Subject: Author's Note
From: Dan Schwerin <[email-masked]>
To: John Podesta <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2014 10:01:59 -0400

John, I have to tell you that I loved both your walk-about on the Mall and
seeing you with your son in Afghanistan ‹ so glad you got to do that!  I
wanted to give you a heads up that this morning we released the Author¹s
Note for Hard Choices: http://www.hillaryclintonmemoir.com/excerpt.  I will
be very curious to hear what you think.  Hopefully a grown-up conversation
about the choices and trade-offs we face in the world will resonate with
readers tired of both triumphalism and defeatism.  We¹ll see!

Best,

Dan

AUTHOR¹S NOTE
All 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 married‹or
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.
I¹m eternally grateful that I was born to loving and supportive parents in a
country that offered me every opportunity and blessing‹factors beyond my
control that set the stage for the life I¹ve led and the values and faith
I¹ve 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, ³Are you out of your mind?² I heard similar questions when I took on
health care reform as First Lady, ran for office myself, and accepted
President Barack Obama¹s 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,
I¹ve 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.
What¹s 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 Obama¹s order to send a team of Navy
SEALs into a moonless Pakistani night to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.
The President¹s top advisors were divided. The intelligence was compelling,
but far from definitive. The risks of failure were daunting. The stakes were
significant for America¹s 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 I¹ve 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 country¹s 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
³smart power.² To succeed in the 21st century, we need to integrate the
traditional tools of foreign policy‹diplomacy, development assistance, and
military force‹while 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 America¹s 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 I¹m 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. I¹ve 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.
While my views and experiences will surely be scrutinized by followers of
Washington¹s long-running soap opera‹who took what side, who opposed whom,
who was up and who was down‹I didn¹t write this book for them.
I wrote it for Americans and people everywhere who are trying to make sense
of this rapidly changing world of ours, who want to understand how leaders
and nations can work together and why they sometimes collide, and how their
decisions affect all our lives: How a collapsing economy in Athens, Greece,
affects businesses in Athens, Georgia. How a revolution in Cairo, Egypt,
impacts life in Cairo, Illinois. What a tense diplomatic encounter in St.
Petersburg, Russia, means for families in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Not every story in this book has a happy ending or even an ending yet‹that¹s
not the world we live in‹but all of them are stories about people we can
learn from whether we agree with them or not. There are still heroes out
there: peacemakers who persevered when success seemed impossible, leaders
who ignored politics and pressure to make tough decisions, men and women
with the courage to leave the past behind in order to shape a new and better
future. These are some of the stories I tell.
I wrote this book to honor the exceptional diplomats and development experts
whom I had the honor of leading as America¹s sixty-seventh Secretary of
State. I wrote it for anyone anywhere who wonders whether the United States
still has what it takes to lead. For me, the answer is a resounding ³Yes.²
Talk of America¹s decline has become commonplace, but my faith in our future
has never been greater. While there are few problems in today¹s world that
the United States can solve alone, there are even fewer that can be solved
without the United States. Everything that I have done and seen has
convinced me that America remains the ³indispensable nation.² I am just as
convinced, however, that our leadership is not a birthright. It must be
earned by every generation.
And it will be‹so long as we stay true to our values and remember that,
before we are Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, or any of
the other labels that divide us as often as define us, we are Americans, all
with a personal stake in our country.
When I began this book, shortly after leaving the State Department, I
considered a number of titles. Helpfully, the Washington Post asked its
readers to send in suggestions. One proposed ³It Takes a World,² a fitting
sequel to It Takes a Village. My favorite was ³The Scrunchie Chronicles: 112
Countries and It¹s Still All about My Hair.²
In the end, the title that best captured my experiences on the high wire of
international diplomacy and my thoughts and feelings about what it will take
to secure American leadership for the 21st century was Hard Choices.
One thing that has never been a hard choice for me is serving our country.
It has been the greatest honor of my life.