Hillary Rodham Clinton - Hard Choices

ALSO BY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON

It Takes a Village
Dear Socks, Dear Buddy
An Invitation to the White House
Living History

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright 2014 by Hillary Rodham Clinton

The opinions and characterisations in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily represent official positions of the United States Government.

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of Hillary Rodham Clinton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-47113-150-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-47113-153-0

Interior design by Joy OMeara
Jacket Design by Jackie Seow
Map by Robert Bull

Photo research and editing by Laura Wyss, Wyss Photo Inc., with the assistance of Elizabeth Ceramur, Amy Hidika, and Emily Vinson.

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For Americas diplomats and development experts, who represent our country and our values so well in places large and small, peaceful and perilous all over the world.

and

In memory of my parents:
Hugh Ellsworth Rodham (19111993)
Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham (19192011)

A ll of us face hard choices in our lives. Some face more than their share. We have to decide how to balance the demands of work and family. Caring for a sick child or an aging parent. Figuring out how to pay for college. Finding a good job, and what to do if you lose it. Whether to get marriedor stay married. How to give our kids the opportunities they dream about and deserve. Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become. For leaders and nations, they can mean the difference between war and peace, poverty and prosperity.

Im eternally grateful that I was born to loving and supportive parents in a country that offered me every opportunity and blessingfactors beyond my control that set the stage for the life Ive led and the values and faith Ive embraced. 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 Obamas 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, Ive 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.

Whats true in our daily lives is also true at the highest levels of government. Keeping America safe, strong, and prosperous presents an endless set of choices, many of which come with imperfect information and conflicting imperatives. Perhaps the most famous example from my four years as Secretary of State was President Obamas order to send a team of Navy SEALs into a moonless Pakistani night to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. The Presidents top advisors were divided. The intelligence was compelling, but far from definitive. The risks of failure were daunting. The stakes were significant for Americas national security, our battle against al Qaeda, and our relationship with Pakistan. Most of all, the lives of those brave SEALs and helicopter pilots hung in the balance. It was as crisp and courageous a display of leadership as Ive ever seen.

This book is about choices I made as Secretary of State and those made by President Obama and other leaders around the world. Some chapters are about events that made headlines; others are about the trendlines that will continue to define our world for future generations.

Of course, quite a few important choices, characters, countries, and events are not included here. To give them all the space they deserve, I would need many more pages. I could fill a whole book just with thanks to the talented and dedicated colleagues I relied on at the State Department. I have enormous gratitude for their service and friendship.

As Secretary of State I thought of our choices and challenges in three categories: The problems we inherited, including two wars and a global financial crisis; the new, often unexpected events and emerging threats, from the shifting sands of the Middle East to the turbulent waters of the Pacific to the uncharted terrain of cyberspace; and the opportunities presented by an increasingly networked world that could help lay the foundation for American prosperity and leadership in the 21st century.

I approached my work with confidence in our countrys enduring strengths and purpose, and humility about how much remains beyond our knowledge and control. I worked to reorient American foreign policy around what I call smart power. To succeed in the 21st century, we need to integrate the traditional tools of foreign policydiplomacy, development assistance, and military forcewhile also tapping the energy and ideas of the private sector and empowering citizens, especially the activists, organizers, and problem solvers we call civil society, to meet their own challenges and shape their own futures. We have to use all of Americas strengths to build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries, more shared responsibility and fewer conflicts, more good jobs and less poverty, more broadly based prosperity with less damage to our environment.

As is usually the case with the benefit of hindsight, I wish we could go back and revisit certain choices. But Im proud of what we accomplished. This century began traumatically for our country, with the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the long wars that followed, and the Great Recession. We needed to do better, and I believe we did.

These years were also a personal journey for me, both literally (I ended up visiting 112 countries and traveling nearly one million miles) and figuratively, from the painful end of the 2008 campaign to an unexpected partnership and friendship with my former rival Barack Obama. Ive served our country in one way or another for decades. Yet during my years as Secretary of State, I learned even more about our exceptional strengths and what it will take for us to compete and thrive at home and abroad.

I hope this book will be of use to anyone who wants to know what America stood for in the early years of the 21st century, as well as how the Obama Administration confronted great challenges in a perilous time.