Hulu’s <em>Hillary</em> Is a Warning

Burstein laughed after sharing the anecdote. “That was across the board,” she told me, listing other Republicans, including Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Lindsey Graham—who wrote a tribute to Clinton in Time magazine in 2006—as major names she tried hard to recruit. “They all just said no,” Burstein said. “That surprised me.” Then again, she noted, she had been interested in exploring Clinton’s divisiveness. These rejections made for the perfect, albeit unusable, proof.

When Clinton agreed to participate in Hillary, she wasn’t quite sure what she was in for. She wasn’t informed of the list of sources Burstein had reached out to, or whether the footage would be turned into a film or a series, or whether anything she said in her 35 hours of interviews—“marathons,” as she put it—would be useful. In fact, she told me that same day in Pasadena, she remembered less about herself than Burstein did.

“[Nanette] had really mastered my life,” Clinton marveled, adding that Burstein spent a year studying her before turning the camera on. “She remembered things about my life in a sequence that I didn’t remember! Like, ‘Did that happen then?’ ‘Yes, that happened then.’ ‘Oh, okay!’ …  I’m in awe of what they pulled together, because it would be impossible for me to take even the 35 hours of my interview and make sense of it. It was all over the place.”

Burstein overprepared for a reason. She’d hoped her extensive research would help Clinton process her past more deeply and openly when the time came for their interviews. This would be the first time in decades, she reasoned, that Clinton would be able to engage in a wide-ranging conversation about herself as a private citizen. “This is the first time she hasn’t had to be careful,” Burstein said.

Indeed, even during our conversation, Clinton seemed eager to be able to speak openly about the upcoming presidential election; she sees the candidates facing the same issues that she did in 2016. “As I’ve told every one of the candidates that I’ve talked to, ‘Voter suppression is still going to hurt you. The stealing of your emails and the weaponization of them will hurt you. The fake news propaganda, especially with Facebook not reining in false ads—that will help people who spread false information.’” She added, “So the press has to be more vigilant, voters have to be more vigilant, social media should take more responsibility, which apparently only some will do, not all. And that’s going to be the contest.”

Clinton’s bluntness emerges throughout the docuseries. When reflecting on her attempts to reform health care as the first lady, she admits that she made “a mistake.” When talking about her 2016 primary opponent and current presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, she calls him a “career politician” who “got nothing done,” to the consternation of Sanders’s supporters. And when she discusses her loss to Donald Trump, she’s forthright. “I was totally emotionally wrecked. I felt like I let everybody down,” she says in the final episode. “I was the one who didn’t figure it out… I have to take responsibility.” This is a Clinton less guarded, showing her pain—and her pride. “I am the most investigated innocent person in America,” she jokingly laments at one point. These moments provide a stark contrast to the Clinton seen in archival footage, who trained herself to temper her reactions in public after early mishaps drew backlash. Hillary frames the Clinton of yesteryear as a woman who learned that to be taken seriously as a lawmaker, she’d have to wear a mask. She never fully removes it, of course, but in her interviews with Burstein, it occasionally slips.

Sharing her thoughts out loud for hours on end seems to have been liberating for Clinton. Burstein, heard in a few scenes but never appears on camera, encourages her subject to explain why she’s been asked to answer for the same things year after year and why she’s the topic of such fervent debate—a subject Clinton has thought about endlessly. “It’s just the reality of my life,” Clinton explained to me. “I’m a historic figure because I was a part of history. I’ve tried to make a difference and to promote causes that I believe in.”