What Happened

Love and Kindness

Politics has always been a rough business. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams hurled insults at each other that would make today’s nastiest politicians blush. It’s just how the game is played: Every campaign seeks to draw contrasts with opponents and the media want to cover conflict. So it’s not surprising that two words you don’t hear very often in our knock-down, drag-out political brawls are love and kindness. But you heard them from our campaign.

It started as something I’d occasionally mention at the end of speeches, how our country needed compassion and a spirit of community in a time of division. It eventually became a rallying cry: “Love trumps hate!” Partly this was because the race felt ugly and mean and we wanted to be an antidote to that. But partly it was because I’ve been thinking for a long time about how our country needs to become kinder and all of us need to become more connected to one another. That’s not just a sweet thought. It’s serious to me. If I had won the election, this would have been a quiet but important project of my presidency.

A few weeks after the election, I picked up a copy of a sermon called “You Are Accepted” by Paul Tillich, the Christian theologian of the mid-twentieth century. I remembered sitting in my church basement in Park Ridge years ago as our youth minister, Don Jones, read it to us. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness… Sometimes at that moment, a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted.’ ” Years later, when my marriage was in crisis, I called Don. Read Tillich, he said. I did. It helped.

Tillich says about grace: “It happens; or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves.” This stuck with me. “Grace happens. Grace happens.” In other words, be patient, be strong, keep going, and let grace come when it can.

Now I was sixty-nine and reading Tillich again. There was more here than I remembered. Tillich says sin is separation and grace is reconciliation—it’s “being able to look frankly into the eyes of another… understanding each other’s words… not merely the literal meaning of the words, but also that which lies behind them, even when they are harsh or angry.” After a divisive election, this resonated in a new way. A lot of Americans were estranged from one another. Reconciliation seemed far away. The whole country was seething. Before the election, it felt as if half the people were angry and resentful, while the other half was still fundamentally hopeful. Now pretty much everyone is mad about something.

Tillich published his sermon the year after I was born. Sometimes people describe the postwar years as a golden age in America. But even then, he sensed a “feeling of meaninglessness, emptiness, doubt, and cynicism—all expressions of despair, of our separation from the roots and the meaning of our life.” That could just as easily be America in 2016. How many shrinking small towns and aging Rust Belt cities did I visit over the past two years where people felt abandoned, disrespected, invisible? How many young men and women in neglected urban neighborhoods told me they felt like strangers in their own land because of the color of their skin? The alienation cut across race, class, geography. Back in 1948, Tillich was concerned that technology had removed “the walls of distance, in time and space” but strengthened “walls of estrangement between heart and heart.” If only he could have seen the internet!

How are we supposed to love our neighbors when we feel like this? How are we supposed to find the grace that Tillich says comes with reconciliation and acceptance? How can we build the trust that holds a democracy together?

Underneath these questions are ones I’ve been wrestling with and writing and speaking about for decades.

It started in college. Like a lot of kids, I felt stifled by the conservative, dollar-crazed conformity of the Mad Men era. That scene in The Graduate where an older man pulls Dustin Hoffman aside and, with great seriousness, shares the secret of life in one word—“Plastics”—made all of us groan. It’s no wonder so many of us were looking for meaning and purpose wherever we could find them. As I put it in my Wellesley graduation speech, we were “searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” (Yes, I’m aware of how idealistic that sounds, but that’s how we talked!) I didn’t know quite how to put it into words, but what many of us wanted was an integrated life that blended and balanced family, work, service, and a spiritual connection all together. We wanted to feel like we were part of something bigger than ourselves—certainly something bigger than “plastics.”

Surprisingly, I found some of what I was looking for not in a New Age manifesto but in a very old book.

In one of my political science classes, I read Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. He came from France and traveled across the United States in the 1830s trying to understand what made our young nation work. He was amazed by the social and economic equality and mobility he saw here, unheard of in aristocratic Europe, and by what he called our “habits of the heart,” the everyday values and customs that set Americans apart from the rest of the world. He described a nation of volunteers and problem solvers who believed that their own self-interest was advanced by helping one another. Like Benjamin Franklin, they formed volunteer fire departments, because they realized that if your neighbor’s house is on fire, it’s your problem, too. Middle-class women—including a lot of Methodists—went into the most dangerous nineteenth-century slums to help poor children who had no one else standing up for them. Those early Americans came together, inspired by religious faith, civic virtue, and common decency, to lend a hand to those in need and improve their communities. They joined clubs and congregations, civic organizations and political parties, all kinds of groups that bound a diverse country together. De Tocqueville thought that spirit made America’s great democratic experiment possible.

Those “habits of the heart” felt distant to me in the turmoil of the 1960s. Instead of pitching in to raise a barn or sew a quilt—or clean up a park or build a school—Americans seemed always to be at one another’s throats. And a pervasive loss of trust was undermining the democracy de Tocqueville had celebrated 130 years before. Reading his observations helped me realize that my generation didn’t need to totally reinvent America to fix the problems we saw and find the meaning we sought, we just had to reclaim the best parts of our national character. That started, I told my classmates in my graduation speech, with “mutuality of respect between people,” another clunky phrase but still a pretty good message.

Fast-forward twenty years, to early 1991. I’d gotten what I’d always dreamed of—a loving family, a fulfilling career, and a life of service to others—plus more that I had never imagined. I was the First Lady of Arkansas. Every part of that statement would have surprised my college-age self. Now my husband was thinking about running for President of the United States. I didn’t know if he could win—George H. W. Bush’s approval rating surpassed 90 percent after winning the Gulf War—but I was sure the country needed him to try. The Reagan years had rebuilt America’s confidence but sapped its soul. Greed was good. Instead of a nation defined by “habits of the heart,” we had become a land of “sink or swim.” Bush had said some of the right things, calling for a “kinder, gentler” country and celebrating the generosity of our civil society as “a thousand points of light.” But conservatives used that as an excuse for government to do even less to help the less fortunate. It’s easy to forget what this was like. Now that the Republican Party has moved so far to the extreme right in the years since, the 1980s have taken on a retrospective halo of moderation by comparison. And it’s true that Reagan gave amnesty to undocumented immigrants, and Bush raised taxes and signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. But their trickle-down economic policies exploded the deficit and hurt working families. I thought they were wrong on most issues, and still do.

In those days, I still read Life magazine, and in the February 1991 issue, I came across something that caught me totally by surprise. It was an article by Lee Atwater, the Republican mastermind who’d helped elect Reagan and Bush with slash-and-burn campaigns that played to our country’s worst impulses and ugliest fears. He was the man behind the infamous race-baiting “Willie Horton” ad in 1988, the man who believed in winning at any cost. He was also mortally ill with brain cancer and not yet forty years old.

Atwater’s piece in Life magazine read like a death-bed conversion. The bare-knuckled political brawler was having an attack of conscience. And despite coming from someone with whom I disagreed about virtually everything, it was like reading my own thoughts printed out on the page. Here’s what he wrote that made such a big impression on me:

This was exactly how I felt! Atwater was getting to a question that had been gnawing at me for years. Why, I wondered, in the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth, with the oldest, most successful democracy, did so many Americans feel like we lacked meaning in our individual lives and in our collective national life? What was missing, it seemed to me, was a sense that our lives were part of some greater effort, that we were all connected to one another and that each of us had a place and a purpose.

This was part of why I thought Bill should run for President. Filling America’s “spiritual vacuum” wasn’t a job for government, but it would help to have strong, caring leadership. Bill was starting to think about how to root a campaign in the values of opportunity, responsibility, and community. Eventually he’d call it a “new covenant,” a biblical concept. He hoped it would speak to this feeling, articulated so well by Atwater, that something important was missing in the heart of American life.

I cut out the Life magazine article and showed it to Bill.

(I wonder what Lee Atwater would say about Donald Trump. Would he admire the chutzpah of a campaign that stopped blowing dog whistles and spoke its bigotry in plain English for all to hear? Or would he see Trump as the embodiment of everything he hated about the eighties: one big tumor of the American soul?)

Fast-forward again, this time to April 1993. My eighty-two-year-old father was lying in a coma in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Little Rock. It had been two weeks since he suffered a massive stroke. All I wanted to do was keep sitting by his bedside, hold his hand, smooth his hair, and wait and hope for him to open his eyes or squeeze my fingers. But nobody knew how long his coma would last, and Chelsea had to get back to school in Washington. For reasons passing understanding, I also had a commitment I couldn’t get out of: a speech to fourteen thousand people at the University of Texas at Austin.

I was, to put it mildly, a wreck. On the plane to Austin, I leafed through the little book I keep of quotations, Scripture, and poems, trying to figure out what I could possibly say. Then I turned the page and saw the cutout from Lee Atwater’s Life article. Something missing from our lives, a spiritual vacuum—this is what I would talk about. It wouldn’t be the most articulate or coherent speech I’d ever given, but at least it would come straight from my wounded heart. I began sketching out a new appeal for the “mutuality of respect” I’d talked about in my graduation speech at Wellesley, a return to de Tocqueville’s “habits of the heart.”

When I got to Texas, I spoke about the alienation, despair, and hopelessness I saw building just below the surface of American life. I quoted Atwater. And to his question—“Who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum?”—I answered, “all of us.” We needed to improve government and strengthen our institutions, and that’s what the new Clinton administration was trying to do, but it wouldn’t be enough. “We need a new politics of meaning,” I said, “a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring.” And that would take all of us doing our part to build “a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.” I cited de Tocqueville and talked about the importance of networks of family, friendship, and communities that are the glue that hold us together.

There had been so much change in our country, a lot of it positive but also much of it profoundly unsettling. The social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the economic and technological shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of automation, income inequality, and the information economy, all of it seemed to be contributing to a spiritual hollowing out. “Change will come whether we want it or not, and what we have to do is to try and make change our friend, not our enemy,” I said.

People in politics don’t normally talk this way. Neither do First Ladies. I soon discovered why.

The day after my speech, my father died. I returned to Washington and found that many in the press had hated my attempt to talk unguardedly about what I thought was wrong in the country. The New York Times Magazine put me on the cover with the mocking headline “Saint Hillary.” The writer described the Texas speech as “easy, moralistic preaching couched in the gauzy and gushy wrappings of New Age jargon.”

I learned my lesson. Over the next few years, I kept thinking about a “new ethos of individual responsibility and caring,” but I didn’t talk about it much. I read as much as I could, including a new article by Harvard professor Bob Putnam, which later became a bestselling book titled Bowling Alone. Putnam used declining membership in bowling leagues as an evocative example of the breakdown in America’s social capital and civil society—the same problems I’d been worrying about.

I decided to write a book of my own. It would speak to these concerns in a less “gauzy and gushy” way than my Texas speech and offer a practical, kitchen-table vision for what we could do about it. The focus would be the responsibility we all had to help create a healthy, nurturing community for children. I’d call it It Takes a Village, after an African proverb that captured something I had long believed.

I wrote about how frantic and fragmented American life had become for many people, especially stressed-out parents. Extended families didn’t provide the support they used to. Crime was still a big problem in a lot of communities, making neighborhood streets places of danger rather than support and solidarity. We were spending more time in our cars and in front of the television and less time participating in civic associations, houses of worship, unions, political parties, and, yes, bowling leagues.

I believed we needed to find new ways to support one another. “Our challenge is to arrive at a consensus of values and a common vision of what we can do today, individually and collectively, to build strong families and communities,” I wrote. “Creating that consensus in a democracy depends on seriously considering other points of view, resisting the lure of extremist rhetoric, and balancing individual rights and freedoms with personal responsibility and mutual obligations.”

Once again, the response from some quarters was brutal. Republicans caricatured my appeal for stronger families and communities as more big-government liberalism, even “crypto-totalitarianism” in one magazine’s words. “We are told that it takes a village, that is collective, and thus the state, to raise a child,” Bob Dole said, his voice dripping with disdain, in his acceptance speech at the 1996 Republican National Convention. “I am here to tell you it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.” The crowd went wild.

You might think it’s a little odd for the nominee of a major political party to take time out of the most important speech of the campaign to take a swipe at a book about children written by the First Lady—and you would be right.

It was becoming painfully clear that there was no room in our politics for the kind of discussion I wanted to have. Or maybe I was the wrong messenger. Either way, this wasn’t working.

I found more receptive audiences overseas. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1998, I tried to explain how my “village” concept fit together with a broader global agenda of political and economic reform. I used the metaphor of a three-legged stool, which I’d come back to many times in the years that followed. An open and thriving economy was one leg. A stable and responsive democratic government was a second leg. And the third, too often undervalued in serious foreign policy discussions, was civil society. “It is the stuff of life,” I said. “It is the family, it is the religious belief and spirituality that guide us. It is the voluntary association of which we are a member. It is the art and culture that makes our spirits soar.”

Another twenty years went by. Now I was running for President in a time of deep division and smoldering anger. On the news, there was a seemingly endless series of terrorist attacks and mass shootings. Young black men kept getting killed by police. A candidate for President called Mexican immigrants rapists and encouraged violence at his rallies. On the internet, women were harassed frequently, and it was impossible to have a conversation about politics without enduring a blizzard of invective.

In late May 2015, I was campaigning in Columbia, South Carolina. In between events, we squeezed in a quick stop at the Main Street Bakery so I could get a cupcake and shake some hands. There was only one customer in the place, an older African American gentleman sitting alone by the window, engrossed in a book. I was reluctant to disturb him, but we made eye contact. I walked over to say hello and ask what he was reading.

The man looked up and said, “First Corinthians 13.”

I smiled. “Love is patient, love is kind,” I said, “it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.”

His name was Donnie Hunt, and he was a minister at the First Calvary Baptist Church, getting ready for the day’s Bible study. He invited me to sit down.

He told me how rewarding he found it to read these familiar lines again and again. “You always learn something,” he said.

“Well, it’s alive,” I replied. “It’s the living word.”

We sat and talked for a long time—about books, his church, the local schools, racial tensions in the community, his hope to one day visit the Holy Land. “It’s on my bucket list,” he told me.

A few weeks later, I was back in South Carolina. This time it was Charleston. I visited a technical college and talked with apprentices hoping their training would lead to a good job and a happy life. It was a diverse group—black, white, Hispanic, Asian—all young, all incredibly hopeful. I listened to their stories and heard the pride in their voices.

I got on a plane for Nevada and didn’t hear the news until I landed. A young white man trying to start a race war had massacred nine black worshippers at an evening Bible study at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. Emanuel means “God with us,” but the news made it hard to feel that way. Nine faithful women and men, with families and friends and so much left to do and contribute in their lives, cut down as they prayed. What is wrong with us? I thought. How did we let this happen in our country? How did we still allow guns to fall into the hands of people whose hearts were filled with hate?

Two days later, police brought the murderer into court. One by one, grieving parents and siblings stood up and looked into his blank eyes, this young man who had taken so much from them, and they said: “I forgive you.” In its way, their acts of mercy were more stunning than his act of cruelty.

A friend of mine sent me a note. “Think about the hearts and values of those men and women of Mother Emanuel,” he said.

“A dozen people gathered to pray. They’re in their most intimate of communities, and a stranger who doesn’t look or dress like them joins in. They don’t judge. They don’t question. They don’t reject. They just welcome. If he’s there, he must need something: prayer, love, community, something. During their last hour, nine people of faith welcomed a stranger in prayer and fellowship.”

My friend said it reminded him of the words of Jesus in Matthew: “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

In a speech in San Francisco, I read my friend’s note out loud. Then I looked up, and I said what I was feeling in that moment: “I know it’s not usual for somebody running for President to say what we need more of in this country is love and kindness. But that’s exactly what we need.”

“Love and kindness” became a staple for me on the campaign trail. Never the core message of the day, never a full-fledged “new politics of meaning” call to arms, but something I’d come back to again and again, and that audiences nearly always responded to, as if they were thirsty for it. With all the rotten news on television and all the negativity in the race, a lot of people wanted to be reassured about the basic goodness of our country and our hope for a better, kinder future. When we started using the phrase “love trumps hate,” it caught on like wildfire among our supporters. There were times when I listened to huge crowds chanting those words, and for a minute I’d get swept up in the swell of positive energy and think it might really carry us all the way.

I’ve spent many hours since the election wondering whether there was more we could have done to get that message through to an angry electorate in a cynical time. There’s been so much said and written about the economic hardships and declining life expectancy of the working-class whites who embraced Donald Trump. But why should they be more angry and resentful than the millions of blacks and Latinos who are poorer, die younger, and have to contend every day with entrenched discrimination? Why were many people who were enchanted by Barack Obama in 2008 so cynical in 2016 after he saved the economy and extended health care to millions who needed it?

I went back to de Tocqueville. After studying the French Revolution, he wrote that revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst, but in places where expectations are most unmet. So if you’ve been raised to believe your life will unfold a certain way—say, with a steady union job that doesn’t require a college degree but does provide a middle-class income, with traditional gender roles intact and everyone speaking English—and then things don’t work out the way you expected, that’s when you get angry. It’s about loss. It’s about the sense that the future is going to be harder than the past. Fundamentally, I believe that the despair we saw in so many parts of America in 2016 grew out of the same problems that Lee Atwater and I were worried about twenty-five years ago. Too many people feel alienated from one another and from any sense of belonging or higher purpose. Anger and resentment fill that void and can overwhelm everything else: tolerance, basic standards of decency, facts, and certainly the kind of practical solutions I spent the campaign offering.

Do I feel empathy for Trump voters? That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot. It’s complicated. It’s relatively easy to empathize with hardworking, warmhearted people who decided they couldn’t in good conscience vote for me after reading that letter from Jim Comey… or who don’t think any party should control the White House for more than eight years at a time… or who have a deeply held belief in limited government, or an overriding moral objection to abortion. I also feel sympathy for people who believed Trump’s promises and are now terrified that he’s trying to take away their health care, not make it better, and cut taxes for the superrich, not invest in infrastructure. I get it. But I have no tolerance for intolerance. None. Bullying disgusts me. I look at the people at Trump’s rallies, cheering for his hateful rants, and I wonder: Where’s their empathy and understanding? Why are they allowed to close their hearts to the striving immigrant father and the grieving black mother, or the LGBT teenager who’s bullied at school and thinking of suicide? Why doesn’t the press write think pieces about Trump voters trying to understand why most Americans rejected their candidate? Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country?

And yet I’ve come to believe that for me personally and for our country generally, we have no choice but to try. In the spring of 2017, Pope Francis gave a TED Talk. Yes, a TED Talk. It was amazing. This is the same pope whom Donald Trump attacked on Twitter during the campaign. He called for a “revolution of tenderness.” What a phrase! He said, “We all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent ‘I,’ separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone.” He said that tenderness “means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future.”

On all my long walks in the woods and quiet days at home, when I’m not losing my mind about something I’ve read in the newspaper or on Twitter, this is what I’m thinking about. I’m coming around to the idea that what we need more than anything at this moment in America is what you might call “radical empathy.”

This isn’t too different from the “mutuality of respect” I hoped for at Wellesley all those years ago. I’m older now. I know how hard this is and how cruel the world can be. I’m under no illusions that we’ll start agreeing on everything or stop having fierce debates about the future of our country—nor should we. But if 2016 taught us anything, it should be that we have an urgent imperative to recapture a sense of common humanity.

Each of us must try to walk in the shoes of people who don’t see the world the way we do. President Obama put it very well in his farewell address. He said white Americans need to acknowledge “that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the sixties; that when minority groups voice discontent, they’re not just engaging in reverse racism or practicing political correctness; that when they wage peaceful protest, they’re not demanding special treatment but the equal treatment our Founders promised.” And, for people of color, it means understanding the perspective of “the middle-aged white man who from the outside may seem like he’s got all the advantages, but who’s seen his world upended by economic, cultural, and technological change.”

And, practicing “radical empathy” means more than trying to reach across divides of race, class, and politics, and building bridges between communities. We have to fill the emotional and spiritual voids that have opened up within communities, within families, and within ourselves as individuals. That can be even more difficult, but it’s essential. There’s grace to be found in those relationships. Grace and meaning and that elusive sense that we’re all part of something bigger than ourselves.

I know this isn’t the language of politics, and some will roll their eyes again, just as they always have. But I believe as strongly as I ever have that this is what our country needs. It’s what we all need as human beings trying to make our way in changing times. And it’s the only way I see forward for myself. I can carry around my bitterness forever, or I can open my heart once more to love and kindness. That’s the path I choose.

Onward Together

One day a few months after the election, I called some friends and suggested we make a pilgrimage to Hyde Park, New York. I was feeling restless and needed an emotional boost. I thought it might help to visit Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s cottage, which is one of my favorite historical sites. That’s where Eleanor went when she wanted to think, write, entertain, and plan for the future. Maybe I’d be inspired. If nothing else, it would be a nice day out with friends.

It was a cold but clear March day when we arrived. The cottage, simple and unpretentious, was just as I remembered: the rustic “sleeping porch” with its narrow single bed, some of Eleanor’s favorite books, her radio, the portrait of her husband she kept over the mantel. A historian who joined us for the tour was kind enough to share some of Eleanor’s letters. Reading the mix of adoring fan mail and nasty, cutting diatribes was a reminder of the love-hate whiplash that women who challenge society’s expectations and live their lives in the public eye often receive.

I’d been thinking about Eleanor a lot lately. She put up with so much vitriol, and she did it with grace and strength. People criticized her voice and appearance, the money she made speaking and writing, and her advocacy for women’s rights, civil rights, and human rights. An overzealous director of the FBI put together a three-thousand-page file on her. One vituperative national columnist called her “impudent, presumptuous, and conspiratorial,” and said that “her withdrawal from public life at this time would be a fine public service.” Sound familiar?

There were plenty of people hoping that I, too, would just disappear. But here I am. As Bill likes to say, at this point in our lives, we have more yesterdays than tomorrows. There is no way I am going to waste the time I have. I know there is more good to do, more people to help, and a whole lot of unfinished business.

I can only hope to come close to the example Eleanor had set. After her husband died and she left the White House, in 1945, she grew even more outspoken. She became a stateswoman on the world stage, leading the global movement to write and adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the same time, she was an active player in national and local Democratic politics, fighting for the soul of her party and her country in a postwar era marked by fear and demagoguery. When she died in 1962, the New York Times obituary described how she outlasted ridicule and bitter resentment to become “the object of almost universal respect.”

Her friends and supporters clamored for Eleanor to run for Senate, Governor, even President, but she decided instead to pour her energy into helping elect others. Her favorite was Adlai Stevenson, the Governor of Illinois who ran for President unsuccessfully in 1952 and 1956. His losses hurt. “Though one may doubt the wisdom of the people,” Eleanor wrote in a newspaper column after the second defeat to Dwight Eisenhower, “it is always best to trust that in time the wisdom of the majority of the people will be greater and more dependable and those who are in the minority must accept their defeat with grace.” She was right, of course. But I would have loved to have heard her response if Adlai had ended up winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College. She would have found just the right way to capture the absurdity of it all.

As we walked through the cottage, I tried to picture Eleanor in her chair writing, or holding court at the table, surrounded by friends and comrades in arms. She was, until the end, her own person, despite all the demands and constraints the world placed on her—true to herself and her values. That’s a surprisingly rare and special thing.

Back in 1946, when Eleanor was charting her post-FDR course, she said something that resonates with me now as it never has before. “During a long life, I have always done what, for one reason or another, was the thing which was incumbent upon me to do without any consideration as to whether I wished to do it or not,” she wrote. “That no longer seems to be a necessity, and for my few remaining years, I hope to be free!”

That’s the future I want, too. As Eleanor showed, it’s there for the taking.

“What do we do now?” That’s the question a lot of Democrats asked me in the first months after Trump’s victory and inauguration. Many of my campaign staff, donors, and volunteers were eager—desperate, even—to find new ways to keep up the fight for the progressive values we all shared. People came up to me in restaurants, airports, and theaters, asking for direction. They wanted to help but didn’t know the best way to do it. Should they be giving everything they could to the American Civil Liberties Union and others trying to stop Trump’s travel ban in court? Or throw themselves into the handful of special elections that would fill open House seats in 2017? What about diving into new efforts to fight gerrymandering and voter suppression? Should they run for office themselves? There were so many causes, groups, and candidates looking for support, it was hard to know where to begin. Frankly, I was asking the same questions.

At first, I had intended to keep relatively quiet. Former Presidents and former nominees often try to keep a respectful distance from the front lines of politics, at least for a while. I always admired how both George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush avoided criticizing Bill and Barack, and how Bill ended up working with George H. W. on tsunami relief in Asia and Katrina recovery on the Gulf Coast. And with George W. in Haiti after the earthquake in 2011. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But these weren’t ordinary times, and Trump wasn’t an ordinary President.

The Russia scandal was getting more disturbing by the day. Polls showed that respect for the United States around the world was collapsing. The understaffed, overpoliticized Trump administration was consumed by crises of their own making, but I shuddered to think about how they would handle a real emergency, whether it was a clash with nuclear-armed North Korea, a major terrorist attack, a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, or a cyberattack on a nuclear power plant. At home, instead of investing in infrastructure and jobs, the new administration was busy rolling back protections for civil rights, worker’s rights, and clean air and water. I watched with horror as Republicans in Congress moved methodically to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which would strip tens of millions of Americans of their health care. Soon it became clear their target was much bigger than Obamacare. They wanted to strike a major blow against Medicaid, too. I had no doubt that Medicare and Social Security would soon be on the chopping block as well. It was a full-on ideological assault on the legacy of the Great Society and the New Deal. They don’t just want to erase Barack Obama from the history books—they’re coming for LBJ and FDR, too. Hardworking families I’d met across the country were going to pay the price. They needed help getting ahead but instead they were getting stabbed in the back. Watching all this unfold in the early months of the Trump presidency, I knew there was no way I could sit quietly on the sidelines.

Not long after I got back from my Val-Kill visit, I was trying to figure out what to say to a conference of businesswomen in California and I came up with a phrase that was a little silly, but it felt right: “Resist, insist, persist, enlist.” It became a mantra of sorts for me over the next few months.

Ever since the Women’s March in January, resistance had become the watchword for everyone opposed to Trump and all the protests, large and small, spreading across the country. Mitch McConnell had unintentionally made “persistence” a rallying cry as well, after he tried to justify his outrageous silencing of Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor by saying, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” That last part was now showing up on signs, T-shirts, and hashtags. Chelsea even decided to write a children’s book about thirteen inspiring women who shaped American history called She Persisted.

My new mantra celebrated all that energy and activism, but I thought its most important word was the last one: enlist. Unless people stay engaged and find ways to translate protests into political power, we aren’t going to stop Trump’s agenda or win future elections. To do that, we need to invest in political infrastructure: rebuilding the Democratic Party, training new candidates and staffers, improving our data and social media operations, beating back efforts to restrict voting rights, and more.

I know there are a lot of people—including a lot of Democrats—who are not eager to see me leading such an effort. They feel burned by my defeat, tired of defending me against relentless right-wing attacks, and ready for new leaders to emerge. Some of that sentiment is totally reasonable. I, too, am hungry for new leaders and ideas to reinvigorate our party. But if Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain, and Mitt Romney can find positive ways to contribute after their own election defeats, so can I. That doesn’t mean I’ll ever run for office again—although I was amused and surprised by the brief but fervent speculation over whether I would run for Mayor of New York. It does mean I will speak out on the causes I care about, campaign for other Democrats, and do whatever I can to build the infrastructure we need to succeed.

My thinking on all this crystalized in the spring of 2017 during a series of conversations with Howard Dean, the former Vermont Governor. As a presidential candidate in 2004, Howard pioneered many of the online organizing and fund-raising tactics that would later help elect Barack Obama. As chair of the Democratic National Committee, he led a “fifty-state strategy” that extended the party’s organizing into red states that had been neglected for too long. That experience made him the perfect person to talk to about the work Democrats needed to do now and how I could help.

Howard shared my enthusiasm for supporting the next generation of Democratic organizers, and he told me about the growing number of grassroots groups sprouting up in the wake of the election. Letting a thousand flowers bloom was great, he said, but it would be important to help the most promising groups find funding and focus. I agreed, and we decided to start a new organization that would identify and support up-and-coming groups and leaders who might not otherwise get the resources they deserved. We recruited a few like-minded colleagues and got to work.

We did a lot of research and met with many young leaders, which itself was both fun and fascinating. I listened to their presentations and peppered them with questions: What inspired you to start this organization? What are your strategic imperatives? What’s the one thing you wish you could do with additional resources? They gave smart, thoughtful answers. I walked out of those meetings feeling more hopeful and optimistic than I had in a long time.

After some tough deliberation, we landed on five initial groups to support with fund-raising and advice. Some were already hard at work helping channel a surge of grassroots energy opposing Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare and offering practical advice for how people could most effectively make their voices heard on Capitol Hill. Others were mobilizing volunteers in swing districts with the goal of taking back the House in 2018 and recruiting and training talented, diverse Democratic women and young people to run for office and win.

The working name of our new umbrella organization was Our American Future. We created a logo and a website and prepared to go public. Luckily, a friend of mine pointed out that the acronym of Our American Future would be OAF. I imagined the headlines: “Hillary Clinton Lurches Out of the Woods: Here Comes OAF.” We needed a new name, stat! After a quick brainstorm, we came up with a better option that combined my campaign slogan, Stronger Together, with “Onward!” the exhortation I’d been using to close personal notes for years. (What can I say? I’m a sentimentalist.) The logo and website got a quick makeover, and we were ready to launch Onward Together.

I hope you’ll join us in this effort. Check it out at OnwardTogether.org. Become a member and help us support these fantastic groups and the future of Democratic grassroots organizing.

There are many other ways to resist, insist, persist, and enlist. Register to vote. Help your friends and family do the same. You have to vote in every election, not just during presidential years. It matters. For one, your right to vote is protected or undermined by state and local officials who oversee and conduct elections. Bring as many other people as you can to the polls with you.

Get involved in a cause that matters to you. Just pick one, start somewhere. Women’s rights, LGBT rights, workers’ rights, voting rights, the environment, health care, campaign finance reform, public education—they all deserve attention. Don’t just think about it or talk about it: support a cause with your money, your time, and your talents. Find an organization that’s doing work you believe in. It may be a long-standing organization or a newer or smaller one. If it doesn’t exist, build it.

Local issues are every bit as important as national and global ones. If you see a problem in your community that needs fixing or an injustice that needs correcting, and you think, “Someone ought to do something about that,” guess what? That someone could easily be you. Show up at a city council or school board meeting and suggest a solution. If a problem is affecting your life, it’s probably affecting someone else’s—and that person might just be willing to join you.

Try to get to know your elected officials at every level and learn where they stand. If you disagree with them, challenge them. Learn when they’re holding their next town hall and show up. Don’t forget to support and contribute to candidates who will fight for your values and interests. Better yet, run for office yourself.

If you’ve been keeping your opinions to yourself, try speaking out—whether that’s on social media, in a letter to the editor, or in conversations with friends, family, and neighbors. Your views are every bit as valuable as everyone else’s. You’ll be surprised by how satisfying it can be to express yourself. And chances are, once you take a stand, you’ll find you’re not standing alone for long. If all else fails, make a sign and show up at a protest.

One of my supporters, Katy from Bellevue, Washington, sent me her five-step plan, which I think is a great road map for anyone looking to make a difference:

There’s an African proverb I’ve always loved: “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” If ever there was a moment to channel that spirit, it’s now. We have a long road ahead, and we’ll only get there together.

In the spring of 2017, I received a letter from a group called Wellesley Women for Hillary. Thousands of current and former students from my alma mater had worked their hearts out during the campaign. They were crushed by the outcome, but the group stayed together, supporting and encouraging one another. Now they wanted my advice about what to do next.

Around the same time, I got an invitation from Wellesley’s new President, Dr. Paula A. Johnson, to speak at the college’s graduation at the end of May. This would be the third pivotal moment in my life when I addressed a Wellesley graduation. It had been nearly a half century since the first time—at my own graduation in 1969—and doing so again in 2017, in the middle of this long, strange year of regret and resistance, felt fitting. I could try to answer the question posed by the Wellesley Women for Hillary—What do we do now?—for the class of 2017, for our country, and for myself.

I love going back to campus. It’s more built up than it used to be but still beautiful and full of memories: swimming in Lake Waban… staying up late arguing about the war and civil rights… being told by my French teacher, “Mademoiselle, your talents lie elsewhere”… placing a panicked collect call back to Park Ridge because I didn’t think I was smart or sophisticated enough to cut it at Wellesley, and hearing my father say, “Okay, come home,” only to have my mother insist, “There aren’t quitters in our family.”

Over the years, I’ve had a chance to spend time with several generations of Wellesley students, and it’s always a tonic. They’re so smart, engaged, and eager to make their marks on the world. It energizes me, and reminds me of the fire and ambition I felt all those years ago.

In the dizzying, depressing days after my defeat, that’s what I needed. I needed to remember who I was, where I came from, what I believed, and why I fought so hard and so long for it. Wellesley helped me find myself as a young woman. Maybe it could help me again now chart my path.

The second time I spoke at a Wellesley graduation was in 1992, during the heat of Bill’s first run for the White House. I was trying to adjust to the bright glow of the national spotlight (actually, it often felt more like a scorching flame)—and still smarting from the “cookies and tea” fiasco—but also feeling exhilarated by the passion and optimism of our campaign. It was one of the most remarkable years of my life, and I wanted to share what I’d learned and how it felt with my fellow Wellesley grads. In my speech, I urged the class of ’92 to defy the barriers and expectations they still faced as strong, independent women, and focus instead on finding fulfillment in their own unique balance of family, work, and service. I reminded them of Wellesley’s Latin motto, Non Ministrari sed Ministrare, which means “Not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” That sentiment always appealed to my Methodist sensibilities, and it resonated even more in a year when Bill and I were crisscrossing the country talking about a new birth of responsibility, opportunity, and community.

Since I was speaking at an academic event, I reached for a lofty source of wisdom to give a little oomph to my heartfelt advice about serving others: Václav Havel, the dissident Czech playwright and activist who had recently become his country’s first freely elected President. Later, as First Lady, I would meet Havel, and he would take me on a mesmerizing moonlit walk through the old city of Prague. But in 1992 I knew him only through his writing, which was eloquent and compelling. Only “by throwing yourself over and over again into the tumult of the world, with the intention of making your voice count—only thus will you really become a person,” he wrote. That’s what I wanted those Wellesley graduates to understand and act on. It was a time of hope and change, and they belonged at the vanguard of a rising generation.

Boy, did 2017 feel different. The hope so many of us felt in 1992 was gone, and in its place was a creeping dread about the future. Every day, the new Trump administration was disgracing our country, undermining the rule of law, and telling such bald-faced lies that it seemed as if it really had no shame at all. (According to the New York Times, Trump lied or dissembled at least once every day for the first 40 days of his presidency. The Washington Post counted 623 false and misleading statements he had made over his first 137 days.)

In 1969, my classmates and I had worried about the loss of trust in our leaders and institutions. Those fears were back at full force, amplified for the internet age, when it’s so easy to live in echo chambers that shut out contrary voices and inconvenient truths. Our leaders now have tools at their disposal to exploit fear, cynicism, and resentment that were unimaginable in 1969.

And as for me, I had thrown myself “into the tumult of the world,” but it had left me bruised and gasping for air. What could I possibly say to the Wellesley class of 2017 in a moment like this?

I thought about Havel. He had persevered through much worse. He and all of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe had lived for decades under what Havel called “a thick crust of lies.” He and other dissidents had managed to punch through those lies and ultimately tear down the authoritarian regimes that propagated them. I went back and reread one of his essays, “The Power of the Powerless,” which explains how individuals can wield truth like a weapon, even when they lack all political influence. Havel understood that authoritarians who rely on lies to control their people are fundamentally not that different from neighborhood bullies. They’re more fragile than they look. He wrote, “The moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, ‘The emperor is naked!’—when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game—everything suddenly appears in another light.”

This felt like the right message for 2017. I could warn the Wellesley graduates that they were becoming adults during an all-out assault on truth and reason, especially from a White House specializing in “alternative facts.” I could explain how the administration’s attempts to distort reality were an affront to the Enlightenment values our country was founded on, including the belief that an informed citizenry and free and open debate are the foundations of a healthy democracy. But Havel’s words gave reason to hope. Every one of us has a role to play in defending our democracy and standing up for rational thought. I could remind the graduates of what I’d said in my concession speech: that they are valuable and powerful, and that the skills and values they learned at Wellesley had given them everything they would need to fight back.

It drove me crazy that since the election, pundits had fetishized stereotypical Trump supporters to such a degree that they had started dismissing anyone who lived on the coasts and had a college education as irrelevant and out of touch. I wanted to assure the Wellesley grads that this was nonsense. Their capacity for critical thinking, their commitment to inclusiveness and pluralism, their ethic of serving others—that’s precisely what we needed in America in 2017. My advice would be simple: Don’t let the bastards get you down. Stay true to yourself and your values. Most of all, keep going.

I woke up early on May 26. I had spent the previous evening with Bill and a few former campaign aides, eating Thai food, drinking white wine, and working on my speech. I wanted this one to be good. It would be my first big speech since the concession, and I knew a lot of my supporters across the country were eager to hear from me. Many were scared, angry, and hungry for inspiration. Most of all, the graduates deserved a memorable graduation.

It was raining in Chappaqua, and the weather report said it was drizzling in Boston, too. I felt for all the families at Wellesley who surely had been hoping for a perfect day. I had graduated under a brilliantly clear New England sky. Oh well; some people say rain on a wedding day is good luck. Maybe the same is true for graduations.

I got dressed in Wellesley blue, had a cup of coffee, and found a sweet note from Bill. He had stayed up to all hours reading the latest speech draft and scribbled on the top of the page, “H—I like this speech. Hope these suggestions help make it better—wake me and we’ll go over it—I love you.” I thought for the ten millionth time how glad I was that I had married my best friend and biggest cheerleader. And yes, like always, his edits made my speech better.

Puttering, I turned on the news and quickly regretted it. Overnight, a Republican congressional candidate in Montana who had body-slammed a reporter for asking tough questions about health care had won his special election. At the NATO summit across the Atlantic, Donald Trump had shoved the prime minister of Montenegro out of the way so he could get a better spot in a group photo. I watched the clip several times, like rubbernecking at a car wreck. It was hard not to see the two stories as related, both symbols of our degraded national life in the Age of Trump. I sighed, turned off the television, gathered my things, headed to the airport, and flew to Massachusetts.

Even in the rain, seeing the old redbrick buildings of Wellesley made me feel better. The campus was humming with the familiar rituals of graduation. Parents and grandparents were fawning over their embarrassed children. Younger siblings were soaking in everything, imagining when it would be their turn. Some of the grads had decorated their mortarboards with flower crowns and rainbow flags. Others sported “I’m With Her” stickers and “Love Trumps Hate” pins, which made me smile. By tradition, every Wellesley class is assigned a color. As it happened, both 1969 and 2017 were green classes. As a result, it felt a little like Saint Patrick’s Day all over campus.

President Johnson, whom I knew and admired for her work in medicine and on public health issues, met me and brought me to the aptly named Green Hall, a lovely old Gothic building. There I found my academic robes and tasseled cap. As a general rule, I don’t wear silly hats in public, but this was an exception. I resolved to see it as jaunty.

To my delight, before the graduation ceremony began, I was able to steal a few minutes with an old friend. When I was a student at Wellesley, Rev. Paul Santmire was the college chaplain and became an important mentor for me. In my ’69 commencement speech, I cited him as a model of integrity at a time when we didn’t trust authority figures and hardly anyone at all over thirty. Now, in his early eighties, Paul was as sharp and humane as ever. We embraced, and he told me that he’d driven up to New Hampshire in the fall to go door-to-door for my campaign. We reminisced about the old days when I was a wide-eyed student activist, and he mentioned my favorite line from John Wesley, the call to “Do all the good you can.” I assured him it was closer to my heart than ever and that my faith had been a rock in this period when everything else felt topsy-turvy.

I also had a chance to visit briefly with a young woman named Lauren, who was the president of the Wellesley Republicans club—a post I had held as a student myself before realizing my evolving views and values were taking me in a different direction. Lauren seemed to be going through similar soul-searching. Wellesley was a lonely place to be a conservative, but she told me her classmates had been eager to talk through their differences in an open and supportive way. Lauren wasn’t a Trump fan and was torn about what to do after he won the nomination. The Wellesley Republicans withheld its endorsement. But like most people, Lauren assumed Trump would lose and things would go back to normal. Now she was wrestling with what it all meant. Join the club, I thought. (Or, quit it! Seriously, if anyone is thinking of quitting the Republican Party, now would be a good time.)

There was one more person to meet. Tala Nashawati was chosen by her classmates to be the student speaker at graduation, just as I was in 1969. The American daughter of Syrian immigrants living in Ohio, she was graceful and poised, with a warm smile. Like so many Wellesley students, Tala was ridiculously accomplished and well rounded: a Middle Eastern Studies major, sought-after kickboxing instructor, and soon-to-be medical student. The night before my graduation speech in 1969, I had stayed up all night writing, pacing, and thinking, and in the morning, I was still in a barely controlled panic. But Tala appeared calm. She had been up late putting the finishing touches on her speech, but she had known for a long time what she wanted to say. And now she was ready.

Tala had brought a photo for me to sign. It was from 1969. There I was, standing at the podium, leaning ever so slightly in toward the microphone, my hair swept back into a bun that I remember thinking was very grown up, big glasses perched on my nose. So young. Behind me, a row of gray-haired faculty and trustees looking very serious. Some of them were probably wondering why President Ruth Adams had allowed a student to speak at graduation at all, something that had never happened before. Or they were struggling to follow my passionate but somewhat incoherent remarks. At the bottom of the photo was printed a quote from my speech: “The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”

I had borrowed that line from a poem written by a friend. It captured the idealism so many of us felt, despite the war and assassinations and unrest all around us. We really believed we could change the world. Forty-seven years later, I had planned to use the line again in the victory speech I hoped to deliver on election night. “I’m older now. I’m a mother and a grandmother,” I would have said. “But I still believe with all my heart that we can make the impossible, possible. Look at what we’re celebrating tonight.”

But in the end, there was nothing to celebrate. The glass ceiling held. The impossible remained so. I looked at Tala. We had never met before this moment, but in so many ways, I felt like I had been fighting for her and millions like her my entire career. And I had let them all down.

Yet here she was, bright-eyed and full of spirit, asking me to sign this black-and-white photo. It meant something to her. So did those words. Despite my defeat, she still believed in making the impossible possible.

It was time to go. There was a long walk through the snaking halls of the old academic building to get out to the tent where the graduation ceremony would be held. President Johnson and I lined up behind the college’s trustees, and the procession began.

We turned a corner and saw young women in black robes lining both sides of the hall. They began to clap and cheer wildly. Around another corner were more students. They went on and on, hundreds of them, the entire senior class, lined up like an honor guard. Their cheers were deafening. It was like they were letting months of pent-up feelings pour out—all the hope and hurt they’d felt since November or perhaps since long before. I felt loved and lifted, carried aloft on a wave of emotion.

Finally, we emerged out into the misty air, with waiting parents and news cameras and all the pomp and circumstance of a college commencement. Sitting on the stage, I tried to compose myself, but my heart was still beating fast. Soon Tala was standing at the podium, just like me in the photo. She looked great up there, and her speech was graceful and heartfelt.

Noting that green was the 2017 color, she compared her classmates to emeralds. “Like us, emeralds are valuable, rare, and pretty durable,” she said. “But there’s something else emeralds are known for: their flaws. I know it’s hard to admit, especially as Wellesley students, but we all have a lot of flaws. We are incomplete, scratched up in some places, jagged around the edges.”

I leaned in, curious. This is not what I had expected to hear.

“Flawed emeralds are sometimes even better than flawless ones,” Tala went on, “because the flaws show authenticity and character.”

There was that word again, authenticity. But she was using it as a balm instead of a bludgeon. Flawed. How often had I heard that word over the past two years. “Flawed Hillary.” But here was Tala defiantly reclaiming the word, insisting on the beauty and strength of imperfection.

Now her classmates were leaning in, too. They snapped their fingers instead of clapping, as Tala smiled and built to her close.

“In the words of Secretary Clinton, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance in the world to pursue your dreams,” she told the class of 2017. “You are rare and unique. Let yourself be flawed. Go proudly and confidently into the world with your blinding hues to show everyone who’s boss and break every glass ceiling that still remains.”

Now the snaps gave way to cheers. I was among the loudest. I stood and applauded and felt hope and pride rising in my heart. If this was the future, then everything had been worth it.

Things are going to be hard for a long time. But we are going to be okay. All of us.

The rain was ending. It was my turn to speak.

“What do we do now?” I said. There was only one answer: “Keep going.”