When I think back on the evacuation and resettlement, I’m struck by what a collaborative effort it was among multiple organizations supporting and led by women. The ingenuity of our team to overcome immense obstacles. The bravery of so many Afghan women and their families to leave their homeland and start anew. A mantra emerged every time one plan failed: There’s always another way. Together, we’d always find it.
I deeply regret that American leadership in Afghanistan across four administrations was not more successful in helping the Afghan people achieve the peace and security they deserve. I tried to make sure gender equality and human rights were at the forefront of our policies and not an afterthought of our military operation. And I’m proud that American leaders, starting with Laura Bush, worked to help Afghan women and girls reclaim their rights. As secretary of state, whenever I met with Afghan women I made a promise on behalf of our country: “We will not abandon you. We will stand with you always.” In the end, we couldn’t keep that promise. I lose a lot of sleep over that. That’s why this evacuation was immensely personal to me. It’s why I’m so grateful to Belquis, Horia, and all the others who shared my determination to get as many women and their family members out of Afghanistan as we possibly could.
I take some comfort from knowing that while the Taliban can close the schools, they can’t take away two decades of girls’ education. They can’t erase the memory from millions of women’s minds of what it was like to pursue careers outside the home, vote, and work together to effect change. No matter how brutal they are, they can’t control women’s minds or extinguish their dreams.
Here’s one more story that will always stay with me: In the fall of 2021, after U.S. troops left Afghanistan, we continued to quietly evacuate women on our list from an airport in Mazar-i-Sharif, a city about 250 miles north of Kabul. One day we secured a flight but couldn’t find safe shelter near the airport for the women to wait at until it was time to go. The hotels and safe houses weren’t an option. Some were full, and some had been raided by the Taliban. We weren’t sure what to do. Belquis said she knew of a wedding venue close to the Mazar airport. It was large enough to accommodate the women and families on our flight and was unlikely to raise suspicion. Belquis and Horia rented it out, paid for a catered meal, and hoped the Taliban would think a wedding was taking place. It worked. Women always find another way.
THIS REMARKABLE SISTERHOOD
I never cared much for the question that so many reporters like to ask: Do you have any regrets? Maybe because it often feels like a can’t-win trap, a gotcha question whose answer, whatever that answer might be, will be breathlessly framed as an admission of weakness, wrongness, or guilt. But mostly, I am not someone who spends a lot of time looking back with second thoughts—unless a publisher commands it (see: Living History, Hard Choices, and What Happened). I am more naturally present-day oriented, not inclined to dredge my memory for certain snapshots in time or ruminate on shoulda-coulda-woulda scenarios.
But when the news of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s death broke on November 19, 2023, one memory from three decades earlier came back to me clearly. It involves a regret I feel to this day. It was the summer of 1993, and I had been First Lady for five months. One morning late that June, I read in the daily White House newspaper clippings that Pat Nixon had been laid to rest on the grounds of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in California. This was in the pre-digital age before twenty-four-hour news, the internet, and social media would be bombarding us from all sides with this kind of news as it was happening. I saw from news photos that the funeral ceremony had been attended by two couples who had succeeded the Nixons in the White House: Betty and Gerald Ford and Nancy and Ronald Reagan. Seated in the first row, across the aisle from Richard Nixon and his children and grandchildren, the Fords and Reagans literally were at their fellow former president’s side as he wept over the woman who was his wife of fifty-three years. It was a quietly powerful portrait of a man who had held his emotions in check when he resigned the presidency while Pat Nixon stood beside him holding back tears.
I don’t remember what Bill and I were busy with that weekend. I have no idea whether the funeral was ever on my scheduler’s radar or brought up to me by my staff or Bill’s. All I knew was that I should have been there, showing respect for a woman who had once been our nation’s First Lady during a tumultuous time. Especially because I believed in showing up for funerals, calling hours, and memorial services for people I knew and cared about long before Deirdre Sullivan’s 2005 essay for National Public Radio, titled “Always Go to the Funeral,” went viral. I try to never miss one of those opportunities to be present for family, friends, and neighbors. But I had never met Pat Nixon. And I didn’t know Richard Nixon but for a brief handshake in March 1993, when Chelsea and I waited at the elevator in the White House residence to greet the former president upon his arrival for a visit with Bill. Nixon had done his homework. As he said hello to Chelsea, he added with a note of nostalgia that she was attending the same school in Washington that his daughters had. He didn’t have much to say to me, knowing I had served on the impeachment inquiry staff that had investigated him in 1974 and recommended that he be impeached. The Judiciary Committee voted on a bipartisan basis to do so, which led to his resignation.
I didn’t know Pat Nixon. I had no relationship at all with her. And yet I did. I just hadn’t really understood that at the time.
Now I do. And I haven’t missed the funeral of a former First Lady since.
November 28, 2023. The flight aboard Air Force One to Atlanta for Mrs. Carter’s memorial service was a mini-reunion, as the ceremonies attending death are for so many families. President Biden had invited Michelle Obama, Bill and me, and former senator Chuck Robb and Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, President Lyndon Johnson’s daughter, to catch a ride with him and Jill. In the president’s conference room, Jill used the flight to catch Michelle up on what was new at the White House, while the president, the Robbs, Bill, and I talked about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Despite the fraught topic, it was a comfortable chat. Familiar. Bill and I knew intuitively the sky-high stakes Joe was managing. Only eleven people alive that day could truly know, having lived it from inside the White House, exactly what that high-wire act really is, bearing on your shoulders the weight of war, markets, natural disasters, and whatever else the day could bring, all while dodging fire from critics, adversaries, and even friends. There on Air Force One were five of those eleven people, heading south to honor she who had, until days earlier, made us an even dozen.
Rosalynn’s grandson Jason said it had been her wish that all the First Ladies would come together for her memorial in a show of unity in these divisive times. “My grandmother campaigned against and voted against some of their husbands,” he said. “But she believed that there are some things that are more important than politics.” So, when all of us flying together from Washington finally arrived at Atlanta’s Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church and were shown to a large holding room in the basement, we expected to see Laura Bush. She had flown in from Texas and was, as always, a picture of polish and warmth. She said hello, leaning in to touch her cheek to mine.
That Melania Trump was also in the room seemed a huge surprise to everyone. If anybody at the White House or on Bill’s or my Secret Service detail had been briefed on Mrs. Trump’s plan to attend, they didn’t tell me. I had not spoken to her since our briefest of hellos on the dais at the 2016 Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City less than three weeks before that fateful Election Day. I never quite knew what to make of the third Mrs. Trump. Back in 2005, when I was Donald’s senator, I accepted his invitation to their wedding at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. I went out of curiosity. I was going to be in Florida anyway and thought it would be entertaining to see what a Donald Trump wedding was like. It was the first time I met Melania, and I just remember that she was young, very beautiful, and very tall. And that she didn’t talk much, at least to me.
Now, here she was, standing alone as Laura, who’d looked to be chatting with Melania when the rest of us walked in, stepped away to say her hellos. Melania had a look on her face—very smiley but uncertain—that reminded me of the little kid at the birthday party who doesn’t know anyone and is waiting at the edge of the circle, hoping people are going to be nice. We were. We all went up to her. President Biden walked over to greet her. Jill air-kissed her cheek, and Michelle Obama gave her one of her signature big hugs. As at her wedding, Melania didn’t engage much. Bill tried to make conversation, asking her how she was, but he was met with a smile and few words. I reached out, shook her hand, and said, “Hello, Melania, it’s nice to see you.”
In the sanctuary, Melania, Michelle, Laura, Jill, and I sat in the front row as the Carter children and grandchildren took turns reading Scripture and sharing heartfelt reflections of Rosalynn. Amy Carter read a beautiful seven-sentence love letter that her father had sent home to her mother seventy-five years before from his deployment with the Navy. Amy is now a fifty-six-year-old mother of two, but with her familiar blond bangs and glasses, she reminded me of the young girl who moved into the White House in 1977. I had often wished from afar to give her a hug then. By 1979, I was the First Lady of Arkansas and expecting my own baby girl, Chelsea. I would see intrusive news photos and footage of Amy and worry over her privacy and innocence in the Washington, D.C., spotlight. Cameramen boorishly stalked her at school. Comics cruelly mocked her for having her nose in a book during a state dinner. What Amy endured warned me to fiercely protect Chelsea when she moved into the White House. Now, as the former First Daughter stepped off the altar shaking with grief over losing her mother, I felt again the urge to give her a hug.
Then Jason Carter stepped to the lectern and opened his eulogy this way:
“Secretary Clinton, Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Obama, Mrs. Trump, and Dr. Biden, thank you all for coming and acknowledging this remarkable sisterhood that you share with my grandmother. And thank you all for your leadership that you provided for our country and the world.
“Secretary Clinton and Dr. Biden, we also welcome your lovely husbands.”
That last line got a good laugh from an audience well acquainted with how often First Ladies—or, really, any wives at events where they are plus-ones to the men who are the real stars of whatever show we’re sitting through—are reduced to “your lovely wife” in an emcee’s opening remarks. I have come to appreciate over the years how I present an even more nettlesome conundrum in these kinds of circumstances. In my husband’s White House, I was Mrs. Clinton. (Mrs. Rodham Clinton was a bridge too far in 1993.) Then, for eight years, I was Senator Clinton. In Barack Obama’s White House, I was Madam Secretary. Had 2016 turned out differently, I wonder now if I could have gotten away with President Rodham Clinton; I would have liked that as an enduring tribute to my parents. I hope the women presidents in our nation’s future get to choose how they will be addressed, no matter how much of a mouthful it is. I’ve loved every chapter of my story and the titles that attended them. I know that, for all the paths I’ve walked since being First Lady, there will still be spaces where I am Mrs. Bill Clinton. That’s okay. (If you ask Bill, he’ll tell you there are times when he feels like Mr. Hillary Clinton.)
You can also just call me Hillary.
So while we all enjoyed Jason’s knowing nod to “your lovely husbands,” what made an even deeper impression on this former First Lady were three other words: “this remarkable sisterhood.”
I never had a sister. Never really thought about what it would be like to have one. Two younger brothers were enough for me when it came to siblings. And I can’t say that I ever thought of the women who have borne the title First Lady as sisters. We didn’t sign up for a sorority, and the title is no personal achievement, excepting the work we did to help get our husbands elected. The title itself was never conceived by our founders; it unsteadily evolved from alternatives tried in the 1800s, like “Lady Presidentress” and “Mrs. President.” I can’t help but think how the Right would have delighted in using both as slurs when they burned me in effigy for trying to improve Americans’ health care when I was First Lady. For all the heartburn that came with the failure of “Hillary Care” (the Right’s actual slur, but one I’m proud to own simply for trying), Whitewater, and the rest, I loved my years as First Lady. The state dinners, international travel, grand Christmas decorations—I was proud to be the nation’s hostess, and, let’s face it, those things were a lot of fun.
But even more important to me was the opportunity to work, with real influence, on the things I had always cared about, like women’s rights and early childhood development. Still today, I’ll meet mothers, some of them now grandmothers, who say they learned from me the developmental value of reading, talking, and singing to their newborns. Credit really goes to then new brain research we highlighted at the 1997 White House Conference on Early Childhood Development, but I prize the compliment as proof that I accomplished some lasting good as First Lady. The fact remains that the job of First Lady is not a real job. There is no job description, no salary, only a generally agreed-upon unfunded mandate: helpmate to the president, hostess to the nation, and avatar for ideal womanhood, whatever that happens to be when history finds us in the White House.
As for the club of former First Ladies, if anything, we are like the neighborhood book club of moms that never got off the ground because it was impossible to find a night that worked for everyone, let alone agree on a book and then make the time to read it. Before the service for Rosalynn, five whole years had passed since the last time the small group of us got together—at the 2018 funerals of first Barbara Bush and then her husband, former president George H. W. Bush. Funerals, presidential library dedications, and a gala for the U.S. Botanic Garden. Those are the few occasions that lured us away from our separate lives, busy with family, advocacy, and our personal commitments. I felt a much more genuine sorority with my fellow gubernatorial wives in the 1980s and then with the women with whom I served during my eight years in the U.S. Senate. The group of us women senators worked really, really hard at getting along as people and working together as lawmakers. We regularly got together for dinner as a group, and when Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine got engaged just before Valentine’s Day in 2012, I threw her a girls’ night dinner party at my house. Before the tribalism of today took over political life, I found the company of the women senators—and, before them, the state First Ladies—to be a supportive safe space, where we could ask questions and talk through concerns as women, not as political rivals. When the governors’ wives got together, which was at least twice a year around the governors conferences, we could talk through serious policy challenges back home, like improving schools, or more mundane ones. I remember my friend Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, then the First Lady of Virginia, saying in one especially freewheeling discussion group, “What can you ask these First Ladies that none of your other friends could ever answer? It’s ‘What do you do with all your plaques?’ Everywhere I go, I’m given a plaque.”
When it came to us few presidential wives, “sisterhood” was a bit of a stretch. We were certainly connected, as Jason recognized, but I wasn’t sure it was a fair description.
I thought about sisterhood some more when I was asked weeks later what it was like seeing Mrs. Trump in Atlanta. Social media had been abuzz with catty (read: sexist) takes on Melania’s gray tweed coat and the body language among us “sisters.” The Washington Post reported that we “barely looked at each other or smiled, and appeared to take pains to stare straight ahead after entering the church.” The Post also observed that Michelle, in the seat beside Melania, appeared at times to be “leaning away” from her. Typical. Also, ridiculous. Of course, reporters couldn’t see into the First Families’ holding room before the service to know that Michelle hugged Melania. So they saw what they wanted to see in the sanctuary (female rivalry at any level, real or imagined, makes good copy), never stopping to consider that perhaps the five of us First Ladies didn’t enter the sanctuary all smiley and sociable, like we were walking into a chick-flick matinee, because, you know, we were at a funeral.
As for what we wore that day, the New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman noted that four of us were “united” in black, while Melania’s choice of gray made her stand out, not a team player—as if the rest of us had a group chat and worked out beforehand what we would all wear—calling it “a sign, perhaps, of Mrs. Trump’s historic ambivalence toward the role of first lady and her reluctance to play to the expectations that surround it.” On the social media site X, commentary was not so delicate, with one user writing that Melania’s decision to eschew black was “distasteful and gross.”
Let’s get real. The Victorian-era tradition of donning black for funerals has gone the way of the edict against wearing white after Labor Day. Jason Carter wore a gray suit to deliver a tribute to his “cool grandma.” President Biden was in blue. As far as I can tell, neither of them got any flak for it. Was I really feeling some sympathy for Melania Trump after all the ugliness and turmoil the Trump family had heaped on the nation, the world, and my own family the past several years? I won’t go that far. But in my view, what Melania wore to pay tribute to Rosalynn (who herself was pointedly critical right back at the Trumps) was perfectly appropriate, and I was sorry that Melania got slammed for something so petty. She came. That’s what mattered. After the shattering of so many norms by the Trump White House, the former First Lady came to Atlanta to embrace one still-sacred American tradition: unity in mourning. I give her points for that. I can appreciate how awkward it must have been, not knowing what kind of reception she would get after all her husband’s insults directed at us Bushes, Bidens, Obamas, and Clintons alike. When I thought of Melania at all, I found myself conflicted. On a gut level, I have never believed that a wife bears responsibility for the actions of her husband. But did she aid and abet her husband’s worst instincts? Was she quietly complicit in his bigotry and hate-mongering? I can only think of what she wore to a Texas shelter for migrant children separated from their parents: an army-green jacket with I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO YOU? boldly scrawled on its back. It sure seemed on brand for Donald Trump. As for Melania Trump, I’ll stick to my own edict of not passing judgment on another woman’s appearance. We get too much of that already.
January 20, 1993. I thought we were supposed to wear hats.
Leaning into the “lady” of First Lady and Second Lady, Tipper Gore and I both showed up to the White House in hats—hers purple, mine a royal blue—on the sunny winter morning our husbands were being sworn in as vice president and president. Before the ceremony and celebration began the long day ahead, it was tradition to meet up at the White House for tea (coffee, in our case) with the outgoing president and First Lady (in our case, George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush). It was all part of the peaceful, civilized transfer of power.
It had been a bruising election, turning the Bushes out after a single term. But Barbara met the day with an élan that I admired. In her diary-style memoir the following year, she would remember this: “The ladies looked great and both wore hats. It reminded me of how critical everyone had been about Marilyn Quayle’s hat four years before, and I wondered if Hillary and Tipper would get away with theirs.” These are the things you think about after being put on a pedestal under a spotlight and picked apart—how you look, the way you sound, and what you care about—for four or eight years.
This wasn’t my first time as Barbara’s guest in the executive mansion that would next be mine to make into a home. In mid-November, after the election, she had given me a tour of the White House family quarters. She greeted me on the south driveway with a hug and held my hand as she led me inside. It was crystal clear that she was still smarting, badly, from her husband’s defeat. As she showed me the rooms where her grandchildren had sleepovers and filled me in on things like how we would get our mail, she also vented about the election and how James Baker should have left the State Department sooner to help George’s campaign. At one point, she asked me, “Do you think Ross Perot knew his third-party candidacy would help you?” It was a little uncomfortable at the time. Today, I remember it as vintage Barbara.
Eight years later, I held Laura Bush’s hand in the same spot on the driveway where Barbara and I had stood. Laura had visited the White House numerous times when her in-laws lived there; surely she didn’t need a tour from me. But she came anyway, because before she could put her own stamp on the house and our history (most notably as a champion for education, literacy, and the Taliban-oppressed women of Afghanistan), she had a role to play in this other decades-long tradition of the peaceful transfer of power, unbroken until 2020, when Mrs. Trump neglected to extend an invitation to Jill Biden after Joe Biden’s election. Years later, when Laura’s memoir, Spoken from the Heart, came out, I was charmed to read what she wrote about our visit. How she and George ended up growing tomatoes in pots right where Chelsea had told her our tomato plants had thrived. And the “kinship” she felt in the easy warmth of our time together, just as she’d felt with other wives of political leaders. As Laura described it, “There was a similarity and at times a strangeness to our shared circumstances that created an instant bond.”
Also instant was Laura’s baptism in the gratuitous and cruel snark aimed at women who step onto the public stage. Coverage of her White House visit panned the outfit she wore, an immaculately tailored skirt suit. A “purple plaid upholstery suit,” jeered a fashion critic in the Washington Post. Laura’s home-state Texas Monthly was no more charitable, regurgitating a review that said her “terrible purple plaid number” made our incoming First Lady look “like nothing so much as a country mouse.” It was unfair to her, and I felt awful.
From far outside the gates surrounding 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a walk-through of a handful of rooms might seem incidental. But it was a gesture of continuity so historically powerful and personally meaningful—woman to woman, as one is moving out and another is moving in—that Jacqueline Kennedy, busy with trauma, grief, and two young children, made time to host Lady Bird Johnson for tea and a tour just one day after President Kennedy’s burial. In her memoir, A White House Diary, Lady Bird recalled walking with Jackie through the Yellow Oval Room, the same sunny refuge where Chelsea, Bill, and I would put up our personal Christmas tree and spend time outside on the Truman Balcony. “There on the table,” Lady Bird wrote, “were the black boots—the boots that were on the riderless horse in [President Kennedy’s] funeral procession. There was also a folded flag.”
Life happened in those grand spaces that were handed down family to family along with the furniture, the artwork, and the household staff who kept the place running. On our first morning in the White House, Bill and I learned pretty abruptly just how much we had inherited from our new home’s previous occupants. After the long day and late night of inauguration festivities, we had been asleep just a few hours—in the bedroom vacated by the Bushes only twenty-four hours earlier—when we were awakened at 5:30 a.m. by a tuxedoed butler carrying coffee on a silver breakfast tray, just as George and Barbara had liked it.
In 1976, about six months after Bill and I got married and before I joined the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, I worked as the Indiana field coordinator for the Carter presidential campaign. Carter didn’t carry Indiana (to be fair, it was always a long shot), but I came away deeply admiring our new president-elect and incoming First Lady. They were an unusual couple, for sure. They could drive you crazy with how single-minded they could seem, so possessed of their own righteousness and urgency to act. Jimmy was governor of Georgia when I first met him in early 1975. He stuck his hand out to shake mine, saying, “I’m Jimmy Carter. I’m going to be your next president.” He hadn’t even announced his campaign yet, but that’s who he was. He had a sense of destiny about him.
Rosalynn was the same way. She was a hard worker and a serious, somewhat reserved person who really wanted to get things done. When you saw her, there were few pleasantries. She would dive right into whatever passion project she was working on at the time, whether it was mental health, childhood immunization, or the Equal Rights Amendment. She had a deep confidence in the contributions she could make, and she was unabashed about being Jimmy’s full partner—in everything. She went to cabinet meetings and attended whatever interested her on her husband’s Oval Office schedule. Feminist chutzpah to some, maybe. But I saw it as reflective of her relationship with Jimmy and the religious faith they shared. They had this clear sense that they were meant to do great things, and they were going to take up every minute that they could trying to get those good things done. Their approach spoke straight to the heart of this Methodist girl who, well before I was confirmed in the sixth grade, could recite church founder John Wesley’s golden rule: “Do all the good you can.” It was with Rosalynn that I first felt that kinship Laura Bush would later enunciate. I had been First Lady of Arkansas for just a little over six months when Rosalynn came to Little Rock in July 1979 for a childhood immunization event on the back lawn of the governor’s mansion. It was a big deal for the nation’s First Lady to come to Arkansas. It was a big deal to me. And it was a big deal to celebrate vaccinating children against dangerous childhood illnesses.
In the years ahead, it was probably Rosalynn’s pragmatic, activist example—she with her notebook at cabinet and Oval Office meetings—that made me think it would be no problem to take a West Wing office after Bill asked me to lead his health care reform initiative. And, even later, it was partly Rosalynn’s indefatigable good works in her First Lady afterlife that emboldened me in my own political afterlife, even though some loudmouths on the Right wanted this “former” (former First Lady, former senator, former secretary of state, former presidential nominee) to go home, stay home, and keep quiet.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting we were a cozy, “Kumbaya”-singing foursome of like-minded Democrats. Google “Bill Clinton Jimmy Carter North Korea” and you’ll get just a taste of how complicated the relationship was between the Carters and us Clintons. For more, try “Did Jimmy Carter vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016” and you’ll see what I mean. (He apparently didn’t in the primary and then did against Trump. Carter also famously said that, in his opinion, Trump “didn’t actually win the election in 2016” but was “put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”) But the important thing is that, throughout, we respected that each of us was trying to do what we individually believed was best for the American people. As “formers,” I think we all came to see that perhaps our most critical role was in preserving the norms of the presidency, as is enshrined in the peaceful transfer of power, and protecting democracy.
