Greetings! 'Tis I, your friendly neighborhood "Hillstorian!" 😁 I was just in the neighborhood and figured i'd drop by. Also, it meant a lot to me that some people here seemed to find my last "Hillstorian" post genuinely entertaining to read (I may or may not be a bit of an aspiring writer lol) and, since I had a massive amount of fun writing yet another such book review, I figured I'd share it for anyone interested in reading that kind of thing. 😁 Anyway, here goes:

Finally, here is a book that will have you asking "wait a minute... did the government already have ChatGPT in 2014?"

It's actually not that crazy if you think about it: according to this account, the government has helicopters so advanced that they have to be blown up when they crash so the technology doesn't fall into the wrong hands (they're... not advanced enough to not crash). Also, presidents are apparently required to be chauffered around exclusively in an extra-advanced and secure limousine that is shipped (or maybe flown? How does that work? How heavy is this armoured vehicle??) ahead of time to their every destination... to hell with the rest of the administration though. They can either make do with the host country's motorcade or, if they don't like it, walk. 💀😂

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah: my theory probably falls apart when you remember that government officials were still typing away on Blackberries back then and dangerously close to slaughtering a baby goat in a desperate, last-ditch effort to appease their mysterious and presumably all-powerful new god of the day, Twitter.

Suffice it to say that the government's level of technological sophistication at any given moment in time might be a little... overstated. In other words, I suspect the government has been face-tuning itself to the outside world long before we even had dial-up and, for just as long, politicians have published memoirs that sound like they asked ChatGPT to turn their resume into a polite, professionally-worded extended memo for an upcoming presidential campaign they are still deciding when to officially announce. (Or as a New York Times reviewer once put it when referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton's pre-2016 memoirs like Hard Choices, habitually "measuring every word with a tea spoon and spraying it with sanitizer.")

To be fair, HRC basically writes the way she speaks in public (very formal language, encyclopedic memory, chooses her words carefully, etc) so despite her thanking a suspiciously large team of writing assistants in the acknowledgements, the "voice" in the book sounds exactly like her's. But if you're looking for a heart-to-heart that explores how she really feels about something personal like her 2008 rivalry with Obama, her relationship with Bill or the prejudices she encounters as a woman in politics, this ain't it chief. She indeed wipes all of those bad thoughts down with Lysol-- extra-strength, baby.

That said, if you can can glean meaningful insights from the small asides she occasionally makes in this otherwise very contrived account about her term as secretary of state then congrats, kid. You're gonna be alright. I'll give you some examples of those asides and you can see for yourself:

1.) The time she had a private meeting with Sheikh Sharif Sheihk Amad. Never heard of him? Me either. He was the president of Somalia (a country that btw accepts millions of dollars in annual aid from the United States), and HRC wondered if he would have the balls to shake her hand in front of the cameras later. (I'm paraphrasing; HRC does not in fact use the word "balls" in the book.) Given the pressure of his country's Muslim traditions against shaking a woman's hand in public, she couldn't be sure. I for one was pleasantly surprised to read that the president ultimately decided to shake rather than bite the hand that feeds him when they arrived at their scheduled press conference. When a local journalist bravely raised his hand and asked if the president had just violated local religious customs that regular citizens were expected to live by, instead of saying "yes, a dollar make me HOLLA honey boo-boo," Sheikh Amad shrugged the question off with a "meh."

2.) She never criticizes Barack Obama directly in the book. According to her, they became fast friends pretty quickly after he bested her in the 2008 primaries. I'm sure there is truth to that version of things (she and Obama really do seem to respect each other in interviews), but I also can't help noticing this book was published in 2014 and that Obama went on to campaign just as vigorously for her in 2016 as she did for him after losing the nomination in 2008. On a totally unrelated note, here's a passage from the book that probably sounds benign on the surface but, when translated from Hillary-speak, sounds a little more like Amy Poehler's 2008 Saturday Night Live version of HRC taking the wheel for a moment:

"'That's not going to cut it,' President Obama said, visibly frustrated. Then he called Mubarak and said the same thing. We debated whether the president should make a public statement declaring that he was done waiting for Mubarak to do what was right. Once again, senior Cabinet officials, including me, counseled caution. We warned that if the President appeared to be too heavy-handed, it might backfire. But other members of the team appealed once again to the President's idealism and argued that events on the ground were moving too quickly for us to wait. He was swayed, and that evening he went before the cameras in the Grand Foyer of the White House." As it so happens, HRC turned out to be right on the issue, as she tries very hard to minimize and not gloat about in the book. 😂 (For us aging millennials out there desperate for every bit of nostalgia we can get, here's the exact Amy Poehler sketch the passage made me think of 😁: https://youtu.be/lHSvdkbDqMI?si=wg2Wy0_9eTjXbz43

... Anywho, if you can set aside your hopes for a revealing personal memoir, the book is actually a treasure trove of information on global politics (I initially used a term I recently learned here, "geopolitics," before realizing I don't actually know what that word means. Google keeps insisting the term refers to "how geographical factors" [like what, sea levels? Number of mountain ranges??] influence a nation's politics but I keep seeing people, even HRC in this book, use the term as if it's a synonym for international politics in general. Your guess is as good as mine, so let's just say "global politics" to be safe.) Reading it, you learn A LOT about the various problems plaguing different regions and the delicate balance countries like the United States have to strike between advancing overall global interests (as well as their own interests) without inflaming relations in, like, Timbuktu. And when I say you learn a lot, I really do mean a lot. Sooooo... so much... Please tell me you can hear the strain in my writer's "voice" through the screen. 😬

Just for fun, let's do a little exercise: you tell me if you can read the following passage from the book without dying of boredom: "...the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran represented a serious security threat to Israel, Iran's neighbors in the Gulf, and, by extension, the world, which is why the UN Security Council had passed six resolutions since 2006, calling on Iran to cease it's weapons program and abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Like more than 180 other nations, Iran is a signatory to the Treaty, which gives countries the right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes but requires those with existing nuclear weapons to pursue disarmament and those without nuclear weapons to foreswear acquiring them. Allowing Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon in violation of this treaty could open the floodgates on proliferation, first in the Middle East among its Sunni-led rivals, and then around the world."

Are you still awake? Did you try to smother yourself with your pillow to get out of reading the whole paragraph? (Be honest!) Well, don't feel bad: the whole book is like that! Even I, your friendly neighborhood Hillstorian, have to admit I've probably had more fun reading the warning label on a box of Tylenol. The book was truthfully a chore to finish (it's like 500 pages of basically Wikipedia summaries disguised as chapters). If I didn't have a few traits of OCD, according to a therapist I saw once like ten years ago, I don't think I would have had the drive to finish it. That and I of course wanted to pat myself on the back again for still being the world's biggest Hillary-nerd.

I wouldn't say I adored the book, but it was... adorably tedious?? In fact, things get worse in that regard after the Iran passage. 😂 The last section is like 100 pages or so and is very clearly HRC's presidential sales pitch (of course she never mentions the possibility of her running for president again in the entire book, despite it clearly being intended to explain what she stands for and what her vision for the country is. Honestly, #QueenTingz 👑 We stan.) Anyway, she comes off as very, VERY prepared for 2016, at least during the parts I could make heads or tails of. I was at least able to understand the Iran passage earlier (well, after re-reading it a few times) but I was completely lost trying to make sense of passages like this:

"China had become the leading exponent of an economic model called 'state capitalism,' in which state-owned or state-supported companies used public money to dominate markets and advance strategic interests. State capitalism, as well as a range of new forms of protectionism involving barriers behind borders-- such as unfair regulations, discrimination against foreign companies, and forced technology transfers-- posed a growing threat to the ability of American businesses to compete in key markets... Though China was the largest offender when it came to new forms of protectionism and state capitalism, it was hardly alone. By 2011, sovereign wealth investment funds, which are owned and run by governments, often with revenue from exports of oil and natural gas, had grown to control roughly 12 percent of all investment worldwide. Increasingly, state-owned and state-supported enterprises were operating not just in their home markets but around the globe, sometimes in secrecy, often lacking the transparency and accountability that shareholders and regulations ensure."

What does any of that mean?! I could at least make sense of the Iran passage (after re-reading it a few times), but this one left me wondering "am I the world's biggest idiot, or was that passage intentionally written in flexing, policy-wonk jargon? Hmm..."

In any case, I think the most valuable lesson I took away from the book (as well as a few other books I've read recently) is how difficult it is for any administration official in any presidential cabinet, regardless of party, to navigate the world's problems.

Here is a quote from the book where she is specifically referring to the Syria conflict but that I think describes the work of a foreign diplomat in so many situations: "wicked problems rarely have a right answer; in fact, part of what makes them wicked is that every option appears worse than the next. Increasingly that's how Syria appeared. Do nothing, and a humanitarian disaster envelops the region. Intervene militarily, and risk opening Pandora's box and wading into another quagmire, like Iraq. Send aid to the rebels, and watch it end up in the hands of extremists. Continue with diplomacy, and run head-first into a Russian veto. None of these approaches offered much hope of success."