WASHINGTON (AP) - Hillary Rodham Clinton’s upcoming book will be called “Hard Choices,” a title that reflects how the potential 2016 presidential candidate may try to define her record as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state while she considers another White House campaign.
Publisher Simon & Schuster said Friday the new book, to be released June 10, will offer Clinton’s “inside account of the crises, choices and challenges” she faced as secretary of state and “how those experiences drive her view of the future.”
“All of us face hard choices in our lives,” Clinton writes at the start of the book, according to the publisher. “Life is about making these choices, and how we handle them shapes the people we become.”
Clinton’s State Department memoir will hit bookshelves as the former first lady and New York senator sits atop polls showing her as the leading Democratic contender should she seek the presidency. Since leaving the State Department, Clinton has traveled widely, giving speeches to industry groups, college students and others while joining the foundation led by her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
A preview released by the publisher indicates that Clinton will highlight a close working relationship with Obama, whom she may wish to succeed. Simon & Schuster said on a website promoting the book that Clinton and Obama “had to decide how to repair fractured alliances, wind down two wars, and address a global financial crisis. They faced a rising competitor in China, growing threats from Iran and North Korea, and revolutions across the Middle East.”
Clinton’s potential candidacy has been eagerly anticipated by Democrats, who frequently ask Clinton about her intentions and encourage her to try to become the nation’s first female president. A series of Democratic outside groups is already building support for a future campaign while Republicans question her accomplishments at Foggy Bottom.
Republicans have criticized Clinton’s response to the killing of four Americans in the 2012 attacks on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and pointed to her handling of relations with Russia. In 2009, Clinton memorably gave Russia’s top diplomat a red button labeled, “reset,” to symbolize how U.S. relations had thawed, but the button was mistranslated into Russian. In the aftermath of Russia’s bold annexation of Ukraine’s strategic Crimean peninsula, Republicans have suggested it represented a naiveté.
“The only thing missing from the preview of Hillary’s book is one single Hillary accomplishment as Secretary of State,” said Joe Pounder, research director for America Rising LLC, a Republican group. “Most of the challenges she says she dealt with confronted Secretary (of State John) Kerry when he took over.”
But the book’s preview says Clinton and Obama “grappled with some of the toughest dilemmas of US foreign policy, especially the decision to send Americans into harm’s way, from Afghanistan to Libya to the hunt for Osama bin Laden.”
The book will chronicle Clinton’s travel to 112 countries and nearly 1 million miles as secretary of state and “offers her views on what it will take for the United States to compete and thrive in an interdependent world. She makes a passionate case for human rights and the full participation in society of women, youth and LGBT people.”
Clinton will also “offer readers a master class in international relations, as does her analysis of how we can best use “smart power” to deliver security and prosperity in a rapidly changing world - one in which America remains the indispensable nation.”
Clinton is already a publishing powerhouse: Her 2003 memoir, “Living History,” sold more than a million copies, and her new book’s release is expected to include a publicity tour with stops around the country. The new book is expected to play an important role in shaping her legacy and setting up a White House bid if she chooses to run.
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