[applause] figures, thank you very much. Good evening, im bradley graham, coowner of politics and prose. Along with my wife lately some muscatine and on behalf of the entire staff,welcome , thank you for coming. What a marvelous proud. And what a great space for a bookevent. Thanks for the warriors peter for making this spacious place in available. As much as we at pnb you enjoy hosting our authors at our store on connecticut avenue northwest, the we had a feeling, we had a feeling that a somewhat larger venue would be needed for this one. In fact, in fact, this is the largest author talk that he and he has ever sponsored. [applause] familiar with her long and storied career. A lawyer and advocate for children to first lady of arkansas, first lady of the united states, u. S. Senator from new york, your secretary of state and the democratic parties president ial candidate. [cheers and applause] she is the daughter of hugh and dorothy, wife of bill, mother of the kelsey and grandmother of charlotte and aidan. Along the way hillary also is managed to write books. In fact, this is her sixth, and reviewers of it so far seem to agree on at least one thing. In these pages she is less guarded than ever before, more revealing, blood and authentic. She says she didnt intend the book to be a comprehensive recap of the campaign and it isnt. But it does convey with the raw emotion, humor and insight outlet felt to run for president as the first woman nominated i major american political party. [cheers and applause] and how it is felt to do with the aftermath of a shocking defeat. And one other thing comes through loud and clear in what happened. Hillary intends to remain active and to speak out. [cheers and applause] hillary will be in conversation up there with my wife lissa. The two then go back a a long. At various times over the past two and half decades, lissa has worked with hillary as chief speechwriter, communications director, book collaborator, and campaign advisor, including several stints helping in the 2016 campaign. Currently lissa is writing her own book about her experiences as part of hillary land, a small group of staffers, mostly women, who started with hillary 25 25 years ago in the white house and have remained in her orbit sense. I would also like to take a moment to recognize that in the audience this evening are a number of members of hillarys 2000 campaign staff. They are out there somewhere. [applause] they toiled mightily for months to help their the candidate ead nearly 3 million more votes than the republican nominee. [cheers and applause] and now, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the woman who won more than 65 million 800,000 votes in the last election, Hillary Rodham clinton. [cheers and applause] [applause] [applause] thank you all so much for coming. You sound like 65 the. 8 Million People. [applause] this is great. And its such a great crowd. Thank you all for being here, and thank you for being here. I feel like we just did this, but that was three years ago. We did for your last book our choices. We are back for what happened. Its what happened. Its not what happened question mark. Its not what happened what happened exclamation point. Its just what happened. Congratulations, book number six pick by the way, produced in record time i might add. Its a very personal book which im sure those of you have read it already know and if you want to interviews and you heard about it you know i just wanted one thing before we get started. Of course its about the 2016 election and because Hillary Clinton is Hillary Clinton, if course delves deeply into a very broad range of very, very important issues from the erosion of our Democratic Institutions, the growing signs of totalitarianism creeping into two human aspects of our lives, the rolling back of voting rights, health care, environment the protections, economic and social justice, and, of course, ongoing seemingly daily if not hourly and more overt examples of sexism and racism across our country. What i want to say as we get started is that if you dont have it yet, you picture book up on the way out, in washington theres that thing where you look in the index and you kind of pick and choose what youre going to read. Start at the beginning, read all 469 pages. Because [applause] she has a lot to say and just like to say about really, really, really important challenges facing this country. And if you actually read from start to finish you will learn a lot, and its just fascinating and really important stuff in the book. So thank you for that. But tonight were going to try to keep it a bit more personal. If thats okay. At the want to start really without this book even give about, and im going to remind you, you may not remember this but you and i had a conversation way back in the winter, early winter, you mentioned you were thinking of writing a book about the election and then we had several more conversations about this over the next weeks and months. And each time i said to her emphatically, you are nuts. That is a crazy idea. Why would you do that . Its way too soon. Youre still processing everything. Were all still processing everything. I dont know about the rest of you and i dont know about you, but everybody i know was experiencing weird things like insomnia and anxiety, gastrointestinal disorders. [laughing] in fact, a friend of mine whos a doctor washington said its an election related syndrome known as pierre, south dakota i can say could possible such a short space of time it so soon after this election process all of it for yourself. Of course you with the central actor in it so i advised you consistently not to write it and, of course, thankfully she didnt listen to me. So that was very wise on your part and now here we are with this wonderful book. I just am wondering though how did you process it so quickly . Apparently this is not involve any therapy along the way. [laughing] thats a sign of something. [laughing] actually it was my therapy to be really clear. Lissa has been a friend of mine and a colleague of mine for a long time now, and is a terrific writer, was a great reporter when she worked for the post and other publications. So i take what she says very seriously when it comes to writing, and she did come to see me, like a number of my friends who rallied around, came to support me, just listen to me vent, share their concerns and worries. I had, after the election as you can read in the book, pretty much nothing i wanted to say to anybody. I was so devastated, and it was incredibly painful, and it took weeks of just getting up every day cleaning closets, going fr walks in the woods, all the things that i did, to begin to clear my head. But, of course, other people were commenting and writing about the election, and i just didnt think there was a broad enough view, really, and comp understanding, of what it looked like to meet in real time. And what i believed happened. But i wasnt sure at a new it would take a lot of analysis and evidence gathering and, you know, i do kind of belief in fax and [applause] so i just began to talk and listen to people, other information, and i think that it hit me really around the inauguration, people had have d to me about what are you going to do and, you know, when you buy Something Else . I was still just trying to muddle through. It really hit me that there were these very important issues that needed to be discussed, debated even, that our democracy and country relied upon that kind of selfexamination, and i thought, well, i need to know what happened and they need to be as honest, candid, open as i possibly can in order to figure it out for myself, and may be doing it in a book would provide the discipline, the deadline to try to think it through. And so really starting in february i dove in, and i just decided i was going to write it, and it was painful. I say in the book that i write about something and i would have to go lie down, because it was just so hard to think about the mistakes i made, you know, the missed opportunities. But then it also to come to grs with these other big forces at work that i think had a determined to impact on the outcome. So it ended up being really from what people are telling me as i have begun to start to do booksignings and talking about the book, i think it does provide some catharsis and some opportunity a reflection of a lot of other people, too. Im very happy about that because there are some really important issues we have to come to grips with, and i wrote it not just to see what happened but what we need to do to make sure what happened doesnt happen again. And thats what im going to spend a lot of time on. [applause] amen. Just to followup for a second second on this, how hard it is. As if that you are the central actor, you writing about yourself and it was obviously a mindboggling experience. You and i share a favorite author in cheryl straight. I do know how many of you have read wild or seen the movie, and you have a quote from her in the book actually and i think i made mentioned to you she once said to me, i asked her how to write about these things that is a deeply personal . She said i write to get to a deeper truth. If im not going to be honest with myself, why do i bother to write . But getting to that deeper truth as you have experienced is hurtful, overwhelming, painful, could be said and she had to do with things that are intensely private. Im just wondering do you censor yourself at all . With are times when words or thoughts, it was just too much and you couldnt go there . Or what did you do to try to get to that next level . I ended up not censoring my thoughts, not censoring what i put into the book. I will admit i censored some of the original language i used. [laughing] shocks. You shouldve left that in. Yes, some of those early venting sessions. I had a great team of people who vented with me, and did research for me and helped me better explain what i was venting about, but i didnt hold back at all on what i saw as my own shortcomings and my deepest disappointments. Not just for me obviously but for the country. So it was not censored. It was really candid, and it was something that did help me get to some deeper and bigger truths about me, about our country, about some of the really difficult forces that we have to face, the concerns i have about im sure well get into this, everything from sexism and misogyny and race and the russians, you know, just vote suppression. Theres a lot there that i was learning as i was writing. Because when youre in the middle of a campaign, and i know there are people here who have been involved in campaigns, and for that i thank you, when youre in the middle of it you are so focused on the immediate tasks. You know what the overall goal is, obviously to win, and you got your strategies and tactics lined up, but boy, every day is 18 hours of just the hardest concentration and work trying to move it forward. Its hard to lift your head up. Sometimes its hard to really understand everything thats happening at the same time. Being able to step back a a little, go through it, take it apart, look at it, analyze it and then write about it helped me a lot. Did you learn anything about yourself that you didnt know . You know, i really believe that, i think in retrospect it was a misconception or it was certainly out of sync with the time of which we are living and the candidate i ended up running against. Because i did have this idea based on my prior experiences in president ial campaigns really going way back into the late 60s and 70s that it mattered greatly if you could make clear what you wanted to achieve. Didnt have to have all the details, but that it was important to tell people what you wanted to do because then when you were in office they could judge you on whether or not you were fulfilling that commitment you made. So we spent a lot of time making sure that everything i said about policy and how we pay for things and all of that was just bulletproof, because i kept thinking at some point its really going to matter. And for all sorts of reasons it didnt, and so i think i stayed way too focused on a path that was not the direction that the campaign was having because of the pressures from outside forces, because of the reality tv candidate i was running against. I think i was not as adept or as quick to try to figure out, okay, what is a better way for me to try to communicate this . These are things that you do the best you can, and you think you are running one kind of campaign and you realize the press is not covering the policy you are putting out every day. They are covering an empty podium. I kept thinking we are still going to break through because people really do care what kind of jobs and infrastructure and healthcare and other things you want to do for them and their families and their incomes, but there was a disconnect. So i learned that i just wasnt, i wasnt as, i think, quick to try to make some adjustments along those lines. You also say in the book you developed a new appreciation for big, simple ideas. I think thats part of what youre getting at, isnt it . Theres a difference. The big simple ideas, i still believed that a big simple idea like were going to raise taxes on the wealthy, thats a big simple idea. I did have that idea, very much centered in my campaign, but theres also i think an important debate about, in Politics Today when we have a really intense, Quick Movement of news and its very short Attention Span and social media plays a bigger and bigger part, you know, trying to develop a relationship with the voters or to engender confidence in voters that you know what youre talking about and youre going to deliver because you do understand the complexities may not be as significant as just repeating those big ideas over and over again, and leaving the details for later. Who knows though, by 2020 maybe people will want to know details again and policy again, so you never know. [applause] to be clear shes at saint big, simple ideas without details, just outlining every single detail ahead of time necessarily, which i thought that was a pretty interesting observation. Just one of the quick thing about what it feels like because you are so revealing in the book about what it feels like to be a president ial candidate. Of course youve got constant incoming good, bad, youre trying to assess all sorts of information for all sorts of people all the time. It was interesting to me in the book that you say in a number of places that were times when you wish you had struck back, when youre been criticized or challenged by bernie on wall street and other things, by matt lauer in that really awful interview, by jim comey and then of course with the jaws imitation by trump on the debate stage, you know. In each of those it sounds like, i i just want site also by the way even though you didnt say it, do you know how much it warmed the hearts of tens of native americans to know that you thought about saying back up, you create . [cheers and applause] but in the situations it was really also it was such a relief to do you think about it. And in the situations are able to do that and you tell yourself constraint or is a collector ia straitjacket at times. What is it that makes it so hard to be able to do that in the situations . Im sure it has something to do with being a woman but ill let you enter that. I think it does have a lot to do with being a woman, because its very hard to be perceived as strong as opposed to aggressive or any of the word you can think of. Part of the challenge is how you modulate, how you present yourself in a mature, appropriate way as a woman seeking a job no other woman has ever had. And i write a whole chapter on being a woman in politics, but much of what i say goes for being a woman in business, being a woman any profession. Its not just politics, and i think as i try to describe my thought process up on that stage in the second debate, it was hard. We had practiced what i would do if he invaded myspace, because we kind of assumed he would because he had his own issues that he was trying to push through at that time. So we knew it, but once you are there and it is actually happening to you in real time in front of, i dont know, 50 Million People or something, you are discomforted. You are annoyed. You are a little frustrated that he is stalking you and staring at you. And so i was going back and forth, but i had believed that its better not to show that kind of reaction in the middle of a president ial debate. And as you might think back, funny gestures, facial expressions, heavy sighs, things really do affect viewers. And i just ended up deleting that in addition to the gender linked aspect of this, there was a history of people in president ial debates who had deviated in a way to show frustration, anger, dismissiveness, whatever their feelings were, and paid a heavy price for it. And i thought, whatever price they paid, i would pay double or triple. And so i just thought, okay, im going, you know, i sort of thought at the end of the day people would say, yeah, we really do want somebody whos calm and composed in the oval office. [applause] so i was aware of all the different crosscurrents, but i carried on in a way that i thought was what a president or somebody who wants to be president should do. And you say in the book, and to think you are referring to longer than this campaign that you sort of have to wear your composure like a suit of armor and thats what you did. Everybody in this audience knows that feeling that the next day or the middle of of the nit to wake up and say if only i had said that. There always is at that. You do, i thought that, its the toughest job in the world. Its a job that requires, or at least used to require, a level of [applause] you know, curiosity and focus and things that youd want to think somebody with that responsibility would have. I honestly believed we were in a different kind of campaign, unlike any ive ever seen before i have watched people go up and that in campaigns. Ive worked in thin. I was deeply involved obviously in my husbands to campaigns. I know the ebb and flow of a campaign. This was really different, and i dont think anybody fully grasp how it was a variation on a president ial campaign, unlike any weve ever seen, and by now, looking back, see a lot of different signals about that, that maybe i could at and my camping couldve done a better job trying to figure how to push back on or make more transparent so people would understand, what, ill tell you what, that campaign of his, they have the best empty podium anybodys ever seen. Get people to think it even laugh a little bit about what was happening in that campaign. But, you know, that didnt happen soon enough and it didnt happen and quite enough places. Did you watch the emmys last night at all . [laughing] [applause] i did, i did. Many people may know you and your husband are big fans of Television Dramas and comedies, and if you watched, as im sure many of you did, you know the handmaids tale was a big winner, and you and ive actually talked talk about then the past, written in 1985, dystopian work