WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG
She was so certain she’d be America’s next president that on election night she went for a nice, long nap to be fresh and ready to deliver her victory speech. When Hillary Clinton awoke she found her presidential dream in tatters. In this candid interview
FIRST comes a man to switch the chairs. Then a young press officer to arrange their position. Two men in grey suits with telltale earpieces, the Secret Service, hover at the doorway. Stylists flit in, pleased the weather is overcast as it’s “kind for photos”.
It feels like the entourage of a veteran movie star or the forward party of an absolute monarch. “She’s just coming,” I’m repeatedly told, followed by, “She’s held up.” I keep getting my notebook and tape recorder ready for my interview with Hillary Clinton, to no avail.
To kill time I help the photographer set up for the shoot, making angry and devastated faces as I pretend to be Hillary – she did, after all, lose the American election to a womaniser whose candidacy she considered a joke.
And then, abruptly, the real Hillary walks in just as I’m mid-pout. Fortunately she appears not to notice and immediately moves the chairs closer. “I feel like we’ve met,” she says, warmly. This is odd, as she’s the one who’s familiar, if a bit softer, blonder and bluer-eyed in person.
At 70 she’s been on the world stage my entire adult life. First lady, wronged wife, senator, secretary of state, first woman to run for president for a main party. Even her pants suits are familiar; today she wears black trousers and a shiny blue top.
“I’ll bet you know more about my private life than you do about some of your closest friends,” she says in her new book, which is the reason she’s doing this interview. “You’ve read my emails, for heaven’s sake. What more do you need? What could I do to be ‘more real’? Dance on a table? Swear a blue streak? Break down sobbing?”
That, of course, is exactly what I want as I wait in the hotel in Chappaqua, the small, leafy town north of New York that she and Bill (71) call home. At the end of a nearby cul-de-sac stands their large white clapboard house where she’s been doing yoga, praying and downing chardonnay to drown her sorrows.
Today it’s strictly iced tea and she’s so much nicer than that brittle woman on TV that it feels mean to ask her to relive her pain. Instead of cursing or sobbing she’s keen to discuss why child refugees are going missing in Europe and the implications of last month’s Kurdish referendum.
We establish that we met in the bar of a hotel on a trip to South Korea in 2010. I was surprised then by how funny she was over gin and tonics.
Korea, of course, is very much in the news. The day before President Donald Trump (71) had prompted gasps in his first speech to the annual UN general assembly in New York by threatening to “totally destroy North Korea” and taunting its leader, Kim Jong-un, as “Rocket Man”.
You must feel you should have been the one standing there, I say. Her smile is part-grimace.
“Put aside what I’d have said, how I’d have conducted myself, I just found it hard to believe he was standing there as president and saying what he was saying,” she says. “It was a distressing speech – dark, dangerous, selfish, incoherent – and left as much room for misinterpretation and confusion as I ever heard in a speech by a president of the United States.”
Trump’s repeated use of the word “sovereignty” (21 times) in his UN speech and insistence he’d “always put America first” seemed intent on undoing all the effort she put in as secretary of state in the Obama administration to – as she sees it – restore the international reputation of the US after the damage caused by George W Bush’s War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq.
“It’s not about me,” Hillary insists. “It’s about the message that he sends to the world and what his priorities are, what he values and doesn’t.”
Of course, it is also about her. Rather than accept defeat and go quietly into the night, as many believed she should,
I was surprised by how funny Hillary was over gin and tonics
(From previous page) she’s written a 494-page angst-ridden book titled What Happened. Though she laughs a lot in our interview her bitterness resonates in every mention of the T-word – and there are many. Although a close friend of hers tells me “Hillary is utterly devastated”, she tells me she’s “developed the hide of a rhinoceros”.
IN THE ’90s she had to endure the whole world knowing about her president husband’s affair with an intern. Who can forget Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress? Then, when Hillary contested the Democratic nomination in 2008, she had to watch the job go to the cool, younger guy with far less experience. After that she had to swallow her pride to work for him. Then to run again and lose to a reality TV host who boasted of sexual abuse and tweets insults to everyone from the mayor of London to the pope.
Hillary clearly can’t get her head round the fact her fellow Americans voted for Trump. “I thought I’d be a damn good president,” she says. “I didn’t think I was going to lose.”
She admits she’d prepared for her first 100 days with binders full of policies and had written her victory speech, which she planned to give dressed in white, the colour of the suffragettes. Indeed, so confident was she that as the results started coming in on election night she went for a nap in her suite at New York’s The Peninsula hotel. She woke before midnight to find husband Bill and her team ordering in whisky and ice cream for the shock as the key states of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Iowa all fell to Trump.
By 1.35 am it was all over. The victory party was cancelled, the white suit packed away and the specially built platform in the shape of the United States under a symbolic glass ceiling a terrible embarrassment. Instead she and Bill lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Does she still wake up every morning wondering how it happened?
“Yeah,” she replies. “I’m not living it every minute of every day but every day I live it.”
Does she sometimes want to kick something? She laughs. “A friend gave me a little sign that says, ‘I do yoga, I meditate and I still want to kick somebody.’ I know that feeling.” It wasn’t just losing, she adds, but to whom. “It’s deeply troubling because if I’d lost to what I’d call a ‘normal Republican’, I’d have disagreed with them – I had deep disagreements with George W Bush but came to understand his world view. I wouldn’t have felt the same sense of real loss for our country – that we elected someone who knows so little, cares even less and is just seeking the applause of the masses. I feel a terrible sense of responsibility for not having figured out how to defeat this person. There must have been a way and I didn’t find it.”
Instead, in the early hours of 9 November 2016 she made a concession telephone call she describes as “one of the strangest moments of my life – weirdly ordinary, like calling a neighbour to say you can’t make his barbecue”.
After addressing shocked and tearful supporters the next day she and Bill drove home in silence. Desperate for distraction, she decluttered all her wardrobes, arranged photos in albums and remodelled the adjoining house they bought last year. In between she went for walks with Bill and their dogs, read all the Elena Ferrante novels and went to weepy Broadway musicals such as Les Misérables.
But it was impossible to escape. Even the wallpaper in their bedroom, yellow with pastel flowers, was a copy of that in their old bedroom in the White House.
Then there was the inauguration she and Bill were expected to attend as former president and first lady. Knowing the eyes of the world were on her, she steeled herself to “breathe out, scream later”, and tried to imagine she was in Bali. Over and over she asked herself, “Why?” Astonishingly it came down to just 77 744 votes out of 136 million cast.
“If just 40 000 people across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania had changed their minds I’d have won,” she writes.
“I thought, ‘I have to understand what happened,’ ” she tells me. “That’s why I wrote the book.”
Yet the writing process was so painful, she admits, that “at times I had to go and lie down”. Shouldn’t she just accept defeat and shut up? She gives the very idea short shrift. “I’m perfectly willing to take responsibility for all the shortcomings I can identify about myself and my campaign,” she says. “But that wasn’t the whole story. I’ve been in campaigns for decades. Nobody runs a perfect campaign. People make gaffes, missteps . . . This was of a different order in terms of forces at work and I think that’s one of the biggest threats to democracy.”
The “forces” blamed in the book include misogyny whipped up by Trump, the American electoral college system (which meant she got three million more votes than Trump yet still lost), the spreading of fake news through social media as well as other interference by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, that she describes as “more serious than Watergate”.
Most of all she blames FBI director James Comey for firing off a letter to Congress just before the election – in which he revealed the bureau had uncovered emails “pertinent” to a previously closed investigation into Hillary’s use of a private email address for classified information during her time as secretary of state. “What happened was almost a perfect storm,” she says. “I think I’d have
‘I feel a terrible sense of responsibility for not having figured out how to defeat him’
won without the Comey letter. I think the combination of the letter 11 days before the election and what the Russians did raised enough doubts right at the end among a couple of tens of thousands of people in three states to vote differently.”
Last month Facebook admitted Russians had spent at least $100 000 (now R1,35 billion) on some 3 000 ads on US issues posted on the site in the past two years. If people clicked they received a stream of provocative news stories.
“No country has attacked the US with so few consequences,” Hillary writes.
Grudges aside, what did Putin hope to achieve by supporting Trump? “I think it’s exceeded his expectations – except for the unpredictability of it,” she replies. “He thought he was backing somebody who’d immediately lift sanctions, be quiescent about Syria and Ukraine, and he’s got a lot of it.”
The Russians might have spread fake news but why did so many Americans believe it? This, it seems, is the question that haunts her. One particularly improbable story that gained traction involved Clinton and her campaign chair, John Podesta, running a child-trafficking network from a pizzeria in Washington, DC.
“Why would people believe that? Do they despise me and my politics so much they’re willing to believe the most horrible lie? How in democracies like ours [can] people believe nonsense and lies? How did we let this happen?”
Hillary not only feels she inflicted Trump on the world but that she let down women who’d thought they were going to see America’s first female president.
Whatever you might think about Hillary it was unedifying, to say the least, to see election rallies in the world’s most powerful nation chanting, “Kill the bitch!” How did that make her feel? “Sexism and misogyny are endemic in our society so of course they’re present in our politics,” she replies.
“What I found so despicable was it was stimulated by the candidate himself. In that campaign we had someone who advocated violence, who said all kinds of terrible things, who smirked at other terrible things. It was hard to believe it was happening.”
In the book she describes how it felt as Trump followed her around the stage in the second TV debate two days after the release of a tape in which he bragged about groping women. “He was literally breathing down my neck,” she writes. “My skin crawled.”
ALTHOUGH Hillary has ruled out a third presidential bid, she intends remaining active in politics. She’s setting up an organisation to recruit and train young people – particularly women – to go into politics. “I will do not-for-profit work, working with universities and writing and speaking out [against] what I see as a global backlash against women’s progress.”
Do women lead in a different way? “I think I do. I’m very comfortable in a more collegial way. I like to listen, I don’t like to brag or lie about what I can do, which I think put me at a disadvantage this time!”
After all she’s endured, would she encourage her own daughter, Chelsea (37), to enter politics?
“I don’t ever think like that because she’s an independent, incredibly accomplished person. She’s written a couple of very good books, I don’t think she’s at all interested in office.”
In the meantime, spending time with Chelsea and her two young children is one of the bonuses of losing. “Grandchildren are the best!” she exclaims.
Bill, she says, is a wonderful, hands-on grandfather to Charlotte (3) and Aidan (15 months). It’s an unexpected image – almost as unexpected as the affection with which she repeatedly refers to her husband throughout the interview. When I was a Washington correspondent in the Obama years everyone told me the Clintons’ was a marriage on paper and the couple had struck a deal that she’d stay with him in return for him helping her become president.
Hillary denies this, saying she’s “fed up with people speculating on the state of my marriage”. In the book she admits there were times she doubted its future but she chose to stay with him because “I love him with my whole heart”.
Family aside, there’s always the chardonnay and a strange relaxation technique she describes as alternate nostril breathing.
It’s time for her photos and what Hillary calls her “glam squad” appears to touch up her hair and make-up. She’s worked out she spent 600 hours – or 25 days – getting ready on the campaign trail. It’s not over. Now she’s on the promotional trail for her book.
“I’m blessed with a strong constitution and I’m resilient,” she insists. “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life looking backwards.”
The smile breaks and for a moment she looks as crestfallen as the 13-year-old Hillary who wrote to Nasa saying she wanted to be an astronaut.
“Sorry, little girl,” came the response. “We don’t accept women into the space programme.”