Clinton Memoir Excerpt Released, Defends ‘Smart Power’ Foreign Policy
How do you keep the jackals in the news media from leaking your book? One way is to leak it yourself, which is the tack the publishers of Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming book have taken. Simon & Schuster released the four-page “author’s memo” Tuesday morning as a way to get ahead of the spin on what will be the most picked-apart political book of the season.
“We’re not under any illusions that this book won’t leak,” Clinton’s team said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re resigning ourselves to that certainty, and not trying new and creative ways to present it to the public before that happens.”
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So basically they made the hard choice to leak the first four pages, which are as anodyne as you’d expect. “All of us face hard choices in our lives,” the book begins.
When I chose to leave a career as a young lawyer in Washington to move to Arkansas to marry Bill and start a family, my friends asked, “Are you out of your mind?” I heard similar questions when I took on health care reform as First Lady, ran for office myself, and accepted President Barack Obama’s offer to represent our country as Secretary of State.
In making these decisions, I listened to both my heart and my head. I followed my heart to Arkansas; it burst with love at the birth of our daughter, Chelsea; and it ached with the losses of my father and mother. My head urged me forward in my education and professional choices. And my heart and head together sent me into public service. Along the way, I’ve tried not to make the same mistake twice, to learn, to adapt, and to pray for the wisdom to make better choices in the future.
Clinton goes on to discuss the importance of marrying traditional foreign policy apparatuses to private sector innovations, and to praise, in broad strokes, the foreign policy of the Obama administration. It promises later chapters on Clinton’s accomplishments at the State Department, specifically the reorientation to “smart power,” over which GOP mouths are watering.
“When I began this book, shortly after leaving the State Department, I considered a number of titles,” Clinton concludes. “Helpfully, the Washington Post asked its readers to send in suggestions. One proposed ‘It Takes a World,’ a fitting sequel to It Takes a Village. My favorite was ‘The Scrunchie Chronicles: 112 Countries and It’s Still All about My Hair.’”
Read the excerpt via Simon & Schuster.
[Image via JStone / Shutterstock.com]
