What Happened

by Clinton, Hillary Rodham

  Every Thanksgiving, it’s become our tradition since leaving the White House to host a bunch of Chelsea’s friends who don’t travel home for the holiday or who hail from other countries and want to experience an American Thanksgiving in all its glory. There are always twenty or thirty of us sitting around long folding tables decorated with leaves, pinecones, and votive candles—nothing too high blocking people’s views, so conversation moves easily back and forth. We start our meal with grace by Bill and then go around the table so everyone can say what he or she is thankful for during the past year. When it was my turn, I said I was grateful for the honor of running for President and for my family and friends who supported me.

  Back in our old house, I organized every closet in a blitz of focused energy that sent our dogs scurrying from every room I entered. I called friends and insisted they take a pair of shoes they’d once said they liked or a blouse I suspected would fit just right. I have often been that pushy friend, so most of them knew to expect it. I also organized jumbled heaps of photos into albums, threw out stacks of old magazines and disintegrating newspaper clippings, and sorted through probably a million business cards that people had handed me over the years. With every gleaming drawer and every object placed in its correct, appointed spot, I felt satisfied that I had made my world just a little more orderly.

  Some of my friends pushed me to go on vacation, and we did get away with Chelsea, Marc, and the grandkids for a few days to the Mohonk Mountain House, a favorite spot of mine in upstate New York. But after twenty months of nonstop travel for the campaign—on top of four years of globe-trotting as Secretary of State—I just wanted to sit in my quiet house and be still.

  I tried to lose myself in books. Our house is packed with them, and we keep adding more. Like my mother, I love mystery novels and can plow through one in a single sitting. Some of my recent favorites are by Louise Penny, Jacqueline Winspear, Donna Leon, and Charles Todd. I finished reading Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels and relished the story they tell about friendship among women. Our shelves are weighed down with volumes about history and politics, especially biographies of Presidents, but in those first few months, they held no interest for me whatsoever. I went back to things that have given me joy or solace in the past, such as Maya Angelou’s poetry:

  You may write me down in history

  With your bitter, twisted lies,

  You may trod me in the very dirt

  But still, like dust, I’ll rise. . . .

  You may shoot me with your words,

  You may cut me with your eyes,

  You may kill me with your hatefulness,

  But still, like air, I’ll rise.

  On raw December days, with my heart still aching, those words helped. Saying them out loud made me feel strong. I thought of Maya and her rich, powerful voice. She wouldn’t have been bowed by this, not one inch.

  I went to Broadway shows. There’s nothing like a play to make you forget your troubles for a few hours. In my experience, even a mediocre play can transport you. And show tunes are the best soundtrack for tough times. You think you’re sad? Let’s hear what Fantine from Les Misérables has to say about that!

  By far my favorite New York City performance was way off Broadway: Charlotte’s dance recital. It’s enchanting to watch a bunch of squirming, giggling two-year-olds trying to dance in unison. Some are intensely focused (that would be my granddaughter), some are trying to talk to their parents in the audience, and one girl just sat down and took off her shoes in the middle of everything. It was lovely mayhem. 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.

  Back at home, I caught up on TV shows Bill had been saving. We raced through old episodes of The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, Blue Bloods, and NCIS: Los Angeles, which Bill insists is the best of the franchise. I also finally saw the last season of Downton Abbey. That show always reminds me of the night I spent in Buckingham Palace in 2011 during President Obama’s state visit, in a room just down the hall from the balcony where the Queen waves to the crowds. It was like stepping into a fairy tale.

  On the Saturday after the election, I turned on Saturday Night Live and watched Kate McKinnon open the show with her impression of me one more time. She sat at a grand piano and played “Hallelujah,” the hauntingly beautiful song by Leonard Cohen, who had died a few days before. As she sang, it seemed like she was fighting back tears. Listening, so was I.

  I did my best, it wasn’t much,

  I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch

  I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you

  And even though it all went wrong

  I’ll stand before the lord of song

  With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah.

  At the end, Kate-as-Hillary turned to the camera and said, “I’m not giving up and neither should you.”

  * * *

  * * *

  I prayed a lot. I can almost see the cynics rolling their eyes. But pray I did, as fervently as I can remember ever doing. Novelist Anne Lamott once wrote that the three essential prayers she knows are “Help,” “Thanks,” “Wow.” You can guess which one I reached for last fall. I prayed for help to put the sadness and disappointment of my defeat behind me; to stay hopeful and openhearted rather than becoming cynical and bitter; and to find a new purpose and start a new chapter, so that the rest of my life wouldn’t be spent like Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, rattling around my house obsessing over what might have been.

  I prayed that my worst fears about Donald Trump wouldn’t be realized, and that people’s lives and America’s future would be made better, not worse, during his presidency. I’m still praying on that one, and I can use all the backup you can muster.

  I also prayed for wisdom. I had help from Bill Shillady, the United Methodist minister who co-officiated at Chelsea and Marc’s marriage and led the memorial services for my mother. During the campaign, he sent me devotionals every day, which are now collected in his book Strong for a Moment Like This. On November 9, he sent me a commentary that originally appeared in a blog by Pastor Matt Deuel. I read it many times before the week was out. This passage in particular really moved me:

  It is Friday, but Sunday is coming.

  This is not the devotional I had hoped to write. This is not the devotional you wish to receive this day.

  While Good Friday may be the starkest representation of a Friday that we have, life is filled with a lot of Fridays.

  For the disciples and Christ’s followers in the first century, Good Friday represented the day that everything fell apart. All was lost. And even though Jesus told his followers that three days later the temple would be restored . . . they betrayed, denied, mourned, fled, and hid. They did just about everything but feel good about Friday and their circumstances.

  You are experiencing a Friday. But Sunday is coming! Death will be shattered. Hope will be restored. But first, we must live through the darkness and seeming hopelessness of Friday.

  I called Reverend Bill, and we talked for a long time.

  I reread one of my favorite books, The Return of the Prodigal Son by the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen. It’s something I’ve gone back to repeatedly during difficult times in my life. You may know the parable about the younger of two sons who strays and sins but finally comes home. He’s welcomed lovingly by his father but resented by his older brother, who had stayed behind and served his father honorably while the younger brother did whatever he wanted. Maybe it’s because I’m the oldest in our family and something of a Girl Scout, but I’ve always identified with the older brother in the parable. How g
rating it must have been to see his wayward sibling welcomed back as if nothing had happened. It must have felt as if all his years of hard work and dutiful care meant nothing at all. But the father says to the older brother, “Have I not taken good care of you? Have you not been close to me? Have you not been at my side learning and working?” Those things are their own reward.

  It’s a story about unconditional love—the love of a father, and also the Father, who is always ready to love us, no matter how often we stumble and fall. It makes me think of my dad, a flinty, tight-lipped man who nevertheless always made sure I knew what I meant to him. “I won’t always like what you do,” he’d tell me, “but I will always love you.” As a kid, I would come up with elaborate hypotheses to test him. “What if I robbed a store or murdered somebody? Would you still love me then?” He’d say, “Absolutely! I’d be disappointed and sad, but I will always love you.” Once or twice last November, I thought to myself, “Well, Dad, what if I lose an election I should have won and let an unqualified bully become President of the United States? Would you still love me then?” Unconditional love is the greatest gift he gave me, and I’ve tried to give it to Chelsea and now to Charlotte and Aidan.

  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.”

  It’s up to us to make the choice to be grateful even when things aren’t going well. Nouwen calls that the “discipline of gratitude.” To me, it means not just being grateful for the good things, because that’s easy, but also to be grateful for the hard things too. To be grateful even for our flaws, because in the end, they make us stronger by giving us a chance to reach beyond our grasp.

  My task was to be grateful for the humbling experience of losing the presidential election. Humility can be such a painful virtue. In the Bible, Saint Paul reminds us that we all see through a glass darkly because of our humbling limitations. That’s why faith—the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen—requires a leap. It’s because of our limitations and imperfections that we must reach out beyond ourselves, to God and to one another.

  As the days went by, November turned into December, and that horrible, no good, very bad time came to a close, I began to rediscover my gratitude. I felt the good effects of all that walking and sleep; I was getting calmer and stronger. I found myself thinking of new projects I’d like to take on. I started accepting invitations to events that spoke to my heart: a Planned Parenthood dinner, the Women in the World summit and the Vital Voices gala celebrating women leaders and activists from around the world, and gatherings with students at Harvard, Wellesley, and Georgetown. Those rooms were full of purposeful energy. I soaked it all up and found myself thinking more about the future than the past.

  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

  Competition

  For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

  —T. S. Eliot

  Get Caught Trying

  I ran for President because I thought I’d be good at the job. I thought that of all the people who might run, I had the most relevant experience, meaningful accomplishments, and ambitious but achievable proposals, as well as the temperament to get things done in Washington.

  America was doing better than any other major country, but there was still too much inequality and too little economic growth. Our diversity was an advantage, spurring creativity and vitality, but rapid social and economic change alienated people who thought too much was happening too fast and felt left out. Our position in the world was strong, but we had to cope with a combustible mix of terrorism, globalization, and the advances in technology that fueled them both.

  I believed that my experiences in the White House, Senate, and State Department equipped me to take on these challenges. I was as prepared as anyone could be. I had ideas that would make our country stronger and life better for millions of Americans.

  In short, I thought I’d be a damn good President.

  Still, I never stopped getting asked, “Why do you want to be President? Why? But, really—why?” The implication was that there must be something else going on, some dark ambition and craving for power. Nobody psychoanalyzed Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Bernie Sanders about why they ran. It was just accepted as normal. But for me, it was regarded as inevitable—people assumed I’d run no matter what—yet somehow abnormal, demanding a profound explanation.

  After the election, I thought a lot about this. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, and we’re not used to women running for President. Maybe it’s because my style of leadership didn’t fit the times. Maybe it’s because I never explained myself as bluntly as this.

  So let me start from the beginning and tell you how and why I made the decision to run.

  * * *

  * * *

  “You might lose,” Bill told me. “I know,” I said. “I might lose.”

  The problems started with history. It was exceedingly difficult for either party to hold on to the White House for more than eight years in a row. In the modern era, it had happened only once, when George H. W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1989. No nonincumbent Democrat had run successfully to succeed another two-termer since Vice President Martin Van Buren won in 1836, succeeding Andrew Jackson.

  There was still a lot of pent-up anger and resentment left over from the financial crash of 2008–2009, and while that had happened on the Republicans’ watch, Democrats had presided over a recovery that had been too slow.

  There also was “Clinton fatigue” to consider. Pundits were already complaining that the election would be an exhausting contest between two familiar dynasties: the Clintons and the Bushes.

  Then there was the matter of my gender. No woman had ever won the nomination of a major party in the history of our country, let alone the presidency. It’s easy to lose sight of how momentous that is, but when you stop to consider what it means and the possible reasons behind it, it’s profoundly sobering.

  It was a chilly day in autumn 2014, and Bill and I had been having the same conversation for months now. Should I run for President for a second time? Lots of talented people were ready to jump on board with my campaign if I ran. The press and most of the political class assumed I was already running. Some of them were so convinced by the caricature of me as a power-hungry woman that they couldn’t imagine me doing anything else. I, on the other hand, could imagine lots of different paths for myself.

  I already knew how it felt to lose. Until you experience it, it’s hard to comprehend the ache in your gut when you see things going wrong and can’t figure out how to fix them; the sharp blow when the results finally come in; the disappointment written on the faces of your friends and supporters. Political campaigns are massive enterprises with thousands of people working together toward a common goal, but in the end, it’s intensely personal, even lonely. It’s just your name on the ballot. You’re embraced or repudiated all by yourself.

  The race against Barack Obama in 2008 was close and hard-fought. By the end, he led in the all-important delegate count, but our popular vote totals were less than one-tenth of a percent apart. That made it all the more painful to accept defeat and muster up the good cheer to campaign vigorously for him. The saving grace was the respect I had for Barack and my belief that he would be a good President who would do everything he could to advance the values we both shared. That made it a lot easier.

  Did I want to put myself through a grueling race all over again?

  My life after leaving politic
s had turned out to be pretty great. I had joined Bill and Chelsea as a new board member of the Clinton Foundation, which Bill had turned into a major global philanthropy after leaving office. This allowed me to pursue my own passions and have an impact without all the bureaucracy and petty squabbles of Washington. I admired what Bill had built, and I loved that Chelsea had decided to bring her knowledge of public health and her private sector experience to the foundation to improve its management, transparency, and performance after a period of rapid growth.

  At the 2002 International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Bill had a conversation with Nelson Mandela about the urgent need to lower the price of HIV/AIDS drugs in Africa and across the world. Bill figured he was well positioned to help, so he began negotiating agreements with drugmakers and governments to lower medicine prices dramatically and to raise the money to pay for it. It worked. More than 11.5 million people in more than seventy countries now have access to cheaper HIV/AIDS treatment. Right now, out of everyone being kept alive by these drugs in developing countries around the world, more than half the adults and 75 percent of the children are benefiting from the Clinton Foundation’s work.

  After recovering from heart-bypass surgery in 2004, Bill joined with the American Heart Association to start the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which has helped more than twenty million students in more than thirty-five thousand American schools enjoy healthier food and more physical activity. The Alliance made agreements with major beverage companies to reduce calories in drinks available in schools by 90 percent, and also partnered with Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative.