Hillary Clinton Had Nothing to Do With My Book About the First Woman to Be Elected President

Hillary Clinton Had Nothing to Do With My Book About the First Woman to Be Elected President
Many Liberian women said they were sure that Mrs. Clinton, upon election, would make Liberia one of the first places she visited, so she
and Mrs. Sirleaf could stand side-by-side as two icons of female political empowerment.
In this article, Helene Cooper, The Times’s Pentagon correspondent, writes about the "life-changing moment"
that led to her new book, "Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf." WASHINGTON — When you are working on a book about the first woman to be elected president, you get a lot of flack about Hillary Clinton.
But Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with my book about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,
the first woman democratically elected president of an African country.
They flung back any dirt the men could throw and swamped the polls, adopting the phrase "Vote for Woman." The woman in Bukavu was on
my mind when I went to Liberia to research the book I wanted to write about Mrs. Sirleaf and the campaign that brought her to power.
Mrs. Sirleaf herself had taken a special trip to the United States in the last days of Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State so she could get Mrs. Clinton’s signature, and not
that of whomever took her place, on a joint agreement enshrining American support for Liberia.
When the men in Liberia said "no Weah, no peace" — a threat
that the country would return to war if their man wasn’t elected — the women ignored them and fought back.
For the first time in history, the women of Liberia rose up as one, and elected a woman president: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.