What Happened

HILLARY Clinton was surrounded by women the moment she lost the 2016 presidential election. “Things had been going too well for too long” when, on the morning of October 28, her spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri approached her and long-time aide Huma Abedin and said: Jim Comey. “I immediately knew it was bad,” Clinton writes in her memoir

There was a moment of mournful sisterhood as Abedin learned that the FBI was probing her husband Anthony Weiner’s computer, ensuring that the final week of the election was going to be about Clinton’s e-mail server. “This man is going to be the death of me,” Abedin said. Clinton gave her a hug.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first female presidential nominee of a major party – defeated by a man who even Republicans called a sexist – is, as she points out in the book, the frequent answer to Gallup’s question of who is the “most admired woman in America”? Nonetheless, she was unable to break the presidential glass ceiling. Locked out of the White House, she offers solidarity with Senator Elizabeth Warren and other women who are called shrill, or unlikeable, because they want to climb the same ladder as men.

“I wish so badly we were a country where a candidate who said, ‘My story is the story of a life shaped by and devoted to the movement for women’s liberation’ would be cheered, not jeered,” she writes. “But that’s not who we are.”

Her book takes on directly what has been muttered for years: that Clinton was often treated poorly simply because she was a woman.

It will be up to other woman to carry on the battle, Clinton writes. She’s done with politics. Much of is a meditation on powerful women, a test-run for the speeches Clinton will give for the rest of her life. “I’ve seen women CEOs serve coffee at meetings,” she writes, “women heads of state walk tissues over to a sneezing staffer.”

But still Clinton cannot let that Comey moment go. She quotes Fox News clips, legal analysis and congressional testimony to conclude that she was wronged. She takes subtle pleasure in Comey being fired by Donald Trump six months later. “It wasn’t healthy or productive,” she writes, “to dwell on the ways I felt I’d been shivved.”

It’s a perfect word, “shivved”. The Hillary Clinton of this bitter memoir resembles the shrunken, beaten Richard Nixon who told David Frost that he gave his enemies a sword and “they twisted it with relish”. Again and again she blames herself for losing, apologising for her “dumb” e-mail management, for giving paid speeches to banks, for saying she’d put coal miners “out of business”.

“I regret handing Trump a political gift with my ‘deplorables’ comment,” she writes. Then she lays out studies on voter biases from the University of Chicago and the Voter Study Group. Clinton clarifies: “Too many of Trump’s core supporters do hold views that I find – there’s no other word for it – deplorable.”

is a raw and bracing book. There has never been a candidate memoir like this, but there has never been a defeated contender like Clinton.

“One thing I’ve learned is how easy it is for some people to say horrible things about me when I’m not around, but how hard it is for them to look me in the eye and say it to my face.” – Washinton Post Show That Never Ends, The