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“What Happened is not one book, but many. It is a candid and blackly funny account of her mood in the direct aftermath of losing to Donald J. Trump. It is a post-mortem, in which she is both coroner and corpse. It is a feminist manifesto. It is a score-settling jubilee…. It is worth reading.” —The New York Times
“What Happened is a raw and bracing book, a guide to our political arena.” —The Washington Post
“The writing in What Happened is engaging — Clinton is charming and even funny at times, without trying to paint herself in too flattering of a light…. Ultimately, the book might be a historical artifact most of all — the chronicling of what, exactly, it was like to run for president as the first woman major-party candidate (and, yes, a Clinton as well). Plenty may disagree with Clinton’s opinions on what went wrong for her, but her story will still be an important part of that history when America looks back on the melee that was the 2016 election.” —NPR
“Here is Clinton at her most emotionally raw.... While What Happened records the perspective of a pioneer who beat an unprecedented path that stopped just shy of the White House, it also covers territory that many women will recognize.... She demonstrates that she can mine her situation for humor.” —People
“Contains... insights into Ms. Clinton’s personality, character, and values, and the challenges confronting women in politics.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“What Happened is not a standard work of this genre. It’s interesting; it’s worth reading; and it sets out questions that the press, in particular, has not done enough to face.” —The Atlantic
“The most useful way to read What Happened is as one last instance of Clinton doing what she calls her civic duty.” —Los Angeles Times
“This is an important book, and anyone who’s worried by what happened last November 8 should pick it up.” —Entertainment Weekly
About the Author
Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first woman in US history to become the presidential nominee of a major political party. She served as the 67th Secretary of State after nearly four decades in public service advocating on behalf of children and families as an attorney, First Lady, and US Senator. She is a wife, mother, and grandmother.
This book is a snapshot of how I felt and what we knew in the spring and summer of 2017, just a few months after the 2016 election. As you’ll see, it is at times raw, bewildered, and angry. By the end, though, I found some peace. And I remain hopeful that our country is resilient enough to withstand even these challenging times.
The reception of the book was more positive and fervent than I expected. All over the country, people lined up for hours to tell me— often in tears—how much the book and our campaign meant to them. Hearing from them meant the world to me. Many book signings became part group-therapy session, part organizing rally. I was enchanted by the little girls who came to my events with their parents, some wearing tiny pantsuits and pearls, beaming up at me, so proud to tell me about their siblings, their teachers, and what they want to be when they grow up.
Since I wrote this book, some things have changed. Wounds heal. Emotions cool. History marches on. As it does, it reveals itself more fully. We’ve learned a lot more about what happened in 2016. It turns out the Russian misinformation campaign was even more insidious . . . the dirty tricks that Cambridge Analytica and others used on Facebook and elsewhere were even more devious . . . and the Republican voter suppression efforts were even more effective than we imagined. In a new afterword included in this edition, written in early summer 2018, I try to make sense of these new revelations and what they mean for our country going forward.
As more facts have come to light, I’ve gone back and reconsidered this book with fresh eyes. I believe it stands the test of time. The arguments I made about the factors that contributed to Trump’s election still hold up a year later. Meanwhile, my fears about the danger he poses to our country have only grown. And while Trump and his allies have continued to attack me at every opportunity, none of them has poked any real holes in this book, even about the whole email debacle. I hope that gives you confidence as you read on. And I hope that What Happened helps give you the courage to join the fights we face today. May you find it as cathartic to read as I found it to write.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2018
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Hillary’s sour grape lamenting and self righteous rhetoric saturated every page of this book. While she did admit her share of mistakes on the campaign trail she seems to be much more interested in taking jabs at her opponent and implying that she was the only choice.....so what happened? I still don’t know.
Understandably losing something you strived for so desperately is crushing and I felt bad for her. I really believe she thought there was no way she would lose to someone like Donald Trump. She didn’t see defeat barreling toward her, didn’t realize no one trusted her, didn’t step outside her haughty brilliance to notice the large crowds at Trump rallies, nor did she seem to catch on that though the tone of Trump’s delivery was harsh vernacular, he was saying what many were thinking.
But it’s all over now. You lost. you’ve had your whine. Get over yourself and move on.
Oh, and Hillary,I wouldn’t bring up that lying thing...Clinton’s should not throw stones in that direction.
Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2018
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Reading through reviews on this page, I don’t think half of the people writing even read the book. Hillary does NOT claim her campaign was perfect, she does NOT say she was the perfect candidate, and she does NOT place the blame on others for her loss. Rather, she clearly admits when and how mistakes were made, how she earnestly sought to understand the needs and desires of ALL Americans, and how she continuously revisits campaign moments, wondering how she could have done it differently. This is an honest, touching, and well-written memoir of a woman who put it all on the line for her country. Great read and would recommend 100%.
What happened to Hillary Rodham Clinton is much like what happened with this book. Nothing. A woman in politics thinks she is going to be president and loses. This is her talking to herself and cleaning house to keep the pain of defeat at bay. Just my opinion. Another book bites the dust. Will anyone care in 20 years about this book?
Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2017
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That was a painful read. Instead of a book I can't put down, it was a book I couldn't pick up. It took me a month to read it. I was expecting an inside look at the campaign: what worked, what didn't, strategies and the reasonings behind them, internal battles, successes and failures. This book has none of that. Instead it is a book of: * Democrat talking points * I love my daughter and my mother and my grandkids. They are so wonderful. Oh, and my dad too, I guess. And Bill's really an OK guy. * Everyone else is a jerk: Donald, Bernie, Comey, the FBI, the Russians, the Republicans, the media, white women--make that any woman who didn't vote for me because, well, you know, because I'm a woman. * People who voted for Trump really are deplorable. No seriously, I mean it. Geesh, Trump groped a woman. That makes people who support him deplorable, doesn't it? * I wanted to talk about issues but everyone else wanted to talk about how incompetent I am with email.
There was so much in this book that had nothing to do with "What Happened" and so little to do with what actually did happen.
The way she blamed everyone else, a better title would have been, "The Buck Starts Here".
Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2017
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I wanted to hear her side of what happened not her tell how great her campaign was, how her positions were the best, how she would have been the better President. It would have been a better read had she won.
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2019
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She wrote in the “Author’s Note” section of this 2017 book, “This is my story of what happened. It’s the story of what I saw, felt, and thought during two of the most intense years I’ve ever experienced. It’s the story of what led me to this crossroads of American history and how I kept going after a shocking defeat… It’s also the story of what happened to our country, why we’re so divided, and what we can do about it… In this book, I write about moments from the campaign that I wish I could go back and do over… I’ve tried to learn from my own mistakes. There are plenty, as you’ll see in this book, and they are mine and mine alone… I also share with you the painful days that followed the election… Now when people ask me how I’m doing, I say that, as an American, I’m more worried than ever---but as a person, I’m doing okay. This book is the story of that journey.”
In the first chapter, she observes, “Something is wrong. How could sixty-two million people vote for someone they heard on tape bragging about repeated sexual assault? How could he attack women, immigrants, Muslims, Mexican Americans, prisoners of war, and people with disabilities---and still be elected to the most important and powerful job in the world?... Why did the media decide to present the controversy over my emails as one of the most important political stories since the end of World War II? How did I let that happen? How did we?” (Pg. 15)
She notes, “my opponents spun wild tales about … how as President I would be forever in the pocket of the shadowy bankers who had paid my speaking fees… That was a mistake… I shouldn’t have assumed it would be okay for me to do it. Especially after the financial crisis of 2008-2009, I should have… stayed away from anything having to do with Wall Street. I didn’t. That’s on me.” (Pg. 45-46)
She states, “I understand that political coverage has to be about the horse race, but it’s become almost entirely about that and not about the issues that matter most to our country and to people’s lives. That’s something that has gotten increasingly worse over the years. That’s not entirely the press’s fault: the way we consume news has changed, which makes getting clicks all important, which in turn encourages sensationalism. Still, they’re responsible for their part.” (Pg. 99)
She points out, “This has to be said: sexism and misogyny played a role in the 2016 presidential election. Exhibit A is that the flagrantly sexist candidate won… But Donald Trump didn’t invent sexism, and its impact on politics goes far beyond this one election… Sexism exerts its pull in our politics and our society every day, in ways both subtle and crystal clear.” (Pg. 114) She continues, “It’s not easy to be a woman in politics… It can be excruciating, humiliating. The moment a woman steps forward and says, ‘I’m running for office,’ it begins: the analysis of her face, her body, her demeanor…. It can be unbelievably cruel.” (Pg. 116) Later, she adds, “It’s not easy for any woman in politics, but I think it’s safe to say that I got a whole other level of vitriol flung my way… I’ve been in politics for a long time, but I was taken aback by the flood od hatred that seemed only to grow as we got closer to Election Day.” (Pg. 126)
She states, “‘Change’ might be the most powerful word in American politics… In 1992 and 2008, ‘change’ meant electing dynamic young leaders who promised hope and renewal. In 2016, it meant handing a lit match to a pyromaniac.” (Pg. 195)
She recalls, “We had settled on Stronger Together as our theme for the general election after a lot of thought and discussion… My team… had started with three basic contrasts we wanted to draw with Trump… He was divisive, while I would work to bring the country together. The challenge was to find a way to marry all three together in a memorable slogan that reflected my values and record. Stronger Together did that better than anything else we could think of.” (Pg. 254)
She recounts, “you’ve most likely already heard more than your fill about my emails… For months after the election, I tried to put it all out of my mind. It would do me no good to brood over my mistake. And it wasn’t healthy or productive to dwell on the ways I felt I’d been shivved by then-FBI Director Jim Comey—three times over the final five months of the campaign.” (Pg. 290) She acknowledges, “let me say again that, yes, the decision to use personal email instead of an official government account was mine and mine alone. I own that. I never meant to mislead anyone, never kept my email use secret, and always took classified information seriously… Mostly, I was furious at myself…” (Pg. 291-292) She continues, “31,000 of the emails I had were personal and not related in any way to my job as Secretary of State… But these messages also included… reports from family and friends about things happening in their personal lives… clearly private personal content. Naturally I didn’t want strangers reading them. So we checked to make sure we were following the rules, providing every relevant email I had, and deleted the personal ones.” (Pg. 300)
She adds, “Comey said that although … I had not violated the law… [we] were nevertheless ‘extremely careless.’ … I was angry and frustrated that Comey had used his public position to criticize me, my staff… with no opportunity for us to counter or disprove the charge… My first instinct was that my campaign should hit back hard and explain to the public that Comey had badly overstepped his bounds… My team raised concerns with that kind of confrontational approach. In the end, we decided it would be better to just let it go and try to move on. Looking back, that was a mistake.” (Pg. 310-311) She adds, “Why did Comey do it?... I can’t know what was in Comey’s head… What I do know, though, is that when you’re the head of an agency as important as the FBI, you have to care a lot more about how things really are than how they look, and you have to be willing to take the heat that goes along with the big job.” (Pg. 316)
She suggests, “If you add together all these factors---Trump’s affection for tyrants and hostility toward allies, sympathy for Russia’s strategic aims, and alleged financial ties to shady Russian actors---his pro-Putin rhetoric starts to make sense… Republican national security experts were appalled by Trump’s embrace of Putin. So was I.” (Pg. 337) About the Russian cyberattacks in 2016, she states, “I understand the predicament the Obama administration faced… And President Obama did privately warn Putin directly to back off. I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack. Maybe more Americans would have woken up to the threat in time. We’ll never know.” (Pg. 356) She adds, “This man [Trump] is President of the United States. And no one is happier than Vladimir Putin.” (Pg. 374)
As she and her team watched the election returns, “Now it was slipping away. I felt shell-shocked. I hadn’t prepared mentally for this at all. There had been no doomsday scenarios playing out in my head in the final days, no imagining what I might say if I lost. I just didn’t think about it. But now it was as real as it could be, and I was struggling to get my head around it… I could barely breathe.” (Pg. 385)
She summarizes, “I do think it’s fair to say there was a fundamental mismatch between how I approach politics and what a lot of the country wanted to hear in 2016… When people are angry and looking for someone to blame, they don’t want to hear your ten-point plan to create jobs and raise wages. They want you to be angry too… Moreover, I have come to terms with the fact that ta lot of people… decided they just didn’t like me… It hurts. And it’s a hard thing to accept. But there’s no getting around it.” (Pg. 398-399) She adds, “Comey made a choice to excoriate me in public in July and then dramatically reopen the investigation on October 28, all while refusing to say a word about Trump and Russia. If not for those decisions, everything would have been different. Comey later said that he was ‘mildly nauseous’ at the idea that he influenced the outcome of the election. Hearing that made me sick.” (Pg. 406)
There is, or course, much, MUCH more to read and digest in this detailed, revealing, and illuminating memoir. It will be “must reading” for anyone who wishes to analyze the 2016 election, and its aftermath…
OK, the book is reasonably well written and so it should be if HRC is as intellectual as she portrays herself to be. I found myself skimming through long sugary sections of self praise, how wonderful The Clintons are, how they have done so much good for the world and how many people she has hugged. The book opens with self praise for her bravery in facing the fact that lost the campaign, and as many other reviewers have pointed out, she goes on to seek to place blame on just about every one else. I suppose I found out a little about the American political system, a topic in which I have never previously been interested. There is much reference to how she has fought for and cried with underprivileged groups of people - more descriptions of hugging, and yet most of one chapter is taken up by describing how her team of personal beauticians travel everywhere with her. I struggled to finish this book, which I suspect will be available in most charity shops.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 16, 2018
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Many of us followed the events of the 2016 US presidential election and saw what happened. I know I was shocked on election night at the events that unfolded. All I knew then came from what I read in the papers, online or heard on the news. It was refreshing to read “What happened” from the the eyes of Mrs Clinton the democratic presidential nominee. In this book she gives an honest assessment of what happened, but also gives an honest reflection of some of the things she got wrong and could have done better. I think in the course of the coming years more things will come to light to explain some of the events of that year. In her own words this was cathartic for her and it must have taken a lot of courage to write this while the wounds were still raw. It is a well written book and an excellent read.
5.0 out of 5 starsA must read for all feminists or potential feminists
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 30, 2019
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Imagine sitting down with Hilary as she talks dispassionately about her failure in the presidentially race. and then, goddammit, the anger breaks through. She did win, she won the popular vote, she did everything right...! she had more votes than any candidate for president has ever received, other than Barak Obama, three million votes more than Trump, 'roughly the same margin by which George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004'. There is withering scorn for Julian Assange, an alleged rapist colluding with the Republicans, for Jim Covey 'a misguided FBI director' who reopened a pointless emails investigation with 11 days left in the campaign, Jill stern, a stooge of RT, Bernie in hock to the NRA and a craven capitulator to pro-lifers, and above all to Trump the liar and bully who defeated her. 'but is just 40,000 people across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania had changed their minds, I would have won.' On the positive side, she shares her hopes and fears, writing passionately about the need for gun-control, health care, the racial issues which bedevil American society. And, most of all, feminism. Her calls to action and advocacy are so vital, so important, I immediately bought a copy for my 14 year old daughter. She writes of her experience as a daughter, a wife, a mother and grandmother, and the challenges she and those around her faced and still face as women. Unputdownable.
This is a very interesting read - it is forthright and honest. Reckon it is a piece of history to view for many years to come. Bought the book as a response to some of the most ridiculous attacks from some rather obnoxious individuals. Reading it though was so worthwhile - to find a politician interested in improving the lot of folks in the USA. The full detail of the players in the election shows Mrs Clinton up against unprecedented odds and still won the popular vote. Why comment from the UK ? Because the kind of distorting abuse sustained by Mrs Clinton in your election is now being visited upon female elected Members of our Parliament here with some word for word copies. Your statement about Forward Together has resonance here too. Best wishes.
5.0 out of 5 starsVery interesting - shines light on the mire of the 2016 Presidency race
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 2, 2020
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This is an enjoyable book to read. It's well written and flows well. She gets her points across in a structured well researched way with funny asides and great quotes. I will admit I was gutted at the election results and reading this just underlines how she was robbed of the Presidency. She has re-awakened my desire to see true equality of opportunity for women across all professions and in all countries. Even if you don't like or agree with her politics she is a remarkable woman and thus book reminds us of the wealth of experience she brought to the table. I regret we did not get the chance to see what kind of President she would have made.
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