Read HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton for Free Online

mutually exclusive; they were bound together. Voters, particularly women, identified with her precisely because she was a woman with an iron spine. Over that summer, from her dining room table in June to the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August, she started to develop a new narrative in which she embraced being a trailblazing political force in her own right.
    Though the point in her speech was resolved, Hillary’s night was far from over. There was a lot riding on this address, and she needed to strike the perfect chord with the endorsement. She couldn’t afford to alienate her remaining loyalists. Her advisers even feared that supporters might walk out if she was too strong in her endorsement. She knew that 10 percent of them would never go over to Obama, but she had to make sure she could move the other 90 percent. Yet neither could she come up short in praising Obama. It wasn’t really an either-or proposition. If she failed to give a hearty enough endorsement, she might severely and permanently damage her own standing in the Democratic Party. No one wanted to relive the awful moment when Ted Kennedy refused to join hands with Jimmy Carter after their 1980 primary fight.
    Hillary stayed up with the speech past four a.m., and then it was circulated to top advisers. Garin, the chief strategist, was dumbstruck at the final version, which he thought had too much about Hillary and not enough about Obama. He e-mailed an F-word-punctuated missive that the revisions had to go.
    To this day, there are still disagreements among Hillary’s advisers about the degree to which edits were made that morning. “There was no resistance or reluctance to change it back,” said one source who sided with Garin’s view. “It’s not like there was a real fight over this.”
    But a friend who favored Hillary’s version disputed that conclusion. “There were a lot of attempts by some people in that othercamp to [put in] more refrains about Obama,” the friend said. “She kind of ended up where she was overnight.”
    The morning of Hillary’s concession speech played out in inadvertently comic fashion—half royal wedding and half afternoon car chase. The news media staked out the Whitehaven house, so viewers knew the minute her motorcade left for the National Building Museum. The museum, defined by the seventy-five-foot-high Corinthian columns in its Great Hall, is a nineteenth-century Bureau of Pensions building that Congress converted into amemorial to “the built environment.” Its Roman-themed interior was meant to house both the federal pension service and Washington’s great social galas. That Great Hall, and the thousands of Clintonites who filtered into it, had to wait for Hillary, who was running late. Even the delay was turned into the kind of minidrama of speculation that the cable networks live for.
    The final tweaks to the speech were made at the last minute. Hillary arrivednearly an hour late, well past even Clinton Standard Time, the term Washingtonians have long used to describe Bill’s indifference to other people’s schedules.
    She had to bury her own campaign before she could praise Obama, and she delivered a long eulogy. It took more than six minutes, and almost seven hundred words, for Hillary to get to the two that mattered most: “The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand is to take our energy, our passion, our strength, and do all we can to help elect
Barack Obama
, the next president of the United States,” she said.
    In its final iteration, Hillary’s Building Museum speech wove together the threads of her base, Obama’s base, and the common Democratic values they shared. As is often the case with politicians and their concessions, it rated as the best speech of her campaign. But it will be most remembered for the stanzas that had made Hillary uncertain the night before.
    “Now, on a personal note, when I was asked what it means to be a woman running