CHAPTER 9 THE CONTROVERSIES THAT FOLLOWED HER — WHITEWATER, VINCE FOSTER, BENGHAZI, EMAILS, AND WHAT THE INVESTIGATIONS ACTUALLY FOUND
For decades, almost every major chapter of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s public life seemed to acquire a second story.
There was the story of what she was doing.
Then there was the controversy surrounding it.
Health-care reform became a controversy over power and secrecy.
An old Arkansas real-estate investment became Whitewater.
The tragic death of a White House lawyer became the foundation for conspiracy theories.
The Benghazi attack became years of congressional investigation.
A private email system became an FBI investigation during a presidential campaign.
The Clinton Foundation became the subject of questions about donors, access, influence, and conflicts of interest.
Eventually, Americans reached a strange point.
Some believed almost every accusation involving Hillary Clinton.
Others dismissed almost every accusation as partisan warfare.
Neither approach is sufficient for biography.
History demands something more difficult.
Evidence.
So this chapter begins with a rule:
An allegation is not a fact merely because it was repeated thousands of times.
But an allegation does not become meaningless merely because it was made by a political opponent.
We have to ask what investigators actually found.
And to understand how Hillary Clinton became one of the most investigated political figures of her generation, we have to return to Arkansas.
WHITEWATER
Long before Bill Clinton became president, Bill and Hillary Clinton invested in an Arkansas real-estate venture with James and Susan McDougal.
The venture was called the Whitewater Development Corporation.
It involved land in the Ozarks.
The investment itself might have remained an obscure episode in the financial lives of an Arkansas political couple.
Instead, after Bill Clinton reached the presidency, questions surrounding Whitewater grew into a national controversy.
The questions expanded beyond whether the Clintons had made or lost money.
Investigators examined relationships involving the McDougals, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, Hillary’s legal work, financial transactions, records, and statements made during investigations.
Congress investigated.
Federal investigators investigated.
An independent counsel investigated.
The investigation expanded.
People around the Clintons were prosecuted for crimes connected to various Arkansas financial matters.
James McDougal was convicted.
Susan McDougal was convicted on several fraud-related counts.
Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker was also convicted.
Those were real criminal cases.
But another question remained:
What had investigators established against Hillary Clinton herself?
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ASSOCIATION AND CRIMINAL LIABILITY
This distinction is essential.
A political scandal can involve people who commit crimes without proving that every person connected to the scandal committed one.
Investigators examined whether Hillary had committed offenses including perjury, false statements, or obstruction of justice.
They did not ultimately prosecute her.
Years later, a federal appeals court summarizing the publicly known outcome of the Independent Counsel investigation noted that investigators concluded there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hillary Clinton had committed a federal criminal offense.
That does not mean every question raised during Whitewater was imaginary.
It means something more precise.
After years of investigation, prosecutors did not establish a criminal case against Hillary Clinton sufficient to bring charges.
That distinction was often lost in politics.
To supporters, “no charges” became proof that Whitewater had been a partisan obsession.
To opponents, the absence of prosecution did not erase questions they had about Hillary’s conduct and explanations.
And Whitewater had already accomplished something politically important regardless of prosecution.
It helped establish a pattern.
From then on, whenever a new Clinton controversy appeared, many Americans interpreted it through everything that had come before.
Suspicion accumulated.
So did defensiveness.
Then another name entered the story.
Vince Foster.
VINCE FOSTER
Vincent Foster was a longtime friend and colleague of the Clintons from Arkansas.
He had worked with Hillary at the Rose Law Firm.
After Bill Clinton became president, Foster joined the White House as Deputy Counsel.
Washington was not easy on him.
The new administration quickly became engulfed in controversy, including the firing of White House Travel Office employees.
Foster came under pressure.
Then, on July 20, 1993, he was found dead in Fort Marcy Park in Virginia.
He had suffered a fatal gunshot wound.
The death of a senior White House official was shocking.
And because Foster had been close to the Clintons, suspicions began almost immediately.
Was it really suicide?
Had he known something dangerous?
Had he been killed?
Had his body been moved?
Were the Clintons somehow involved?
The theories multiplied.
But theories are not findings.
WHAT THE INVESTIGATIONS FOUND
Foster’s death was examined repeatedly.
Official investigations concluded that he died by suicide.
Independent Counsel Robert Fiske reached that conclusion.
Later, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr conducted another investigation and likewise concluded that Foster had committed suicide.
Yet the conspiracy theories survived.
This is an important case study in how political mythology operates.
An official conclusion does not always end suspicion.
Sometimes repeated investigation actually strengthens conspiracy thinking.
People reason:
Why investigate so many times unless something is being hidden?
But that logic can become circular.
An investigation is demanded because people are suspicious.
Then the existence of the investigation itself becomes evidence for further suspicion.
Eventually, no finding can satisfy the theory.
A conclusion of suicide becomes evidence of a cover-up.
Contradictory evidence becomes evidence that evidence was manipulated.
The theory becomes impossible to disprove because every attempt to disprove it is absorbed into the theory itself.
That is not historical method.
Historical method requires evidence capable of changing our conclusion.
In the case of Vince Foster, multiple official investigations concluded suicide.
There is no established evidence that Hillary Clinton murdered Foster or arranged his death.
That claim belongs to conspiracy theory, not established history.
BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN EVERY RELATED QUESTION VANISHED
There were legitimate controversies involving the handling of Foster’s office, documents, and the White House response.
Congressional investigators criticized aspects of how access to materials was handled after Foster’s death.
Those questions should not be erased simply because the murder conspiracy lacks evidentiary support.
This distinction matters.
It is possible for poor judgment, bureaucratic conflict, excessive secrecy, political defensiveness, and conspiracy theories to exist around the same event.
Rejecting an unsupported murder accusation does not require pretending that every action surrounding the episode was handled perfectly.
That principle will become important again.
Because nearly two decades later, another tragedy involving American officials would produce another enormous political controversy.
Benghazi.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2012
Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
Libya was unstable following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.
Armed groups operated in the country.
Security conditions were dangerous.
Then American facilities in Benghazi were attacked.
Four Americans died:
Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
Sean Smith.
Tyrone Woods.
Glen Doherty.
Their deaths were not political abstractions.
They were human losses.
But almost immediately, the attack became part of American politics.
Questions were legitimate.
Was security sufficient?
Had requests for additional security been handled properly?
What intelligence existed?
Could military assistance have arrived in time?
Why did early public explanations of the attack change?
What did Hillary know?
What did President Obama know?
What happened inside the State Department?
Investigations followed.
And then more investigations.
THE ACCOUNTABILITY REVIEW BOARD
The State Department’s independent Accountability Review Board examined the attack.
Its conclusions were serious.
The board identified systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies within two State Department bureaus.
Security at the Benghazi mission was inadequate for the threat environment.
Those were not inventions by Hillary’s political opponents.
They were official findings.
As Secretary of State, Hillary accepted responsibility for the department.
But another set of claims circulated far beyond those findings.
One particularly explosive accusation suggested that American forces had been available to save the men in Benghazi but had been deliberately ordered not to act.
The evidence did not establish that Hillary Clinton personally issued such an order.
The Accountability Review Board concluded that there had not been enough time for U.S. military forces to make a difference in the outcome.
The distinction was enormous.
Security failures before the attack were real.
That did not establish every allegation made afterward.
CONGRESS INVESTIGATES
Congress examined Benghazi repeatedly.
Then, in 2014, the House created a Select Committee specifically devoted to investigating the attack.
Republican Representative Trey Gowdy chaired it.
The committee conducted interviews, obtained documents, examined government actions, and eventually produced a lengthy final report.
Democrats on the committee issued their own report and strongly disputed Republican interpretations.
The investigation itself became politically controversial, particularly because it unfolded while Hillary was preparing for and running in the 2016 presidential election.
Then came October 22, 2015.
Hillary Clinton appeared before the House Select Committee.
The hearing lasted approximately eleven hours.
Television cameras carried the confrontation across the country.
Members questioned Hillary about security decisions, Libya policy, communications, and the administration’s response.
For opponents, Benghazi represented a test of Hillary’s judgment and accountability.
For supporters, the hearing demonstrated how thoroughly the issue had become politicized.
But after years of investigation, the committee did not establish the most dramatic accusation sometimes made against Hillary:
That she had deliberately abandoned Americans in Benghazi or personally ordered rescuers not to save them.
Again, that does not mean nothing went wrong.
Something had gone terribly wrong.
Four Americans were dead.
Security deficiencies were documented.
The question is not whether failures existed.
They did.
The question is what evidence connects a particular person to a particular failure.
That is where political rhetoric and historical evidence must separate.
THEN BENGHAZI LED TO SOMETHING ELSE
Investigators examining Hillary’s records discovered something politically explosive.
She had used a private email account and private server while Secretary of State.
Suddenly the story changed.
Benghazi remained important.
But the email controversy would become even more consequential to Hillary’s presidential campaign.
THE SERVER
During her four years as Secretary of State, Hillary used a personal email system for both personal and government-related communications rather than relying exclusively on an official State Department email account.
That arrangement created multiple questions.
Federal records.
Cybersecurity.
Classified information.
Preservation.
Transparency.
Government procedure.
Hillary said convenience had been a reason for using one device and account arrangement.
She later acknowledged that using separate accounts would have been better.
But by then, the issue had moved beyond political embarrassment.
The FBI was investigating.
WHAT THE FBI FOUND
On July 5, 2016, FBI Director James Comey publicly described the bureau’s findings.
His statement was devastating in one sense and relieving for Hillary in another.
Comey said investigators had not found clear evidence that Hillary or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing classified information.
But he also said they had been “extremely careless” in handling highly sensitive information.
The FBI found email chains containing information that was classified at the time they were sent or received, including highly classified material.
Comey also said that although the FBI found no direct evidence that Hillary’s personal email domain had been successfully hacked, investigators assessed that hostile actors potentially could have gained access, particularly given her use of personal email while traveling abroad.
Then came the central legal conclusion.
The FBI did not recommend criminal charges.
Comey explained that investigators could not identify a comparable case supporting prosecution on those facts and noted that prior prosecutions generally involved aggravating circumstances such as intentional mishandling, enormous quantities of exposed material, disloyalty, or obstruction.
The FBI said it did not see those factors in Hillary’s case.
So the historical record requires us to hold two facts together.
The FBI sharply criticized Hillary Clinton’s handling of sensitive information.
The FBI did not recommend prosecuting her.
Neither fact cancels the other.
“BUT SHE WAS NEVER CHARGED”
Supporters sometimes emphasized only the second half.
No charges.
Opponents sometimes emphasized only the first.
Extremely careless.
Both were true.
The legal standard for criminal prosecution is not identical to the standard voters use when evaluating judgment.
A voter could reasonably conclude that Hillary’s email practices reflected poor judgment without claiming she committed a prosecutable crime.
Another voter could reasonably conclude that the controversy was politically exaggerated while still acknowledging that the email arrangement had been a mistake.
That is what nuance looks like.
Politics rarely rewards it.
THE OCTOBER SURPRISE
Then the email controversy returned at the worst possible moment for Hillary.
October 28, 2016.
Eleven days before the presidential election.
James Comey informed congressional leaders that the FBI had learned of additional emails potentially relevant to the investigation.
The emails had been discovered in connection with another investigation.
The announcement exploded into the presidential race.
Donald Trump immediately used it against Hillary.
News organizations covered it intensively.
Voters who thought the email investigation was finished suddenly heard that the FBI was reviewing emails again.
Then, on November 6—two days before the election—Comey informed Congress that the review had not changed the FBI’s previous conclusion.
No charges were recommended.
But politically, the sequence could not be reversed.
The election arrived.
Hillary lost.
Debate over Comey’s decisions would continue for years.
But the email story contained another misunderstanding that deserves clarification.
CLASSIFIED THEN OR CLASSIFIED LATER?
Some defenders of Hillary argued that the disputed emails had only been classified retroactively.
The reality was more complicated.
Comey’s statement said the FBI found email chains containing information that was classified at the time the messages were sent or received.
At the same time, only a very small number bore markings indicating classified information.
That distinction became part of the argument.
The Clinton team emphasized issues involving markings and retroactive classification.
Critics emphasized that government officials have obligations to protect classified information even when material is not properly marked.
Again, the full record was less convenient than either political slogan.
WAS THE SERVER HACKED?
Another frequent claim involved hacking.
Comey said the FBI found no direct evidence that Hillary’s personal email domain had been successfully hacked.
But he did not declare the system unquestionably secure.
The FBI assessed that hostile actors had compromised private commercial email accounts belonging to people with whom Hillary communicated.
And because of the nature of sophisticated cyber operations, investigators acknowledged that a successful intrusion might not necessarily leave evidence they could later identify.
Therefore:
“We found proof that foreign intelligence hacked Hillary’s server” goes beyond what the FBI established.
But:
“The FBI proved nobody could possibly have accessed it” also goes beyond what the FBI established.
History often lives in that uncomfortable middle.
THE CLINTON FOUNDATION
Then there was the Clinton Foundation.
Bill Clinton established the foundation after leaving the presidency.
Its work expanded internationally in areas including global health, economic development, climate-related initiatives, and other philanthropic projects.
Hillary became associated with the foundation during periods when she was not serving in government.
Chelsea also became deeply involved.
The foundation raised large amounts of money from donors around the world.
And that created a political vulnerability.
Some donors were foreign governments.
Others were wealthy individuals or corporations.
Some had interests involving the United States government.
Critics asked an obvious question:
Could donations purchase influence?
ACCESS IS NOT AUTOMATICALLY A QUID PRO QUO
This issue requires another careful distinction.
Political and charitable networks often create access.
Wealthy donors know powerful people.
Former presidents know business leaders.
Government officials meet representatives of major organizations.
Those relationships can create ethical concerns even when no crime occurs.
But proving a criminal quid pro quo requires something more than showing that a donor met or communicated with an official.
It requires evidence connecting something of value to a specific official act or corrupt agreement.
Public reporting and investigations generated substantial scrutiny of Clinton Foundation relationships.
Critics argued that the arrangements created unacceptable appearances of conflicts of interest.
Supporters pointed to the foundation’s charitable work and argued that accusations of corrupt exchanges were not substantiated.
The controversy mattered.
But again, the strongest versions of political accusation often exceeded what was proven.
THE PROBLEM OF APPEARANCE
This leads to one of the recurring themes of Hillary Clinton’s career.
Legality and political wisdom are not identical.
Something can be legal and still look terrible.
Something can comply with one rule while violating the spirit voters expect.
Something can create no criminal liability while creating a serious appearance problem.
Hillary’s political career repeatedly encountered this distinction.
The private email server is perhaps the clearest example.
Even without criminal charges, why create the vulnerability?
Even if convenience was the motivation, why use a system that would inevitably create questions about transparency and security?
Even if accusations were exaggerated, why hand opponents the material?
These are political questions rather than criminal ones.
But presidential elections are political events.
Judgment matters.
Appearance matters.
Trust matters.
WHY DID THE CONTROVERSIES STICK?
By 2016, Hillary had been a national figure for nearly twenty-five years.
That meant voters did not encounter each controversy independently.
They accumulated.
Whitewater.
Travel Office.
Filegate.
Fundraising controversies.
Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
Iraq.
Benghazi.
Emails.
The Clinton Foundation.
For voters who already distrusted Hillary, every new story appeared to confirm the previous one.
For voters who believed Republicans had spent decades attempting to destroy the Clintons, every new investigation appeared to confirm political persecution.
This created a feedback loop.
Investigation produced suspicion.
Suspicion produced demands for investigation.
Investigations that ended without charges convinced supporters that accusations had been exaggerated.
The same outcomes convinced opponents that powerful people escaped accountability.
Both sides became harder to persuade.
Eventually, Hillary Clinton was not simply a politician.
She was a test of what Americans already believed about politics itself.
THE MYTH OF THE PERFECTLY INNOCENT HILLARY
A serious biography should reject the temptation to portray Hillary as someone who never made consequential mistakes.
The record does not support that.
The private email arrangement was an avoidable decision with serious security and records implications.
The FBI criticized the handling of classified information.
The Benghazi Accountability Review Board identified serious State Department security and management failures.
Hillary’s Iraq War authorization vote became a decision she herself later described as a mistake.
Her handling of controversies sometimes reinforced perceptions of secrecy.
Political strategy sometimes failed.
She made errors.
All major political careers contain them.
THE MYTH OF THE CRIMINAL MASTERMIND
But the opposite caricature also fails.
Decades of political rhetoric created an image in some circles of Hillary as the center of an enormous criminal enterprise responsible for everything from murder to treason.
The evidence does not support such claims.
Vince Foster’s death was repeatedly determined to be suicide.
Whitewater investigations did not produce a federal criminal charge against Hillary.
The Benghazi investigations documented failures but did not establish that Hillary deliberately ordered Americans abandoned.
The FBI criticized her email conduct but recommended no criminal charges.
One can criticize Hillary Clinton severely without inventing crimes.
In fact, evidence-based criticism is stronger because it does not require conspiracy.
WHY FACTS MATTER
This chapter is not about defending Hillary Clinton.
It is not about prosecuting her either.
It is about understanding a political phenomenon.
How does a public figure become surrounded by decades of suspicion?
Sometimes because opponents exaggerate.
Sometimes because the politician makes avoidable mistakes.
Sometimes because secrecy creates a vacuum that speculation fills.
Sometimes because genuine wrongdoing by associates contaminates everyone nearby.
Sometimes because partisan media reward the most dramatic interpretation.
Sometimes because a complicated explanation cannot compete with a five-word accusation.
And sometimes all of those things happen simultaneously.
That is the Hillary Clinton story.
THE INTERNET CHANGES EVERYTHING
There was another difference between the controversies of the 1990s and those of 2016.
The information environment had transformed.
Whitewater unfolded during an era dominated by newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
By 2016, social media could distribute a claim to millions of people almost instantly.
Facebook.
Twitter.
YouTube.
Online forums.
Blogs.
Memes.
Screenshots.
Anonymous accounts.
A false claim could travel globally before a journalist finished checking it.
A complicated correction might arrive hours or days later.
By then, millions could already believe the original story.
Hillary’s long history of controversy made her particularly vulnerable to this environment.
Old accusations could be revived.
Unrelated events could be connected.
Photographs could be stripped of context.
Rumors could be transformed into certainty through repetition.
The phrase “I saw it online” acquired extraordinary political power.
PIZZAGATE
Perhaps no example demonstrated the danger more clearly than the conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate.
During the 2016 election, online conspiracy theorists falsely interpreted leaked emails and claimed that Democratic political figures were connected to a child-trafficking operation centered on a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.
The allegations were baseless.
But online repetition gave them an appearance of reality to some believers.
In December 2016, a man carrying firearms entered the restaurant intending to investigate the supposed conspiracy himself.
He fired shots.
No one was killed.
But the episode demonstrated how misinformation can leave the internet and enter the physical world.
Hillary Clinton’s name had become embedded in an information ecosystem where the difference between evidence and imagination could disappear.
And America was entering an era in which that problem would become much larger than one politician.
WHAT SHOULD THE READER BELIEVE?
Not me.
Not Hillary Clinton.
Not Donald Trump.
Not a Facebook post.
Not a viral video.
Not a campaign advertisement.
Believe evidence.
Ask:
Who made the claim?
What is the original source?
Was the evidence produced?
Was it authenticated?
What did investigators conclude?
Were those investigators independent?
Did later evidence contradict them?
Is the claim an allegation or a finding?
Has the wording changed as the story traveled?
Those questions matter whether the subject is Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, George W. Bush, or anyone else with political power.
Democracy depends on citizens capable of distinguishing accusation from proof.
AFTER ALL THE INVESTIGATIONS
And so we return to Hillary.
Years of subpoenas.
Hearings.
Depositions.
Documents.
Congressional committees.
Independent counsels.
FBI agents.
Inspectors general.
Television investigations.
Journalists.
Political opposition research.
Millions of pages of argument.
What remains?
Not perfect innocence.
Not the criminal mythology constructed around her.
Something much more human.
A powerful politician who made significant mistakes.
A woman whose opponents sometimes made accusations far beyond the evidence.
A public official whose instinct for privacy sometimes created more suspicion rather than less.
A political figure who survived investigations that would have ended many careers.
A candidate whose reputation for secrecy became one of her greatest vulnerabilities.
And a person who became so polarizing that millions of Americans could look at exactly the same investigation and see completely different realities.
THE FINAL VERDICT?
History does not issue verdicts the way courts do.
It revises.
It compares.
It waits for documents.
It listens to witnesses.
It places decisions within context.
Hillary Clinton’s historical reputation will continue changing long after the political arguments of her era have faded.
Perhaps future generations will find some controversies less important than Americans once believed.
Perhaps they will judge other decisions more harshly.
That is how history works.
But future historians will possess one advantage.
Distance.
They will not be watching Hillary through campaign advertisements.
They will not be voting for or against her next Tuesday.
They will not need her to be a hero.
They will not need her to be a villain.
They will simply need to understand what happened.
And perhaps that is the fairest way to approach Hillary Rodham Clinton now.
Not as the woman her supporters imagined.
Not as the woman her enemies imagined.
But as the complicated political figure the evidence reveals.
The controversies are part of her story.
They always will be.
But they are not the whole story.
And our next chapter returns to one of the most consequential decisions she ever made.
A decision that involved no private server.
No Arkansas land deal.
No conspiracy theory.
No question about what investigators discovered.
The vote was public.
The record was clear.
October 2002.
Iraq.
Hillary Clinton voted yes.
Years later, she would say it had been a mistake.
But by then, thousands of Americans and vastly more Iraqis had died in a war that transformed American foreign policy.
To understand Hillary Clinton’s record, we have to understand not merely what she voted for—
but why.
END OF CHAPTER 9
NEXT CHAPTER
CHAPTER 10 — THE DECISIONS THAT HAUNTED HER: IRAQ, LIBYA, AMERICAN POWER, AND THE QUESTION OF HILLARY CLINTON’S FOREIGN-POLICY JUDGMENT
October 2002.
The United States was still living in the shadow of September 11.
President George W. Bush asked Congress for authority to use military force against Iraq.
Hillary Clinton was a senator from the state that had suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.
She listened to intelligence assessments.
She considered Saddam Hussein’s history.
She listened to the administration’s arguments.
Then she cast her vote.
Yes.
Five months later, American forces invaded Iraq.
The war would last for years.
The weapons stockpiles at the center of the public case for invasion were not found.
The occupation became violent.
And Hillary’s vote became a political burden she could never completely escape.
Then, as Secretary of State, another crisis emerged.
Libya.
This time Hillary was not merely a senator voting on someone else’s policy.
She was inside the administration helping shape the debate.
Muammar Gaddafi fell.
But Libya descended into instability.
Two different countries.
Two different decisions.
Two different administrations.
One enormous question:
When Hillary Clinton believed American power should be used abroad, was her judgment sound?
The answer is more complicated than either her supporters or her opponents usually admit.
CHAPTER 10 THE DECISIONS THAT HAUNTED HER — IRAQ, LIBYA, AMERICAN POWER, AND THE QUESTION OF JUDGMENT
Some political decisions disappear.
Others remain attached to a person’s name forever.
For Hillary Rodham Clinton, one date belongs to the second category.
October 2002.
She was a United States senator from New York.
America was still living in the shadow of September 11.
Smoke no longer rose above Lower Manhattan, but the psychological consequences of the attacks remained everywhere.
Families were still grieving.
American troops were fighting in Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden remained at large.
The Bush administration increasingly turned national attention toward Iraq.
Saddam Hussein had ruled Iraq for decades.
His government had invaded Iran.
Then Kuwait.
It had used chemical weapons.
It had repeatedly confronted the international community over weapons inspections.
No serious observer needed to imagine Saddam Hussein as a benevolent ruler.
He was not.
But the question before the United States Senate was not whether Saddam was a dictator.
The question was whether the President should be authorized to use American military force against Iraq.
Hillary Clinton had to vote.
She voted yes.
Years later, she would regret it.
But history does not allow us to jump directly from the vote to regret.
First we have to understand the world in which the decision was made.
AMERICA AFTER SEPTEMBER 11
The attacks of September 11 transformed American national-security thinking.
Threats that might once have appeared distant suddenly seemed immediate.
Government officials were haunted by the possibility that the next attack could be worse.
What if terrorists obtained chemical weapons?
Biological weapons?
Nuclear material?
What if hostile governments assisted them?
Intelligence was interpreted in an atmosphere where underestimating a threat seemed potentially catastrophic.
That environment mattered.
But context is not absolution.
Fear can explain a decision without proving the decision correct.
That distinction applies to Hillary as much as anyone else.
SADDAM HUSSEIN
Iraq had a long history of conflict with the United States and international weapons inspectors.
After the 1991 Gulf War, United Nations resolutions imposed obligations concerning Iraqi weapons programs.
Disputes over inspections continued through the decade.
By 2002, the Bush administration argued that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and that waiting could become dangerously irresponsible.
Administration officials presented intelligence to Congress and the public.
Some of it appeared alarming.
Some of it was disputed.
Some of it would later prove badly wrong.
Senators had to decide whether to grant the President authority to use force.
Hillary Clinton chose to grant that authority.
THE VOTE
Her vote was not technically a vote declaring war at that moment.
It authorized President George W. Bush to use the United States Armed Forces against Iraq under conditions described in the resolution.
That legal distinction mattered.
Politically, however, everyone understood that authorization could lead to war.
And it did.
In March 2003, American and coalition forces invaded Iraq.
Saddam’s government collapsed quickly.
For a brief period, images of military success dominated coverage.
Then came the occupation.
THE WAR AFTER THE WAR
Removing Saddam Hussein proved far easier than stabilizing Iraq.
The Iraqi state fractured.
An insurgency grew.
Sectarian violence intensified.
American troops faced roadside bombs, ambushes, and suicide attacks.
Abu Ghraib became synonymous with prisoner abuse.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq emerged.
Iraqi civilians suffered terribly.
American service members continued dying.
And the large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that had been central to the public case for war were not found.
The political meaning of the authorization vote changed.
What had once been defended as prudence increasingly looked, to many Americans, like a catastrophic error.
Hillary had to answer for her vote.
THE QUESTION THAT WOULD NOT GO AWAY
Why did you vote yes?
It followed her.
As senator.
As presidential candidate.
As Secretary of State.
Then again as presidential candidate.
Hillary argued that she had expected the authorization to strengthen diplomatic pressure and weapons inspections, while criticizing how the Bush administration ultimately handled the authority and the war.
Critics rejected that defense.
They argued that any senator voting for the authorization should have understood that military action was a foreseeable outcome.
The debate contained a larger question.
Was Hillary’s mistake primarily trusting bad intelligence?
Trusting the Bush administration?
Underestimating the likelihood of war?
Underestimating what would happen after invasion?
Or was the fundamental error supporting military authorization in the first place?
Different observers answered differently.
But Hillary could not erase the vote.
THEN CAME BARACK OBAMA
The Iraq vote became especially damaging in 2008.
Barack Obama had not been a United States senator in October 2002.
He therefore had not cast a congressional vote on the authorization.
But as an Illinois state senator, he had publicly opposed what he called a “dumb war.”
That gave him a powerful argument.
Hillary could point to experience.
Obama could point to judgment.
Experience had told Hillary to take national-security threats seriously.
Obama argued that experience without good judgment was not enough.
For Democratic voters angry about Iraq, the contrast was potent.
Hillary lost the nomination.
The Iraq vote was not the only reason.
But it became one of the defining differences between them.
Then something remarkable happened.
The man who had attacked her foreign-policy judgment chose her to become his Secretary of State.
FROM VOTING ON POWER TO HELPING SHAPE IT
The Senate had allowed Hillary to authorize presidential power.
The State Department placed her much closer to its actual use.
As Secretary of State, she sat inside the administration while crises unfolded.
Theoretical questions became operational ones.
What should America do?
What should America threaten?
What should America tolerate?
When should sanctions be used?
When should diplomacy continue?
When should military force remain an option?
When should the United States intervene in another country’s conflict?
These questions have no universal formula.
Then came Libya.
FEBRUARY 2011
The Arab Spring was spreading.
In Libya, demonstrations against Muammar Gaddafi escalated into armed rebellion.
Gaddafi’s government responded violently.
His forces advanced against opposition-held territory.
Benghazi became especially important.
The possibility that regime forces could overrun the city produced international alarm.
The Obama administration debated its response.
Hillary initially emphasized diplomatic and international pressure while the administration considered options.
But as the situation deteriorated, she became an important advocate for stronger international action.
The Arab League supported a no-fly zone.
Britain and France pushed for intervention.
The United Nations Security Council eventually adopted Resolution 1973, authorizing necessary measures to protect civilians while excluding a foreign occupation force.
The United States joined military operations.
THE ARGUMENT FOR INTERVENTION
Supporters of intervention feared mass killing if Gaddafi’s forces entered Benghazi.
The administration argued that the United States was not acting alone.
There was a United Nations mandate.
Regional support mattered.
European allies participated.
The operation was designed around civilian protection.
For Hillary, these features distinguished Libya from Iraq.
This was not supposed to be another unilateral American invasion followed by occupation.
There would be no enormous American ground army taking Tripoli and governing Libya.
International partners would carry significant responsibility.
The objective appeared limited.
Protect civilians.
Stop Gaddafi’s forces.
Support an international coalition.
But military interventions have a habit of changing after they begin.
THE FALL OF GADDAFI
NATO operations weakened Gaddafi’s forces.
The rebellion advanced.
His government collapsed.
Gaddafi fled.
In October 2011, Libyan fighters captured and killed him.
The dictatorship was over.
At that moment, the intervention appeared to many supporters to have succeeded.
A threatened city had not been overrun.
A dictator had fallen.
American casualties had been limited.
There had been no Iraq-style American occupation.
Hillary traveled to Tripoli in October 2011 and met leaders of Libya’s transitional authorities.
The United States expressed hope that Libya could build a representative political system.
But removing a dictator is not the same thing as creating a state.
That distinction would become painfully clear.
WHAT CAME AFTER
Libya had institutions weakened by decades of authoritarian rule.
Weapons were everywhere.
Militias held power.
Political factions competed.
The central government struggled to establish authority.
The country became increasingly unstable.
Then came Benghazi.
September 11, 2012.
Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.
The attack transformed the political discussion of Libya inside the United States.
Suddenly, critics were not simply asking whether diplomatic security had failed.
They were asking a larger question.
Had the intervention itself been a mistake?
IRAQ AND LIBYA — THE TEMPTING COMPARISON
The comparison was obvious.
Hillary supported military authorization involving Iraq.
Years later, she supported intervention in Libya.
Both governments fell.
Both countries experienced severe instability afterward.
Therefore, critics argued, the pattern demonstrated a consistent flaw in Hillary’s foreign-policy judgment.
Use force.
Remove dictator.
Underestimate aftermath.
There is force to that criticism.
But the two cases were not identical.
Iraq involved a massive invasion designed to overthrow Saddam Hussein, followed by a prolonged American occupation.
Libya involved an internationally authorized operation focused initially on protecting civilians, conducted with NATO and regional participation, without a comparable U.S. ground occupation.
Those differences matter.
But differences do not eliminate another similarity.
In both cases, what happened after the existing regime lost power became far more difficult than advocates of action had hoped.
And that is where the deepest foreign-policy question emerges.
WINNING THE WAR IS NOT THE SAME AS WINNING THE PEACE
Power can destroy.
Building is harder.
American aircraft can destroy military equipment.
Special forces can conduct raids.
Sanctions can damage economies.
Governments can be pressured.
Dictators can fall.
But political legitimacy cannot simply be delivered by missile.
Institutions cannot be manufactured overnight.
Trust cannot be bombed into existence.
Tribal, ethnic, religious, ideological, and regional divisions do not disappear because a ruler disappears.
Iraq demonstrated that.
Libya demonstrated it differently.
For Hillary, both cases became part of the argument over whether she was too willing to support American intervention.
WAS HILLARY A HAWK?
The label followed her.
“Hawk.”
In American political language, the term generally suggests someone more willing to use military force or maintain a strong military posture.
Compared with some Democrats, Hillary often adopted more assertive national-security positions.
She supported the Afghanistan war after September 11.
She voted for the Iraq authorization.
She supported the Libya intervention.
Within the Obama administration, she sometimes favored stronger responses than officials who were more cautious about military involvement.
But reducing her entire foreign policy to the word “hawk” can also oversimplify.
She placed substantial emphasis on diplomacy.
Alliances.
Sanctions.
Development.
Women’s participation.
International institutions.
Negotiations.
What she called “smart power.”
Her worldview did not reject diplomacy in favor of military force.
Rather, she tended to see military power as one instrument among several that the United States needed to keep available.
The central debate was over how readily that instrument should be used.
SMART POWER
Hillary’s concept of “smart power” reflected an attempt to move beyond the simplistic choice between diplomacy and force.
The United States possessed different forms of influence.
Military strength.
Economic power.
Diplomatic relationships.
Foreign assistance.
Technology.
Cultural influence.
International institutions.
Partnerships.
Sanctions.
Trade.
The challenge was choosing the right combination.
In theory, almost everyone could agree.
In practice, deciding the combination was enormously difficult.
Libya began as an example of multilateral action.
It later became an example critics used to demonstrate the limits of intervention.
Foreign policy rarely respects the neat categories politicians create for it.
A QUESTION OF COUNTERFACTUALS
Every debate about intervention contains a hidden problem.
We know what happened after a decision.
We do not know with certainty what would have happened if the opposite decision had been made.
What if Hillary had voted against the Iraq authorization?
The broader Senate resolution still passed.
Would the Bush administration have invaded anyway?
Almost certainly, given the political balance at the time.
But Hillary’s personal political record would have been different.
What if the United States and NATO had refused to intervene in Libya?
Would Gaddafi’s forces have massacred large numbers of civilians in Benghazi?
Would the rebellion have collapsed?
Would Libya have stabilized under Gaddafi?
Would civil war have continued anyway?
We cannot rerun history.
Counterfactuals can illuminate choices.
They cannot prove alternative outcomes.
That is why leadership is difficult.
Presidents and Cabinet officials must decide before they know the ending.
Historians judge afterward.
HILLARY’S IRAQ REGRET
Over time, Hillary’s language about Iraq changed.
During the 2008 campaign, she resisted giving the simple apology some anti-war Democrats wanted.
By the time she published Hard Choices and later entered the 2016 presidential campaign, she acknowledged more directly that voting for the authorization had been a mistake.
That admission mattered.
But politically, it came too late to erase the original decision.
Voters do not evaluate only whether politicians learn.
They evaluate whether politicians saw the danger before everyone else did.
Obama’s early opposition therefore remained powerful.
He had been right about a decision Hillary had gotten wrong.
At least on the central question of whether America should launch that war.
BUT EXPERIENCE CHANGED HER TOO
The Hillary Clinton of 2016 had something the Hillary Clinton of 2002 did not.
Four years inside the State Department.
She had watched wars from inside national-security meetings.
She had dealt with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
She had participated in discussions surrounding the bin Laden operation.
She had watched the Arab Spring unfold.
She had seen Libya move from dictatorship to revolution to instability.
She had confronted Syria’s catastrophic civil war.
Experience had become heavier.
The question was whether it had made her wiser.
Her supporters said yes.
Her critics remained unconvinced.
SYRIA — THE INTERVENTION THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN THE SAME WAY
Syria presented another test.
President Bashar al-Assad’s government responded brutally to an uprising that began in 2011.
The conflict evolved into civil war.
Hillary supported stronger assistance to selected opposition forces.
Other administration officials shared versions of that position.
President Obama remained cautious about deeper American involvement.
No Libya-style intervention toppled Assad.
But Syria did not therefore become peaceful.
The war became catastrophic.
Hundreds of thousands died.
Millions fled their homes.
ISIS exploited regional instability and seized territory in Syria and Iraq.
Russia later intervened militarily on Assad’s side.
Syria complicated simplistic lessons.
Libya suggested intervention could produce disastrous instability.
Syria suggested non-intervention or limited intervention could coexist with humanitarian catastrophe.
So what was the correct rule?
Always intervene?
Clearly not.
Never intervene?
Syria made that answer morally difficult as well.
Foreign policy offered no formula.
Only choices.
THE PRESIDENTIAL QUESTION
By 2016, voters were not simply evaluating Hillary Clinton’s past.
They were deciding whether to give her control of American foreign policy.
As president, she would become Commander in Chief.
She would possess enormous authority over nuclear weapons.
Military deployments.
Covert operations.
Diplomacy.
Alliances.
Intelligence.
Sanctions.
Her experience was undeniable.
But experience cuts in two directions.
It tells voters that a candidate understands government.
It also gives voters decisions to judge.
Donald Trump had almost no comparable government record.
That meant he could attack Hillary’s decisions without defending years of his own votes or Cabinet recommendations.
Hillary had experience.
Trump had freedom from a governing record.
In 2016, that asymmetry mattered.
TRUMP ATTACKS LIBYA AND IRAQ
Trump repeatedly portrayed Hillary as a symbol of failed American interventionism.
He attacked the Iraq War.
He attacked the handling of Libya.
He argued that American leaders had spent enormous resources overseas while neglecting problems at home.
His own past public statements about Iraq were more complicated than his campaign rhetoric suggested, but as a candidate he positioned himself as an opponent of establishment foreign-policy failures.
Hillary defended American alliances and international engagement.
The contrast was profound.
Trump’s message emphasized “America First.”
Hillary emphasized alliances, diplomacy, American leadership, and an international order built with U.S. participation.
The election therefore involved competing ideas about America’s role in the world.
THE WOMAN IN THE SITUATION ROOM
There was one image Hillary’s campaign could point toward.
The photograph from the bin Laden operation.
Hillary sitting in the Situation Room.
It communicated experience without words.
She had been there.
She had participated in national-security deliberations at the highest level.
She understood the weight of decisions involving American forces.
But even that successful operation contained uncertainty before it happened.
Intelligence officials could not guarantee bin Laden was inside the compound.
The raid could fail.
American personnel could die.
Pakistan could respond.
The helicopters could encounter mechanical problems—and one did.
Obama approved the mission.
Hillary supported the decision.
It succeeded.
Bin Laden was killed.
No major presidential candidate could promise that every future decision would end similarly.
JUDGMENT WITHOUT CERTAINTY
That may be the central theme of Hillary Clinton’s foreign-policy career.
Decision-making without certainty.
In 2002, intelligence about Iraq was deeply flawed.
In 2011, nobody could know precisely what post-Gaddafi Libya would become.
During the bin Laden operation, nobody could guarantee the target was actually inside the compound.
In Syria, policymakers could not know what greater intervention—or less intervention—would ultimately produce.
Foreign policy punishes certainty.
The information is incomplete.
The consequences are enormous.
The timeline may be short.
The enemy may deceive you.
Your allies may have different interests.
And doing nothing is itself a decision.
SO WAS HILLARY’S JUDGMENT GOOD OR BAD?
There is no intellectually serious one-word answer.
Iraq weighs heavily against her.
She ultimately acknowledged the vote as a mistake.
Libya is more complicated but remains a major vulnerability in assessments of her record, especially because the post-Gaddafi political order failed to stabilize and violence proliferated.
The bin Laden operation demonstrates her willingness to support a risky mission that achieved its primary objective.
Her diplomatic record demonstrates that she did not see military force as the only tool of American power.
Her advocacy for alliances and multilateral institutions shows a worldview different from simple unilateral interventionism.
But critics have a legitimate argument that Hillary was often more comfortable with the potential use of American power than more restrained foreign-policy thinkers believed wise.
Supporters have an equally legitimate response:
A superpower cannot protect its interests or allies by promising never to use force.
The argument has no permanent resolution.
Because every crisis is different.
THE BURDEN OF EXPERIENCE
Hillary once sought to make experience one of her greatest qualifications for the presidency.
And it was.
But experience carries a burden.
Every decision leaves fingerprints.
Every vote becomes searchable.
Every prediction can be replayed.
Every intervention can be evaluated years later.
Every mistake becomes evidence for opponents.
A candidate without experience can promise.
A candidate with experience must explain.
By 2016, Hillary had a great deal to explain.
That was both her strength and her weakness.
THE LESSON OF IRAQ
If there is one lesson Hillary’s career offers about foreign policy, perhaps it is this:
The most dangerous moment may come when uncertainty is treated as certainty.
The Bush administration presented a powerful case about Iraqi weapons.
Many members of Congress accepted enough of that case to authorize force.
Hillary was one of them.
The assumptions proved disastrously unreliable.
A president must therefore ask not only:
What does intelligence say?
But:
How confident are we?
What evidence contradicts it?
What if it is wrong?
What happens the day after military victory?
What happens five years later?
What happens if the state collapses?
What happens if the enemy is removed but something worse fills the vacuum?
Those questions are easier to ask after Iraq.
The tragedy is that thousands of lives were affected before the lesson became obvious.
THE LESSON OF LIBYA
Libya offers a different warning.
International legitimacy and coalition support can reduce some dangers of intervention.
They do not solve the problem of what comes afterward.
Preventing an immediate catastrophe does not guarantee long-term political order.
Destroying a regime’s military capacity does not automatically create institutions capable of replacing it.
And refusing an Iraq-style occupation can avoid one disaster while creating another challenge:
Who stabilizes the country?
Libya never found an easy answer.
THE LIMITS OF POWER
Hillary Clinton spent much of her career near power.
She saw its possibilities.
She also saw its limits.
The United States could help overthrow Saddam Hussein.
It could not easily build a stable Iraq afterward.
NATO could help defeat Gaddafi’s forces.
It could not manufacture Libyan political unity.
American special forces could kill Osama bin Laden.
They could not end extremist ideology with one raid.
Sanctions could pressure governments.
They could not guarantee surrender.
Diplomacy could create agreements.
It could not guarantee future leaders would preserve them.
Power mattered.
But power was not control.
AND THAT RETURNS US TO HILLARY
Perhaps Hillary’s foreign-policy legacy will always remain contested because it contains both competence and miscalculation.
She understood government.
She understood alliances.
She understood diplomacy.
She could speak with foreign leaders as someone familiar with the machinery of power.
She believed strongly in American engagement with the world.
But she also supported decisions whose consequences became deeply troubling.
That combination resists easy judgment.
She was neither the reckless warmonger of caricature nor the infallible diplomat of campaign mythology.
She was a policymaker.
Policymakers make choices.
Choices produce consequences.
And history remembers both.
THE DECISION THAT NEVER CAME
Hillary Clinton spent years preparing herself for the ultimate foreign-policy responsibility.
President.
Commander in Chief.
Had she won in 2016, every lesson from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Russia, Iran, and the State Department would have entered the Oval Office with her.
We will never know how President Hillary Clinton would have handled the crises that followed.
That history does not exist.
The decisions she did make are enough.
And they leave us with a question larger than Hillary Clinton:
What do we actually want from leaders facing dangerous uncertainty?
Confidence?
Caution?
Experience?
Restraint?
Willingness to act?
Willingness to wait?
The answer usually arrives only after we know what happened.
The leader never has that luxury.
Hillary did not.
Sometimes she chose well.
Sometimes she did not.
Sometimes the consequences remain debated.
And one decision—her vote on Iraq—followed her from the Senate floor all the way to the edge of the presidency.
But foreign policy was only one battlefield where Hillary’s career intersected with a much larger transformation.
There was another battle she had been fighting, in one form or another, since long before Iraq.
Women.
Power.
And the question of whether America was truly prepared to place a woman at the very top.
To understand why 2016 mattered so much, we need to go back again.
Not to Washington.
Not to Baghdad.
Not to Benghazi.
To a world in which ambitious women were often expected to hide the very quality men were rewarded for displaying.
And to the woman who spent decades refusing to hide hers.
