WeeklySA_AdminLENS: The former US First Lady’s memoir, Something Lost, Something Gained, is a “snapshot of how she sees the world right now” – with or without her nemesis, Donald Trump…
By Jacob Mawela
Hillary Rodham Clinton could have updated her résumé from being the First Lady of the United States to President Rodham Clinton in deference to her parents, and so as to differentiate herself from her former pre=sident husband, Bill – had it not been for one Donald Trump.
A crushing defeat to a man accused then by prosecutors to have “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election”, which put paid to her grand aspiration to become “The Most Powerful Woman in the World”. That “this criminal” (as she refers to Trump) – who brought ignominy to the nation by being convicted of 34 felonies related to electoral fraud, and scuppered the ultimate ambition of her political career of becoming the very first female president of the US – became president in the first instance, rendered her to seethe with bitter hindsight almost palpable.
She herself admits that much, writing, in this recent memoir, Something Lost, Something Gained, that, “even now, just thinking about that moment makes fury well up in my chest.” Adding on to imply that as long as Trump remained within striking distance of the White House, she’d do all she could to stop him – which ultimately proved futile since, despite her endorsement of then Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in the 2024 election, it couldn’t deter Trump from re-election as president.
Likening herself to Greek mythology’s Cassandra (the woman capable of seeing the future, whose warning of Greek invaders’ concealment inside a giant horse went unheeded by the Trojans, Clinton claims that she had raised the alarm regarding ‘the con man, Russian puppet and threat to democracy Trump was’. This had resulted in people rueing having not heeded her warning and her retorting to an FBI official who commiserated with her about Trump’s 2016 electoral victory: “I would have been a great president”.
Ironically, she pontificates about missing elections whose outcomes are not open to the attacks of sore losers. Clinton – who in the 2019 book she co-authored with her daughter Chelsea, titled, The Book of Gutsy Women: Favourite Stories of Courage and Resilience – mentions growing up hardly knowing any women who worked outside the home, and started a scrapbook of her own after learning that aviator Amelia Earhart kept a scrapbook with newspaper articles about successful women in male-dominated jobs.
She writes that she’s proud that her two presidential campaigns paved the way for women like Harris to bid for the Oval Office, adding that she still believes that America will have a woman president one day. Her disparaging of Trump doesn’t conclude there, with her recalling his participation in the United States Capitol attack of January 6 2021, in an attempted self-coup in which his supporters sought to keep him in power by preventing the formalisation of president-elect Joe Biden’s victory – two months after he’d been defeated in the 2020 presidential election.
Having experienced fear during her abrupt evacuation from the Capitol while a senator during the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001, it became déjà vu almost 20 years on as domestic insurrectionists brazenly laid siege to the very symbol of “the Free World”.
Further on, in a segment titled “Putin’s Republican Party”, the avowed Democrat lambasts Trump by limning him as an admirer of dictators such as Vladimir Putin, and whose acolytes in Congress try hard to divert attention from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to the supposed “invasion” of America by caravans of Central American migrants.
Waxing the lyrical, Clinton posits: “It’s xenophobic three-card monte” (a confidence game in which victims are tricked into betting money on the assumption of finding the ‘money card’ among three playing cards facing down).
Regarding alleged Trump’s and his associates’ ties to the Kremlin, the Chicago native further mentioned a Republican House majority leader who, in 2016, was recorded telling colleagues that Trump was being paid by Putin.
In her deduction, and much to her anger, Russia (and Putin for that matter) was complicit in thwarting her presidential aspiration, backing her assertion by including an excerpt of a Senate Intelligence Committee report which partly surmised that Putin ordered Russian efforts intended at tarnishing a looming Clinton presidential administration while helping the Trump campaign.
Putin, whom she refers to as her old adversary, is quite bluntly another of her nemeses, with Clinton suggesting that the toppling of ex-Soviet bloc authoritarian regimes rendered him intensely paranoid. She continued on to assert that he is terrified of losing his head, while supporting her view by mentioning hearsay purporting Putin’s repeated viewing of a gory video depicting Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi’s brutal death, as evidence. (As Secretary of State, Clinton enabled Libyan rebels to overthrow Qaddafi – a US intervention which resulted in the North African country becoming a failed state.) Furthermore, she claims that he invaded Ukraine because he felt scared – whilst evoking an image of the Russian leader cock-a-doodle-doing inside the Kremlin in the face of the West’s ineptitude.
Brimming with varying experiences of her ‘mission-driven’ life, Clinton also recounts encounters with women from diverse walks of life such as the mothers of victims of racist violence – among them, Sybrina Fulton, whose son Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a Hispanic-American – and another from the converse side of America’s racial divide, Shannon Foley Martinez, an ex-Nazi working to deprogram white supremacists.
In another segment, she shares her participation in the evacuation of the ‘White Scarves’, a group of Afghan women included on a Taliban ‘kill list’, to safety pending America’s withdrawal from its longest war – while another depicts her sweating alongside women salt farmers beside salt pans in a sweltering desert of India, while trying to adapt to the subcontinent’s climate crisis.
Elsewhere in a segment titled “Rebels With A Cause”, Clinton expounds on her rendezvous with brave women dissidents who had defied dictators around the world such as Violeta de Chamorro (Nicaragua’s first woman president), Leymah Gbowee (Liberian 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate), Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala’s 1992 Nobel Peace Prize laureate).
In another segment regarding US First Ladies, Clinton divulges her regret at not attending Pat Nixon’s funeral in 1993, while the First Lady. (Back in 1974, Clinton had served on the impeachment inquiry which led to the deceased ex-First Lady’s husband, Richard, resigning as US president on account of the Watergate scandal.)
And, at the memorial of ex-First Lady Rosalynn Carter in November 2023, who to bump into, but her nemesis Donald Trump’s wife, Melania.
Writing that she knew not what to make of the third Mrs Trump, Clinton mentions that she shook her hand and said: “Hello Melania, it’s nice to see you.” The title of the book is gleaned from the lyrics of a 1969 song by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (whom Clinton mentions as having been a fan of since the 1960s) titled, “Both Sides Now”.
The memoir, Clinton informs, is a love letter to life, family and democracy, adding that it’s a snapshot of how she sees the world right now. She wrote it during 2024 when Donald Trump was, as in 2016, once again the Republican Party’s presidential nominee – which goes to explain her sense of trepidation and fervent opposition to his White House comeback, so unwaveringly expressed in this no-holds-barred chronicle! Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first woman to be nominated for president by a major US political party and the winner of the national popular vote. She served as United States Secretary of State in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013 and US senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009. She was also the First Lady of the US as the wife of President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001, as well as first lady of the State of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992. She is also an author of numerous books and in 1997 received a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for the audio recording of the book, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us.
• A trade paperback, Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love and Liberty is published by Simon Schuster UK and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers. Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R740
