Over the years, Republicans have often invoked Reagan’s Cold War dictum “weakness only invites aggression”—usually to argue for less diplomacy, bigger defense budgets, and more military intervention. Yet they seem blind to how their attacks on American democracy and the effectiveness of our institutions make our country look to our adversaries. Whether Putin continues testing NATO’s resolve and whether the trajectory of our competition with China veers toward conflict will in part be driven by Russian and Chinese perceptions of America’s decline or resilience. When our democracy looks weak, our country looks weak, and as Reagan said, that only invites aggression.
At the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, Chinese leaders watched carefully as the financial crisis devastated the U.S. economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drained American resources and resolve. For decades, Chinese foreign policy had been constrained by Deng Xiaoping’s direction to “hide capabilities and bide time” waiting for the “international balance of power” to shift toward China and away from the United States. With America on its heels, President Hu Jintao announced in 2009 that China was no longer content to hide and bide but now would aim to “actively accomplish” its goals. It started making more aggressive moves in the region, testing how hard it could push—accelerating a naval buildup and asserting claims to wide swaths of water, islands, and energy reserves in the South and East China Seas. China’s belligerence in the region and beyond accelerated greatly under Xi Jinping, along with a lurch toward tighter authoritarian control and persecution at home. Xi’s aggression not only reflects his personal ambition but also stems from a perception of accelerating U.S. decline. Rush Doshi, a scholar who has closely studied decades’ worth of CCP documents and pronouncements, has observed that the combination of Brexit, Trump, and the coronavirus pandemic convinced Chinese leaders that the time was right to challenge the U.S.-led international order like never before. The January 6 insurrection helped convince Xi that, as he put it shortly afterward, “time and momentum are on our side.” The sack of the Capitol, and the democratic disarray it represented, reinforced the notion of a “period of historical opportunity” for China to seize the mantle of global leadership.
After the 2020 election, when Trump was whipping up his followers to reject the results and oppose the peaceful transfer of power, a senior Republican official explained to the Washington Post why party leaders were doing nothing to stop him: “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” With the United States competing against a powerful adversary adept at playing the long game, Americans cannot afford to be so painfully shortsighted. And the argument is exactly the one German politicians and businessmen made about Hitler, whom they thought they could control.
We need to once again put America before partisanship. When I was secretary of state, people around the world asked me how I could serve with President Obama after the long, difficult campaign we had waged against each other for the 2008 Democratic nomination. People were especially surprised in countries where losing an election might lead to exile or prison, not a seat in the cabinet. My answer was simple: We both loved our country. The good of our democracy comes first.
Sometimes I wonder what my dad, an old-school Republican, would think about his preferred party spouting Russian propaganda and weakening our nation on the world stage. Before Pearl Harbor, Hugh Rodham was more or less an isolationist who thought we should mind our own business and stay out of foreign affairs. He was certainly no fan of Franklin Roosevelt. But when America was attacked, he enlisted in the Navy. He became a chief petty officer responsible for training thousands of young sailors before they shipped out to sea, mostly to the Pacific theater. Years later, he told me how sad he felt when he accompanied his trainees to the West Coast to join their ships. He knew some of them wouldn’t survive. They probably knew it, too. But still, they went to serve because they knew their country needed them.
After the war, Dad returned to his small business in Chicago. The last thing he wanted to hear from politicians in Washington was that hardworking American taxpayers, who had already sacrificed so much, should shoulder the responsibility of rebuilding our former adversaries in Germany and Japan as well as our allies in Europe. That’s what George Marshall, Harry Truman’s secretary of state, was proposing, and Dad thought it was nuts. So did many members of Congress. They described the plan as a “socialist blueprint” and “money down a rat hole.” So Marshall went to see Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican from Michigan, who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. Like my dad, before Pearl Harbor, Vandenberg had been a classic isolationist, deeply skeptical of expensive foreign adventures and highly allergic to taxes and government spending. Marshall made his case to Vandenberg and spent so much time with the senator that, as he put it, “we could not have gotten much closer unless I sat in Vandenberg’s lap or he sat in mine.” Marshall, a former five-star general and a hero of World War II, explained why America’s future security and prosperity depended on having capable allies who would share our interests and buy our goods. And even more important, he argued, America had a responsibility and an opportunity to lead the world. He appealed to Vandenberg’s patriotism and asked for his help. This would only work, Marshall said, if it was a truly bipartisan national effort. Vandenberg, once the most vocal of isolationists, became a champion of the Marshall Plan and deserves a share of the credit for its eventual success. He said it was necessary to put “national security ahead of partisan advantage.”
That made a big difference to my dad, and to a lot of Americans. His generation knew real hardship, from depression to world war, and they accepted the responsibility of global leadership because they realized it was the best chance to give their kids—kids like me and my brothers—a future with freedom and security. That’s still true today.
THIS OLD HOUSE
Our red-brick house at the end of Whitehaven Street is vacant more often than not these days. If Bill, Chelsea, Marc, or I have a meeting or speech in Washington, D.C., we’ll come with overnight bags for a day or two, greeted in the front hall by framed family photos in which we haven’t aged. On the occasions when we host gatherings at the house—like the fifty-year reunion I threw in May for all of us still around who worked on the Richard Nixon impeachment inquiry—the front drive will be blocked by catering trucks, and the back patio will come alive with chatter, laughter, and the clinking of glasses. But the hummingbird feeders, flower beds, and koi fish—anything that needs regular attention—are no more.
It feels like a lifetime ago that I first fell in love with the place.
In the busy blur that was the end of 2000, Bill was wrapping up his second term as president and preparing to relocate full-time to our new home in Chappaqua, New York, an hour’s drive from his new office in Harlem, where he would plan his presidential library and launch the Clinton Foundation. Me? I had just been elected to the Senate and was hosting my final round of White House holiday festivities, packing up our things in the White House residence, figuring out where I would live while Congress was in session, and already mapping out the work I wanted to do for New York State as its junior senator. House-hunting, which would normally be fun for me, was one more thing on the to-do list. But then my real estate agent brought me to Whitehaven Street. At the far side of a dead-end offshoot of Washington’s Embassy Row, the house was neo-Georgian in style on the outside and, on the inside, very much stuck in 1951, the year it was built. An “Ozzie and Harriet interior” is what my friend Rosemarie Howe, an interior designer, called it. I was skeptical. It would take a lot of work and time I didn’t have to update the 1950s kitchen and bathrooms. But with six bedrooms, we would have plenty of space for Chelsea, my mother, and guests. The quiet street without through traffic was promising for privacy. I climbed two narrow staircases to the third floor, looked down at the gardens in the back yard, then out over the trees to the back of the British embassy. It was like being in old-time London. I was sold. The house was ours by New Year’s Eve, the perfect time to close one chapter and start a new one.
My mother, Dorothy, was eighty-one when, from a seat in the Senate gallery, she watched me get sworn in on January 3, 2001. It was a celebratory day. But for Mom, it was also just a visit. I couldn’t convince her to move to Washington or New York with me. She had been a widow for eight years by then and her life was still in Little Rock, in the small one-bedroom house she and my dad bought back in 1987. That was the year they relocated to Arkansas from my childhood home in Park Ridge, Illinois. Bill was governor at the time, and I was a partner at a law firm. We welcomed my parents’ help raising Chelsea, who was just seven years old and already sweetly bonded to her grandparents, who had regularly visited the governor’s mansion since she was a baby. Chelsea remembers whole days spent with my mom and dad, taking walks on the grounds and watching cartoons (The Jetsons was a favorite) and reading books with them in the attached guesthouse. Every fall, Chelsea would announce her dream Halloween costume—a vacuum cleaner one year, an ice cream cone the next—and my mother would somehow whip it together on her sewing machine. There was a special magic between grandmother and granddaughter that only grew stronger, even after we left Arkansas for the White House and my father died of a stroke less than three months later, on April 7, 1993.
With my father gone, my mother often visited us at the White House, sometimes for weeks at a time. She loved to travel and joined us on a couple of trips overseas. Air Force One was always exciting to her, and she insisted on paying her own costs. (Yes, we were billed for personal guests who flew with us.) But she refused to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Little Rock remained her home. She was healthy and active, with a network of close friends nearby and no one trying to manage her independent and rebellious streaks. She indulged herself with the higher education she had always wanted, auditing college classes in psychology, philosophy, and other interests. A favorite day might be taking a drive, with her friend Patty Criner at the wheel, the soundtrack to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert blasting through the open car windows, and a thrift store or antique shop in their sights.
My mother collected things of beauty: paintings, stained glass, accent tables—anything that suited her taste and sparked joy. These were not extravagances. My father wouldn’t have countenanced fanciful splurges. Instead, her thirst for art and her eye for quality led her to treasures for ten or twenty dollars at Goodwill. I think her collections were, at least in part, a sort of remedy for her miserable childhood. Born to teenagers who weren’t ready to be parents, neglected as a baby, and then abandoned at age eight to live in California with her cruel paternal grandmother, my mother grew up knowing only the beauty that she discovered on her own in nature: the scent of orange blossoms and the sound of birdsong as she walked to and from school or read a book under a tree. When it came to love, she didn’t even know what that looked like until she was a teenager, working as a live-in babysitter for a family that showed each other the kind of warm and nurturing attention she never had. The experience left her determined to create a family of her own to love and to surround us with beauty.
Going straight into secretarial work after high school (she had no money for college), my mother seized her chance at a real home and a family when she married my father. He proved an excellent provider but could be difficult to live with. My father was frugal (to put it mildly) and temperamental. Showing affection was not his thing, but he loved me fiercely and did his best to guide me. He never told me there was any difference between my aspirations and those of my brothers or the boys I played with in school. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do if I studied and worked hard, but I’m sure even Dad would have been surprised that I ran for the Senate and president.
I know that he and my mother had a tense relationship. They were ill-suited for each other, but like so many couples of that era, they made a life for themselves focused on buying a house in a nice neighborhood and sending their kids to good public schools. They socialized with couples like themselves, the men talking about business and politics while the women discussed their families. I learned while writing this book that my mother, in her later years, once confided to a friend that a cold current often ran through her marriage and she thought many times of divorce. “I never knew what love was,” my mother told this friend, “until I held Hillary in my arms as a baby.” She thought about it but never left.
I wasn’t surprised, as heartbreaking as it was to hear, because my parents were so different. I was their firstborn and would spend decades—culminating in a sixteen-day vigil at his bedside as he finally slipped away—struggling to connect with my father on an emotional level. I loved him and I was grateful for all he’d given and taught me. He had beautiful eyes and a sensitive side he kept bottled up. He was very much a man of his time—scraping through the Depression and serving in the Navy during World War II—much like the fathers of all my baby boomer friends. He taught me how to play tennis and baseball. He even threw footballs to me, as well as my brothers. We watched a lot of sports on our clunky black-and-white TV, especially when the Chicago Bears and Cubs were on. I wonder still today how much more my father and I could have had between us before he was gone.
It was different with my mom. My mother was never one of those coddling moms who ladled out “I love you”s or cooed over her children’s hurt feelings. I think it was because she grew up stifling emotion. What was the use of crying if there was no one to comfort you? Instead, she showered my two brothers and me with attention and was devoted to our education. She showed love and found creative ways to nurture an appreciation for beauty in the wider world around us. When we were little, she would lead us through the back yard on the first day of every spring and show us the sprouting crocuses and nesting wild rabbits with their bunnies. And every Christmas Eve, she baked each of us an enormous chocolate chip cookie the size of a dinner plate. Her whole life was a lesson in resilience, how to forgive and how to tend an independent spirit and be devoted to your family at the same time. I connected with that deeply and admired her for it. No matter the pain or disappointment, she steeled herself for another day, a better day. She got up and she kept going. She kept her family whole and never wanted to be seen as a victim.
Last Christmas, someone sent me a tin of cookies made from Mom’s recipe. They were just as good as I remembered them.
My mother was diagnosed with colon cancer at the end of June 2001, just after we celebrated Chelsea’s graduation from Stanford. Without a second thought, Chelsea and Mom’s friend Patty took up residence in my mother’s Washington hospital room while she recovered from surgery. It would be another two years before my mother finally agreed, in 2003, to move to Washington. Still, she wanted her own place. She rented a two-bedroom apartment in a grand old building just a mile or two away from my house and bordering the National Zoo, telling me, somewhat ridiculously, “There’s no room at your house!” I certainly had more room to offer than her apartment, which was now crowded with her dozens of paintings and antique treasures and even her baby grand piano from Little Rock. But I understood where she was coming from. The once-little girl who pined so long for a place to call home wanted now, as ever, to live in a place that felt hers.
I had already been thinking about making the house bigger, so after she had been in Washington for about two years—during which she suffered a minor heart attack but was otherwise healthy—she and I started brainstorming what a renovation could look like. We would extend the back of the house to add a light-filled breakfast room and solarium that opened onto the back yard. While the house was torn up by construction in the fall of 2005, I moved in with my mother at her apartment for six weeks. It was cozy (some might say cramped) and wonderful and a little surreal. After a day at work in the Senate, I would go home to my mother’s apartment, sit with her on her little balcony facing the zoo, and listen for the roar of the lions.
The renovation project brought out the interior designer in my mom. She relished working with Rosemarie to select furnishings, upholstery patterns, and paint colors—a vibrant turquoise in the dining room, a rosy red in the tiled kitchen, and a “Bird of Paradise” pink for the small office off the kitchen that she would soon fancy for writing letters and paying her bills. She designed and oversaw the installation of colorful flower beds in the back garden. Best of all, she agreed, finally, to come live with me.
When the time came to bring her things over from the apartment, we had a deal: Everything could come as long as she found a place for it all. That’s how the ersatz petticoat table with the faux-marble top, a piece she had designed and had made in Arkansas, ended up in our foyer, along with her piano (which she still played) beside our living room window and her paintings in just about every room in the house. For a framed piece of Wedgwood stained glass that used to hang in the family cottage built by my father’s father on Pennsylvania’s Lake Winola, my mother got especially creative. I came home one day to find it nailed—as if it were a skylight—to the center of our powder room ceiling. It made me laugh. It also made me reflect: No matter how dark her childhood was or how disappointing her relationship with my father was, she honored her past, held pieces of it close, and shared its stories without bitterness. She even came to find compassion for the parents who abandoned her. Whenever she talked about her parents, she said they simply were too young, too immature, and that she suspected her father might have secretly been gay. That might explain his family’s cruelty toward her. Despite that, her few memories of her father were happy ones. On the rare occasion he showed up at the home where she lived with his parents in San Gabriel outside Los Angeles, he would come with gifts and take her for ice cream, before disappearing again. She didn’t see her mother at all until she graduated high school and left California to visit her in Chicago with the hope of finding a home. That was a dead end, so my mother was back on her own. I don’t know the truth about my grandfather. He died in 1947, the year I was born. But I’ve always admired how my mother was a woman far ahead of her time in her acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community.
Mom moved into a second-floor bedroom and made the new-and-improved house a real home. She was its heart and its grande dame. Every day, no matter the weather, she walked the back lawn to check the flowering plants, the bird feeders, and the koi pond. She used the pool almost every day from May to October and had visitors all the time. I would come home from the Senate—or, later, the campaign trail or State Department—to find her in her usual seat at the head of the breakfast table, where she could see the TV and also keep an eye on the finches in her garden.
If she wasn’t reading or watching Dancing with the Stars, which was appointment television for her, she was deep in conversation with a visiting friend or her grandson Zach, who would walk a mile and a half to our house a couple afternoons each week after school. And she relished time with my brother Tony and his wife, Megan’s, other little children, Fiona and Simon. Some of Mom’s good friends, like Patty and Carolyn Huber, would come and stay at the house with her for weeks at a time. My mother had a finely tuned radar—and zero tolerance—for ingratiating opportunists. But for the dozens of people who offered genuine friendship, including many of Chelsea’s school friends, some of whom Mom had known as children, she had unlimited time and attention. She collected friends just like she collected art, and her phone rang almost constantly with their calls to chat. She especially loved her frequent long talks with Chelsea—about philosophy, history, and literature—and reveled in being a surrogate grandma to Chelsea’s big circle of friends. At her ninetieth birthday dance party, a group of them kept her swinging and twirling to the big-band music for so long that her friend and physician, Dr. Gigi El-Bayoumi, had to step in and say, gently, “That’s enough now.”
An Egyptian American, fellow midwesterner, and internist, Gigi did so much more than monitor my mother’s health. She fed Mom’s intellectual curiosity about philosophy, culture, medicine, and art. They could spend hours talking about old movies, lamenting that Hollywood stars today don’t have the same elegance and glamour. My mother relished hearing about the (anonymous) cases Gigi was diagnosing and how she would treat them. And she got righteously angry when Gigi would tell her about the inequity she saw in her work in Washington, D.C. How the mostly white people in wealthy Georgetown have a life expectancy of ninety-four years, but the poor people of color in Anacostia can expect to live little better than two-thirds as long, sixty-seven years. And how Gigi could add ten years to the life expectancy of kids in Anacostia, where the high school graduation rate was a dismal 50 percent, if only she could get them to stay in school—because, she explained, education is the biggest social determinant of good health. This resonated deeply with my mother, who knew all too well the opportunity cost of a stunted education.
Those conversations left Gigi convinced that, in another life, one with resources and support, my mother might have been a doctor herself. Gigi was also convinced that my mother never gave up hope for romance. One time, the doctor, who is divorced, vented about dating and how hard it was to meet a man, when my mother replied, tongue-in-cheek, “I know what you mean.” I was always learning new things about my mother through the many and varied people who sat with her in our breakfast nook. But you had to pick my jaw up from the floor when I heard that one.
Mom hated to have me—or anyone else—mothering her, but I did worry about her when I traveled, so it was a great comfort to know that she was never lonely. And here’s proof that no matter how old you get or how far you climb, you never outgrow your mother: She also worried when I was away. She worried about me. Especially during the 2008 campaign, which proved to be a long and grueling fight. I was a sixty-one-year-old adult running for president, and every time I called her from a trip, Mom would sweetly pepper me with the same questions she’d been asking my entire life: Are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating right? On rare nights off, I would get home late and find that Mom had put flowers on my nightstand or left on my bed a book she thought I would enjoy or a news article she wanted me to read, usually one about the importance of sleep. The first time she joined me on the road for a campaign in which I was the candidate, not Bill, was in Iowa in late December 2007. She couldn’t believe the huge, enthusiastic crowds that turned out for her daughter. I later learned that she told Chelsea how proud she was of me but was afraid to say it to me because she didn’t want to add to the pressure I was under. That’s how Mom was. She trusted me to just know how she felt. And I did.
I’ve had a yellow room in every house I’ve lived in. My first bedroom in Park Ridge was painted yellow, and I always associated it with sunshine and light. A yellow room makes me happy. At the little house Bill had bought in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1975 to convince me to marry him, it was my mother and Patty who painted the kitchen yellow as they helped us get the place ready for our wedding on very short notice. As my mother and I chose colors for Whitehaven exactly thirty years later, we picked a lemony yellow for the western-facing living room where the light of a setting sun would dance across her piano as she played.
It was a cloudy and busy Monday for me on October 31, 2011, with back-to-back meetings at the State Department and in the White House Situation Room. By the time I stopped home for a quick dinner with Mom before an evening address to the American-Turkish Council (now the U.S.-Turkey Business Council) and then an overnight flight to London, my mother was in a chipper mood. We ate at the breakfast table, and my brother Tony stopped in to give her photos of his daughter, Fiona, in her “Spider-Girl Vampire” Halloween costume. On his way out, he teasingly swiped Mom’s copy of the latest issue of Time, with me on the cover, knowing it would get her goat. And then he gave the magazine right back to her with a kiss goodbye. She was standing in the foyer when I, soon after, headed out myself. “You look so beautiful tonight,” she said, stopping me in my tracks. Some inkling in that moment made me offer to come back after my speech to see her before going to the plane. But she considered the time and demurred: “I’ll be watching Dancing with the Stars then.”
They were the last words she said to me. That night, as she headed up the stairs to watch her show (she was always too headstrong to use the elevator that came with the house), she fell, hit her head, and never regained consciousness. I got the call on my way to Andrews Air Force Base and immediately diverted to the hospital. She died very early the next morning with Tony, Megan, Bill, Chelsea, and me at her side. She was ninety-two years old.
Like all former U.S. presidents, Bill—and a coterie of government civil servants—worked years ago to put in place plans for his someday funeral. America has long honored its presidents with elaborate state funerals that involve a lot of moving parts. All of that requires detailed planning. My mother had no plans at all for marking the end of her life. She was too busy living it. And so our celebration of her life was just how she lived—at home, without ceremony, protocol, or pretense. Family and friends of all ages from all over the country gathered among the sunflowers in the garden that she loved, telling stories, laughing, remembering, hugging, and indulging in margaritas and Mexican food from her favorite local restaurant, Cactus Cantina.
There was music, too. Of course. That, and the margaritas, my mother would have insisted upon. But in our yellow living room, her piano sat silent. The last song she played, “It Goes Like It Goes,” was still sitting on the music rack. It’s from the soundtrack to Norma Rae, a 1979 film about a factory worker without much formal education fighting to unionize the plant for safer working conditions, better wages, and health care. It wasn’t hard to imagine why my mother was drawn to the movie or the song. “Time it rolls right on,” read the lyrics on my mother’s sheet music, “And maybe what’s good gets a little bit better / And maybe what’s bad gets gone.”
My mother’s journey was done. But her spirit was as unsinkable as ever. In 2013, Gigi established the Rodham Institute at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences to do just what she and my mom had talked about: level the unacceptable health inequities in the nation’s capital through programs to keep disadvantaged students in school and increase the number of under-represented minorities in health care positions in under-served communities. I was touched that Gigi named this passion project of hers after my mother. Relocated to Georgetown University Medical Center in 2023, the institute has made impressive progress, starting with its Health Education Leadership Program (HELP), which, in ten years of serving D.C.-area high school students, has seen 100 percent of its participants graduate high school and 97 percent continue on to college. How my mother would have loved that.
I should sell Whitehaven. I know that. Bill and I got close to putting it on the market in 2019, but then didn’t. Practically, there’s little reason to keep a second house. Chappaqua, so close to Chelsea, Marc, and my grandchildren, is home now. That’s where the sleepover bedtime stories happen and the poolside cannonball splash contests rage.
My mother has been gone almost thirteen years. I still think of her every day. My dad, too. I imagine how much delight my grandchildren would give them both. I wish I could walk my mother through our back yard in Chappaqua, asking for her advice. And I would relish hearing my father’s views, maybe even rantings, about our politics today. When I’m back at Whitehaven, I look around—the sheet music still on the piano, the stained glass on the bathroom ceiling, her book of Mary Oliver poetry on a table beside the ceramic teapot that was a gift from Nelson Mandela—and I think, I cannot sell this house. I just don’t know what I would do with all the things in it that are such important remembrances of her. I like seeing them right where she put them. I like them being here, right where she was.
When I got home from the hospital on that awful November day when I kissed Mom goodbye for the last time, I went up those blasted stairs at Whitehaven to my mother’s room to just sit on her bed for a minute or two, steady myself for the life ahead without her. On her nightstand and another table were the two latest books she’d been reading: The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks and Breakfast with Socrates by Robert Rowland Smith. I chuckled to myself. She had said to me not long before, “You should read these when I’m done.” I didn’t think I had time to read them in addition to my State Department briefings. “No,” I replied. “But Chelsea would love them.”
I am not ready to give up my mother. Or this old house she called home. I don’t think I ever will. And her books? They’re right where she left them.
REMAINING AWAKE THROUGH A COUP
One Sunday night when I was a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, Reverend Don Jones, the youth minister at our Methodist church, took a group of us to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak downtown at Orchestra Hall. His speech that day was titled “Remaining Awake through a Revolution.” It was a theme Dr. King touched on often as he preached across the country. He challenged his audiences—including middle-class white people like me—to fend off apathy and complacency and stay engaged in the great social changes unfolding around us.
