Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

By now, you know the news nuggets from Hillary Clinton’s new campaign memoir, What Happened. You know that she blames herself for the most shocking upset in American political history, while indicting (in varying degrees of anger and exasperation) Bernie Sanders, James Comey, the New York Times, racism, cable news, sexism and Russia as co-conspirators.

You know that she was shellshocked for weeks after Election Day, turning to friends, yoga, inspirational homilies, her family and chardonnay, to ease herself back into the world.


But the real headline to come out of this book—a far more engaging read than the pablum-rich account of her years as secretary of state, Hard Choices—is that she has definitively answered the question that has been asked about her for more than a quarter-century: Who is she?

All through her public life, Clinton has been hobbled by the label “inauthentic.” Her changing hairstyles, her choice of baseball teams, her circle-the-wagons approach to the press—they’ve all felt, to the public, like symptoms of the lack of a core. It’s almost as if Winston Churchill was anticipating her public persona when he proclaimed at a dinner table, “this pudding has no theme.” Her own loyal army of campaign aides seem to have been wrestling with this dilemma; the best-seller Shattered, the post-mortem of her presidential campaign, is filled with accounts of desperate attempts to find a slogan, a stump speech, a campaign ad, that could communicate the essential Hillary. And her primal fear of being distorted—a fear with some rational basis—has led her to approach every public utterance as if she was at the edge of a cliff. Longtime aide Patti Solis Doyle said last year, “You can see her think about the words coming out of her mouth, knowing she knows, ‘I have to be careful about what I say.'”

Her book suggests, though, that the person we’ve seen over the past quarter-century, and the person we watched seek the presidency twice, is the authentic Hillary. In fact, to judge by her book, she may have been the most authentic person in the race. The lengthy analysis of why voters behaved as they did, the detailed accounts of the programs she intended to pursue as president, the ways in which racism and misogyny played out in blatant and subtle forms, all paint the picture of a very smart, deeply engaged self-described “policy wonk,” who is consumed by the need to conquer problems with an army of data-driven policies, and whose instinctive resistance to visionary politics proved to be one of her biggest handicaps in her (presumably) last run.

And if she seemed out of touch and unable to connect to voters in a changed America—unable to understand why a significant majority of voters saw her as untrustworthy—well, in a sense, What Happened suggests that that was “authentic” too, the flaw of a person who still retains blind spots in trying to understand the limits of her appeal.

Clinton has been trying to tell us who she is through much of her public life. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, she acknowledged that it hasn’t been easy. “Through all these years of public service,” she said, “the ‘service’ part has always come easier to me than the ‘public’ part. I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me.”

Her book strikes the same note of understanding and puzzlement: "What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I'm really asking. I'm at a loss.”

In telling her campaign story, Clinton—like almost every other politician—tries to put a human face on her politics by recounting stories of the men and women she has met along the way. But the temperature of the book really rises on two fronts: when she recounts, with specificity unlike any political memoir I’ve read, precisely how and why she believes she was wronged, and when she revisits the ideas she had intended to offer as president.

Her account of the email story that consumed her campaign (“It was like quicksand: the more you struggle, the deeper you sink.”) illustrates the point. She calls it a “boneheaded mistake” that she and her staff used a private server as secretary of state and deleted more than 30,000 emails before handing her files over to State Department record-keepers. But she also devotes page after page to arguing that there was nothing unprecedented about what she did, that there was no threat to national security, and that the New York Times’ front-page story about her email was seriously inaccurate. Her fury at former FBI Director Comey for his public statement in July is unabated, as is her conviction that his late October reopening of the email investigation cost her the election; she cites polls from battleground states, Nate Silver’s analysis and anecdotal accounts from her campaign aides to argue that this led to her defeat. (See Jack Shafer’s recent piece here making a different case.)

Similarly, her account of Russia’s interference in the election reads like a prosecutor's brief (and along the way offers a highly useful guide to any reader who is confused by the avalanche of allegations), and she takes a seriously deep dive into the impact of sexism and racism on her campaign, reaching beyond political polls into social psychology as well.

What drives her just as powerfully as her (understandable) anger is her conviction that she knew how to address the country’s ills. She is clearly frustrated by the argument—offered by ex-Vice President Biden among others—that she failed to connect with the white working class. You and the media weren’t listening, she says in effect. Here are the speeches I made in coal country; here’s what I said in Ohio and Michigan; here are my ideas to bring new businesses to the Rust Belt; here are my plans to make it easier for displaced workers to move to where the jobs are. Here’s my massive infrastructure agenda, with higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for it. And the media were too consumed by the email story, too dazzled by Donald Trump’s reality-TV skills, to pay attention.

The arguments in her book have real weight, and for what it’s worth, PolitiFact has given her high marks for accuracy.

But here’s what’s not in the book: Any understanding of what else, other than sexism and “fake news,” might have made her the second most unpopular presidential candidate in polling history.

At root, Clinton seems to see herself—both personally and as a political figure—as she was a quarter-century ago, not as she was as of 2016. To understand this, look at the root contrast between the Clintons who ran for office in 1992 and the Clintons who ran last year.

Bill, in 1992, was still very much a son of small-town Arkansas (Georgetown, Yale Law and Oxford notwithstanding); Hillary, by 2016, was a creature of Washington and New York, with stops in Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons along the way.

Bill was the lowest-paid governor of any state in the union, making $35,000 a year, while his wife practiced law to pay the bills. Hillary, when she ran, was part of a couple with a net worth well over $100 million, with a life of privilege ranging from private jets to vacations with the Oscar de la Rentas to bestowing similar bounty to the next generation. (Her book is filled with genuinely warm accounts of her life as a mother and grandmother, but never mentions that Chelsea Clinton existed in a world of five-figure speeches, six-figure jobs and a seven-figure home).

Bill campaigned at a time when his centrist impulses fit the desires of a Democratic Party that had been shut out of the White House for a dozen years, and was willing, if not eager, to endorse a candidate who condemned the “brain-dead” politics of his own party—and who was at pains to demonstrate his toughness on crime, embracing the death penalty, appearing in front of a “wall in blue.” Hillary campaigned at a time when those same centrist impulses were in conflict with a party that had moved steadily to the left, that had become far more reliant on minority votes, and that was drawn to the siren songs of Bernie Sanders. (Her frustration as she pushed back against Sanders’ grandiose promises with her own carefully structured arguments on health care and college education jumps off the page.)

Perhaps most fundamentally, Clinton still seems trapped by one central failure of vision: Because (like Bill) she knows she is on the side of the angels, how could anyone impute bad motives to her or her husband?

Her husband’s walk across the tarmac to say hello to Attorney General Loretta Lynch when she was under investigation? “Bad optics,” but they simply exchanged pleasantries. Her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other financial giants? “Bad optics,” but “like other former government officials,” she was simply sharing her views with paying audiences. And when Trump brought to a debate three women who had accused Bill Clinton of various degrees of sexually predatory behavior? This was all about issues “litigated decades ago,” she writes—apparently unwilling to see how Bill’s behavior, painfully aired out during his own presidency, would now help protect Trump from the consequences of his own egregious, possibly criminal, behavior.

In What Happened, Clinton notes that some of her oldest and closest friends and advisers urged her not to run in 2016. She does not say so, but it may be that those members of her inner circle saw the “authentic” Clinton, and grasped that her significant authentic strengths—her intelligence, her preference for practical, data-driven policies over sweeping promises—would not be enough to overcome the authentic weaknesses of a candidate who would find herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even for someone who saw her as a deeply flawed candidate, to read What Happened is to feel a genuine pang of regret that a person with Hillary Clinton’s impressive set of policy skills will never get to use them in the Oval Office. But it is also to recognize that if she is looking at the forces that kept her from the job she was well prepared to do, she is also looking into a mirror.