Something Lost, Something Gained review – Hillary Clinton still plagued by what could have been

On election day 2016, Hillary Clinton won a 2.86m-vote plurality but Donald Trump won the White House. Eight years later, America remains divided.

Trump, 78, is the Republican nominee again. Clinton, 76, remains in the public eye, a trailblazer to many, forever a lightning rod. Something Lost, Something Gained, her fourth memoir, is another attempt to smooth rough edges.

By that measure, it comes up short.

Clinton shares her love for her late mother, life with Bill and her Methodist faith. All this is unlikely to dispel past perceptions. Those who admire the former first lady, senator and secretary of state will continue to do so. Those who aren’t fans won’t be converted. In late 2023, Clinton’s favorability with the public stood at 42% favorable to 38% unfavorable. Michelle Obama was at 58-25.

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Clinton remains plagued by what might have been. “As Faulkner wrote, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’” she writes, early on. “I live with it every day. And every day I make an effort to turn my eyes to the future instead.”

In 2016, whatever could go wrong did. Bernie Sanders and “Carlos Danger” – AKA Anthony Weiner, her aide Huma Abedin’s compromised husband – complicated matters tremendously. James Comey, the FBI director, and Julian Assange, the lord of WikiLeaks, made her life hell. There was also Vladimir Putin, who interfered to help Trump.

Still, it was Clinton who branded Trump’s supporter base “deplorable”. It was Clinton’s campaign that spent its closing days in the south-west, not the Rust belt. Trump cannot be blamed for those unforced errors.

Now, Clinton admits taking pleasure in Trump’s legal woes – then attempts to cloak her emotions in a patina of rectitude.

“Was there even a tiny bit of schadenfreude when I heard about the verdict in New York?” she asks, of Trump’s conviction on 34 criminal charges arising from hush-money payments to a porn star. “I won’t say no. But the truth is that I felt more relief than pleasure seeing the rule of law prevail, even briefly.”

Not done, she catalogs the 45th president’s sins: “Trump was (twice) impeached, defeated, indicted in four different cases, and now convicted of 34 felonies.” But there is also self-pity aplenty. From her own time in the White House, she laments the “bogus Whitewater investigation and Bill’s impeachment ordeal”. Bogusness and ordeals are in the eyes of the beholder.

During Whitewater, a scandal over investments in property in Arkansas, the late William Safire used the pages of the New York Times to brand Clinton a “congenital liar”. As the Pulitzer Prize winner and Nixon speechwriter saw it, she was simply allergic to truth. In the end, Robert Ray, the independent counsel who investigated Whitewater and other matters, did not charge her with any crime. On the other hand, in an October 2000 report he noted gaps in testimony that raised questions about her credibility.

As for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, over his lies about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, it morphed into a political disaster for Republicans. Both Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston were forced to quit as House speaker. The GOP lost seats in the 1998 midterms. Nonetheless, Bill’s behavior led to him losing his right to practice law before the supreme court, and copping a five-year suspension from the bar.

Hillary Clinton also trains fire on Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer and Peter Schweizer, author of the book Clinton Cash, which did damage of its own in the 2016 campaign. She says the trio wrongly trashed the Clinton Foundation, the former first couple’s big post-presidency venture, an attack that “exacted a toll that neither one of us saw coming” and “still pains me”.

“The Clinton Foundation was like Bill’s second child,” Hillary writes. “He poured his enormous energy and enthusiasm into building it. He got so much pleasure and satisfaction from seeing its impact on the world.”

Few, though, would confuse Bill with Mother Teresa.

Bannon – who now sits in federal prison, awaiting trial for fraud and conspiracy – was with Mercer a pillar of Cambridge Analytica, a driving force behind Brexit.

“In retrospect, this was a clear case of the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ in action,” Clinton charges, referring to her famous claim about forces ranged against her and her husband. “For his part, Schweizer shifted his focus to spreading conspiracy theories about Joe Biden and his son Hunter.”

Last June, a federal jury convicted Hunter Biden on gun charges. This month, on the eve of trial, he pled guilty to tax evasion. Imagine the repercussions if Joe Biden were still heading the Democratic ticket.

Something Lost, Something Gained is strongest when it chronicles the protests that seized Columbia University last spring. Clinton is now a professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (Sipa). She saw plenty.

For some protesters, demonstrating against Israel’s response to the surprise attack by Hamas on 7 October morphed into “an excuse to chant antisemitic slogans”, Clinton writes.

She told students “that if Yasser Arafat had accepted the deal offered by my husband in 2000 for a state that the Israeli government was prepared to accept, the Palestinian people would be celebrating their 23rd year of statehood”. She received, she writes, “blank stares”.

She also derides Benjamin Netanyahu for taking “zero responsibility” for the surprise attack, and for “refus[ing] to call an election, let alone step down” as prime minister of Israel.

It’s always a bit rich when a Clinton criticizes others for not taking personal responsibility. Still, few have witnessed history as closely as Hillary. For that reason alone, Something Lost, Something Gained is worth reading.

• Something Lost, Something Gained is published in the US by Simon & Schuster