It has the ring of truth
HILLARY Rodham Clinton is well aware that a lot of people, including some who voted for her, wish she would just go away. She acknowledges this several times in What Happened, her highly anticipated memoir of the 2016 election.
The book itself is a response to those people: No way.
It’s not because Clinton didn’t experience the intensity of the rage against her. In What Happened she describes a rally she attended in West Virginia during the primaries where she hoped to mend fences with coal miners. They were alienated by a sound bite that made it appear she wanted to put them out of work.
When Clinton got to the little town of Williamson, she realised there was much more going on than just a reaction to that gaffe. “They were angry, they were loud, and they hated my guts,” she writes.
By the time Election Day rolled around, she had heard the chants of “Lock her up!” so many times – plus eventual winner Donald Trump’s promise during the second debate to do so – that, she writes, “I had no idea what to expect”.
Some of the more personal sections of What Happened describe the aftermath of her defeat. Clinton went home and tried to relax and enjoy life. She gives details on alternate-nostril breathing exercises and an excellent martini she had in Texas; she names her favourite mystery authors and TV shows.
It didn’t work. At the beginning of this road, Clinton was sure she was the best candidate out there, and she was sure she would win. Now she is obsessed with understanding what went wrong, with figuring out how and when the tide turned. She has a lot to get off her chest. And she is bursting with ideas about the road ahead.
Many readers will enjoy this journey of 600 days, seeing the details of the bizarre 2016 campaign from Clinton’s perspective and with the benefit of her thorough, minutely detailed analysis: The e-mail debacle. The “deplorables” blunder. The contributions of James Comey, Vladimir Putin, Bernie Sanders, Matt Lauer, and others. What she calls the “schizophrenic” coverage of The New York Times. She includes word clouds and charts comparing her speeches to Trump’s.
One long chapter, aptly titled “Sweating The Details”, ends with the line, “As you probably can tell by now, I love talking about this stuff.”
Many people from across the political spectrum feel that Clinton is not the person she says she is. They don’t believe she loves her husband, that she is truly dedicated to the public good, that she wasn’t hiding anything in those e-mails. This book gives us Hillary’s version of Hillary, and it has the ring of truth.