As Hillary Clinton prepares to step down as Secretary of State, the former presidential candidate told Marie Claire magazine in a wide-ranging interview that she will not run for president in 2016.
Although Clinton said she will be cheering for whoever becomes the first female president, she insisted that she is looking forward to having her life back again – away from the public sphere.
“I have been on this high wire of national and international politics and leadership for 20 years," she said. "It has been an absolutely extraordinary personal honor and experience. But I really want to just have my own time back. I want to just be my own person.”
Clinton also offered her opinion of last summer’s cover story in The Atlantic entitled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All," written by Clinton’s former director of policy planning Anne-Marie Slaughter. In the piece, Slaughter, the mother of two teenage boys, describes how she felt obliged to quit her job.
When asked about the article, Clinton’s disapproval was “palpable,” Marie Claire’s Ayelet Waldman writes.
“Some women are not comfortable working at the pace and intensity you have to work at in these jobs… Other women don’t break a sweat,” Clinton said, emphasizing that Slaughter’s problems were her own. “I can’t stand whining. I can’t stand the kind of paralysis that some people fall into because they’re not happy with the choices they've made.”
However, a spokesperson said Clinton was not slamming Anne-Marie Slaughter, claiming instead that Clinton's remarks condemned Holden Caulfield, the fictional character from "The Catcher in the Rye."
“With all due respect to JD Salinger,” Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines said in a release, “it’s clear as day from the transcript that the only person being called a whiner is his fictional character Holden Caulfield."
Slaughter herself took to Twitter after the article was published online to respond to the claim that Clinton's disapproval was aimed at her.
"Hillary Clinton, for whom I have the greatest admiration and loyalty, was not talking about me when she mentioned whining. #anything4astory," she tweeted.
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