John F. Harris is editor-in-chief of Politico and author of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House.

Hillary Clinton was likable enough, answering questions calmly though with a weary smile. She even offered a feint toward humility, allowing that, “looking back,” perhaps there was a “smarter” way for her to have handled her correspondence as secretary of state besides bypassing official government email entirely.

Beneath the politesse, however, was an unmistakable message in her 21-minute news conference in New York on Tuesday, easily distilled into three short words: Go to hell.


No, Clinton said, she did not violate the law or rules when, for reasons of “convenience,” she used a private email account in her years as the nation’s top diplomat.

No, she said, this matter does not need to be turned over to some outsider who can examine the Clinton family’s private email server and independently assess her assertion that she has already given to the State Department any correspondence that might conceivably be of public interest.

And no, she clearly believes, even if she did not explicitly say, she’s not going to pretend that this latest uproar is on the level, that the reporters and politicians second-guessing her judgments and clamoring for more answers have anything but self-interested motives in fanning the controversy.

How essentially combative was Clinton? The main piece of news to emerge from the session was her confusingly worded disclosure that she has already deleted the emails that she believes are no one’s business but her own.

Go to hell is not typically a sentiment expressed by politicians on the brink of a presidential campaign. But in Hillary Clinton’s case, it reflects a sincerely held belief that has been nearly a quarter-century in the making. Even Clinton opponents would have to acknowledge that she has some very good reasons for thinking the way she does.

The same sort of drama, with news conferences and investigations and the uncomfortable blurring of public and private, has played out during literally dozens of episodes over the years—on such seemingly disparate matters as the Clinton marriage, a West Wing suicide, their White House travel office, their efforts to reform health care, their campaign fundraising. The common theme is the tension between privacy, which Hillary Clinton prizes, and a conviction among journalists and others in the political class that those in high public office (or aspiring to it), like the Clintons, should be prepared to surrender nearly all of it.

Unspoken publicly in this latest controversy, but clearly understood among veterans of Hillary Clinton’s circle, is her belief that the pious clamor for more disclosure and more revelation is fundamentally insincere. The media-political complex is not seeking a window into matters of public interest; it is looking for a weapon, one that will be brandished to produce still more stories or start still more investigations.

What’s more, it is an article of faith among Clinton confidants that demands for public disclosure tend to get used more against Democrats, and more against the Clintons specifically, than against Republicans. The subtext: Do you think Dick Cheney worried that the editorial pages were mad that he held secret meetings with energy CEOs or tried to keep wide swaths of White House decision-making about terrorism secret from both the media and Congress?

It was against this context that Hillary Clinton on Tuesday sought both to project nondefensiveness— Sure, I’m happy to answer some questions—and draw some unmistakable lines— I don’t give a damn if you don’t like my answers.

She was simply unresponsive when it came to the question of how and whether it will affect her plans to run for president in 2016, plans that are well advanced and in fact may now be moved forward as a result of the email controversy. Then again, that, too, may not entirely be a surprise: People with long memories will recall that Clinton presidential campaigns have a way of launching amid awkward questions about the past.

In September 1991, just weeks before Bill Clinton formally announced his first presidential campaign, political advisers like Mickey Kantor, Frank Greer and Stan Greenberg worked up the nerve to tell the Clintons they would simply have to address a matter slightly more delicate than today’s somewhat wonkish dispute over custody of State Department emails: Rumors that Bill Clinton’s extramarital wanderings could sink his campaign the same way fellow Democrat Gary Hart’s had four years before.

The result was an appearance by the couple at a Washington institution known as the Sperling Breakfast, attended by political reporters from the major newspapers. "We have been together for almost 20 years and we are committed to each other,” Bill Clinton said, while gazing affectionately at his wife. “It has not been perfect or free from problems, but we are committed to each other and that ought to be enough."

Alas, it was not enough, as uproars over adultery months later rocked the campaign, and years later rocked the presidency.

Watching her performance on Tuesday, all these years later, it was hard not to remember that moment and to wonder if beneath her crisply rehearsed answers— don’t sound defensive; don’t give any ground—Hillary Clinton was asking herself, “Does the questioning of my motives ever end? Am I really ready to do this again?”

By all evidence, of course, the answers are no, the questions won’t end, and yes, she is ready to wage a presidential campaign all over again, with an announcement now reportedly coming within weeks.

Bill Clinton himself likes to say that “all presidential campaigns are about the future.” He survived his own controversies in part because of his personal ebullience and native optimism. But it is hard to believe that the desultory, backward-looking, here-we-go-again mood created by this email controversy is what the doctor would order at this moment in Hillary Clinton’s career, when someone who has spent the past generation as the most famous woman in the world must project fresh energy and a forward-facing vision.

Which will voters see: the aggrieved candidate reminding us of the aggrieved 2008 loser and the aggrieved first lady before that? Or the obsessive media and those conspiring Republicans, trapped and stale in their Clinton obsessions of the past?

***

Shortly before Clinton’s news conference aired on Tuesday, the political commentator David Gergen was on the air saying she would be well served by turning over the private email server to independent authorities at the State Department—that this would show transparency and allow her to shift the focus to the more worthy substance of her coming campaign.

Most viewers probably did not know that this was an echo of a now ancient argument. In passionate terms, in late 1993 and early 1994, Hillary Clinton had argued with Gergen, then a Bill Clinton White House adviser, and other political aides like George Stephanopoulos that it would be folly to agree to voluntary records disclosure and appointment of an independent prosecutor to look into questions about their private investments in Arkansas.

She lost the argument. The next several years saw Whitewater metastasize into Lewinsky, as investigators who found nothing illegal in the Clintons’ land dealings trained their investigative sights on fellatio (or at least false testimony related thereto). While opponents failed in driving Bill Clinton from office, they succeeded in sapping vast time and energy from his presidency. And, despite the jeers her comment has recently provoked now that they are jet-setting multimillionaires, the Clintons did indeed leave the White House “dead broke” (if only temporarily) from millions of dollars in legal bills.

In 1994, amid questions about Whitewater, Hillary Clinton held what became famous as the “pink press conference” (so-named because of the color of her St. John sweater). The idea was to strike a nondefensive stance, acknowledge some mistakes not of propriety but of process and say that she had learned her lesson about the need to be more transparent. While she always believed in a zone of privacy, Clinton told the reporters back then, she recognized that in the modern political culture, “I’ve been rezoned.”

If there was one thing we were reminded of in Tuesday’s news conference, it is that, 21 years later, the zoning wars are still going strong.