Hillary Clinton will likely be the next president of the United States, and why not? We live in an age of choreographed reality, and hers is among the most choreographed of lives. Also, an age of the triumph of symbol over substance and narrative over fact; an age that demonstrates the power of the contention that truth matters only to the extent people want it to matter. Mrs. Clinton’s career is testimony to these things as well.
Which brings me to the subject of her book.
However one feels about Mrs. Clinton, she was the least consequential secretary of state since William Rogers warmed the seat in the early years of the Nixon administration.
I obtained an advance copy of “Hard Choices,” her latest doorstop of a memoir, and started reading it before its publication Tuesday. There she is, bitterly regretting her vote to authorize the war in Iraq. There she is again, standing by her actions during the Benghazi debacle, insisting on the relevance of the “Innocence of Muslims” video.
Elsewhere we find her equivocating over her opposition to the Iraq surge (which, as we learned from Robert Gates’s memoir “Duty,” she privately admitted was purely political), or allowing that the Obama administration’s decision to stand silent over the stolen 2009 Iranian revolution was something she “came to regret.”
To continue reading Bret Stephens’ column in the Wall Street Journal, click here.
Bret Stephens is the deputy editorial page editor responsible for the international opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. He also writes “Global View,” the paper’s weekly foreign-affairs column, and is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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