Hillary Rodham Clinton

I was mad, happy, sad, and back to mad again by the time I finished this memoir. "What Happened" is Hillary Clinton's comments on the recent 2016 United States Presidential Election. Or as I and my friends started to call it, that farce that we all know was rigged (Hi Russia) but not in the way many think. Clinton talks about voter suppression, Russian bots, Russia itself, the media, and heck even former and current politicians who influenced the 2016 election. Yes she even discusses "But show more Her emails" too. What I took away from this was even more respect for Clinton than I had previously. Reading this no holds barred look at what happened just hits you in the gut at how much was thrown at her and how the media and politicians kept letting Trump off the hook.

I do have to say that Clinton really does discuss everything that you would want her to discuss in this book. She discusses her marriage her life as a mother her life as the first lady and then a secretary of state. She mentions how her meetings with Putin become increasingly hostile because hey, Putin doesn't like women and he certainly did not like Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State not giving an inch when he was trying to take a mile.

One thing that this book that speak of extensively is Hillary Clinton's regrets. Most of her regrets are about failing us. That she is worried for us as a country about what this means when we love fake news and men that attack and demean to rise to positions of power in the United States government?

What happens when we decide that being actually really good at your job with real solutions doesn't matter as much as the media can turn something into a meme or a gif and get ratings for it?

What happens when we ignore the racism out of some that we have elected to office because we think that there are a good guy that we can have a beer with.

I do also like the fact that Hillary Clinton goes into how difficult it is to run in the United States for a woman because of the things that are held against us that really are not held against us in other countries. Other countries have elected women to the highest levels of office. It's kind of embarrassing that for America to go around saying that we are the light and the forefront of democracy that no woman has ever been President or Vice President of these United States of America. I hated how people would say that Hillary Clinton was too shrill or wasn't warm enough or any of these other things that we talk about when we discuss women. But men are seen as being forceful and in charge when they're nasty and loud and throw s***.

I loved her comments on the Mothers of the Movement, Flint (she's still pissed and we all should be), the NRA, and people who shook her hand and would then call her the devil saying she should be locked up.

I do have to say though that I would recommend this book to people who just want to read more about Hillary Clinton's thoughts. Because she truly comes alive in this book. I was lucky enough to meet Secretary Clinton back when I was in Iraq and I loved her personality. She looked you right in the eyes when she was talking to you, and you knew that she was listening to what you were saying. I think that says a lot about somebody that she made sure that she personally talked to everybody that had to come to see her give a speech while I was in Iraq. She had to be tired and ready to go, but she made sure she stayed there and talked to everybody who was willing to talk to her. I've seen other politicians flying through who couldn't spend more than 5 minutes talking to you and really wanted to be left alone.

I do think that in the end history is going to remember Hillary Clinton for not just the first woman who managed to get the Democratic nomination for president. But just as a very good person to know who fought for us even when many were hoping she fail.

Look at the media going after the Clintons again, talking about Benghazi again, wanting her to be guilty of something because then it would help erase some of the guilt that they all probably should and do feel over how they easily played into the hands of another foreign power and Donald Trump.

Onward together. show less

Best for: Anyone who is a fan of Secretary Clinton; anyone who isn’t a fan of Secretary Clinton; anyone interested in learning more about how we can prevent something like Trump from happening again.

In a nutshell: First major-party woman nominee for President of the US loses to an ignorant charlatan and seeks to figure out why.

Worth quoting:
“Throughout the 2016 campaign, my staff would come to me wide-eyed. ‘You’ll never believe what Trump said today. It was vile.’ I always show more believed it. Not just because of who Trump is but because of who we can be at our worst. We’ve seen it too many times to be surprised.”
“Something I wish every man across America understood is how much fear accompanies women throughout our lives.”
“I’ve always believed that it’s dangerous to make big promises if you have no idea how you’re going to keep them. When you don’t deliver, it will make people even more cynical about government.”
“Many in the press and political chattering class marveled at how Teflon-coated Trump seemed to be, ignoring their own role in making him so.”

Why I chose it: I voted for Secretary Clinton, both in the primary in my state (which didn’t count, because Washington uses the horribly inaccessible caucus system) and in the general election. I was heartbroken when she lost. I bought this book the week it came out, but could only bring myself to start reading it this year.

Review: I think this book is mostly perfect for what it is. It’s a post-mortem but it’s also a celebration. It’s a glimpse into what we are missing out on because of 40,000 votes in three states, because the fear in the hearts of some outweighed the optimism in the hearts of others.

Secretary Clinton starts with Trump’s inauguration and then jumps back to deciding to run again after losing the primary to President Obama in 2008. She takes the reader through her decision-making process, and from there jumps from topic to topic, looking at what it means to be a woman in politics, what it means to be HER in politics.

She also doesn’t hold back when talking about her perceptions of how she was treated as compared to the men she ran against - first to Sen. Sanders and then to Trump. And I will say I have to agree with how Sen. Sanders seemed to be allowed to just say whatever and was fawned over, while Secretary Clinton would offer a more realistic version and be slammed for it. It was so frustrating. I also appreciated her discussion of gun violence and the stark difference between her position and Sen. Sanders.

The part that is most frustrating to read, however, is how she was treated by and in relation to Trump. She spends an entire chapter on the emails / private server issue, and frankly I wish everyone were required to read it before offering an opinion on the topic. And she gets into very specific detail about why, in the end, she ultimately lost.

I saw other reviewers in the media suggest she doesn’t take responsibility for her loss, but that’s not right. She takes responsibility for the part she should, such as not recognizing fully how much fear and anger were the focus of some people (and rightfully so). But she then appropriately points out how voter suppression, the Russian influence on social media, and the Comey letter less than two weeks before the election really did have a measurable impact. It’s frustrating and made me want to throw things more than once.

One area that she doesn’t talk about as much in the ‘why’ section is misogyny. She definitely devotes time to it throughout, but I do think that there were plenty of people who perhaps stayed home because they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman. They might not recognize that consciously, but it’s there.

The book didn’t leave me despondent, although I was angry when I finished it. It, for me, was just another reminder of how much work we all have to do to keep the current president from causing more damage than he already has. show less

Politician & Author Mashup
Review of the Simon & Schuster/St. Martin’s Press Canadian Export paperback edition (October 12, 2021)

Total loyalty to President Dunn and his decisions, no matter how ego-driven and uninformed and outright dangerous they were, had been demanded.
Competence was replaced by blind loyalty as the determining factor for employment by an increasingly deranged administration.
Secretary Adams, on entering as SecState, had quickly realized there was no such thing as the

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Deep State. There was nothing “deep” about it. Nothing hidden. Career employees and political appointees wandered the halls and sat in meetings and shared bathrooms and tables in the cafeterias.
Those left behind by the Dunn administration had the thousand-yard stare of combatants finally detached from the horrors around them. The horrors they themselves had perpetrated.

You don't have to read very far into State of Terror before it becomes clear that it is going to be political payback, at least in the fictional realm, for the slights of Donald Trump against his 2016 Presidential campaign rival Hillary Clinton. The asides about the incompetence and the outright dangerous policies and practices of a Trump-proxy administration by a fictional President Dunn are frequent. An even more malevolent consequence becomes the main plotline of the book.

It is not as evident about whether the succeeding fictional administration of President Williams is meant to be a mashup of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The Williams administration does appoint the Hillary Clinton-proxy of their political enemy Ellen Adams as the Secretary of State however, as did Obama of Clinton. Adams was not a rival candidate for the Presidential nomination though, she instead ran a media empire (someone along the lines of a younger female version of Rupert Murdoch let's say) that vehemently opposed the Williams candidacy. The subplot is that Williams is seeking for SecState Adams to spectacularly fail, in his own sort of payback.

Your enjoyment of State of Terror will likely increase with the more knowledge that you have of the real world U.S. political situation of the past few Presidential administrations, so that you can pick up on the asides and shades of this political thriller. Overall I'd say that it was well done and that the Clinton/Penny team-up did an excellent job of crafting the build up of suspense with the teases and reveals of the tie-ins and backgrounds of the various fictional characters.

You do have to suspend your sense of belief quite a few times to accept several fictional leaps (main example was that the SecState knows how to produce deepfake videos on the spur of the moment using what is presumably illegal dark web material). Several asides about SecState Adams showing up at meetings in muddy and/or weather-beaten disarray will also strike you as extremely odd. Perhaps they are some sort of insider joke. The main antagonist is of James Bond villain proportions and is someone who seems to be able to magically popup in all sorts of unexpected places in order to provide our heroes with clues for the next stage. But such is the world of fantasy political suspense thrillers and Clinton/Penny hit all the marks perfectly in that regard.

Regular Louise Penny fans will get a few great payoffs towards the end of the book when a certain Quebec village and some of its fictional inhabitants make a few cameo appearances.

I noticed only one copyediting error (see below) in what was likely a rush to print. The book was likely ready several months ago as several international translation editions have already appeared almost simultaneously with the original English language publication. Clinton therefore was spot on in predicting the renewed takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban (mid-August 2021 in real life) which is another subplot of the book.

The ending hints that a likely sequel is planned.

Trivia and Notes
#ThereIsAlwaysOne > Copyediting missed a duplicate sentence at the bottom of page 360 which is repeated at the top of page 361: "The young men and women clutched M-4 rifles and stared across the aisle at each other." show less

This book was our walk together, in the woods of Chappaqua, in our yoga pants trying to make sense of what happened.

Whenever I have a significant life change--relationship ending, career problems, new stages in my child's development, etc. The thing that has gotten me through is a walk, a talk or a phone call with my women friends. Together we work out what happened, where things went wrong or right, what I plan to take as my next steps. Sign up for online dating! Tell that job to shove it! show more Take care of yourself! This is how women bond and this is how we support one another. A woman friend (or a therapist!) will let you talk things out, agree with you, but ultimately let you discover what went wrong and how to fix it. Men--god bless them, often go straight to the fix, not realizing that we need to talk this out.

This book was needed. I needed it. Hillary need to write it. Don't let anyone tell you that HRC should get off the stage and be quiet. No one said that about Bernie's book. No one says that to any of the male public figures that have written a book in the past few hundreds of years. Public figures write books and publishers publish them. This is how we unravel the story of our civilization and move forward.

I especially needed this book and from HRC because I'm still stunned about the election. I believe that a hundred years from now history will look back on 2016 the same way they did 1941, 196os, and 1865. It is a turning point in our history. This was HRC's gift to all of us--as we walk in those woods of Chappaqua together, in our yoga pants, trying to make sense of what happened, so we can figure out where to go from here. show less