The foundation is also fighting the opioid epidemic in the United States; helping more than 150,000 small farmers in Africa increase their incomes; and bringing clean energy to island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific.
In 2005, Bill started the Clinton Global Initiative, a new model of philanthropy for the twenty-first century that brought together leaders from business, government, and the nonprofit sector to make concrete commitments for action on everything from distributing clean water, to improving energy efficiency, to providing hearing aids to deaf children. The annual conferences highlighted the most exciting commitments and their results. No one could just show up and talk; you had to actually do something. After twelve years, CGI members, and their affiliates in CGI America and CGI International, had made more than 3,600 commitments, which have improved the lives of more than 435 million people in more than 180 countries.
Among CGI’s greatest hits were sending 500 tons of medical supplies and equipment to West Africa for those fighting the Ebola epidemic, and helping raise $500 million to support small businesses, farms, schools, and health care in Haiti. In the United States, at no expense to taxpayers, CGI helped launch an amazing partnership led by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to meet President Obama’s goal of 100,000 new STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teachers. And it supported the creation of America’s largest private infrastructure fund—$16.5 billion invested by public employee pension funds, led by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU)—which has created 100,000 jobs and provided skills training to a quarter-million workers every year.
When I joined the foundation in 2013, I teamed up with Melinda Gates and the Gates Foundation to launch an initiative called No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project to advance rights and opportunities for women and girls around the world. I also created a program called Too Small to Fail to encourage reading, talking, and singing to infants and toddlers to help their brains develop and build vocabulary. And Chelsea and I started a network of leading wildlife conservation organizations to protect the endangered African elephants from poachers. None of these programs had to poll well or fit on a bumper sticker. They just had to make a positive, measurable difference in the world. After years in the political trenches, that was both refreshing and rewarding.
I knew from experience that if I ran for President again, everything Bill and I had ever touched would be subject to scrutiny and attack—including the foundation. That was a concern, but I never imagined that this widely respected global charity would be as savagely smeared and attacked as it was. For years, the foundation and CGI had been supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. Independent philanthropy watchdogs CharityWatch, GuideStar, and Charity Navigator gave the Clinton Foundation top marks for reducing overhead and having a measurable positive impact. CharityWatch gave it an A, Charity Navigator gave it four stars, and GuideStar rated it platinum. But none of that stopped brutal partisan attacks from raining down during the campaign.
I have written about the foundation at some length here because a recent analysis published in the Columbia Journalism Review showed that during the campaign there was twice as much written about the Clinton Foundation as there was on any of the Trump scandals, and nearly all of it was negative. That gets to me. As Daniel Borochoff, the founder of CharityWatch, put it, “If Hillary Clinton wasn’t running for President, the Clinton Foundation would be seen as one of the great humanitarian charities of our generation.” I believe that’s exactly what it is and what it will continue to be, and I was proud to be a part of it.
Beyond my work with the foundation, I also spent time in 2013 and 2014 writing a book called Hard Choices about my experiences as Secretary of State. The book was long—more than six hundred pages about foreign policy!—but I still had more stories left on the cutting room floor and a lot more things I wanted to say. If I didn’t run for President, there could be more books to write. Maybe I could teach and spend time with students.
What’s more, like many former government officials, I found that organizations and companies wanted me to come talk to them about my experiences and share my thoughts on the world—and they’d pay me a pretty penny to do it. I continued giving many speeches without pay, but I liked that there was a way for me to earn a very good living without working for any one company or sitting on any boards. It was also a chance to meet interesting people.
I spoke to audiences from a wide range of fields: travel agents and auto dealers, doctors and tech entrepreneurs, grocers and summer camp counselors. I also spoke to bankers. Usually I told stories from my time as Secretary of State and answered questions about global hot spots. I must have recounted the behind-the-scenes story of the raid that brought Osama bin Laden to justice at least a hundred times. Sometimes I talked about the importance of creating more opportunities for women, both around the world and in corporate America. I rarely got partisan. What I had to say was interesting to my audiences, but it wasn’t especially newsworthy. Many of the organizations wanted the speeches to be private, and I respected that: they were paying for a unique experience. That allowed me to be candid about my impressions of world leaders who might have been offended if they heard. (I’m talking about you, Vladimir.)
Later, my opponents spun wild tales about what terrible things I must have said behind closed doors and how as President I would be forever in the pocket of the shadowy bankers who had paid my speaking fees. I should have seen that coming. Given my record of independence in the Senate—especially my early warnings about the mortgage crisis, my votes against the Bush tax cuts, and my positions in favor of financial regulation, including closing the tax loophole for hedge funds known as carried interest—this didn’t seem to be a credible attack. I didn’t think many Americans would believe that I’d sell a lifetime of principle and advocacy for any price. When you know why you’re doing something and you know there’s nothing more to it and certainly nothing sinister, it’s easy to assume that others will see it the same way. That was a mistake. Just because many former government officials have been paid large fees to give speeches, I shouldn’t have assumed it would be okay for me to do it. Especially after the financial crisis of 2008–2009, I should have realized it would be bad “optics” and stayed away from anything having to do with Wall Street. I didn’t. That’s on me.
This is one of the mistakes I made that you’ll read about in this book. I’ve tried to give an honest accounting of when I got it wrong, where I fell short, and what I wish I could go back and do differently. This isn’t easy or fun. My mistakes burn me up inside. But as one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, says, while our mistakes make us want to cry, the world doesn’t need more of that.
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. When you’re in politics, this gets more complicated. We all want—and the political press demands—a “story line,” which tends to cast people as either saints or sinners. You’re either revered or reviled. And there’s no juicier political story than the saint who gets unmasked as a sinner. A two-dimensional cartoon is easier to digest than a fully formed person.
For a candidate, a leader, or anyone, really, the question is not “Are you flawed?” It’s “What do you do about your flaws?” Do you learn from your mistakes so you can do and be better in the future? Or do you reject the hard work of self-improvement and instead tear others down so you can assert they’re as bad or worse than you are?
I’ve always tried to do the former. And, by and large, so has our country, with our long march toward a more perfect union.
But Donald Trump does the latter. Instead of admitting mistakes, he lashes out, demeans, and insults others—often projecting by accusing others of doing wha
t he himself has done or is about to do. So if he knows that the Donald J. Trump Foundation is little more than a personal piggy bank, he’ll turn around and accuse, with no evidence, the well-respected Clinton Foundation of being corrupt. There’s a method to this madness. For Trump, if everyone’s down in the mud with him, then he’s no dirtier than anyone else. He doesn’t have to do better if everyone else does worse. I think that’s why he seems to relish humiliating people around him. And it’s why he must have been delighted when Marco Rubio tried to match him in slinging crude personal insults during the primaries. Of course, it hurt Rubio much more than Trump. As Bill likes to say, never wrestle a pig in the mud. They have cloven hooves, which give them superior traction, and they love getting dirty. Sadly, Trump’s strategy works. When people start believing that all politicians are liars and crooks, the truly corrupt escape scrutiny, and cynicism grows.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to 2014, and deciding to run for President.
We’ve talked about my work at the foundation, my book, and my speeches, but by far the best part about my life after government—and probably the most compelling reason not to run—was being a grandmother. I loved it even more than I’d expected. Bill and I found ourselves looking for any excuse to drive down to Manhattan so we could drop by Chelsea and Marc’s and see little Charlotte, who was born that September. We became the world’s most enthusiastic babysitters, book readers, and playmates. We were doubly blessed when Aidan arrived in June 2016.
Running for President again would mean putting all this—my wonderful new life—on hold and climbing back on the high wire of national politics. I wasn’t sure I was ready to do that.
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My family was incredibly supportive. If I wanted to run, they would be there for me 100 percent. Chelsea had campaigned relentlessly in 2008, becoming a superb surrogate and sounding board for me. Bill knows more than almost anyone alive about what it takes to be President. He was convinced I was the best person for the job and strenuously denied that this was just a husband’s love talking.
Still, the obstacles were daunting. Yes, I had left the State Department with some of the highest approval ratings of anyone in public life—one poll from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News in January 2013 put me at 69 percent. I was also the most admired woman in the world, according to the annual Gallup poll. Ah, the good old days.
But I knew that my high approval rating was partly because Republicans had been willing to work with me when I was Secretary and praised my service. They had trained their fire on President Obama and largely left me alone. Also, the press corps covering me in those years genuinely cared about the work of diplomacy and the issues I dealt with, which meant the news coverage of my work was substantive and, for the most part, accurate. I knew it would be different if I ran for President again. And as Bill said—and history supported—the country’s perennial desire for change would make it hard for any Democrat to win, especially one like me who was closely tied to the current administration.
In 2014, President Obama’s approval rating was stuck in the low 40s. Despite the administration’s best efforts, the economic recovery was still anemic, with wages and real incomes stagnating for most Americans. The administration had botched the rollout of the new health care marketplaces, a centerpiece of the President’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. A new terrorist group, ISIS, was seizing territory in Iraq and Syria and beheading civilians live on the internet. There was even a terrifying Ebola epidemic in Africa that many Americans worried would jump to the United States. Thankfully, the Obama administration reacted swiftly to shore up our public health defenses and support Ebola response efforts in West Africa. Despite the facts, conservative partisans warned breathlessly—and with zero evidence—that ISIS terrorists would sneak across our southern border and bring Ebola with them. It was a right-wing conspiracy theory trifecta.
In the run-up to the 2014 midterms, Bill and I both campaigned hard across the country for endangered Democratic incumbents and competitive challengers. Late at night, we’d compare notes about the anger, resentment, and cynicism we were seeing, and the vicious Republican attacks fueling it.
For years, GOP leaders had stoked the public’s fears and disappointments. They were willing to sabotage the government in order to block President Obama’s agenda. For them, dysfunction wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. They knew that the worse Washington looked, the more voters would reject the idea that government could ever be an effective force for progress. They could stop most good things from happening and then be rewarded because nothing good was happening. When something good did happen, such as expanding health care, they would focus on tearing it down, rather than making it better. With many of their voters getting their news from partisan sources, they had found a way to be consistently rewarded for creating the gridlock voters say they hate.
The success of this strategy was becoming evident. In 2014, in Georgia and North Carolina, I campaigned for two smart, talented, independent-minded candidates who should have had a good chance to win: Michelle Nunn and Senator Kay Hagan. Both races were tight up until the end. But days before the election, a savvy Georgia political observer confided to me that he’d seen private polling that showed Nunn and other Democrats cratering. Republicans were using fears about ISIS and Ebola to scare people and raise questions about whether a Democrat, especially a woman, could really be tough enough on national security.
In several states, Republicans ran an ad mixing images of Ebola responders in hazmat suits with photos of President Obama playing golf. It’s ironic to remember that now, with Donald Trump spending about 20 percent of his new presidency at his own luxury golf clubs. I sometimes wonder: If you add together his time spent on golf, Twitter, and cable news, what’s left?
Bill told me about a particularly troubling conversation he had with an old friend who lived up in the Ozarks of northern Arkansas. He had become an endangered species in Arkansas—a still-loyal, progressive Democrat. Bill called and asked our friend if he thought two-term Senator Mark Pryor could be reelected. Mark was a moderate Democrat with a golden name. (His father, David, was an Arkansas legend, having served as Congressman, Governor, and Senator.) Mark had voted for Obamacare because he believed everyone deserved the high-quality health care he received when he suffered from cancer as a young man. Our friend said he didn’t know, and he and Bill agreed the best way to find out was to visit a certain country store deep in the Ozarks where a couple hundred people regularly came out of the woods to buy food and talk politics.
When our friend got back, he called Bill and told him what the store owner had said: “You know, I always supported Clinton, and I like Mark Pryor a lot. He’s a good man and fair to everyone. But we’re going to give Congress to the Republicans.” The store owner was no fool. He knew the Republicans wouldn’t do anything for him and his neighbors. But he thought the Democrats hadn’t done anything, either. “And at least the Republicans won’t do anything to us,” he said. “The Democrats want to take away my gun and make me go to a gay wedding.”
Sure enough, Mark lost big on Election Day to Tom Cotton, one of the most right-wing members of Congress. It wasn’t that voters were turning away from the policies Mark and other Democrats had championed—in fact, in the same election, they passed an increase in the state’s minimum wage. But the politics of cultural identity and resentment were overwhelming evidence, reason, and personal experience. It seemed like “Brexit” had come to America even before the vote in the United Kingdom, and it didn’t bode well for 2016. Our party might have won the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, but the political landscape for the 2016 race was shaping up to be extremely challenging.
As if all this wasn’t enough to worry about, there was also the simple, inescapable fact that I was turning sixty-eight years old. If I ran and won, I would be the oldest President since Reagan. I suspected there’d be waves of rum
or-mongering about my health—and everything else in my life. It would be invasive, crass, and insidious. But contrary to persistent rumors made up and spread by the right-wing media, my health was excellent. I had recovered fully from the concussion I suffered in late 2012. And the whole world could see I had no trouble keeping up a punishing travel schedule. I admired the likes of Diana Nyad, who at the age of sixty-four became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. When she finally emerged back on dry land, she offered three pieces of advice: Never ever give up. You’re never too old to chase your dreams. And even if something looks like a solitary sport, it’s a team effort. Words to live by!
Still, is this how I wanted to spend my time? Did I really want to put myself back in front of the firing squad of national politics for years on end, first in the campaign and then, hopefully, in the White House? Some of my dearest friends—including my longtime advisors and former chiefs of staff in the White House and the State Department, Maggie Williams and Cheryl Mills—told me I would be crazy to do it. Plenty of other people in my position had passed up the chance to run: everyone from General Colin Powell, to Mike Bloomberg, to New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who came so close to running, he had an airplane waiting on the tarmac to take him to New Hampshire when he finally decided “no.”
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So why did I do it?
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. We had to build an economy that worked for everyone and an inclusive society that respected everyone. We had to take on serious national security threats. These were issues already on my mind all the time, and they would all require a strong, qualified President. I knew I would make the most of every minute. Once I started thinking about it that way, I couldn’t stop.
What Happened Page 5