What Happened
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Simon & Schuster £20
Every author dreads being reviewed by an old enemy who’s out for blood. Sure enough, Hillary’s fears have just come true.
‘Crooked Hillary Clinton blames everybody (and every thing) but herself for her election loss. She lost the debates and lost her direction!’ tweeted one novice book reviewer just two days after the publication of her new book. Seconds later, the same critic tweeted a follow-up review: ‘The “deplorables” came back to haunt Hillary. They expressed their feelings loud and clear. She spent big money but, in the end, had no game!’
The reviewer was, of course, her old friend Donald J Trump. How conscientious of him to have ploughed his way through the 500-page volume, what with all those hurricanes blowing and bombs poised to drop!
Throughout the book, Hillary see-saws jerkily between sweet and sour, calm and fury
Perhaps President Trump was miffed by the impolite character sketches of himself that punctuate Hillary’s book. Among other things, he is, she tells us: a liar, mean-spirited, toweringly self-regarding, a crank, a bigot, flagrantly sexist, a puppet of the Kremlin and ‘the most dishonest candidate ever’.
She begins this book about her failed Presidential campaign and her life in the months following, by saying: ‘This is my story of what happened… how I reconnected with the things that matter most to me and began to look ahead with hope, instead of backward with regret.’
Well, yes and no. Throughout the book, Hillary see-saws jerkily between sweet and sour, calm and fury. In one paragraph, she will be cooing about spending more time with her grandchildren and finding inner calm, and then in the next she will be screaming generalised abuse and wailing that it was all so unfair.
In fact, there were times as I was reading this book when Hillary reminded me of no one so much as Catherine Tate’s character Nan, who goes from tabby cat to sabre-tooth tiger, and then back again, and all in a matter of seconds.
For instance, on page 14 she writes of the Women’s March after Trump’s inauguration and how ‘awe-inspiring it was’ to see the stirrings of a grassroots women’s movement ‘rewriting the destinies of nations’. But in the next paragraph, she delivers her first slap: ‘Yet I couldn’t help but ask where those feelings of solidarity, courage, and passion had been during the election.’
She goes on to claim that ‘more than two dozen women’ had approached her in the street since the election to apologise for not voting. ‘I wanted to stare right in their eyes and say, “You didn’t vote? How could you not vote? You abdicated your responsibility as a citizen at the worst possible time! And now you want ME to make YOU feel better?” ’
And then – after a long and increasingly hyperbolic list of grievances about the unfairness of the election, culminating in ‘Why did the media decide to present the controversy over my emails as one of the most important political stores since the end of World War II?’ – she suddenly comes over all cooey again, saying: ‘For all my concerns, though, watching the Women’s March, I couldn’t help but be swept up in the joy of the moment and feel the unmistakable vitality of American democracy.’
There is no punctuation mark in the book’s title: it reads What Happened rather than What Happened? or What Happened! This suggests that Hillary knows what went wrong, and is now prepared to share that knowledge with the reader…
‘I’ve spent nearly every day since November 8, 2016 wrestling with a single question: why did I lose?’ she writes. But it soon becomes clear that, ten months on, she is still in a dizzy state of befuddlement, lurching between two contradictory positions – a) blaming herself and b) blaming everyone but herself.
Of the two options, she much prefers the latter. Often, she will start off by almost saying ‘I got it wrong’, but by the end of the page she will be adding that, to be perfectly honest, she didn’t really get anything wrong at all. For instance, on page 400, a paragraph begins: ‘So, yes, I had my shortcomings as a candidate.’ But then, in the very next paragraph, she is quoting a commentator who applauded her for ‘the most effective series of debate performances in modern political history’.
Bernie Sanders is to blame; Putin is to blame. Fake news is to blame. FBI director James Comey is to blame; the media are to blame. It was all so UNFAIR and ONE-SIDED. At no point does she mention she spent almost twice as much on her campaign ($581 million) as Trump did on his ($340 million)
Even when she admits to a mistake, like calling Trump’s supporters ‘deplorables’, she goes on to um and er before concluding that, actually, what with one thing and another, she wasn’t so very wrong about it after all. Often she seems unsure whether she actually lost the election at all. I lost count of the number of times she said: ‘Don’t forget that I won the popular vote by nearly three million.’ And a good few pages are devoted to setting out in some detail what she’d now be doing if she were President, regardless of the fact that she’s not.
Self-contradictory and muddled it may be, but at least What Happened gives the reader some idea of the current state of Hillary Clinton’s mind. Needless to say, she sprinkles its pages with the homely truisms that are obligatory in American political memoirs. ‘There’s nothing quite like friendship,’ she tells us; ‘I don’t believe any of us gets through life alone.’ And: ‘I just love children – love just sitting with them and being silly.’ She concludes this particular revelation by saying: ‘If you’re ever looking for me at a party, you’re likely to find me wherever the kids are.’ To which the only valid response is: ‘Pull the other one, Hillary – it’s got bells on.’
There are also endless tales of her encounters with wise old biddies in coffee bars, who all clutch her warmly and tell her their worries and dreams. ‘And that’s been a unique privilege.’ She never stops ‘reaching out’ to people, and finding the experience ‘humbling’. Post-election, she even talks about cuddling her dogs, making stews and – ahem – catching up with the final season of Downton Abbey, which in turn reminds her of the night she spent in Buckingham Palace in 2011. ‘It was like stepping into a fairy tale.’
When Hillary talks of the ‘deep currents of anger and resentment flowing through our culture’, you feel that she may also be talking about herself
But, amid all the bonhomie, there are sudden shafts of the sort of hopeless pain any of us would feel if we had spent the past 15 or so years preparing for a job before finding it given to the most unsuitable candidate of them all. Reading the news every morning after Trump’s election was, she says, ‘like ripping off a scab’ and ‘there are times when all I want to do is scream into a pillow’. Watching Trump’s appointments on TV, ‘I nearly threw the remote control at the wall’. When she talks of the ‘deep currents of anger and resentment flowing through our culture’, you feel that she may also be talking about herself.
Perhaps the most unexpected passage in this peculiar book concerns some therapy she underwent with her yoga instructor, in order to get over the shock of the election. ‘If you’ve never done alternate nostril breathing, it’s worth a try,’ she advises. She then gives the instructions: close one nostril, exhale through the other, close both, hold your breath, and so on. According to Hillary, breathing through the right nostril allows oxygen to the side of the brain where your creativity is stored, and breathing through the left allows it to ventilate your logic. Can this be true?
I wonder what Donald would say?