Hillary had always planned to leave the State Department after the 2012 election. When President Obama had asked her to be secretary of state, she told him the truth—she loved being a senator from New York, wanted to go back to it, and he had other good options for State. He asked her to think about it. I thought in the end she’d have to do it, and when I talked to the president-elect, I told him to be patient; she didn’t make big changes lightly. I said she didn’t say yes when I asked her to marry me until she’d said no twice. I think something that swayed her was that she, like all Democrats, wanted him to succeed, and if she didn’t say yes, it might undermine the respect and cooperation she’d earned from her Senate colleagues. Finally, Hillary said if she accepted, she wanted to make sure she could choose her top staff and meet the president for lunch weekly when they were both in the country. He agreed and she said yes.
She had loved the job more than she’d expected to, but after four years of endless travel and high-stakes work, she was exhausted. Previous secretaries of state had been known for high-profile efforts to resolve crises or make peace. Only a few had also earned a reputation for making the most of “the building,” meaning the several hundred operations and more than 70,000 employees on the organizational chart of the State Department. Hillary was determined to do both: to travel the world to solve problems, reduce tensions, and advance the president’s agenda, and to help the State Department’s workforce be seen, heard, respected, and effective. She believed our world leadership depended on Defense, Diplomacy, and Development. She had done backbreaking work to support the first, advance the last two, and deal with the big crises. She needed a break.
President Obama urged her to stay on. He had developed a close relationship with her and had come to trust her in tough situations. She was loyal to him and kept whatever differences they had on policy between the two of them. She was on track to end her tenure with sky-high public approval ratings, and unusually good working relations with the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and Congress, including many Republicans who weren’t yet too afraid of their right wing to say what they thought. She’d also received thorough, fact-based coverage in the media, including Kim Ghattas’s excellent book The Secretary.
Then came Benghazi. On September 11, 2012, Ambassador Chris Stevens and Information Management Officer Sean Smith were killed in an attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound there. Hours later, two CIA contractors who were former Navy SEALs were slain in the second of two attacks on a still officially secret CIA compound about a mile away.
The U.S. and the U.K. had joined France, other NATO allies, and Arab League members in providing U.N.-approved air support to the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi in early 2011. In October 2011, he was found hiding in his hometown and was killed by fellow Libyans. A new civilian government was established in Tripoli, the capital, but after decades of dictatorship holding together a complex web of tribal alliances, the government was fragile, with limited ability to control the many militia groups who had begun quarreling among themselves after Gaddafi’s demise.
Chris Stevens, an experienced diplomat, became the U.S. ambassador to Libya, where he had served before, and got to work trying to bridge the differences. He traveled around the country for meetings, which is why he was in Benghazi. Stevens spoke Arabic fluently, had met alone and unarmed with tribal leaders, and worked well with them. He was probably the most popular foreigner in Libya. But not with everyone. Ansar al-Sharia, an extremist group, claimed credit for the attacks.
When the assault on the diplomatic compound occurred, a security officer immediately took Stevens and Smith to a steel-reinforced safe room where they remained until the attackers withdrew, setting fire to the buildings on the way out. There was an escape route, a ladder that led to the roof. The security officer got on the ladder and beckoned Stevens and Smith to follow. They didn’t, either because they were too weak from smoke inhalation or didn’t hear or couldn’t find the ladder. Smith’s body was soon found. Stevens was found later by a group of Libyans walking in the ruins of the compound and taken to a hospital. After attempts to revive him failed, he, too, was declared dead by smoke inhalation.
The terrorists then staged a separate attack on the CIA facility, killing the two contractors before being driven off. Soon tens of thousands of Libyans poured into the streets of Benghazi to mourn Chris Stevens, and another group stormed the headquarters of Ansar al-Sharia and ran several of their members out of town.
How did this happen? Could it have been prevented? Hillary accepted responsibility whenever something went wrong involving those 70,000+ State and USAID staff at more than 270 posts around the world. She quickly appointed an Accountability Review Board, as required whenever State Department personnel lose their lives overseas. It happens more often than people think. It was the nineteenth such investigation since 1988. (You may be surprised by the big number. The others took place when Congress didn’t exploit tragedies to make political hay.)
The five-member board was led by the highly respected Tom Pickering, a recently retired foreign service officer who had led many challenging embassies, including El Salvador during its civil war, Israel during the first Intifada, and Russia just after the fall of the Soviet Union. His lead partner was recently retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, a well-liked and very able straight shooter.
The Review Board did a good job identifying problems in handling diplomatic security and coordinating with the people working with local governments and those in the State Department hierarchy charged with giving them the support they needed. The board’s report found too much reliance on Libyan security contractors and called for more support from Congress for the State Department’s needs, which the board pointed out “constitute a small percentage both of the full national budget and that spent for national security.” The report contained twenty-nine recommendations to fix the problem. Hillary and her team handed out assignments designed to implement all of them and she pledged not to leave her job until the changes were underway. After the president’s reelection, she kept working, testifying about Benghazi for five hours before Senate and House committees and preparing a long memo for President Obama with her recommendations for the next four years in foreign policy, soon to be overseen by incoming Secretary of State John Kerry.
Hillary’s last day was February 1, 2013, and the State Department gave her a rousing sendoff, grateful for her leadership, from urging the president to approve the mission to get bin Laden, to securing the votes in the U.N. imposing tough sanctions on Iran, to flying all night from Asia to broker a cease-fire in Gaza between Hamas and Israel, to her wide-ranging efforts to educate and economically empower women and girls in the poorest countries, and to make the countries she visited feel important to the United States.
After she left the State Department, Hillary joined Chelsea and me at the Clinton Foundation, and for the first time since I lost reelection as governor of Arkansas in 1980, we were both out of politics. Sort of.
The congressional hearings on Benghazi, which had started just before Hillary left office on February 1, 2013, continued on, eventually producing five separate reports from House and two from Senate committees. All the committees were chaired by Republicans, all found no wrongdoing by Hillary, and all generally supported the recommendations of the Accountability Review Board she had appointed and which she had already begun implementing. In the end, the GOP-led committees played it straight and because they did, predictably earned precious little press coverage.
The Republicans knew Hillary was their strongest political opponent in 2016. They had to discredit her. So when the regular Republican majority committee hearings didn’t get the desired result, the House Republican leadership, on May 2, 2014, formed a “special committee” on Benghazi headed by Representative Trey Gowdy, the former prosecutor who had defeated Bob Inglis in a Republican primary after Inglis refused to deny climate change, question President Obama’s birth in the U.S., or foment hatred of the president.
The new Benghazi committee, officially labeled the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, was purely political, set up to attack Hillary. Republican leader Kevin McCarthy even bragged about it on Fox News on September 29, 2015, saying, “Everybody thought Hillary was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
By then, Hillary had been a presidential candidate for five months, announcing first with a video designed to showcase the people she wanted to help. Three months later, on June 13, 2015, in a rally on a beautiful summer day in the Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River, she gave a kickoff speech to thousands of people and talked more about what she wanted to do for our country.
On October 22, 2015, more than one hundred days after she launched her campaign for president, Hillary testified for the second time about Benghazi. She was grilled for more than eight hours in an eleven-hour stretch between 10 a.m. and 9 p.m.
McCarthy was right that more than a year of Republican attacks had driven her poll numbers down. But at the hearing, she handled herself, the tragedy, and her record in a way no other man or woman in public life could have matched. She was strong, direct, and calm, displaying the qualities that would have made her a great president. People who watched it live or saw the straightforward coverage and commentary on television and in print media were impressed, and her campaign got a needed boost of enthusiasm.
When it was finally over in 2016, the Benghazi committee investigations, six in the House, two in the Senate, had cost taxpayers $7 million and gone on longer than congressional probes into 9/11, Watergate, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the attack on Pearl Harbor!
Long before that, the headlines had forgotten Ambassador Stevens and the other three Americans who lost their lives, and glommed on to the fact that Hillary had used her personal email to conduct business as secretary of state and that the emails eventually were stored on a private server in our house. Most of these stories were written as if the inquiry that produced them was sparked by a suspicion that she violated the law. Even today, most people still don’t know how it started.
In 2014, more than a year after Hillary had left the State Department, Congress changed the Federal Records Act to require that records still in possession of current and former government employees be included in official government files within twenty days, and to require the use of government devices when doing business. Before that, the State Department rules allowed her and other State Department employees to use their private email devices, as long as their business-related emails were saved and turned over when the career employees in charge of archiving and retrieving records asked for them.
In October of 2014, the State Department record-keeper asked all former secretaries of state to check their emails and copies of any documents they still had to see if there was anything that should be part of the department’s official records. Colin Powell said he had deleted all his emails years before. Madeleine Albright said she didn’t email, as did Condi Rice, although her top aides did and they complied with the request. Hillary called in her lawyers and asked them to go over her emails and resolve all doubt in favor of the State Department request. They already had more than 90 percent of them because they were sent to other State Department personnel using their government-issued email accounts which automatically stored them. The State Department reviewed all the ones she submitted and returned more than a thousand, judging them not to be related to her work.
As for the server, that’s on me. Well before the emails became an issue, the team handling my communications concluded that the company whose server we were using was doing a less than stellar job and that we could get better service and more security if we just bought a server and installed it at our house, where the Secret Service is on duty around the clock. The Secret Service approved the move and even asked to be able to use the server, too. So, I gave the go-ahead.
The email story became the biggest story of the 2016 election. It would get 20 percent more coverage than all Trump’s negatives combined. It was at the core of a reputation-destruction campaign that was also aided in early 2015 by the publication of Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash. At the time, the author was on the payroll of GAI (the Government Accountability Institute), funded by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer and working closely with Steve Bannon, the white nationalist head of the right-wing social media site Breitbart News. The essential argument of the book was that Hillary and I and the Clinton Foundation had gotten a lot of money by using her position as secretary of state to give access to the State Department to our supporters, including donors to the Clinton Foundation, though even Schweizer admitted he had found no “smoking gun” evidence, just questions.
It took about two days to discredit the book for its attacks on the foundation. Some of the errors were so obvious that even the publisher, a Rupert Murdoch company, demanded several changes in the text to continue printing it. But the book achieved its larger purpose when, amazingly, The New York Times and The Washington Post joined Fox in signing “exclusive” agreements to use the book as a “resource” for the campaigns, knowing full well whose payroll the author was on and his past work as a right-wing propagandist.
Gene Lyons, an Arkansas journalist who had earned the ire of the political media in the 1990s with his book The Hunting of the President, coauthored with Joe Conason, wrote a column blasting the Times and the Washington Post for teaming up with Fox on the “exclusive” arrangement with Schweizer, saying “he makes his living vilifying Democrats” and referred to a “long list of withdrawn or retracted stories under his byline.” He also quoted the British Sunday Times, finding that “facts that are checkable do not check out. Individuals credited for supplying information do not exist or cannot be tracked down. Requests to the author for help and clarification result in further confusion and contradiction.”
Nevertheless, The New York Times praised Schweizer’s “meticulous reporting,” as the basis for its first “Uranium One” story, implying that as secretary of state, Hillary sold out the national interest by helping a Russian company to buy a Wyoming-based enterprise for a few million dollars in contributions to the Clinton Foundation. Lyons destroyed the story piece by piece. He said, “The Clinton Rules are back: all innuendo and guilt-by-association.” The story was so bad that the Times and the Post essentially reversed field and conceded that Hillary was not involved, my supporter and Clinton Foundation board member Frank Giustra was not involved, and the charges were false. But besides hurting Frank, airing the charges had hurt Hillary, me, and the Clinton Foundation. It was a “three-fer” for Breitbart and the political press.
What was going on? The political media needed a close race, and Hillary was still a big favorite, so, ignoring the warning of the 2014 midterm results, they decided they wouldn’t get a close race without damaging her reputation. Then they contracted the work of finding ammunition to a source they knew to be biased and unreliable and never publicized the fact that how she handled her emails was explicitly allowed by government regulations. Read that again: government regulations explicitly allowed Hillary to use her own device and said she had to save any business-related work until the State Department people in charge of archiving records asked for it. No matter how closely you followed the 2016 election and how many email stories you read, I’d be surprised if even 3 percent of the voters knew that, or about those multiple Republican-chaired Benghazi committees that had found no wrongdoing by her.
Meanwhile, Hillary had a campaign to run. Like I said earlier, elections are about culture, conditions, candidates, their campaigns, and coverage on television, social media, radio talk shows, and in print media, which often drives what the television networks and other outlets cover and talk about. The press treatment in 2015 and 2016 would turn out to be the worst in my lifetime and made a bigger difference in the election than any coverage I’d ever seen. With the political press’s inexplicable obsession with the false email narrative and the sensationalizing of the Clinton Cash falsehoods, the ultimate effect was that their coverage, along with Comey’s unprecedented violation of decades of FBI policy—plus an assist from Putin—tipped the Electoral College in Donald Trump’s favor.
I lived through Whitewater and the political media’s breathless coverage which continued even after Hillary and I were cleared of wrongdoing in 1995. The Republicans kept on going, though, with Ken Starr’s crowd eventually becoming the first special counsels to lose their bogus cases in court. I didn’t believe it could get any worse. But, boy, did 2016 prove me wrong. We may never know the political press’s motivations for its coverage of Hillary’s campaign—personal animus, power lust, the extra income driven by clicks and retweets, or some combination of all three and other factors—or why most of the mainstream media hasn’t acknowledged its impact on the most critical election of my lifetime.
But I do know this: the media is indispensable to our democracy and is one reason our republic has survived as long as it has. The good news is that by and large, they’ve tried to mend their ways and find a way back to objective reporting. But with the exception of a few brave truth tellers, they’ve done so without acknowledging what they did in 2015 and 2016.
When we first began discussing the possibility of her running for president again, Hillary was clearly the Democrats’ best choice to beat the third-term jinx if she concentrated on what her administration could do to make people’s lives better: from expanding eligibility for healthcare coverage under the Affordable Care Act; to making it easier for working parents to take care of their children; to moving the green energy economy to a more sustainable job-producing model; to implementing a big infrastructure program to create lots of jobs, bring clean water to communities with dangerous rusting pipes, and get affordable broadband, education, and training within reach of every American, especially in economically stagnant areas; and to being more aggressive in confronting China’s clear abuses in trade policy and currency manipulation.
She had to demonstrate how she would be different from Obama without being disloyal or separating herself from the achievements she strongly supported and wanted to build on. It was a tough task. She made many efforts to do so, including going to places with problems not being dealt with early in her “listening tour” mode.
Hillary’s main primary opponent was Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who had been elected to the House in 1992 as an independent, a label he kept when he moved on to the Senate in the 2006 midterm sweep. Sanders thought President Obama had not been far enough left in his proposals for healthcare, taxing the rich, and providing easier access to college, and he opposed all trade agreements, thinking they hurt more Americans than they helped. He considered running against Obama for the nomination in 2012, but didn’t, in part because he was up for reelection, and he wanted to keep his seat.
In 2016, he had nothing to lose, and he sensed a growing frustration among working-class and younger voters who felt things had to be shaken up for them to get a fair shake. It didn’t seem to occur to these voters that if they had voted in the 2010 and 2014 midterms as they did in 2008 and 2012, Obama would have gotten a lot more done and they’d have been less frustrated.
Bernie was vigorous, decisive, and sure of the righteousness of his cause. He told voters what would be different if they elected him. His pitch paid off in the army of younger voters who showed up to work for him and the large number of small contributors who financed the lion’s share of his campaign.
Hillary campaigned on a platform with specific progressive goals and realistic methods for achieving them, including how to pay for them. Bernie’s platform had bigger promises but fewer specifics on how to achieve them, much less how to pay for them, especially given the fact that Congress was still in Republican hands.
Essentially, he said we needed to become a bigger version of Denmark with lots of free things. Except they wouldn’t be free and if we only taxed the wealthiest Americans, it wouldn’t be enough to pay for his priorities. He did acknowledge that the middle class would pay more in taxes for healthcare but said they would more than make up for it by not paying for health insurance. In theory, that’s true. We spend way more than any other country for healthcare. But Bernie never talked about how to make the transition, how long it would take to win back the House and Senate with enough votes to pass his proposal, and what would happen to the hundreds of thousands of people who worked for insurers whose jobs would be lost, or the fact that Denmark taxes its people up to 53 percent of annual income, much higher than the United States, with lower defense expenditures per capita, leaving much more money for social programs.
But it sounded so good. Bernie convinced his supporters that Hillary was almost reactionary for not supporting dismantling the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with a single-payer system, guaranteeing free college for everyone, and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour immediately in all fifty states, regardless of the differences in the cost of living. His troops shouted that if you weren’t as far left as he was, you were an inauthentic pawn of the establishment. Hillary was allergic to promising something no president could deliver, and since her platform was the most progressive yet realistic one ever offered, she believed she could sell it, unless people stopped listening. That’s exactly what the Republicans and the political press were hoping to accomplish by keeping her tied up with the emails as long as possible.
Hillary narrowly won in Iowa, but it felt like a landslide, given what had happened there in 2008. In New Hampshire it was the reverse. She lost by a lot, in spite of having a good campaign staff and all her longtime supporters. I lost New Hampshire in 1992 to Paul Tsongas, whose hometown in Massachusetts was just five miles from New Hampshire’s narrow southern border. Vermont borders the entire west side of New Hampshire from north to south, so Bernie was a constant media presence for those who watched Vermont television. Hillary’s campaign leaders urged her not to contest an unwinnable race, but she said it would be disloyal to all the people who had worked so hard for her for so long. She went to New Hampshire, made her pitch, and sent her message: you might leave me this time, but I will never leave you.
I supported her decision on the merits and because I knew what was coming next: South Carolina. The vote there revealed how Black voters really felt about her and also revealed the dark underbelly of the Sanders campaign: the “Bernie Bros,” who were very active on social media in bashing Hillary in brash, often brutally sexist terms, and in going after people who supported her. Their social media strategy had kept them under the mainstream media’s radar screen for a good while, until just a few days before the South Carolina primary, when they went after Congressman John Lewis for endorsing Hillary.
Hitting Lewis was a big mistake, because he was a wonderful, brave man who repeatedly risked his life to advance civil rights and because virtually all of South Carolina’s prominent Black elected officials, led by veteran Congressman Jim Clyburn and the impressive young mayor of Columbia, Steve Benjamin, were already for her and used the Bernie Bros against him. She won 73 percent of the vote, better than I did twenty-four years earlier and better than President Obama did in 2008. Then she won Nevada again. After that the Southern states rolled up big numbers for her: Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas. She also won almost all the big states outside those in the South: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Illinois, and California.
But many of the white working-class voters who had supported her so strongly in 2008 were defecting, lured by Bernie’s promises and reacting to all her bad press. His numbers didn’t add up, but nobody cared until he did an interview with the New York Daily News, virtually the only publication that gave him the close scrutiny Hillary was used to. They gave major, largely negative coverage to answers he gave—or couldn’t give—to the questions they asked by simply printing a transcript of his interview and giving Hillary a rousing editorial endorsement. It went a long way toward dashing his hope for an upset in New York, where he’d grown up.
I wasn’t surprised that the Northern states of Minnesota and Wisconsin went for Bernie. The primary and caucus electorates were very liberal, and he was more to the left on everything but gun safety, race, women’s and children’s rights, and protecting the Dreamers (schoolchildren of undocumented immigrants). And although in an older body, he was a new face, looking rumpled but real. He also won states that went big for her in 2008, including Oklahoma and West Virginia, and he almost won Kentucky.
In many places, Hillary’s county-by-county map looked like Obama’s in 2008. But she still had her staunchest supporters, including Latinos, and had added the Black voters who had liked her all along, and knew she cared about their kids because of her long history of support for civil rights, her work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund, her support for Mothers of the Movement, a group who had all lost unarmed children to gun violence or encounters with police officers, and her outreach to young Black Lives Matter leaders.
I wasn’t worried about Illinois, which she barely won, because her primary campaign had become a proxy for the fierce battle over local issues in the Chicago area, which Bernie’s supporters smartly played to the fullest. I was sure they’d come home in the general election. But I was worried about Michigan, where she had won decisively in 2008 but lost by 2 points this time (I’d gone to the Labor Day Parade in Detroit in 2015, and it just felt flat); Pennsylvania, where I got more heckling on the Crime Bill (which Bernie had voted for!) than anywhere else; and Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker had won both houses of the legislature and fended off a referendum to remove him from office by stirring up a firestorm of rural and small-town resentment against the university towns, unions, and urban Black Americans who he said were gobbling up all their hard-earned tax dollars to advance a dangerous left-wing agenda. In her prescient 2016 book about Wisconsin, The Politics of Resentment, Katherine Cramer tells the story of the rising rural backlash against “liberal elites” as a major factor dividing America. People in economically stagnant areas were tired of waiting for the benefits of globalization while more populous, more diverse, and more highly educated and trained areas were thriving.
The larger and more troubling issue was that Hillary at the start of the 2016 campaign was a different person to the voters than she was in 2008. She wasn’t the senator from New York who had warned the big banks they were endangering the economy, worked to increase the incomes of small businesses and farmers in traditionally Republican areas, improved security for our troops and healthcare for our veterans, and was the first person to put support for families with autistic kids high on the national agenda. She wasn’t the first lady who had worked to get healthcare for millions of children, reached across party lines to dramatically increase adoptions, including for kids with disabilities, and advised me not to sign NAFTA unless first we had congressional approval of the money necessary to replace the jobs that would be lost and to train the displaced workers to do those new jobs. She wasn’t the first lady of Arkansas who had put improving healthcare for families and better education for all kids, especially in poor underserved rural areas, high on our reform agenda.
Now she was either a former secretary of state who had been really effective on issues large and small but not those at the forefront of voters’ concerns in 2016, or an establishment figure running for Obama’s third term who’d mishandled her emails. She had even given paid speeches after leaving office, including to Wall Street groups, although she gave more than two thirds of the money to the foundation to fund the work she was involved in, and, as I said, she, not Sanders, had gone to Wall Street while still a senator in 2007 to warn them about their dangerous trading practices. More important, her coverage since leaving office was relentlessly negative. If she was seen as running for Obama’s third term, burdened with more negative coverage than any Republican would get, that was a big problem.
In all the books about her, I wish more attention had been paid to what she did for people in her Senate career, how popular she was, and how much support her hard work generated in New York. It’s a textbook example on how to build a world of shared opportunities, responsibilities, and communities from the ground up. And if voters had been allowed to hear it, along with her positive proposals for the future, I think she would have won.
On the other hand, compared to 2008, Hillary was much better organized from the start, did well in the debates, and despite Bernie’s well-organized and vigorous campaign and the media’s email beatdown, she won the primaries by 3.7 million votes, 55 to 43 percent, a much better result than in 2008, when she’d won the popular vote by 100,000 votes and lost the nomination in the caucuses and the superdelegates. This time, she earned enough delegates in the primaries and caucuses to be nominated and then added to that an enormous lead in the superdelegates, some of whom were perplexed by why our party would even allow someone who wasn’t a Democrat to run for the nomination. Nevertheless, Bernie complained a lot about the Democratic National Committee, especially the rule providing for superdelegates, although he liked the rules that worked for him, like the one allowing lots of caucuses and permitting them to apportion all the delegates even in states that also held primaries. For example, Hillary won the primaries in Nebraska and Washington and Bernie won the caucuses, but while the primaries had almost three times as many voters as the caucuses, the caucuses controlled all the delegates.
I had a good time campaigning for Hillary in the primary, doing what I had done in 2008, fundraisers so she could stay on the campaign trail, and going to places in key states like Nevada and Ohio where the campaign thought I could make a difference.
There was one event that gave me some hope that we could begin to put the country back together. In the spring of 2016, I visited Morehead State University, a college in easternmost Kentucky, about forty miles from the West Virginia border, to tout Hillary’s plans for rebuilding the economy in rural America, including the area around Morehead, which had once been a center of coal mining.
Kentucky had voted for me twice, in part because I had done a lot of work to get coal miners in Arkansas black lung benefits after the Nixon administration tightened the eligibility rules so much that people who were obviously disabled couldn’t get any benefits at all. As president I had done all I could to make sure the miners got their due, but I also tried to heal their communities by maintaining benefits for miners and getting new job-creating investments there. By then coal mining in the eastern United States had already been in decline for more than thirty-five years, displaced first by lower-sulfur coal from the West, then by natural gas.
In 1999, I went to Hazard, Kentucky, on a sweltering hot day to promote the New Markets Tax Credit, my last major bipartisan initiative, which gave credits up to 39 percent for investments in poor areas. Hazard was hurting. When I went back in 2016, the place was reborn, but not enough had been done to give other places like it a new future.
That’s what Hillary wanted to do and the case I was trying to make when I visited Morehead State. She had voted consistently in the Senate to help the miners and was familiar with their problems, not only in Arkansas, but also in New York, which had its own coal legacy issues. In 2015, she proposed to invest $30 billion in coal country to maximize their ability to attract and perform the work of today and tomorrow. Sadly, that didn’t get much coverage.
When I visited the campus, I got a good reception from a large group of students the campus Democratic Club had raised. And before the rally, the university president, Dr. Wayne Andrews, invited me to tour its Space Center’s nanosatellite program, an initiative that had grown out of the first $500 million nanotechnology bill I’d strongly supported late in my second term with broad bipartisan backing. As I recall, the program then had six grad students, four from the Midwest and one each from Ukraine and Vietnam, and a dozen undergrads, all from Eastern Kentucky. The satellites they were making weighed eight pounds and cost a million dollars, and had many of the capabilities of traditional communications satellites that weighed on average two hundred pounds and cost more than $200 million. The students in the program design and make the components, and assemble the nanosatellites. They now also make larger microsatellites that weigh twenty-four pounds in a partnership with NASA and major tech companies.
I visited a lab where a nineteen-year-old undergraduate from Eastern Kentucky was carefully placing a small nanochip in a tiny container designed to protect it in space. When I asked him what the container was made of, he said, with a nice Appalachian twang, “Tungsten. Tungsten does real well in outer space.” I asked where it came from and he said, “I made it here with a 3D printer.” Then, as I was about to leave, he stopped me and said, “President Clinton, don’t let them make fun of Hillary for saying she’ll put up a half a billion solar panels. Actually, I think she’s a little low.” When I asked him why he thought that, he said, “Because before you know it, we’ll be making solar panels with 3D printers, too. They’ll be cheap as dirt and just as good. Then we’ll all be free.”
I wasn’t sure he was right on the timetable, but I wanted to jump for joy. A little more than six months from an election in which the American people had been told over and over that the emails were the most important issue since the end of the Vietnam War, here was someone too smart and future-focused to fall for the campaign coverage.
As of 2020, the Morehead State Space program, Eastern Kentucky’s first engineering school, had helped Kentucky rank second in the U.S. in exports of aerospace products and parts. They’ve become the state’s number one manufacturing export, increasing 183 percent over the last five years to $15 billion a year. Nine thousand three hundred people work for the space cluster of which Morehead is the hub, and it supports 21,000 more jobs, with a payroll of $1.46 billion.
While Hillary and Bernie were duking it out, on the GOP side Donald Trump was eating everybody’s lunch. The first time I saw him in Florida onstage with all the other candidates in early 2015, I told the group I was with that I thought Trump could win the nomination. Most of them rolled their eyes. They either didn’t come from “flyover” country or had lost touch with their roots. Trump was a genius at turning legitimate concerns into rage-fueled resentment by convincing deeply alienated people he had mastered a system they hated and would change it to benefit the working class, especially in culturally conservative, economically stagnant areas, and hurt those they blamed: college-educated, socially liberal, upper-middle-class voters. And he didn’t mess around with surrogates—he did his own dirty work.
Here was his essential message: The Republicans have been treating you like a cheap date for decades. They tell you what you want to hear about the Democrats, but when they get elected, they’re in the tank for big banks and big companies on globalization, bad trade deals, and immigration, costing us millions of good jobs and holding down wages for the working class. All these people on the platform with me are just retreads—Low Energy Jeb, Lying Ted, all of them—they’re so boring and antichange. Elect me and I’ll actually do something for you. I’ll build a border wall on the Rio Grande to keep the illegals out. They’re just a bunch of murderers and rapists, anyway. I’ll send the illegals already here back home, and you can have their jobs. And I’ll make the Mexicans pay for the wall! I’ll stop the Chinese from cheating us, keep their products out, and you can make that stuff here. I’ll repeal Obamacare and give you something better and fill the courts with rock-ribbed conservatives. And I’ll hate all the same people you do. That’s how we’ll Make America Great Again.
Trump rode that message to victory in the primary. Besides the rallies, he did a lot of media interviews. He always said provocative things, many of them crude, false, or both. But his strategy had a dual benefit. First, it kept his base excited, and second, it gave the political media so many things to hit him on that they couldn’t focus on any one thing long enough for it to impact the public remotely as much as their endless haranguing about the emails. From 2015 until the conventions, the political media actually gave Hillary more negative and less positive coverage than Trump. The emails were “trumped up” in more ways than one.
The two conventions were a week apart in July. They were very different, but both were interesting and revealing. Trump opened in Cleveland, named Mike Pence as his running mate, and ran a longer, slightly less rambunctious version of his big rallies. It was much darker in tone and substance than most conventions, but in the deeply polarized environment, it worked better than I thought it would. He got a modest bump of about 3 points and the Democrats started in Philadelphia just four days later with the race extremely close, just the result the political media wanted.
Hillary’s convention was very good for her. It was upbeat, positive, and focused on an impressive group of people who were supporting her and why they did. The speakers embodied a broad cross-section of America, with a good representation of union workers, small business owners, farmers, teachers, and several students—who were white, Black, Latino, Native American, and Asian American, male, female, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. There were people with disabilities and people who were injured on 9/11. President and Mrs. Obama, Vice President Biden, and Bernie Sanders all spoke and made the case for Hillary. President Obama was especially effective when he pointed out that she was the best qualified candidate in his lifetime, better qualified than either he or I had been, to be an effective president on day one. Bernie Sanders cut to the chase, saying of course he and Hillary had differences, but that’s democracy. He said she had opened the party to his supporters and their influence was evident in the platform. He also said she would be a fine president, which was important, given the continued grumbling among his supporters whose behavior at the convention showed they couldn’t believe they’d been beaten.
Her nomination of Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia as her running mate was well received. An impressive former governor, lieutenant governor, and mayor, he also spoke fluent Spanish as a result of his volunteer work with Jesuits in Honduras as a young man. His wife, Anne, had served in Governor Terry McAuliffe’s cabinet and her father had been a moderate, progressive Republican governor of Virginia before his crowd became an endangered species. She had made good in her first “presidential decision.”
Hillary’s campaign leaders asked me to make her more “real” to the country. I did my best to describe the woman I had known and loved for more than forty years with stories that both pushed back on the cartoon coverage but also were relevant to the lives of voters.
The speech started, “In the spring of 1971, I met a girl,” which probably made some young women cringe, but proved a good way to start the story of our first years together, leading up to our marriage and Chelsea’s birth. I gave examples from every stage of her life, showing that from a young age to her service as first lady of Arkansas and in Washington, as a first lady, New York senator, and secretary of state, whenever she got involved in something, she always made it better. And she did it while always being a mother first, staying close to her family, keeping her friends from childhood and adding to them every step of the way. “Ask the people who know her and you’ll see. She always makes things better.” I said there’s a big difference between talking about change and making it, and Hillary was the best changemaker I’d ever known.
The next night, Chelsea gave an eloquent, loving, and persuasive account of what it was like to be Hillary’s daughter. Then Hillary gave a really upbeat speech about how she wanted to make things better for Americans. She looked great all dressed in white, in honor of the women who crusaded to give women the vote almost a hundred years earlier. And she talked about what she wanted to do in clear, strong, compelling language. The person people learned about from seeing her and others who knew her and had served with her was very different from the relentless ridicule she’d been through. She was the happy warrior with whom I’d shared more than half my life.
Thanks in part to Donald Trump, perhaps the most notable speech of the convention was given by Dr. Khizr Khan, whose family had come to the United States from the United Arab Emirates and whose son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun S. M. Khan, had been killed in Afghanistan in 2004. When a bomb-laden truck had driven toward Captain Khan and his men, he immediately ordered his troops to draw back, then took ten steps forward before it exploded, killing him. Captain Khan was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. When Dr. Khan spoke about his son’s patriotism and his belief in America’s promise of equality and opportunity for all, his voice trembled as his wife leaned into him.
Then Dr. Khan, who would later be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Biden, said his family wouldn’t be welcome in Donald Trump’s America, with its proposed Muslim ban and endless slurs against immigrants, and that Trump, unlike his late son, had never put himself in harm’s way or sacrificed for America. He said he wondered if Trump had ever read the Constitution and pulled out his copy, held it up for all to see, and offered to lend it to him. The effect of the Khans, standing close on the stage and lifting up their son as the best of our country, was breathtaking.
But not to Trump, who had plenty of breath left to take a shot or two, saying he had sacrificed a lot in building his businesses. He even dissed Mrs. Khan for remaining silent. It hurt him and reinforced the power of Khan’s message.
Hillary got a bigger bounce out of her convention than Trump did because it was positive, with all kinds of Americans talking about what her election could mean for them, including a 9/11 victim she’d supported through multiple surgeries and a painful recovery, and a first responder who said that after 9/11, Hillary had done everything she promised to do when the cameras were off. He liked her for being “a workhorse not a show horse.” She left Philadelphia with the wind at her back, and I thought if she did well in the debates, it would work out.
The coverage even became more balanced, though the press still wanted a name-calling brawl. The first warning sign came when Hillary was about to give a speech of what she wanted to do. A member of her traveling press corps told one of her staff that Hillary’s proposal to improve the lives of working people living in areas of the country with low economic growth was impressive, but they’d been told that she wouldn’t get any TV coverage unless she attacked Trump. That’s the storyline the political press wanted—Trump screaming “Lock her up” to frenzied crowds, and Hillary taking him on. Good for their ratings, but bad for persuadable voters who wanted to know what Hillary would do for them. It was the first time since the email flood that I’d seen her discouraged, but she kept going.
After the convention I went back on the road. The campaign felt the most effective way for me to spend my time, apart from fundraising, was to travel to critical states, fire up the local campaign staff and volunteers, then go to crowded places, shake hands, answer questions, and take selfies. Apparently such spontaneous encounters garnered more social media coverage and saved the campaign the cost of holding events. The only problem with it was that there was nothing substantial for the local media to report and the only way to get Hillary’s positive message out was to advertise and to shine in the debates. In 2008, the blizzard of front-porch rallies I did was very inexpensive but got extensive local coverage on what she actually wanted to do for people. Selfies posted on social media were largely useless for that, but the campaign had saved $100 million to run a positive and comparative ad blitz in the last ten days or so. And the debates would have a big effect. I knew she would work hard to prepare with a very able team. So I stayed on the road and with the program.
There were three instances in my travels in the general election that showed me vividly the ways our country was both coming together and breaking apart. The first was an encounter on a bus trip through Ohio, talking to people in small and midsized towns who were mostly concerned about the opioid crisis and the need for more local drug treatment, and more jobs. On the way into Marietta, I saw a Black pastor standing alone by the side of the road. He was well dressed and wearing a large cross embossed with red stones.
I stopped the bus and got out to shake his hand. He said, “Mr. President, I’m Bishop Stewart and I’ll save you some time. I’m for Hillary. I was even for her in the 2008 primary, just as I always supported you, because I am the proud grandson of Luther Black of Hope, Arkansas.”
I was pretty sure what he was going to say next, but I wanted to hear it. “When you started running for president,” he continued, “my grandfather called me and said that for a few years after World War II, he got his groceries from your grandfather’s store across the road from the cemetery in Hope. One day your grandfather saw my grandfather just staring at the food and he said, ‘Luther, you need to buy food for your family but you don’t have any money, do you?’ He answered, ‘I don’t, Mr. Cassidy. I worked this week but I didn’t get paid. I always work but sometimes I get paid a week or so late.’ So your grandfather said, ‘Luther, any man who works deserves to feed his family.’ He told him to take what he needed, sign for it, and pay when he had the money. And my grandfather said he did the same thing for a lot of customers who were hard up.”
Reverend Stewart continued, “Then he said, ‘You have to support Governor Clinton. If he’s half the man his grandfather was, he’ll be a great president.’ ” He said his grandfather was right about me, and based on what he had seen Hillary do as first lady, in the Senate, and leading the State Department, he thought she would be great, too. Trying to hold back tears, I agreed with him about Hillary, thanked him, and headed for the barbershop in Marietta.
The second instance was the polar opposite of that first encounter. Closer to the election, I was on a tour of North Carolina and stopped at East Carolina University in Greenville to shake hands. Most of the students who came to visit and mentioned me on their social media sites were young women supporting Hillary, but I noticed a blond, blue-eyed young man who obviously spent time pumping iron standing at the back of the crowd, staring at me with a hostile glare. I made my way back to him and shook his hand. He said, “Can I ask you a question?” I told him to ask away. “How did it feel to take $50 million out of your foundation?” I replied, “I don’t know. That’s a lot more than I’m worth. Hillary and I give money to the foundation. I have donated about 10 percent of my speech earnings to the Clinton Foundation, Chelsea donates all of her speech income, and since Hillary joined us, she’s given 70 percent of her speech earnings to cover the costs of foundation programs she’s worked on. And we’ve put millions more from our family foundation into it. You don’t have to take my word for it, because unlike Bernie and Trump, we’ve released thirty-eight years of our tax returns.”
He sort of sneered and said, “Yeah, you can do that when you control the establishment.”
For all his body muscle, his brain had been fried by falsehoods he probably read on the internet. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” We’re a long way from that now. In a post-fact world, everything asserted is just an opinion, including the earth is flat, vaccines are ineffective and dangerous, two plus two equals five, and of course the emails were a scandal.
The third instance was a visit that reminded me of why politics, business, and nongovernmental organizations all matter. On one of my last trips before the election I was in Florida, in the small town of Immokalee in Collier County, also home to Naples, one of the wealthiest cities in the nation, and the Big Cypress National Preserve. In 2016, Immokalee had just over 24,000 residents, of whom 71 percent were Latino, 18 percent African American, and 3.2 percent white. Many were migrant agricultural workers. More than a third of families lived below the poverty line, and just under half of the residents were under the age of eighteen.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is an internationally recognized human rights organization whose work includes the Fair Food Program, an innovative partnership among the workers and growers from Florida to the Northeast, as well as retail buyers, including Walmart, Subway, and Whole Foods. All the partners benefit—the workers with better working conditions and a fair wage; the growers with a more stable workforce and decreased liability risk; and the retailers with higher-quality products whose valuable brands are untainted by workplace abuses, because CIW fights beside them, especially against human trafficking and slavery.
CIW embodied the message Hillary wanted to send in the last days of the campaign: government should help all workers get better working conditions, better pay, and protections from abuse by unscrupulous employers. The CIW had proved that if they worked together, both workers’ lives and the corporations’ bottom lines would improve.
This window into how politics can advance the lives of real people was too often shut and locked in 2016. The politics of subtraction and division, of resentment and tribalism, leads to power for those who stoke the most fear and anger. But when we face unprecedented challenges from a global pandemic, excessive inequality at home and abroad, a warming planet, homegrown extremists, culture clashes, and authoritarian countries dedicated to weakening or destroying our democracy, we need a different approach—more addition and multiplication. As Hillary said, we have to be stronger together. We all know how boring the media thought that motto was in 2016, but it was and remains true.