What Happened

by Clinton, Hillary Rodham

  The changes that will count the most are the millions and millions of changes that take place on the individual level as people reject cynicism; as they are willing to take risks to meet the challenges they see around them; as they truly begin to try to see other people as they wish to be seen and to treat them as they wish to be treated; to overcome all of the obstacles we have erected around ourselves that keep us apart from one another, fearful and afraid, not willing to build the bridges necessary; to fill that spiritual vacuum that Lee Atwater talked about.

  People in politics don’t normally talk this way. Neither do First Ladies. I soon discovered why.

  The day after my speech, my father died. I returned to Washington and found that many in the press had hated my attempt to talk unguardedly about what I thought was wrong in the country. The New York Times Magazine put me on the cover with the mocking headline “Saint Hillary.” The writer described the Texas speech as “easy, moralistic preaching couched in the gauzy and gushy wrappings of New Age jargon.”

  I learned my lesson. Over the next few years, I kept thinking about a “new ethos of individual responsibility and caring,” but I didn’t talk about it much. I read as much as I could, including a new article by Harvard professor Bob Putnam, which later became a bestselling book titled Bowling Alone. Putnam used declining membership in bowling leagues as an evocative example of the breakdown in America’s social capital and civil society—the same problems I’d been worrying about.

  I decided to write a book of my own. It would speak to these concerns in a less “gauzy and gushy” way than my Texas speech and offer a practical, kitchen-table vision for what we could do about it. The focus would be the responsibility we all had to help create a healthy, nurturing community for children. I’d call it It Takes a Village, after an African proverb that captured something I had long believed.

  I wrote about how frantic and fragmented American life had become for many people, especially stressed-out parents. Extended families didn’t provide the support they used to. Crime was still a big problem in a lot of communities, making neighborhood streets places of danger rather than support and solidarity. We were spending more time in our cars and in front of the television and less time participating in civic associations, houses of worship, unions, political parties, and, yes, bowling leagues.

  I believed we needed to find new ways to support one another. “Our challenge is to arrive at a consensus of values and a common vision of what we can do today, individually and collectively, to build strong families and communities,” I wrote. “Creating that consensus in a democracy depends on seriously considering other points of view, resisting the lure of extremist rhetoric, and balancing individual rights and freedoms with personal responsibility and mutual obligations.”

  Once again, the response from some quarters was brutal. Republicans caricatured my appeal for stronger families and communities as more big-government liberalism, even “crypto-totalitarianism” in one magazine’s words. “We are told that it takes a village, that is collective, and thus the state, to raise a child,” Bob Dole said, his voice dripping with disdain, in his acceptance speech at the 1996 Republican National Convention. “I am here to tell you it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.” The crowd went wild.

  You might think it’s a little odd for the nominee of a major political party to take time out of the most important speech of the campaign to take a swipe at a book about children written by the First Lady—and you would be right.

  It was becoming painfully clear that there was no room in our politics for the kind of discussion I wanted to have. Or maybe I was the wrong messenger. Either way, this wasn’t working.

  I found more receptive audiences overseas. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1998, I tried to explain how my “village” concept fit together with a broader global agenda of political and economic reform. I used the metaphor of a three-legged stool, which I’d come back to many times in the years that followed. An open and thriving economy was one leg. A stable and responsive democratic government was a second leg. And the third, too often undervalued in serious foreign policy discussions, was civil society. “It is the stuff of life,” I said. “It is the family, it is the religious belief and spirituality that guide us. It is the voluntary association of which we are a member. It is the art and culture that makes our spirits soar.”

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  * * *

  Another twenty years went by. Now I was running for President in a time of deep division and smoldering anger. On the news, there was a seemingly endless series of terrorist attacks and mass shootings. Young black men kept getting killed by police. A candidate for President called Mexican immigrants rapists and encouraged violence at his rallies. On the internet, women were harassed frequently, and it was impossible to have a conversation about politics without enduring a blizzard of invective.

  In late May 2015, I was campaigning in Columbia, South Carolina. In between events, we squeezed in a quick stop at the Main Street Bakery so I could get a cupcake and shake some hands. There was only one customer in the place, an older African American gentleman sitting alone by the window, engrossed in a book. I was reluctant to disturb him, but we made eye contact. I walked over to say hello and ask what he was reading.

  The man looked up and said, “First Corinthians 13.”

  I smiled. “Love is patient, love is kind,” I said, “it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.”

  His name was Donnie Hunt, and he was a minister at the First Calvary Baptist Church, getting ready for the day’s Bible study. He invited me to sit down.

  He told me how rewarding he found it to read these familiar lines again and again. “You always learn something,” he said.

  “Well, it’s alive,” I replied. “It’s the living word.”

  We sat and talked for a long time—about books, his church, the local schools, racial tensions in the community, his hope to one day visit the Holy Land. “It’s on my bucket list,” he told me.

  A few weeks later, I was back in South Carolina. This time it was Charleston. I visited a technical college and talked with apprentices hoping their training would lead to a good job and a happy life. It was a diverse group—black, white, Hispanic, Asian—all young, all incredibly hopeful. I listened to their stories and heard the pride in their voices.

  I got on a plane for Nevada and didn’t hear the news until I landed. A young white man trying to start a race war had massacred nine black worshippers at an evening Bible study at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. Emanuel means “God with us,” but the news made it hard to feel that way. Nine faithful women and men, with families and friends and so much left to do and contribute in their lives, cut down as they prayed. What is wrong with us? I thought. How did we let this happen in our country? How did we still allow guns to fall into the hands of people whose hearts were filled with hate?

  Two days later, police brought the murderer into court. One by one, grieving parents and siblings stood up and looked into his blank eyes, this young man who had taken so much from them, and they said: “I forgive you.” In its way, their acts of mercy were more stunning than his act of cruelty.

  A friend of mine sent me a note. “Think about the hearts and values of those men and women of Mother Emanuel,” he said.

  “A dozen people gathered to pray. They’re in their most intimate of communities, and a stranger who doesn’t look or dress like them joins in. They don’t judge. They don’t question. They don’t reject. They just welcome. If he’s there, he must need something: prayer, love, community, something. During their last hour, nine people of faith welcomed a stranger in prayer and fellowship.”

  My friend said it reminded him of the words of Jesus in Matthew: “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

  In a speech in San Francisco, I read my friend’s note out loud. Then I looked
up, and I said what I was feeling in that moment: “I know it’s not usual for somebody running for President to say what we need more of in this country is love and kindness. But that’s exactly what we need.”

  * * *

  * * *

  “Love and kindness” became a staple for me on the campaign trail. Never the core message of the day, never a full-fledged “new politics of meaning” call to arms, but something I’d come back to again and again, and that audiences nearly always responded to, as if they were thirsty for it. With all the rotten news on television and all the negativity in the race, a lot of people wanted to be reassured about the basic goodness of our country and our hope for a better, kinder future. When we started using the phrase “love trumps hate,” it caught on like wildfire among our supporters. There were times when I listened to huge crowds chanting those words, and for a minute I’d get swept up in the swell of positive energy and think it might really carry us all the way.

  I’ve spent many hours since the election wondering whether there was more we could have done to get that message through to an angry electorate in a cynical time. There’s been so much said and written about the economic hardships and declining life expectancy of the working-class whites who embraced Donald Trump. But why should they be more angry and resentful than the millions of blacks and Latinos who are poorer, die younger, and have to contend every day with entrenched discrimination? Why were many people who were enchanted by Barack Obama in 2008 so cynical in 2016 after he saved the economy and extended health care to millions who needed it?

  I went back to de Tocqueville. After studying the French Revolution, he wrote that revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst, but in places where expectations are most unmet. So if you’ve been raised to believe your life will unfold a certain way—say, with a steady union job that doesn’t require a college degree but does provide a middle-class income, with traditional gender roles intact and everyone speaking English—and then things don’t work out the way you expected, that’s when you get angry. It’s about loss. It’s about the sense that the future is going to be harder than the past. Fundamentally, I believe that the despair we saw in so many parts of America in 2016 grew out of the same problems that Lee Atwater and I were worried about twenty-five years ago. Too many people feel alienated from one another and from any sense of belonging or higher purpose. Anger and resentment fill that void and can overwhelm everything else: tolerance, basic standards of decency, facts, and certainly the kind of practical solutions I spent the campaign offering.

  Do I feel empathy for Trump voters? That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot. It’s complicated. It’s relatively easy to empathize with hardworking, warmhearted people who decided they couldn’t in good conscience vote for me after reading that letter from Jim Comey . . . or who don’t think any party should control the White House for more than eight years at a time . . . or who have a deeply held belief in limited government, or an overriding moral objection to abortion. I also feel sympathy for people who believed Trump’s promises and are now terrified that he’s trying to take away their health care, not make it better, and cut taxes for the superrich, not invest in infrastructure. I get it. But I have no tolerance for intolerance. None. Bullying disgusts me. I look at the people at Trump’s rallies, cheering for his hateful rants, and I wonder: Where’s their empathy and understanding? Why are they allowed to close their hearts to the striving immigrant father and the grieving black mother, or the LGBT teenager who’s bullied at school and thinking of suicide? Why doesn’t the press write think pieces about Trump voters trying to understand why most Americans rejected their candidate? Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country?

  And yet I’ve come to believe that for me personally and for our country generally, we have no choice but to try. In the spring of 2017, Pope Francis gave a TED Talk. Yes, a TED Talk. It was amazing. This is the same pope whom Donald Trump attacked on Twitter during the campaign. He called for a “revolution of tenderness.” What a phrase! He said, “We all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent ‘I,’ separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone.” He said that tenderness “means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future.”

  On all my long walks in the woods and quiet days at home, when I’m not losing my mind about something I’ve read in the newspaper or on Twitter, this is what I’m thinking about. I’m coming around to the idea that what we need more than anything at this moment in America is what you might call “radical empathy.”

  This isn’t too different from the “mutuality of respect” I hoped for at Wellesley all those years ago. I’m older now. I know how hard this is and how cruel the world can be. I’m under no illusions that we’ll start agreeing on everything or stop having fierce debates about the future of our country—nor should we. But if 2016 taught us anything, it should be that we have an urgent imperative to recapture a sense of common humanity.

  Each of us must try to walk in the shoes of people who don’t see the world the way we do. President Obama put it very well in his farewell address. He said white Americans need to acknowledge “that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the sixties; that when minority groups voice discontent, they’re not just engaging in reverse racism or practicing political correctness; that when they wage peaceful protest, they’re not demanding special treatment but the equal treatment our Founders promised.” And, for people of color, it means understanding the perspective of “the middle-aged white man who from the outside may seem like he’s got all the advantages, but who’s seen his world upended by economic, cultural, and technological change.”

  And, practicing “radical empathy” means more than trying to reach across divides of race, class, and politics, and building bridges between communities. We have to fill the emotional and spiritual voids that have opened up within communities, within families, and within ourselves as individuals. That can be even more difficult, but it’s essential. There’s grace to be found in those relationships. Grace and meaning and that elusive sense that we’re all part of something bigger than ourselves.

  I know this isn’t the language of politics, and some will roll their eyes again, just as they always have. But I believe as strongly as I ever have that this is what our country needs. It’s what we all need as human beings trying to make our way in changing times. And it’s the only way I see forward for myself. I can carry around my bitterness forever, or I can open my heart once more to love and kindness. That’s the path I choose.

  Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what is still possible to do.

  —Pope John XXIII

  Onward Together

  One day a few months after the election, I called some friends and suggested we make a pilgrimage to Hyde Park, New York. I was feeling restless and needed an emotional boost. I thought it might help to visit Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s cottage, which is one of my favorite historical sites. That’s where Eleanor went when she wanted to think, write, entertain, and plan for the future. Maybe I’d be inspired. If nothing else, it would be a nice day out with friends.

  It was a cold but clear March day when we arrived. The cottage, simple and unpretentious, was just as I remembered: the rustic “sleeping porch” with its narrow single bed, some of Eleanor’s favorite books, her radio, the portrait of her husband she kept over the mantel. A historian who joined us for the tour was kind enough to share some of Eleanor’s letters. Reading the mix of adoring fan mail and nasty, cutting diatribes was a reminder of the love-hate whiplash that women who challenge society’s expectations and live their lives in the public eye often receive.

  I’d been thinking about Eleanor a lot lately. She put up with so much vitriol, and she did it with grace and strength. People criticized her voice and appearance, the mone
y she made speaking and writing, and her advocacy for women’s rights, civil rights, and human rights. An overzealous director of the FBI put together a three-thousand-page file on her. One vituperative national columnist called her “impudent, presumptuous, and conspiratorial,” and said that “her withdrawal from public life at this time would be a fine public service.” Sound familiar?

  There were plenty of people hoping that I, too, would just disappear. But here I am. As Bill likes to say, at this point in our lives, we have more yesterdays than tomorrows. There is no way I am going to waste the time I have. I know there is more good to do, more people to help, and a whole lot of unfinished business.

  I can only hope to come close to the example Eleanor had set. After her husband died and she left the White House, in 1945, she grew even more outspoken. She became a stateswoman on the world stage, leading the global movement to write and adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the same time, she was an active player in national and local Democratic politics, fighting for the soul of her party and her country in a postwar era marked by fear and demagoguery. When she died in 1962, the New York Times obituary described how she outlasted ridicule and bitter resentment to become “the object of almost universal respect.”

  Her friends and supporters clamored for Eleanor to run for Senate, Governor, even President, but she decided instead to pour her energy into helping elect others. Her favorite was Adlai Stevenson, the Governor of Illinois who ran for President unsuccessfully in 1952 and 1956. His losses hurt. “Though one may doubt the wisdom of the people,” Eleanor wrote in a newspaper column after the second defeat to Dwight Eisenhower, “it is always best to trust that in time the wisdom of the majority of the people will be greater and more dependable and those who are in the minority must accept their defeat with grace.” She was right, of course. But I would have loved to have heard her response if Adlai had ended up winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College. She would have found just the right way to capture the absurdity of it all.