“I will not be a part of a political slugfest on the backs of dead Americans. It’s just plain wrong, and it’s unworthy of our great country,” Hillary Clinton writes in a chapter of her forthcoming book, “Hard Choices,” which Politico got a look at. The particular slugfest this chapter is about is the attack on a U.S. diplomatic installation in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, in which four Americans were killed. “Those who insist on politicizing the tragedy will have to do so without me,” she writes.
“Without me”—what will that mean, in practical terms? Will she just, when asked about it, decline to respond? (“Many of these same people are a broken record about unanswered questions. But there is a difference between unanswered questions and unlistened to answers,” she writes, according to Politico.) One does understand Clinton’s impatience with the way that Benghazi has been turned into a conspiratorial shorthand. Relying on quiet disdain, if that is the plan, might be a more efficient tactic if it didn’t seem like she was a candidate for President in 2016. An alternative is to shame her critics into silence a bit more loudly, by making the case that just saying the word Benghazi is a sign of poor political character. But however much they may seem to blur together, Benghazi is distinct from trumped-up scandals like Travelgate, or deeply personal ones like the Monica Lewinsky affair.
For one thing, four people died, people who were working for her, in her role as Secretary of State. Clinton says that the responsibility for what happened ultimately lies with her, while pushing back on questions about whether security was adequate, or—and this might be more important—whether anybody in the Administration really thought the diplomats’ mission through, or was clear-eyed about who America’s allies and antagonists in Benghazi were. Republicans have certainly been disingenuous about their willingness to provide resources for diplomatic missions. But Clinton has not always spoken about what happened in Benghazi adeptly, as real as her grief for the diplomats surely is—Politico quotes her as saying that it was a “crushing blow.” In the chapter, she addresses a moment in testimony on the affair last year, when she was questioned by Senator Ron Johnson about whether an Al Qaeda plot or anger at a film was behind the attacks:
“What difference, at this point, does it make?” That line has, predictably, been used as a shorthand indictment by Clinton’s critics. Writing now, she says, “In yet another example of the terrible politicization of this tragedy, many have conveniently chosen to interpret [those words] to mean that I was somehow minimizing the tragedy of Benghazi. Of course that’s not what I said.….Nothing could be further from the truth. And many of those trying to make hay of it know that, but don’t care.” Fair enough, except that Clinton then adds,
Which isn’t really parallel; motives are not the same thing as “how the intruder spent his day.” Did it seem impossible to own up to some verbal clumsiness or frustration? There has always been an odd mixture, with the Clintons, of visceral pleasure in politics and disdain for certain of its demands. (The tolerance for each is not evenly distributed between husband and wife.) As Ken Auletta notes in The New Yorker this week, Clinton has a particular antipathy involving the press, and how she will manage it is a central question if she wants to be President. (On Benghazi, Auletta writes, “regardless of what she says, if she runs in 2016 Benghazi will be the bloody shirt around which many of her critics rally.”) There is a telling quote in Politico having to do with Susan Rice’s appearances on the Sunday-morning talk shows, bearing the talking points whose editing has been the subject of the least edifying of the Benghazi subconspiracy theories. Rice was there as a proxy for Clinton, who writes that critics
This is one effect of Clinton’s long public life: obligations, opportunities, challenges, and tedious rituals of politeness are all mixed up. You decide that you don’t have to go to every dinner party or every television interview, and are not pleased with hearings. When your words have been analyzed as closely as Clinton’s have, every appearance may feel like jury duty—you are sworn in and can’t just walk away. She continues,
So how would she like to talk to Americans—through her book, which will have a printing of a million copies, and which has been excerpted in Vogue? (That part had to do with her relationship with her mother.) As far as one can tell from the excerpts, Clinton does try to offer a strong counter-narrative on Benghazi; Politico describes the chapter as a “defiant” chronological account of the incident. It also adds that it got this section of “Hard Choices” “on the eve of a meeting in which members of Democratic-leaning groups will be briefed by Clinton’s team about how she addresses the attacks in the book.” Perhaps they’ve got a plan for making the issue go away.
Would that be for the best? It would depend on what is banished—Benghazi or Libya. This is where Clinton’s impatience is not entirely earned. Benghazi, as I’ve written before, was not some unconnected pioneer outpost; the circumstances there were defined by a larger policy that was flawed in ways that have nothing to do with Fox News hysteria, and everything to do with issues like the use of military force (and her reputation, within the Obama Administration, as a hawk) and the need to consult Congress. And those are points worth talking about.
Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty.
