Page 34 - Harvard Business Review, November-December 2018

You look at the alternatives—crying into your teacup, pulling away from the field, becoming a

hermit—and acknowledge that those are pretty stupid choices. I was not going to be cowed. I was

not going to quit. The issues I was fighting for didn’t all suddenly go away. So I just decided, I’m
going back to work.

After your time as a protester and an attorney, why did you choose to enter politics?

Because I felt that the best way to make the government work was to run for office, represent

people, and build the movement inside Congress. For a long time that path worked. Look at civil
rights legislation in the 1960s. Look at what President Obama did with health care. Nothing gave

me more pleasure than working in committee to come up with meaningful legislation that could

pass and change the lives of people who didn’t have health insurance.

You wrote that while developing that legislation, you were determined not to make the perfect
the enemy of the good.

Yes. Ted Kennedy always talked about how, earlier in his career, he’d had a chance to get a partial

health care bill passed, but other members of Congress said, “No, we’ve got to hold out for a fully
paid government program.” So instead they got nothing for 35 years. When health care came up

again, I and others argued that sometimes you need to take what you can get and build on it.

That’s a very important lesson for anybody in anything. You don’t cut off your nose to spite your

face.

When you were a junior senator, you didn’t have much authority. How did you work relationships

and process to wield inuence?

A lot of politics is personal. People care about whether you understand what their lives are like

and how certain circumstances—a different state with a different constituency and different

issues—might make things difficult. To be there in crisis or when they’re down matters. If you can

show that you’re not just asking people to walk the plank—that you care about them and their

future and are sensitive to how you can shape what you’re working on to help them—boy, you get
a lot of things done. You’ve also got to learn the process. When I joined the Senate, I watched my

colleague Ted Kennedy very carefully to see how he maneuvered. There’s a great deal of

backroom, back-channel work in the making of legislation. Some people think, “I’ll just put this

bill in and it will carry through with its own natural weight,” but it doesn’t work that way.

Through all the campaigns and legislative sessions and your stint as secretary of state, how did

you make time for your family?