CHAPTER 5 MADAM SECRETARY — OBAMA, BIN LADEN, THE ARAB SPRING, LIBYA, AND BENGHAZI
On January 21, 2009, the United States Senate confirmed Hillary Rodham Clinton as Secretary of State.
The vote was 94–2.
Only months earlier, Barack Obama had been her rival.
Now he was her president.
And Hillary Clinton was about to become America’s chief diplomat.
It was one of the most remarkable political transitions of her career.
The woman who had fought Obama through a long and sometimes bitter Democratic primary campaign would now represent his administration across the world.
The campaign signs were gone.
The primary debates were finished.
The delegate calculations no longer mattered.
A different set of questions awaited her.
Iran.
Russia.
China.
Afghanistan.
Pakistan.
North Korea.
Nuclear weapons.
Terrorism
Human rights.
The Middle East.
And two wars that America had been fighting for years.
Hillary had wanted to become President of the United States.
Instead, she was about to discover what it meant to represent one.
MADAM SECRETARY
The office of Secretary of State is unlike almost any other position in American government.
The Secretary is simultaneously a diplomat, negotiator, adviser, administrator, spokesperson, crisis manager, and representative of the President.
The work can shift within hours.
One morning might involve negotiations over nuclear weapons.
The afternoon might involve an alliance dispute.
The evening might bring a coup, terrorist attack, political uprising, or humanitarian emergency thousands of miles away.
For Hillary, there was another challenge.
She entered the administration with her own political identity.
Foreign leaders knew her.
The American public knew her.
She had almost become the Democratic presidential nominee herself.
Obama therefore had not chosen an anonymous subordinate.
He had chosen a former rival with an enormous international profile.
The relationship had to work.
And over time, it did.
They would not agree on everything.
No president and Secretary of State do.
But the rivalry of 2008 gradually became a governing partnership.
Hillary began traveling.
And traveling.
And traveling.
By the time she left office, she had visited more than one hundred countries.
The scale of the job was enormous.
Yet some of the most consequential moments of her tenure would happen not on foreign soil but inside secure rooms in Washington.
One of them concerned a man America had been hunting for almost a decade.
THE HUNT FOR OSAMA BIN LADEN
September 11 had transformed Hillary’s first year in the Senate.
Now, as Secretary of State, she became part of the national-security team dealing with the continuing hunt for Osama bin Laden.
By 2010 and 2011, American intelligence had developed information pointing toward a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Officials believed bin Laden might be living there.
But certainty was impossible.
The stakes were extraordinary.
What if he was not there?
What if American forces entered Pakistan and the mission failed?
What if troops were captured or killed?
What if Pakistan’s military responded?
What if civilians died?
The Obama administration debated the options.
A bombing strike was considered.
So was a raid by American special operations forces.
The decision belonged to President Obama.
But senior officials, including Hillary Clinton, participated in the deliberations.
Eventually, Obama authorized the raid.
On the night of May 1, 2011, Washington time, members of the national-security team gathered to monitor the operation.
One photograph from that night became famous around the world.
President Obama sits forward.
Vice President Joe Biden is nearby.
Military and national-security officials fill the room.
Hillary Clinton sits at the table with one hand raised near her mouth.
The photograph captured only a fraction of a second.
It could not reveal every thought or emotion in the room.
But it became one of the iconic images of the Obama administration.
American forces reached the compound.
Osama bin Laden was killed.
Nearly ten years after September 11, the architect of the attacks was dead.
For Hillary, the moment connected two chapters of her political life.
She had been New York’s newly elected senator when the towers fell.
She was Secretary of State when the United States finally found bin Laden.
But even as one long American pursuit ended, another international upheaval was beginning.
THE ARAB SPRING
In late 2010 and 2011, protests began spreading across parts of the Arab world.
Tunisia.
Egypt.
Libya.
Syria.
Yemen.
Bahrain.
Citizens challenged governments that had seemed entrenched for decades.
The movement became known broadly as the Arab Spring.
To many observers, the early demonstrations appeared to offer possibilities for democratic political change.
But revolutions rarely follow simple paths.
Some governments fell.
Some survived.
Some countries entered prolonged instability.
Some conflicts became wars.
For the Obama administration, the events created difficult choices.
Should America support protesters against governments that had been American partners?
How quickly should Washington abandon an authoritarian leader?
What happened after a regime collapsed?
Could the United States encourage democratic change without becoming responsible for the outcome?
There were no easy answers.
Then Libya moved toward civil war.
MUAMMAR GADDAFI
Muammar Gaddafi had ruled Libya since 1969.
In 2011, demonstrations against his government escalated into armed conflict.
Government forces moved against opposition-held areas.
International concern grew over what might happen to civilians, particularly around Benghazi.
The Obama administration debated intervention.
Hillary supported international action as part of a coalition.
The United Nations Security Council authorized measures including a no-fly zone and the protection of civilians.
American and allied military operations followed.
NATO eventually assumed command of the operation.
Gaddafi’s government collapsed.
In October 2011, Gaddafi was captured and killed by Libyan fighters.
At first, the fall of his regime seemed to create an opening for a different political future.
But removing a government and building a stable replacement are entirely different achievements.
Libya fragmented.
Militias gained influence.
Weapons circulated.
Government institutions remained weak.
Security deteriorated.
And the consequences of that instability would soon reach the American diplomatic presence in Benghazi.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2012
Eleven years after the attacks on New York and Washington, Americans marked another September 11 anniversary.
In Benghazi, Libya, armed attackers assaulted U.S. facilities.
The violence unfolded over hours and involved the U.S. Special Mission Compound and a nearby Annex.
Four Americans were killed.
Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
Sean Smith.
Tyrone Woods.
Glen Doherty.
Stevens was the United States Ambassador to Libya.
His death was particularly shocking.
An American ambassador had been killed while serving abroad.
The attack immediately became a national-security crisis.
It soon became a major political controversy.
WHAT HAPPENED?
In the immediate aftermath, confusion surrounded several aspects of the attack.
What had intelligence agencies known beforehand?
Was security adequate?
Could additional forces have reached Benghazi in time?
How should the attack initially have been characterized publicly?
Who had made which decisions?
Those questions became subjects of investigations, hearings, media reporting, and fierce partisan debate.
Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
That meant responsibility for the department ultimately reached her office.
She ordered an independent Accountability Review Board to investigate the circumstances surrounding the attacks.
The board was led by Ambassador Thomas Pickering, with retired Admiral Michael Mullen serving as vice chairman.
Its findings were serious.
The board concluded that security at the Special Mission Compound was inadequate for the threat environment and identified systemic failures and management deficiencies within State Department bureaus.
At the same time, the board reported that there had been no immediate tactical warning of the attack and said the interagency response after the assault began was timely and appropriate.
It also concluded there had not been enough time for U.S. military forces to make a difference during the attacks.
Those findings did not end the political argument.
Far from it.
RESPONSIBILITY
Hillary publicly accepted responsibility as Secretary of State for security under her department.
But political debates over the meaning of that responsibility continued.
Critics argued that the State Department had failed to provide sufficient security despite the deteriorating situation in Libya.
Supporters emphasized the findings concerning systemic problems and rejected accusations that Clinton personally ordered security requests denied or deliberately prevented military assistance during the attack.
Congress investigated.
The State Department investigated.
Questions multiplied.
Benghazi became more than the name of a Libyan city.
In American politics, it became shorthand for an entire controversy.
And Hillary knew that she would eventually have to answer questions before Congress.
JANUARY 23, 2013
Hillary appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
She was nearing the end of her tenure as Secretary of State.
But Benghazi dominated the hearings.
Senators and representatives questioned her about security, intelligence, the administration’s public statements, and the response to the attack.
The exchanges became heated.
For Hillary, the hearings represented one of the most difficult public confrontations of her tenure.
Yet beneath the political conflict was something that should never disappear from the history.
Four Americans had died.
The Accountability Review Board issued 29 recommendations.
The State Department accepted all 29 and began implementing security changes.
Whatever Americans believed about the political arguments surrounding Benghazi, the attack exposed real vulnerabilities in the protection of diplomats working in dangerous environments.
And the consequences would continue long after Hillary left office.
THE OTHER SIDE OF HER DIPLOMACY
Benghazi would eventually dominate political discussions of Hillary’s State Department record.
But her tenure encompassed far more.
She promoted what she called “smart power,” emphasizing the use of diplomacy, development, partnerships, military strength, and other tools of American influence.
Women’s rights remained central to her international agenda.
She argued that the political and economic participation of women was not merely a social issue but a matter connected to national development and stability.
She advocated for LGBT rights internationally.
She traveled extensively.
She worked on sanctions and diplomatic pressure involving Iran.
She participated in the administration’s strategic shift toward greater attention to the Asia-Pacific region.
She dealt with Russia.
China.
Pakistan.
Afghanistan.
Israel and the Palestinians.
Burma.
North Korea.
Europe.
Latin America.
Africa.
Every region carried different problems.
Every relationship required different calculations.
Some initiatives produced progress.
Others produced results that remain debated.
Foreign policy rarely offers clean endings.
The consequences of a decision may not become visible for years.
Libya demonstrated that brutally.
And Syria would become even worse.
SYRIA
The uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad escalated into a devastating civil war.
The Obama administration faced arguments over how aggressively the United States should intervene.
Hillary generally supported a more assertive approach to assisting elements of the Syrian opposition than some others inside the administration.
But American policy remained cautious about direct large-scale military involvement.
The conflict expanded.
Hundreds of thousands would eventually die over the course of the war.
Millions would be displaced.
Extremist organizations would exploit the chaos.
Once again, the limits of American power were visible.
The United States was enormously powerful.
But power did not mean control.
A Secretary of State could negotiate, pressure, persuade, threaten, sanction, organize coalitions, and advise a president.
She could not simply order the world to become stable.
That may have been one of the hardest lessons of Hillary’s tenure.
FOUR YEARS LATER
By late 2012, Hillary was preparing to leave the State Department.
She had entered the position after losing the presidency.
She was leaving with an international résumé few American politicians could match.
Former First Lady.
Former United States senator.
Former presidential candidate.
Secretary of State.
She had participated in debates involving wars, revolutions, terrorism, alliances, and global diplomacy.
She had been inside the administration during the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
She had also become politically linked to Libya and Benghazi.
The successes and controversies would travel with her.
On February 1, 2013, Hillary Clinton left office.
John Kerry succeeded her as Secretary of State.
For the first time in decades, Hillary no longer held public office and was not serving inside a presidential administration.
She could have stopped.
She was sixty-five.
She had been living inside American political conflict for much of her adult life.
There were books to write.
Speeches to give.
A foundation to work with.
A granddaughter would soon enter her life.
There were countless ways to remain influential without ever becoming a candidate again.
But everyone knew the question.
WOULD SHE RUN AGAIN?
The number followed Hillary almost everywhere.
Would she try again?
The political conditions appeared different from 2008.
Barack Obama could not run for a third term.
Hillary had expanded her résumé dramatically.
She had spent four years representing the United States around the world.
She remained nationally famous.
She possessed a formidable fundraising network.
Many Democrats wanted her to run.
And if she won, she could achieve something no woman had ever achieved.
The presidency.
But before Hillary could reach 2016, another controversy emerged.
It involved emails.
THE PRIVATE EMAIL SYSTEM
During her tenure as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had used a private email account hosted on a private server for government-related communications rather than relying exclusively on a State Department email account.
The arrangement became publicly controversial after she left office.
Questions followed immediately.
Why had she used it?
Were government records properly preserved?
Had classified information been transmitted?
Had national-security information been placed at risk?
Investigations followed.
Hillary defended her conduct while acknowledging that using separate accounts for personal and government business would have been preferable.
The issue would become politically damaging.
And unlike Benghazi, which involved a complex international crisis, the email controversy was easy to summarize in a few words.
Private server.
Emails.
Classified information.
For political opponents, it was powerful material.
For Hillary, it would become extraordinarily difficult to escape.
Yet in 2015, despite Benghazi, despite the email controversy, despite decades of political battles, Hillary made her decision.
She would run again.
APRIL 12, 2015
Hillary Clinton announced her second campaign for President of the United States.
This time Barack Obama was not standing in her path.
But another unexpected challenger was emerging inside the Democratic Party.
He was older than Hillary.
He was an independent senator from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist.
He spoke relentlessly about income inequality, corporate power, health care, college costs, and political revolution.
His name was Bernie Sanders.
At first, many observers saw Hillary as the dominant Democratic candidate.
Then Sanders began filling arenas.
Small donations poured into his campaign.
Young voters rallied around him.
Once again, Hillary discovered that the Democratic nomination would not simply be handed to her.
But she eventually defeated Sanders and secured the nomination.
And in July 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton achieved something no woman in American history had achieved before.
A major American political party nominated a woman for president.
She had finally broken through one barrier.
One remained.
Donald J. Trump.
The Republican businessman and television personality had shattered expectations throughout the Republican primaries.
Almost no conventional political rule seemed to apply to him.
His rallies drew enormous attention.
His statements repeatedly generated controversy.
His campaign attacked Hillary relentlessly.
Hillary attacked his qualifications and temperament in return.
The campaign became bitter.
Then came more leaked emails.
More investigations.
More headlines.
And eleven days before Election Day, FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing that investigators were reviewing additional emails that might be relevant to the investigation of Hillary’s email practices.
The presidential race entered its final days in chaos.
On November 8, 2016, Americans voted.
Hillary Clinton would receive nearly three million more popular votes nationwide than Donald Trump.
But America does not choose presidents through the national popular vote.
It chooses them through the Electoral College.
And as election night unfolded, the states Hillary needed began slipping away.
Florida.
North Carolina.
Then the industrial Midwest.
Pennsylvania.
Wisconsin.
Michigan.
The electoral map turned against her.
Sometime after midnight, the reality became unavoidable.
Eight years earlier, Barack Obama had stopped Hillary Clinton from reaching the general election.
This time she had reached it.
She had become the first woman nominated for president by a major American party.
She had won more votes nationally than her opponent.
And still—
she had lost the presidency.
The office she had pursued for years was gone again.
Only now there would probably never be another campaign.
Hillary Rodham Clinton had spent decades moving toward the highest glass ceiling in American politics.
In 2016, she came closer than any woman before her.
But she did not break it.
And the story of how she came so close—and how Donald Trump defeated her—would become one of the most debated elections in modern American history.
END OF CHAPTER 5
NEXT CHAPTER
CHAPTER 6 — “I’M WITH HER”: BERNIE SANDERS, DONALD TRUMP, THE EMAIL INVESTIGATION, RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE, AND THE SHOCK OF ELECTION NIGHT 2016
Hillary Clinton entered the 2016 race carrying perhaps the most extensive résumé of any candidate in the field.
Former First Lady.
Former senator.
Former Secretary of State.
But experience came with baggage.
Decades of political conflict had left millions of Americans with strong opinions about her before the campaign even began.
Bernie Sanders challenged her from the left.
Donald Trump attacked her from the right.
The FBI investigation followed her.
Russian operatives interfered in the election.
WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic emails.
The presidential debates became confrontational spectacles watched by tens of millions.
Then came November 8.
The Clinton campaign had prepared for a historic celebration beneath a glass ceiling at the Javits Center in New York.
Instead, as the electoral map changed color state by state, celebration gave way to disbelief.
Donald Trump had won the presidency.
Hillary had won the national popular vote.
But she had lost the Electoral College.
The woman who had spent decades preparing for the presidency would never enter the Oval Office as president.
The question was no longer whether Hillary Clinton could win.
The question was:
What happens to a political life after the goal that defined so much of it is suddenly gone?
CHAPTER 6 “I’M WITH HER” — BERNIE SANDERS, DONALD TRUMP, THE EMAIL INVESTIGATION, RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE, AND THE SHOCK OF ELECTION NIGHT
On April 12, 2015, Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that she was running for President of the United States again.
Seven years had passed since Barack Obama defeated her for the Democratic nomination.
But Hillary was no longer the same candidate.
She had served four years as Secretary of State.
She had traveled across the world representing the United States.
She had participated in decisions involving wars, revolutions, terrorism, diplomacy, and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
She had expanded a résumé that was already unusually long.
Now she wanted the one job that had escaped her.
The presidency.
This time there was no Barack Obama competing against her in the Democratic primary.
There was no obvious rival with his combination of charisma, organization, fundraising, and historic appeal.
For Hillary’s supporters, 2016 appeared to offer the opportunity that 2008 had denied them.
America might finally elect its first woman president.
But presidential campaigns have a way of destroying assumptions.
And almost every assumption surrounding the 2016 election would eventually be tested.
A DIFFERENT HILLARY CAMPAIGN
The Clinton campaign wanted to avoid simply recreating 2008.
Hillary emphasized economic opportunity, families, health care, women’s rights, voting rights, immigration, national security, and other issues.
Her candidacy also carried an unavoidable historical dimension.
Every American president had been a man.
Forty-four presidencies.
No woman.
Hillary was not the first woman to seek the presidency.
She was not even the first woman to seek the nomination of a major political party.
But she possessed something previous female candidates had never possessed at the same scale:
A realistic path to winning a major-party nomination and potentially the presidency itself.
That possibility energized many voters.
It also guaranteed intense scrutiny.
And Hillary entered the race with vulnerabilities.
Benghazi remained politically controversial.
Her decades in national politics had created powerful opposition.
Questions were emerging about the Clinton Foundation.
And then there were the emails.
THE EMAIL PROBLEM
While serving as Secretary of State, Hillary had used a private email account on a private server for government-related communications.
Once the arrangement became public, the issue quickly grew.
Government records.
Classified information.
Cybersecurity.
Transparency.
Record preservation.
Each produced questions.
Hillary argued that she had used the arrangement for convenience and said she had turned over work-related emails to the State Department.
But the controversy did not disappear.
Instead, it became one of the most persistent stories of the campaign.
The FBI investigated the handling of classified information.
For Hillary’s critics, the server became evidence of poor judgment or disregard for government procedures.
Her supporters argued that the controversy was frequently exaggerated for partisan purposes.
The legal question, however, belonged to investigators.
And the political question belonged to voters.
Those were not the same question.
A person could avoid criminal charges and still suffer political damage.
Hillary was about to learn just how important that distinction could become.
THEN CAME BERNIE
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont entered the Democratic race.
At first, Hillary remained the nationally dominant candidate.
But Sanders possessed something powerful.
Enthusiasm.
His message was direct.
Economic inequality.
The influence of wealthy donors.
College costs.
Universal health care.
Wall Street.
Campaign finance.
A political revolution.
Large crowds began appearing at his rallies.
Young voters responded strongly.
Small-dollar donations poured into his campaign.
And once again, Hillary Clinton discovered that a nomination many people had expected her to win would have to be fought for.
IOWA
February 1, 2016.
The Iowa caucuses produced an extraordinarily close contest.
Hillary narrowly prevailed in the delegate-equivalent count.
Then came New Hampshire.
Sanders won decisively.
Suddenly, echoes of 2008 seemed unavoidable.
Once again, an insurgent candidate was challenging Hillary from a position she had not fully anticipated.
But 2016 would not become 2008.
Hillary’s coalition was different.
She performed strongly among Black voters, particularly in Southern states.
She won important contests.
Super Tuesday strengthened her position.
Sanders continued winning states and attracting enormous crowds, but Hillary gradually built a delegate advantage that became increasingly difficult to overcome.
The campaign continued for months.
Then Hillary crossed a historic threshold.
THE NOMINATION
In July 2016, Democrats gathered in Philadelphia for their national convention.
Hillary Rodham Clinton became the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
For the first time in American history, a woman had been nominated for president by a major political party.
The moment represented far more than one candidate.
Women who remembered eras when professional opportunities had been dramatically narrower watched a woman accept a presidential nomination.
Girls who had never known an America without women serving as senators, governors, judges, generals, executives, and Cabinet officials saw another barrier fall.
Hillary had reached a place no American woman had reached before.
But winning the nomination was not winning the presidency.
And waiting on the other side was one of the most unconventional candidates in American political history.
DONALD J. TRUMP
Donald Trump had never served in elected office.
He was a businessman.
A real-estate developer.
A celebrity.
A television personality.
And now he was the Republican nominee for President of the United States.
Trump had defeated a large Republican primary field containing senators, governors, and experienced political figures.
His political style was confrontational.
His rallies were theatrical.
His use of social media allowed him to speak directly to millions of people.
He attacked opponents with nicknames.
He attacked institutions.
He attacked the news media.
And he attacked Hillary Clinton relentlessly.
“Crooked Hillary” became one of his recurring labels for her.
Hillary attacked Trump in return.
She argued that he lacked the temperament and experience required for the presidency.
The election increasingly became not merely a disagreement about policy but a conflict between two deeply different political identities.
Both candidates entered the general election with significant numbers of Americans already holding strongly negative views of them.
The campaign became bitter.
And it was about to become stranger.
RUSSIA ENTERS THE STORY
During 2016, Democratic organizations were hacked.
Internal communications were stolen.
Documents were subsequently released publicly.
At the time, questions surrounded who was responsible and what they wanted.
The full scope would become clearer through later investigations.
Russian interference was not a minor footnote to the election.
It became the subject of investigations by American intelligence agencies, Congress, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The Mueller investigation later concluded that the Russian government interfered in the election through two principal operations.
One involved a social-media influence campaign.
Another involved Russian intelligence hacking Democratic targets and releasing stolen material.
The Mueller report also documented numerous contacts between people associated with the Trump campaign and individuals linked to Russia, while stating that the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.
Those distinctions matter.
Russian interference was real.
Questions about criminal conspiracy were separate.
The political arguments surrounding both would continue for years.
But Hillary Clinton was not campaigning in 2019 with the Mueller report available.
She was campaigning in 2016.
And the stolen material was appearing in real time.
WIKILEAKS AND THE EMAIL RELEASES
WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic emails during the campaign.
The releases created repeated news cycles.
Campaign strategy.
Internal arguments.
Political relationships.
Private comments.
Each new batch created opportunities for opponents and generated media coverage.
The Clinton campaign was fighting on multiple fronts.
Trump.
Questions about her own private email system.
Benghazi.
WikiLeaks.
Russian interference.
Doubts among some Sanders supporters.
And the normal pressures of a presidential campaign.
Then came the debates.
THE FIRST DEBATE
September 26, 2016.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stood on the same debate stage.
Tens of millions watched.
The contrast was unmistakable.
Hillary emphasized preparation, policy knowledge, and experience.
Trump emphasized disruption, trade, immigration, law and order, and opposition to the political establishment.
The debate was combative.
So were the ones that followed.
By this point, the campaign had become one of the most polarizing presidential contests in recent memory.
Then, in October, another explosive event arrived.
THE ACCESS HOLLYWOOD RECORDING
On October 7, 2016, a recording from 2005 became public in which Trump made vulgar comments about women and described conduct involving women in sexually aggressive terms.
Republican politicians condemned the remarks.
Some withdrew endorsements.
For a moment, Trump’s campaign appeared to be facing a potentially devastating crisis.
But 2016 rarely allowed one controversy to dominate for long.
The same day, WikiLeaks began publishing emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The information war surrounding the election intensified.
And still another development was coming.
One that would put the FBI directly into the final days of the presidential campaign.
JAMES COMEY
Months earlier, FBI Director James Comey had publicly announced the bureau’s findings regarding Hillary’s handling of emails.
He criticized her and her colleagues as “extremely careless” in their handling of highly sensitive information.
But he said the FBI was not recommending criminal charges.
For Hillary, the decision appeared to remove the possibility of prosecution while leaving political damage behind.
Then came October 28.
Eleven days before Election Day.
Comey sent a letter to congressional leaders informing them that the FBI had learned of additional emails that appeared potentially relevant to the investigation.
The emails had been found during an unrelated investigation involving a device associated with Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
The political impact was immediate.
The words “FBI,” “Clinton,” and “emails” returned to headlines across America.
The actual significance of the newly discovered material was not yet known.
But voters were hearing again that the investigation was active.
Nine days later, Comey informed Congress that the review had not changed the FBI’s previous conclusion.
But by then only two days remained before the election.
Whether and precisely how much Comey’s actions affected voting behavior remains debated by scholars, political analysts, campaign participants, and voters.
What is not disputed is the timing.
The first letter arrived eleven days before Election Day.
The second arrived two days before it.
And the race was close enough that even small shifts mattered.
NOVEMBER 8, 2016
Election Day.
The Clinton campaign gathered at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City.
The location carried obvious symbolism.
A glass ceiling towered above the event space.
If Hillary won, the symbolism would write itself.
The first female president.
The highest glass ceiling in American politics shattered.
Supporters arrived expecting history.
Early in the evening, there was still reason for confidence.
Then the map began changing.
Florida was too close.
North Carolina moved toward Trump.
Ohio moved toward Trump.
But Hillary’s path had always included another wall of states.
Michigan.
Wisconsin.
Pennsylvania.
States Democrats had carried in presidential elections for years.
If they held, she still had a route.
Then the numbers became uncomfortable.
WISCONSIN
Wisconsin had voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1988.
Hillary’s campaign had expected it to remain Democratic.
Trump was doing better than expected.
Rural counties were moving heavily toward him.
Democratic margins elsewhere were not enough.
Wisconsin slipped away.
MICHIGAN
Michigan had not voted Republican for president since 1988.
It too became dangerously close.
Trump’s support among white working-class voters was reshaping the electoral map.
Hillary could win enormous margins in cities and still lose if those margins were not large enough to offset Trump’s strength elsewhere.
Michigan moved toward Trump.
PENNSYLVANIA
Then came Pennsylvania.
Another state Democrats had carried repeatedly in presidential elections.
Another state Hillary needed.
Trump won it narrowly.
The “blue wall” had cracked.
And once it did, Hillary’s route to 270 electoral votes collapsed.
THE PHONE CALL
As election night became early morning, the outcome became clear.
Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump and conceded.
The celebration under the glass ceiling never happened.
Her supporters waited.
Hillary did not deliver a concession speech that night.
Campaign chairman John Podesta appeared and told the crowd to go home.
The speech would come the next morning.
For Hillary, decades of political ambition had reached an abrupt stopping point.
She had been First Lady.
Senator.
Secretary of State.
Twice a presidential candidate.
She had become the first woman nominated for president by a major American political party.
But she would not become president.
THE MORNING AFTER
November 9.
Hillary appeared before supporters.
The atmosphere could hardly have been more different from what the campaign had expected twenty-four hours earlier.
There would be no victory speech.
No transition team preparing to take power.
No Cabinet selection process.
No inauguration.
Instead, Hillary conceded publicly.
She acknowledged the pain of defeat.
She told supporters that Donald Trump would be president and that Americans owed him an open mind and a chance to lead.
She also spoke directly to girls watching.
Her candidacy had failed to break the final barrier.
But she argued that someone eventually would.
It was one of the most personal moments of her political career.
The campaign was finished.
The counting, however, revealed an unusual result.
MORE VOTES — BUT NO PRESIDENCY
Nationally, Hillary Clinton received approximately 65.8 million votes.
Donald Trump received approximately 63 million.
Hillary’s advantage was roughly 2.9 million votes.
Yet the national popular vote does not directly determine the presidency.
The Electoral College does.
Trump won enough states to secure the Electoral College majority.
The final electoral vote count, after faithless electors were included, was 304 for Trump and 227 for Clinton.
The result was constitutional.
It was also historically unusual.
For the second time in sixteen years, a presidential candidate had won the national popular vote but lost the presidency.
Hillary had persuaded more individual voters nationwide.
Trump had assembled the state-by-state coalition necessary to win the Electoral College.
Those two statements could both be true.
And they were.
HOW DID IT HAPPEN?
There would never be one universally accepted explanation for Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
Elections involving more than one hundred million voters are not controlled by a single cause.
Analysts examined many factors.
Economic frustration.
Partisanship.
Race.
Gender.
Education.
Geography.
Trump’s appeal to voters who felt ignored by political institutions.
Hillary’s decades of political baggage.
Her campaign strategy.
Turnout.
Third-party candidates.
The email controversy.
Comey’s October letter.
Russian interference.
The leaked emails.
Trump’s media dominance.
Clinton’s weaknesses in parts of the industrial Midwest.
And dissatisfaction with political establishments generally.
Different analysts assigned different weight to each.
Hillary herself would later discuss several of these factors.
But biography should resist the temptation to reduce a complicated election to one sentence.
The margins in decisive states were small.
Wisconsin.
Michigan.
Pennsylvania.
Together, those states determined the presidency.
And political history turned on relatively narrow differences among millions of ballots.
THE RUSSIA INVESTIGATION
After the election, investigations into Russian interference intensified.
In May 2017, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel.
His investigation lasted nearly two years.
The resulting report described Russian interference as “sweeping and systematic.”
It detailed a Russian social-media operation designed to influence American political debate.
It detailed hacking operations targeting Democratic organizations and individuals.
It documented releases of stolen material.
It also examined contacts involving Trump campaign associates.
The investigation did not establish that Trump campaign members conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.
That conclusion did not erase the interference itself.
The two issues were distinct.
Russia had interfered.
The Special Counsel did not establish the broader criminal conspiracy it investigated between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
For Hillary, however, Mueller’s investigation could not change the result.
Donald Trump was already president.
JANUARY 20, 2017
Hillary Clinton attended Trump’s inauguration.
Think about the scene.
She had spent more than a year trying to prevent this moment.
She had debated him.
Attacked his policies.
Questioned his fitness for office.
Raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
Traveled across America.
Won the Democratic nomination.
Received millions more votes nationally.
And lost.
Now she sat at the inauguration while Donald J. Trump took the oath of office as the 45th President of the United States.
Bill Clinton sat with her.
Former presidents attended.
Former First Ladies attended.
The peaceful transfer of power continued.
And Hillary’s political life entered an entirely new phase.
For the first time in decades, there was no obvious next office.
No Senate campaign.
No Cabinet appointment.
No presidential campaign waiting immediately ahead.
There was simply the question:
What now?
AFTER THE CAMPAIGN
Defeat creates silence where a campaign once created constant noise.
For months, every hour of Hillary’s life had been scheduled.
Rallies.
Flights.
Briefings.
Interviews.
Debates.
Fundraisers.
Strategy meetings.
Speeches.
Security.
Motorcades.
Then it stopped.
Hillary began spending more time away from the political stage.
But she did not disappear.
She began thinking publicly about what had happened.
Eventually she wrote a book whose title expressed the question millions of Americans were asking.
What Happened.
Published in 2017, it offered Hillary’s own account of the campaign and defeat.
She discussed her own mistakes.
She also discussed Comey.
Russia.
Media coverage.
Sexism.
Political polarization.
And other factors she believed shaped the outcome.
Critics disputed parts of her interpretation.
Supporters saw the book as a candid examination of an extraordinary defeat.
But something larger was happening beyond Hillary’s personal story.
The election of Donald Trump had transformed American politics.
And Hillary Clinton, whether she wanted the role or not, remained one of the central symbols of the political era Trump had defeated.
THE WOMAN WHO ALMOST BECAME PRESIDENT
History often remembers winners more easily than losers.
Presidents receive libraries.
Their portraits hang in the White House.
Their administrations become formal chapters in American history.
Hillary Clinton never received a presidential administration.
There was no Clinton-Kaine White House.
No Hillary Clinton Cabinet.
No first female presidential inauguration in January 2017.
But losing did not erase what had happened.
A woman had won a major-party presidential nomination.
A woman had stood on the general-election debate stage as one of the two principal candidates for president.
A woman had received tens of millions of votes.
A woman had won the national popular vote.
The presidency had remained out of reach.
But the idea of a woman becoming president could no longer be treated as hypothetical in quite the same way.
Hillary had come within a handful of closely contested states of doing it.
The glass ceiling remained.
But everyone had now seen how close it was.
WAS THIS THE END?
After 2016, speculation occasionally surfaced about whether Hillary might run again.
But another presidential campaign never materialized.
A new generation of Democratic politicians began moving forward.
Hillary increasingly occupied the role of former candidate, former Secretary of State, former senator, author, speaker, advocate, and elder figure within Democratic politics.
Her life had crossed almost every level of American public service except the presidency itself.
And that produced a strange historical position.
She was simultaneously one of the most successful female politicians in American history and the protagonist of two of its most famous presidential defeats.
She had lost to Barack Obama in 2008.
She had lost to Donald Trump in 2016.
Yet neither defeat ended her influence on the political culture.
The arguments surrounding Hillary Clinton continued because the arguments had never been only about Hillary Clinton.
They were about women and power.
Marriage and ambition.
Experience and change.
Privacy and transparency.
Foreign policy and intervention.
Political dynasties.
Partisanship.
Media.
Trust.
Gender.
And the presidency itself.
FROM PARK RIDGE TO THE EDGE OF THE PRESIDENCY
Return for a moment to the beginning.
Park Ridge, Illinois.
A young Hillary Rodham.
No White House.
No Senate.
No State Department.
No presidential campaign.
No one around that girl could have known what awaited her.
Wellesley.
Yale.
Bill Clinton.
Arkansas.
Chelsea.
The governor’s mansion.
The White House.
Health-care reform.
Beijing.
Whitewater.
Impeachment.
New York.
September 11.
Iraq.
Barack Obama.
The State Department.
Bin Laden.
Libya.
Benghazi.
Bernie Sanders.
Donald Trump.
Election night.
It was a political life almost impossible to separate from the last several decades of American history.
And yet the story still was not finished.
Because Hillary Clinton had one more transformation to make.
For most of her adult life, she had been pursuing something.
A legal career.
Policy reform.
A Senate seat.
Diplomatic goals.
The presidency.
After 2016, she had to build a public life without another great campaign at its center.
She became a grandmother.
An author.
A teacher and university figure.
A political speaker.
An advocate.
She reflected on democracy and women’s participation in public life.
And as America entered new political crises, people continued asking what Hillary Clinton thought.
Not because she had become president.
But because she had come so close.
Perhaps that is what makes the final chapter of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s story so unusual.
It is not the story of reaching the presidency.
It is the story of what remains after you do almost everything—
except reach the destination you spent years pursuing.
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