The book has created plenty of speculation about Warren’s 2016 aspirations. Warren: 'I was hurt, and I was angry'

Elizabeth Warren was “hurt” and “angry” about attacks on her family and ancestry in the 2012 Senate race, she writes in a new book, defending at length her characterization of her background as rooted in Native American ancestry.

Warren, the first-term Massachusetts Democratic senator, details her campaign to unseat former GOP Sen. Scott Brown in the book “A Fighting Chance.” POLITICO obtained an early copy of the book, which is set to be released on April 22.


The book begins with some of her earliest childhood memories of growing up poor in Oklahoma and reveals personal details about the senator’s life, including her first, failed marriage. It also dives into her views on the 2008 financial crisis and her role in building the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

( QUIZ: Do you know Elizabeth Warren?)

The book’s upcoming release has already created plenty of speculation about Warren’s potential 2016 aspirations — whether she may run or at least seek to shape the political debate surrounding the presidential race.

If there was one takeaway from her 2012 Senate race for Warren, it was that the campaign trail turned out to be more brutal than she could ever have expected. Republicans questioned her integrity, her family members were dragged through the mud and her opponent mocked her appearance in a radio interview.

“What really threw me, though, were the constant attacks from the other side,” she writes about the 2012 Senate campaign. “I would almost persuade myself that I was starting to get the hang of full-throttle campaigning and then — bam! Out of left field, the state Republican Party, or the Brown campaign, or some blogger, would launch a rocket at me.”

Perhaps the most hurtful and high-profile attack thrown against Warren by Brown had to do with her heritage.

( Also on POLITICO: Poll: Elizabeth Warren is the ‘hottest’)

At the height of the 2012 campaign, it was reported that Warren had listed herself as having Native American roots at Harvard University. Soon, there was a “full-blown campaign frenzy,” Warren recalls, with Republicans demanding that she prove her Native-American roots and accusing her of getting her job at the elite university by making false claims about her personal background.

Caught off-guard, Warren admits that she “fumbled” when reporters first asked her about the controversy.

Things only got worse when the Brown campaign asked whether her parents had lied to their children about her family. “He attacked my dead parents,” Warren writes. “I was hurt, and I was angry.”

Brown’s allegation that Warren had used her background to get ahead “simply wasn’t true,” she writes. “I was stunned by the attacks.”

( Driving the day: Reading Elizabeth Warren)

Warren devotes a section of her book — called “Native American” — to this controversy, explaining that she had simply grown up learning about her Native American background from her family and that as a kid, she had never questioned her family’s stories or asked for documentation.

“Everyone on our mother’s side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry,” she wrote. “My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.”

“A Fighting Chance” is published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company. Warren’s book tour will include stops in New York City, Cambridge, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles.

She has written several books in the past that have had more academic tilts, on issues such as bankruptcy and financial struggles of the middle class.

This latest book is more personal and provides an extensive account of Warren’s journey to Washington that captures how her life experiences helped shape her mission of leveling the playing field for average families against powerful corporations that have “rigged” the system.

In her chronicles of the high-profile campaign against Brown, Warren — who had never run for political office prior to the 2012 Senate race — is also forthright about her mistakes on the trail.

She recalls sitting down for an interview with The Daily Beast, and feeling confused to see the publication run a story under the headline: “Warren Takes Credit for Occupy Wall Street.”

“There must have been a mistake — right?” she thought, but an aide soon informed her that the reporter had correctly quoted her.

“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they [Occupy Wall Street] do,” she had told the Daily Beast reporter. “I was deeply embarrassed. My words sounded so puffy and self-important, and they made it seem as if I were trying to take credit for a protest I wasn’t even part of.”

A big chunk of the book is devoted to Warren’s efforts in Washington following the 2008 financial crisis to create an agency to protect consumers against abuses in the markets for financial products such as mortgages and credit cards.

President Barack Obama asked Warren to be in charge of building the CFPB from scratch after the passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.

At the time, she wasn’t sure that she would have enough support to build an agency she would be happy with or that she would eventually be nominated to be agency’s first director. The White House was under intense pressure to nominate someone less controversial than Warren, who writes that one of the president’s advisers suggested that she may best off serving as the agency’s “cheerleader.”

In a tense conversation outside the Oval Office in September 2010, Warren told the president she didn’t want the job of building the agency while he settled on who should be director.

Frustrated, Obama said: “You’re jamming me, Elizabeth.” He added: “Sometimes you have to trust the president.”

When she finally accepted the president’s request, the task before her felt massive. The creation of the consumer bureau faced fierce backlash from Republican lawmakers and the financial services industry, which was armed with lobbyists dispatched all over Capitol Hill.

The job also required her to report directly to then-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Warren and Geithner hadn’t always seen eye to eye on issues — “He and I just didn’t see banking the same way” — and she had reservations about how they would work together.

But Warren says Geithner not only publicly backed her against attacks, he also defended her in private.

Soon after she accepted the role of building the CFPB, a blurb ran in POLITICO’s Morning Money column that Warren says took her by “surprise.”

Her new office at the Treasury Building was “getting a makeover,” the item said, adding “that’s something of a rarity for Treasury officials, who usually leave their office as-is. There is much internal debate as to exactly what color it is that is going up on Warren’s walls.”

When the Huffington Post ran a story the next day titled, “Are Treasury’s Knives Coming Out Against Elizabeth Warren?” detailing a series of leaks from Treasury that had come out since Warren had arrived, Geithner reached out to her.

“He was direct: I’m sorry about the story about painting your office,” Warren writes. “He told me there would never be another nasty leak about me while I was trying to do my job.”

Warren says she doesn’t know what Geithner did, but the leaks stopped.

Obama ultimately chose former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be CFPB’s first director, disappointing Warren’s supporters but also clearing the way for her to launch a Senate campaign.

A running theme in “A Fighting Chance” is the financial industry’s outsized influence on public officials. In 2010, Warren attended a dinner organized by the Financial Services Roundtable, a D.C.-based lobbying group. She was seated next to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who was “complaining loudly about how painful it was for him to be a Democrat when the Democrats were trying to regulate the banks.”

Looking around the ballroom, Warren says she was struck by how there seemed to be at least one member of Congress seated at every table.

“All those tables and all those lawmakers,” she writes. “Two hours of dinner and conversation. That’s a lot of access.”

Warren’s brief but flattering mention in the book of one potential 2016 presidential candidate — Hillary Clinton — is also sure to create some buzz.

Warren writes that the two had met in 1998 to discuss bankruptcy legislation supported by the finance industry, and that Hillary Clinton vowed to “fight on behalf of working families, against ‘that awful bill.’”

When President Bill Clinton came under pressure from banks to sign the bill, Warren says he was “urged on by his wife” to oppose it. “President Clinton stood strong with struggling families,” Warren writes. “With no public fanfare, he vetoed the industry’s bill.”

In the book, Warren also publicly shares for the first time the details of her failed marriage to her first husband, Jim Warren.

She was 19 years old when she married Jim, the first boy she had ever dated. She dropped out of school, giving up a scholarship from George Washington University, and was soon pregnant with their first child. But Warren was determined to return to school and eventually got a law degree, and her marriage began to fall apart.

“He had married a nineteen-year-old girl, and she hadn’t grown into the woman we had both expected,” she writes. “I was very, very sorry, but I couldn’t change what I had become. I was supposed to be the Betty Crocker award winner, but I set things on fire.”

Warren, who is now married to Harvard law professor Bruce Mann, says she chose to keep her last name to try to make things easier for her children.