to the surprise of many as time went on, I kept a photo of him, Michelle, their daughters, and me taken at that Chicago event. The photo was where I left it when I returned to the Senate full-time after the primaries. As colleagues, we had worked together on a number of shared priorities and legislation. After Hurricane Katrina, Bill and I invited Barack to join us in Houston with President George H. W. and Barbara Bush to visit evacuees from the storm and meet with emergency management officials.
We were both lawyers who got our start as grassroots activists for social justice. Early in my career I worked for the Children’s Defense Fund, registered Hispanic voters in Texas, and represented poor people as a Legal Aid attorney. Barack was a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. We had very different personal stories and experiences, but we shared the old-fashioned idea that public service is a noble endeavor, and we believed deeply in the basic bargain at the heart of the American Dream: No matter who you are or where you come from, if you work hard and play by the rules, you should have the opportunity to build a good life for yourself and your family.
But campaigns are based on highlighting differences, and ours was no exception. Despite our general agreement on most issues, we found plenty of reasons to disagre
e and exploited any opening to draw a contrast. And although I understood that high-stakes political campaigns are not for the fainthearted or thin-skinned, both Barack and I and our staffs had long lists of grievances. It was time to clear the air. We had a White House to win, and it was important for the country, and for me personally, to move on.
We stared at each other like two teenagers on an awkward first date, taking a few sips of Chardonnay. Finally Barack broke the ice by ribbing me a bit about the tough campaign I had run against him. Then he asked for my help uniting our party and winning the presidency. He wanted the two of us to appear together soon, and he wanted the Democratic National Convention in Denver to be unified and energized. He emphasized that he wanted Bill’s help as well.
I had already decided that I would agree to his request for help, but I also needed to raise some of the unpleasant moments of the past year. Neither of us had had total control over everything said or done in our campaigns, let alone by our most passionate supporters or by the political press, including a large herd of bloggers. Remarks on both sides, including some of my own, had been taken out of context, but the preposterous charge of racism against Bill was particularly painful. Barack made clear that neither he nor his team believed that accusation. As to the sexism that surfaced during the campaign, I knew that it arose from cultural and psychological attitudes about women’s roles in society, but that didn’t make it any easier for me and my supporters. In response Barack spoke movingly about his grandmother’s struggle in business and his great pride in Michelle, Malia, and Sasha and how strongly he felt they deserved full and equal rights in our society.
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