The Long View: ‘What Happened’? They Lost. With Her Memoir, Hillary Clinton Joins a Haunted Club
Corrections Appended
She had packed for victory. There had been a white suit for election night at the Javits Center beneath a glass ceiling; white was the color of the suffragists who, a century earlier, had at last won the franchise for women. But now, in the morning hours after Donald J. Trump’s White House upset, Hillary Clinton donned gray and purple for her concession to the country. The sartorial detail, which Clinton shares in her new memoir of the 2016 campaign, is a touch worthy of Plutarch, who observed that “a small thing … often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die.” For there had been a different plan. The gray and purple, she writes, was the “one I had intended to wear on my first trip to Washington as President Elect.”
And so Clinton’s starkly titled “What Happened” now joins what we might call the Kempton Collection, after the New York columnist Murray Kempton, who always believed that the real story was to be found not amid the sprays of Champagne among winners but in the tragic bleakness of the losers’ locker rooms. (A classic piece captured the after-action reflections of Sal Maglie, the Dodgers pitcher who lost when Don Larsen pitched his perfect game for the Yankees in the 1956 World Series.) The literature of defeat in the canon of American political memoir is often overlooked, if it’s read and appreciated at all. That’s too bad, for the stories of battles lost tell us as much if not more about the mysteries of political character than do the accounts of battles won.
Clinton’s book, then, offers an occasion to see what those who suffered what she suffered — defeat at the polls after years of toil at once exhilarating and exhausting — have chosen to share with posterity in their own memoirs. Whatever historians and pundits may say about why these candidates lost — and the differing narratives are legion — we can learn a great deal from their own accounts of their ultimate trials. Intentionally and sometimes inadvertently revealing, books by Richard Nixon, Hubert H. Humphrey, George McGovern, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter are by turns self-serving and honest, defensive and brave — rather like the authors themselves.
Some defeated candidates have used wit to cope with loss. “Someone asked me, as I came in, down on the street, how I felt, and I was reminded of a story that a fellow-townsman of ours used to tell — Abraham Lincoln,” Adlai Stevenson told his supporters after losing to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. “They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.” After his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1984, Walter Mondale asked McGovern, who had been crushed by Nixon in 1972, when it stopped hurting. “I’ll let you know,” McGovern replied. Others find the pain so enduring that they can’t bring themselves even to joke about it. On several occasions in the decades since he lost the White House in 1992, I asked George H. W. Bush about his defeat. “God, it was ghastly,” was about all the 41st president could muster up.
Those who confront defeat frontally are often eloquent and affecting in their memoirs. “It was a day of schoolboys’ dreams, a day almost all men in public life in America include in their fantasies,” Hubert Humphrey, the longtime senator and incumbent vice president, wrote of Election Day 1968 in his 1976 book “The Education of a Public Man.” “A day of harshest reality, of total success or total failure. At its end, no matter what the margin, I might be President-elect of the United States or I would be out of public service for the first time in a quarter of a century.” His opponent: Richard Nixon. His patron and albatross: Lyndon Johnson. His fate: a heartbreakingly narrow loss in the year of Tet and of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In a diary of Election Day itself, Humphrey lets us eavesdrop on history. “This is it,” he writes as he votes in Minnesota. “What an odd feeling. Almost schizophrenic, voting for yourself for president … Stand still and pray. Please, God, let our efforts be successful. …We’ve come so far so fast. We are going to make it … No, we aren’t. Stop thinking that. I am so tired again.” The next morning, the sad results in, Humphrey calls Nixon. Humphrey’s stream-of-consciousness recollection of the moment: “Congratulations, Dick. Mr. President. Congratulations. He’s gracious. That’s about it. To lose to Nixon. Ye gods! No warmth, no strength, no emotion, no spirit. No heart. Politics of the computer. Probably if I had more of it, I’d be President.”
Like Clinton, who clinically lists the sundry reasons she believed she lost (the overblown email issues, the F.B.I. director James B. Comey, Trump’s blend of populism and nativism), Humphrey is direct about his own campaign’s failings. He had his own Bernie Sanders: Senator Eugene McCarthy, who offered himself as the conscience of the Democratic Party, an effective politician who affected to be above it all. Humphrey regretted not breaking decisively with LBJ over Vietnam; he allowed his campaign command to be diffuse and thus ineffective; Nixon was, by 1968, masterful at television, seemingly “cool, confident, everything under control” as the nation came apart in violence. And there was the possibility that foreign powers — in Humphrey’s case, South Vietnam — played a role in the outcome. Late in the campaign, the Nixon campaignhad signaled our ally, South Vietnam, that it would get a better deal under Nixon if it chose not to agree to a Johnson-Humphrey administration-led bombing halt. Humphrey had not made it an issue and always wondered if he should have “blown the whistle.”
A man of decency, Humphrey writes of 1968: “Who knows? Maybe Nixon is right for the country now. Give it time to catch its breath. There’s been such misery ever since John Kennedy’s death.” Then, after a figurative pause, he adds: “I just can’t believe Nixon’s right.”
As events proved, Humphrey was correct, and the roots of Nixon’s fall from power six years later lie, in part, in Nixon’s own hour of defeat in 1960. Nixon left us two accounts of his misery in the wake of losing to John F. Kennedy that year, another tantalizingly close campaign. In his 1962 book “Six Crises,” published the year he was seeking redemption as a candidate for governor of California (he lost), and in his 1978 presidential memoir, “RN,” Nixon acknowledged his opponent’s strengths. “I considered Kennedy’s biggest assets to be his wealth and the appeal of his personal style,” Nixon writes in his 1978 memoir. “Some Republican strategists thought that these would weigh against him, but I felt that in the new decades of the ’60s, after eight years of Eisenhower’s rather grandfatherly manner, people might be ready for an entirely new style of presidential leadership.”
He knew he had looked terrible in the first televised debate — in both books he reports that his own mother called in afterward to see if he were feeling all right — but he long maintained, plausibly, that the legend of the debates’ significance was at least somewhat overblown. He had the numbers on his side: before the first TV confrontation, Kennedy led 51 to 49 percent; the election result closely tracked that finding, at 49.7 to 49.6 percent.
Nixon was forever defensive — it was part of his persona — but he gamely took on the armchair analysts about 1960. “Had I lost by two million votes, or more, no one could say ‘if you had just done this or that you would have won,’” Nixon wrote. “But when a shift of ten or twelve thousand votes in three or four key states would have overturned the result, anyone could make a pretty good case for the proposition — ‘if only you had taken my advice, you would have won.’” He listed no fewer than 16 purported “‘sure roads to victory’”—Nixon put quotation marks around the phrase to convey irony — from “I should have refused to debate Kennedy” to “I should have been more ‘liberal’ (particularly on civil rights), as Rockefeller supporters wanted” to, conversely, “I should have been more ‘conservative’ (again, particularly on civil rights), as Goldwater people argued.” Fair enough. But his ultimate takeaway about 1960 in 1962, when the pain was fresh and he hoped to make a comeback, was self-serving. “I believe that I spent too much time in the last campaign on substance and too little time on appearance: I paid too much attention to what I was going to say and too little to how I would look,” Nixon writes.
By the time he came to look back on 1960 after his own fall from power, he was more candid. In 1978, the lessons Nixon recalled learning from his loss to Kennedy helped plant seeds of his own ultimate political self-destruction. It’s unclear whether he himself realized this, but it’s all there, in his memoir. The press, he believed, had fallen in love with J.F.K. After 1960, reporters were, to Nixon, an enemy force. Nixon also grudgingly admired the Kennedys’ hardball instincts, so much so that his 1960 defeat led him to an unwavering resolution. “I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them — or anyone — on the level of political tactics.”
He would, in other words, do whatever he had to do — and then some — to win. Writing during the 1962 gubernatorial campaign, Nixon candidly described the nature of political ambition. For the politician, he observed, the “greatest magnet of all is that those who have known great crisis — its challenge and tension, its victory and defeat — can never become adjusted to a more leisurely and orderly pace. They have drunk too deeply of the stuff which really makes life exciting and worth living to be satisfied with the froth.”
For all their manifold differences, Clinton and Nixon share this commitment to the arena, a passionate intensity about never giving up. In her memoir she quotes her 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley, where she paraphrased T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker.” “There is only the trying,” Mrs. Clinton said then, “again and again and again; to win again what we’ve lost before.”
Senator McGovern, the man Nixon defeated in 1972, carrying every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, wrote an interesting account of the campaign in his 1977 memoir “Grassroots.” McGovern quoted Roger Kahn’s book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer”: “You may glory in a team triumphant but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought.”
McGovern’s saddest thoughts mostly concerned his inability to make the case against Nixon, whom he called “the most discredited man ever to occupy the White House.” McGovern knew he was seen as untested, quixotic, and politically incompetent, especially in light of his having to replace his running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, after 18 days when it was reported that Eagleton had been treated for mental illness with electroshock therapy. “More painful than my defeat in 1972 was the resulting caricature of me and the McGovern campaign,” he wrote. “The caricature bears little resemblance to what I think I am or to the real nature of our effort. Even while rejecting it, I have to accept responsibility for the impressions that contributed to it, particularly the Eagleton affair. My campaign was referred to variously as ‘graceless,’ ‘bumbling,’ ‘a debacle,’ ‘a disaster,’ and a ‘catastrophe.’ I was depicted as an inept, vacillating lightweight with unstable, if not radical, tendencies.”
McGovern’s recollections are a reminder of the ambivalent nature of campaigning, an enterprise that is driven by a curious combination of solipsism and altruism. Clinton acknowledges her ambition, though she insists she was driven to seek power not for its own sake but for its utility to help others. She ran in 2016, she acknowledges, because she thought she was the best person for the job. Looking back on the decision, and recounting conversations with her husband and with President Obama, she writes: “The most compelling argument is the hardest to say out loud: I was convinced that both Bill and Barack were right when they said I would be a better President than anyone else out there.” McGovern would have understood. “It is easy for a candidate’s head to be turned,” he wrote. “He is cheered by crowds, pursued by the press, protected by the Secret Service, attended by a solicitous staff, discussed in millions of homes. For months he is the subject of the lead story in the nightly television news. And therein lies the real value of the effort: He has the chance to be heard on issues about which he cares deeply — in my case, to win and then make a peace, to fight for tax reform, full employment and health care.”
Then — nothing. The crowds are gone, the agents are reassigned, the networks move on, and the candidate is left with his or her own thoughts. McGovern recalled a flow of letters from supporters after the loss. There were “kind words, frustrated hopes, expressions of defiance, notes of cheer, and predictions of vindication and dreams of what might have been.” Finally, “the poignancy became too hard to take … It was a source of strength to know how much they had cared, but it also intensified the pain of failure.” Clinton describes her own mail in strikingly similar terms: she found her voluminous postelection correspondence “poignant,” so much so that “after reading a few, I had to put them away and go for a walk.” One wonders if such moments were also occasions for she describes as a healthy appetite for yoga, breathing exercises — and “my share of chardonnay.” It’s an inevitable truth that, as Clinton puts it, “The question blaring in my head was: ‘How did this happen?’” A failed campaign is a movie that endlessly plays in the head of its defeated protagonist.
For Gerald Ford, the beginning of the end came on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 1975, when Ford, who had taken over the vice presidency after the resignation of Spiro Agnew and then the presidency itself after Nixon left office in August 1974, was handed a note. “Governor Reagan is on the line. Would you like to speak to him?” Ford was in the Oval Office, meeting with his own vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, and agreed to take the call.
“Hello, Mr. President,” Reagan said. “I’m going to make an announcement, and I want to tell you about it ahead of time. I am going to run for president. I trust we can have a good contest, and I hope that it won’t be divisive.”
“Well, Governor, I’m very disappointed,” said Ford, who recounted the conversation in his 1979 memoir “A Time to Heal.” “I’m sorry you’re getting into this. I believe I’ve done a good job and that I can be elected. Regardless of your good intentions, your bid is bound to be divisive. It will take a lot of money, a lot of effort, and it will leave a lot of scars. It won’t be helpful, no matter which of us wins the nomination.”
“I don’t think it will be divisive,” Reagan said again. “I don’t think it will hurt the party.”
“Well, I think it will,” Ford replied, and that was that.
The former California governor’s 1976 challenge marked the midpoint of the great Republican transformation of the last quarter of the 20th century. Under Reagan — a former Democrat who had been a conservative star since an October 1964 televised appeal for Barry Goldwater’s doomed campaign against Johnson — the G.O.P. was moving rightward from the more centrist Eisenhower-Nixon-Ford ethos. Ford had attempted to head off the trouble on the right by announcing that Vice President Rockefeller, long the embodiment of the Eastern liberal Republican wing, would not be on the 1976 ticket, but even that was not enough. (At a meeting of Southern Republican state chairmen in Houston in December 1975, the blunt Rockefeller looked out at the conservative leadership and said: “You got me out, you sons of a bitches. Now get off your ass.”)
Ford would win the nomination, but only barely, and he admitted that he had been wrong not to focus more directly on Reagan earlier. “We had most of the generals on our side,” Ford writes of the pre-primary campaign for G.O.P. support. “But Reagan had many of the troops.” In New Hampshire, Reagan had the energy and, Ford laments, “the only computerized list of registered voters in the state. His people were holding meetings, mapping strategy. By contrast, my own effort seemed in disarray.” The congressman in charge of New Hampshire for the president, for instance, was, at a crucial time, “about to begin a three-week vacation trip.” (Ford ultimately won the primary — by 1,317 votes. But he won.)
In a way, Reagan was to Ford what Bernie Sanders was to Hillary Clinton or Eugene McCarthy was to Hubert Humphrey or, four years later, Ted Kennedy would be to Jimmy Carter: a charismatic figure who won the hearts of many and whose popularity failed to translate to the eventual nominee. “Bernie and I had a spirited contest of ideas, which was invigorating, but I nonetheless found campaigning against him to be profoundly frustrating,” Clinton writes. “He didn’t seem to mind if his math didn’t add up or if his plans had no prayer of passing Congress and becoming law. For Bernie, policy was about inspiring a mass movement and forcing a conversation about the Democratic Party’s values and priorities. By that standard, I would say he succeeded. But it worried me. I’ve always believed that it’s dangerous to make big promises if you have no idea how you’re going to keep them. When you don’t deliver, it will make people even more cynical about government.”
A steady, essentially straightforward man — in that, Ford had much in common, temperamentally, with a predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, and a successor, George H. W. Bush — Ford acknowledged flashes of temper on the campaign trail. When an adviser challenged his idea to hold a post-convention event in Bob Dole’s hometown of Russell, Kan., Ford snapped: “Dammit, I know what I’m doing. I know a little bit about politics.”
In the end, despite a great Ford surge through the fall, Jimmy Carter won the White House. Like Hillary Clinton, like Humphrey, like Nixon, like McGovern, Ford ruminated, if briefly, on what had gone wrong. “What if I hadn’t pardoned Nixon? How many people voted against me because of that? What if I had kept Rockefeller on the ticket as my running mate and hadn’t selected Dole? Bob, a loyal friend, had campaigned very effectively and we had won the crucial farm states. But would Nelson have made the difference in New York, Ohio or Pennsylvania?”
As Clinton writes, such questions evoke a “haunting line” of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s: “For of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”
In the modern era, Nixon, Humphrey, McGovern, Ford and now Clinton submitted themselves to at least some level of self-criticism in defeat. President Carter — as in so many things — is the exception. His 1982 memoir “Keeping Faith” tells the story of the 1980 general campaign almost exclusively through the prism of his efforts to free the American hostages in Iran. To borrow a phrase from George W. Bush, Carter misunderestimated Reagan, and Carter has never tried very hard to conceal his contempt for the man who crushed his bid for re-election. Carter wrote that he was “pleased that Governor Reagan was the nominee,” adding: “With him as my opponent, the issues would be clearly drawn. At the time, all my political team believed that he was the weakest candidate the Republicans could have chosen. My campaign analysts had been carefully studying what he had been saying during the Republican primary elections, and it seemed inconceivable that he would be acceptable as president when his positions were clearly exposed to the public.”
This inability to discern an opponent’s elemental appeal recurred in 2016. While Trump was making his unconventional but effective appeals to just enough of the country to win in the Electoral College, Clinton admits that she was focused on how she was going to govern — working through Cabinet choices and even buying a neighboring house in Chappaqua to house her White House staff during the coming administration. Like Carter, Clinton could not conceive of a world in which the voters would buy what the Republican nominee was selling. “I did not realize then,” Carter wrote of the summer of 1980, “that the press and public would not believe that Reagan actually meant what he was saying — although we tried to emphasize the radical nature of his departure from the policies of my administration and from those of my predecessors in the White House.”
Unlike Carter, Clinton has given us an exhaustive post-mortem, from Russian trolling to her strategy to win white working-class voters. She acknowledges that “there was a fundamental mismatch between how I approach politics and what a lot of the country wanted to hear in 2016. I’ve learned that even the best plans and proposals can land on deaf ears when people are disillusioned by a broken political system and disgusted with politicians. When people are angry and looking for someone to blame, they don’t want to hear your 10-point plan to create jobs and raise wages. They want you to be angry, too.”
As Nixon wrote of 1960, the narrowness of the margins in the voting mean everyone can — and does — offer a plausible theory about why she lost. “It’s difficult to rule anything out,” she writes, always returning to James Comey’s interjection of the email investigation on Oct. 28. Before Comey, she was ahead; now she is writing about defeat rather than trying to implement those beloved 10-point plans. Given the result, historians will be arguing about 2016 as long as American political history is written, which, God and the North Koreans willing, will be a very long time to come. And whatever you think about her or her husband or Trump, Hillary Clinton’s book will be a good place to start.
She offers a final Plutarchian image toward the end of her account — a small moment that tells a larger story. In March 2017 she and some friends drove over to Hyde Park, N.Y., to visit Eleanor Roosevelt’s cottage, Val-Kill. “I’d been thinking about Eleanor a lot lately,” Clinton writes. “She put up with so much vitriol, and she did it with grace and strength. People criticized her voice and appearance, the money she made speaking and writing, and her advocacy for women’s rights, civil rights, and human rights. An overzealous director of the F.B.I. put together a three-thousand-page file on her. One vituperative national columnist called her ‘impudent, presumptuous and conspiratorial,’ and said that ‘her withdrawal from public life at this time would be a fine public service.’” Clinton then adds, as if anyone could miss the point: “Sound familiar?”
But perhaps a friend of Mrs. Roosevelt’s, Hubert Humphrey, whom she once said had “the spark of greatness,” has a more fitting last word, one necessarily more tragic. “What am I going to do?” Humphrey wrote of losing in 1968. “There isn’t anything I want to do. I wanted to be President. … I was ready. I’d really trained for the presidency. I know government. We had such great plans. We could have changed things. Damn it, I love this country. We could have done so much good.”
Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian. His series The Long View looks back at books that speak to our current historical and cultural moment.
Correction: September 12, 2017, Tuesday
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the target of the Nixon campaign’s outreach in 1968. It was South Vietnam, not North Vietnam.
Correction: October 4, 2017, Wednesday
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of a picture caption with this article included an erroneous date for the photograph of Gerald and Betty Ford. It was taken in 1973, not 1974.
PHOTOS: Hillary Clinton giving her concession speech on Nov. 9, 2016. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (BR16); “What am I going to do?” Hubert Humphrey wrote of losing in 1968. “I wanted to be President.” From left, Humphrey, Nixon in 1962, McGovern in 1972, Gerald and Betty Ford in 1974, Carter in 1980. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; ASSOCIATED PRESS; GARY SETTLE/THE NEW YORK TIMES; D. GORTON/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (BR17)
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