Hillary Clinton is awarding her first televised sit-down interview to promote her new book to a woman, selecting CBS Sunday Morning anchor Jane Pauley.
CBS News announced the interview Wednesday, promising that Pauley will hit a number of topics with the former secretary of state, including last year’s election, the Russian hacking, FBI Director James Comey and her thoughts on President Donald Trump.
The interview, which will air Sunday morning on CBS stations at 9 a.m., comes two days before Clinton’s latest book, What Happened, comes out.
Hillary Clinton’s (left) first sit-down television interview promoting her new book, What Happened, will be with CBS Sunday Morning anchor Jane Pauley (right)
Hillary Clinton, seen at the American Library Association conference in June, is about to start a media blitz to promote her book, including with Pauley and an appearance on The View
However, much of the contents of What Happened have already spilled out.
CNN, for instance, found a copy at a Jacksonville, Florida bookstore, and read the book overnight.
Journalists there wrote a piece Wednesday about how Clinton blamed herself for her loss, but also shifted some around.
‘I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully though-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment,’ she wrote in the book.
Looking outward, she also pointed fingers at Russia, wishing she could have won and gotten revenge on President Vladimir Putin, and now fired FBI head Comey, who brought the email scandal back into voters’ minds just days before the election.
She spoke candidly about her marriage with ex-President Bill Clinton.
‘There were times that I was deeply unsure about whether our marriage could or should survive,’ she wrote. ‘But on those days, I asked myself the questions that mattered to me: Do I still love him? And can I still be in this marriage without becoming unrecognizable to myself – twisted by anger, resentment, or remoteness?’
‘The answer was always yes,’ she wrote, according to CNN.
Some supporters of Clinton also got their hands on the book and tweeted out pages earlier this week airing out her thoughts on primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
‘Because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn’t make an argument against me in this area on policy, so he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character,’ Clinton wrote.
She also suggested he oversold the voters, promising them ‘ponies’ or ‘six-minute abs,’ and then punished her when she pointed out the impracticality.
To Bustle, Clinton released an excerpt about the origins of her post-election advocacy group, Onward Together, which originally was supposed to be called Our American Future.
‘Luckily, a friend of mine pointed out that the acronym of Our American Future would be OAF,’ she noted, explaining why they changed the name. ‘I imagined the headlines: “Hillary Clinton Lurches Out of the Woods: Here Comes OAF.”‘
But Morning Joe, whose hosts President Trump likes to go to war with on Twitter, was the first program to tease the Clinton book, which recalled the Democratic candidate’s reaction to Trump playing creep-in-the-back with her during the second presidential debate.
‘It was incredibly uncomfortable he was literally breathing down my neck,’ Clinton said. ‘My skin crawled.’
She wrote that she wanted to hit pause and solicit the audience’s advice.
‘Do you say calm, keep smiling and carry-on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, “Back up you creep, get away from me! I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me, so back up!”‘ Clinton thought at the time.
She decided on the former, and more peaceful, response.
Also, according to CNN’s read of the book, decided to stay in public life, despite the harsh media attention she sometimes receives.
‘There are plenty of people hoping that I, too, would just disappear,’ she wrote.’ But here I am.’
And she won’t just be on CBS Sunday Morning in the coming weeks.
Next Wednesday, Clinton will appear on The View, the co-hosts announce today on their show, as they appeared alongside President Trump’s Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her dad, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
After that, Clinton will return to Washington, D.C. on September 18 to kick off her book tour, being branded as ‘Hillary Clinton Live,’ at the Warner Theatre, situated just one block from the Trump International Hotel and two blocks from the White House.
Clinton’s tour will take her to an additional 14 cities, including some in states she lost to President Trump.