Transcript: Hillary Clinton's Full Interview With NPR's Rachel Martin
Ten months after losing the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton is out with a memoir, What Happened. Morning Edition host Rachel Martin talks to Clinton about her book, the election's outcome and how she's carried on.
Rachel Martin: Hillary Clinton joins us now from her home in Chappaqua, New York. Secretary Clinton, thanks so much for being here.
Thank you so much, Rachel.
How's being home?
It's actually great. It is wonderful being home having time to putter around clean closets spend, you know, long days going for walks, seeing my grandchildren, taking friends out to dinner. So it's not where I wanted to be, but it is a great reminder of what more there is to do in life and what the future can be like.
I'd like to start our conversation about your new memoir by asking you to recount a particular event. This is a campaign event that you did in Mingo County, West Virginia, a town called Williamson. This is coal country, and you had met many voters there weren't happy with you. They were angry over comments that you had made around that time about wanting to "put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." So you knew this was going to be a tough appearance and you wrote in the book the following quote: "All I knew for certain was they were angry, they were loud and they hated my guts." Can you just describe what that day felt like to you and what it signified as you moved forward in your campaign?
Well, it was a particularly difficult, even painful day because I had made clear for years, starting back in my 2008 campaign, that I understood what was happening in the changing fortunes of coal, that were largely global market forces, but also a growing recognition of the challenges that climate change posed. And I had given a number of speeches. I had a very well-developed plan to invest money into the area, and then in the midst of explaining that I said a sentence which I would, you know, I regretfully say, was taken out of context, blown up, and really was a rallying cry for people and others who were running the campaign against me to come out and blow this up out of all proportion. Now my campaign said, really, there's no point going to West Virginia because Democrats haven't won it in years. It didn't matter whether you said something or not, a Democratic candidate was not going to win it. But I felt a personal responsibility to the people in that state who had been good to me in the past, and to my husband, and I also wanted to make clear that I
