Memoir as manifesto

America’s former Secretary of State gears up for a presidential campaign with a much-anticipated autobiography

I’ve always liked Hillary Clinton. I first met her just after the 1992 election, when her youthful and brilliant husband Bill had just won the Presidency, and I met with her several times thereafter at the Renaissance Weekend retreats where the Clintons let their hair down every New Year. At first I was hugely impressed by her brilliance and somewhat intimidated by her ice maiden reputation, but over the years I got to see the softer side to her, most poignantly when seated next to her throughout New Year’s Eve dinner in 1998, the painful year of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. For all my respect, however, I couldn’t bring myself to support her 2008 campaign for President against the history-making claims of the next youthful and brilliant candidate, the son of an African immigrant, Barack Obama.

Obama triumphed in 2008 and again in 2012, but his second innings is already in its final stretch, and America is turning its political thoughts to succession. Hard Choices arrives in that context. The book is obviously an exercise in political branding: it is about reviving the Hillary image in time for the 2016 election. But it is also about reshaping it; from the hard- nosed and somewhat abrasive figure caricatured as the embodiment of entitlement, ruthlessly attacked in the 2008 campaign, to a likeable woman who can be funny as well as smart, has emotions as well as brains, and whom you wouldn’t mind seeing on your living room televisions every evening for four— or maybe even eight—years. As Time’s Washington bureau chief Michael Scherer put it: “She must convince voters both within and without the Democratic Party that she is a real person people can believe in”. Hard Choices takes a huge step in fulfilling this objective. As a serious work of international affairs, however, it falls considerably short.

Hillary Clinton anticipates that much of the election campaign against her will be devoted to attacking her record as Secretary of State in the first Obama Administration, and so she has conducted what armchair generals in the Washington Beltway are all so fond of: a pre-emptive strike on her potential adversaries, by laying out her version of events well in advance. What is disarming and endearing about the exercise is that she has admitted to mistakes and failures— such as voting for the Iraq war and failing to persuade Obama to arm the Syrian fighters against Assad—discussed them frankly, and yet, emerges as a strong, confident and mature leader who has learned from experience.

Hard-headed observers of foreign policy will find less to enthrall them. Hard Choices is largely a fairly safe account of her tenure at the State Department, without any especially surprising revelations or insights. Pakistanis looking for disagreement with US drone attacks, for instance, will be disappointed that she merely says that the attacks raised ‘profound questions’, but that it is ‘crucial that these strikes be part of a larger smart power counterterrorism strategy that included diplomacy, law enforcement, sanctions, and other tools’. That’s what Americans would call Diplomacy 101, not ideas for a serious analyst, but you could hardly expect anything more candid from a potential presidential candidate.

An even more blinding statement of the obvious comes in her discussion of the perennial tensions between liberty and security: ‘Without security, liberty is fragile,’ she writes. ‘Without liberty, security is oppressive. The challenge is finding the proper measure: enough security to safeguard our freedoms, but not so much (or so little) as to endanger them.’ That’s the kind of explanation we would praise in a high school essay, but from a stateswoman it leaves you cold. Her feistiest contribution to a discussion of contemporary world affairs is rejecting the criticism of her handling of the Benghazi attack that cost the lives of a US Ambassador and several diplomats: ‘I will not be part of a political slugfest on the backs of dead Americans’.

But this is a book written not to offend, provoke or upset its readers, the most important of whom are the potential voters Hillary will face in the run-up to the 2016 election. That effort succeeds, but such a book is not going to excite, inspire or uplift its readers, either. It won’t get her into trouble, but it won’t be nominated amongst the most memorable memoirs you’ve read.

Still, there are moments that reward the faithful Hillary fan. Her admission of being devastated by the 2008 election defeat is startlingly human and moving, and her account of the awkward first meeting with President-elect Obama is affecting, as is her description of her enduring love for her husband Bill, despite all he’s put her through. And it is hard not to like her for confessing to us that she has a habit of digging her fingernails into her hand when she gets sleepy at meetings. Or to sympathise when she describes the physical toll of travelling some 2,000 hours by plane around the world to 122 countries in her four years as Secretary of State. Hillary also wears her American patriotism on her sleeve in a way that we Indians are not used to (but may learn to become accustomed to in the Modi era).

However, there is no gossip, very little by way of spicy asides or tart observations, no self-deprecating humour and nothing really headline-making, other than her confession that the Clintons were ‘dead broke’ when they left the White House— an assertion many Americans have sneered at, as her definition of ‘dead broke’ clearly doesn’t match that of people without multiple houses, bestselling memoirs with multi-million dollar advances, highly paid speeches and the limitless moneymaking opportunities available to a former President. Still, it’s interesting to learn about President Putin’s private passion for wildlife conservation—from Siberian tigers to Arctic polar bears—and of former President Sarkozy’s stream-of-consciousness Gallic monologues. And for policy wonks, she waxes eloquent about several global issues, from cooking stoves to human trafficking, and expresses politically correct concern about everything from climate change to inequality.

But what about India? We largely don’t figure. There’s an unexceptional (and unexceptionable) four-paragraph account of her 2009 visit, with no insight worth repeating. There are no revelations or even discussions about Richard Holbrooke’s controversial attempt to hyphenate India and Pakistan again in his pursuit of an ‘Af-Pak’ strategy, or the US role in promoting better trade relations with Pakistan, both of which occurred on her watch. Even her references to our growing middle class and our energy security needs occur only in a general discussion of China and other emerging countries. Her only quotable line on India is itself a pointer to the inadequacy of her analysis; Hillary discusses our reluctance to reduce our dependence on Iranian oil as a case of a nation that ‘simply hated being told what to do’. Of Iran’s geographical proximity, our geopolitical congruities over Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the suitability of Iranian crude for our refineries, there is not even a mention.

On the whole, the book’s length is not matched by its depth. Hard Choices is skimpy on Hillary’s future policy objectives and plans, which is probably wise, in light of the vagaries of electoral politics. In her epilogue Hillary says, somewhat disingenuously, a paragraph after celebrating her impending grandmotherhood: ‘Will I run for President in 2016? The answer is, I haven’t decided yet.’

Which provokes the affectionate response from this reviewer: Frankly, my dear, I don’t believe you. I was reminded of her own prologue instead, in which Hillary describes her guiding principle in simple words: ‘Just try not to make the same mistake twice’. It isn’t too far-fetched to suggest that Hard Choices is a cleverly constructed 635-page version of the same message— to the American voter who made the ‘mistake’ of not electing her the first time around.

(Shashi Tharoor is a Member of Parliament and author. His latest book is Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century)

Hard ChoicesHillary Rodham ClintonShashi Tharoor