Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

She wasn’t always like this. She wasn’t always a woman who could almost collapse in public, then emerge from seclusion a couple of hours later announcing, “I’m feeling great,” as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn’t already known for two days that she had pneumonia. And her opponents didn’t always accuse her of a “lack of transparency”—be it over Benghazi or a bacterial infection—the now-reflexive instinct that her fellow Democrat David Axelrod denounced this week as “an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems.”

No, Hillary Rodham Clinton was once willing to share her deepest thoughts and feelings, as she did in a 1993 speech on “the politics of meaning,” delivered as her father lay dying, in which she said the country was suffering “a sleeping sickness of the soul,” and urged her fellow citizens “to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century.”


Her reward? She was roundly, relentlessly ridiculed, most infamously in a New York Times cover story, titled “Saint Hillary,” by the late Michael Kelly, in which she expounded at even greater length on her personal passions, unaware that Kelly would use them to mock her for high-minded earnestness. In those interviews, the public Hillary Clinton was altogether different than the one the public sees today: less guarded, more candid, far more eager to embrace the “larger message” she’s so often criticized for lacking now. When Kelly suggested to her that she was “trying to come up with a sort of unified-field theory of life,” she responded in what he described as “excited” tones: "That's right, that's exactly right!"

“She is, it develops in the course of two long conversations,” Kelly wrote then, “looking for a way of looking at the world that would marry conservatism and liberalism, and capitalism and statism, that would tie together practically everything: the way we are, the way we were, the faults of man and the word of God, the end of Communism and the beginning of the third millennium, crime in the streets and on Wall Street, teenage mothers and foul-mouthed children and frightening drunks in the parks, the cynicism of the press and the corrupting role of television, the breakdown of civility and the loss of community.”

Clinton would arguably never again sound so open, so vulnerable, so searching, so full of hope. Slowly, inexorably over the years, she has grown a harder and harder shell until, like Marley’s ghost, she now wears the chain she’s forged in life, link by link and yard by yard. The effects of that armor plating are obvious. A desire for privacy has congealed into a demand for secrecy. Candor is dangerous; artifice is safe. Full disclosure is for suckers; hunkering down is the only way to win. Above all, too much honesty about yourself brings you only more grief.

It’s a lesson that’s been drummed into Clinton over and over again for the past quarter century. Reporters threw her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech—in which she said her class was “searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living—back at her as an example of self-indulgent ‘60s gobbledygook. In the 1992 campaign, when she said defended her career by saying that she “could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas,” and defended her straying husband by saying she was “not sitting here—some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” she was excoriated in many quarters (if praised in some others).

So, little by little, she gave in. And shut down. And clammed up. Even, perhaps, covered up a bit. She drafted her proposed overhaul of the nation's health insurance system in almost complete secrecy, and paid a terrible political price. She stonewalled on inquiries into her and her husband's business dealings, eventually all but assuring the appointment of the special prosecutor whose sprawling inquiry ultimately led to impeachment.

And now she is reluctant even to hold news conferences—on Thursday, after weeks of public pressure culminating in the health-scare imbroglio, she held one of the very few she’s had all year.

I witnessed the gradual Hardening of Hillary myself, as a reporter for The New York Times who covered the Clinton White House. On her first solo trip abroad—to South Asia in 1995—she talked to me and other reporters traveling with her on almost every leg of the journey. But she insisted that all conversations be off the record, so it was almost impossible to reflect her curiosity and sometimes earthy sense of humor, including a long middle-of-the-night ramble about public obsession with her hair styles. When reporters told her at one point how impressive Chelsea, then 15, had been, she sighed, "Ah, yes, but now I have to take her home and put her back in purdah," referencing the Muslim and Hindu practice of secluding women behind curtains and veils.

For all the public grind of this campaign, for all her public presence on the world stage over the past two decades, Clinton herself has increasingly spent her days in a kind of purdah, suppressing spontaneous utterances and surrounded by loyalists whose chief role is her care and feeding. She communicates only through a veil of unyielding self-protection, surrounded by a curtain of defensiveness.

On her first solo trip abroad as First Lady—to South Asia in 1995—Clinton insisted that all conversations be off the record. | Getty

So nowadays, almost no one outside Clinton’s innermost circle ever sees the tender side that loyal aides and friends insist is such a palpable part of her personality, but I can attest that it is there. When my father took his own life 20 years ago, she left me a solicitous voice mail, recommended books on suicide and months later was still asking how my family and I were coping. She shared her own grief over the suicide of her friend Vince Foster in an utterly unguarded way.

No more.

Today, Clinton is within reach of her longtime dream, becoming the first female president. But the latest polls show that she is still struggling against a GOP candidate whom even many of his fellow Republicans have described as unfit and whom most smart money says she would be trouncing if she didn’t have serious candor and credibility issues of her own. That’s the Hillary Clinton who provokes roughly 6 in 10 voters into repeatedly telling pollsters they do not see her as honest and trustworthy. The Hillary Clinton who can’t seem to get out of her own way, even when it comes to a simple story of whether she had the flu (her husband’s account) or pneumonia, and whether she was fine or not.

***

The transformation of Hillary Clinton didn’t happen overnight, of course, or as the result of one or two bad stories. As a Midwesterner, and a Methodist, Clinton has never comfortably worn her heart on her sleeve in the manner of her husband. She is cautious by instinct and lawyerly by training. Her introduction to the national political media came in the white-hot glare of Gennifer Flowers, Whitewater and the history of her husband’s Vietnam draft record, a baptism that friends say left her forever scarred.

“If your first experience with your private life going public was that humiliating and that haunting, you would be camera-shy, too,” says one longtime former Clinton White House aide. “Scared of what happens when stuff about your personal life—whether it’s family, medical or sexual, is scrutinized.”

Hillary with reporter Helen Thomas in a White House hallway. | Getty

And through the long string of controversies and investigations that dogged the Clintons’ White House years and culminated in impeachment, Hillary Clinton was a consistent advocate for nondisclosure, and a perennial voice that sharing information—with prosecutors, Congress or the press—almost never paid off.

In Clinton’s view, each surrender of documents, each opening of files, led to further unrelenting inquiry from prosecutors or partisan political enemies. Even some of her strongest defenders and supporters privately acknowledge that her decision to use a personal email server as secretary of state undoubtedly stemmed from her wish to keep communications that she regarded as private out of prying hands on Capitol Hill or in the press.

“She is so tortured by the way she’s been treated that she would do anything to get out of the situation,” Mark Fabiani, who helped manage the White House’s Whitewater defense strategy, told Clinton’s biographer Carl Bernstein. “And if that involved not being fully forthcoming, she herself would say, ‘I have a reason for not being forthcoming,’” reasoning that, “If we do this, they’re going to do this to me. If we say this, then they’re going to say this. You know … let’s just not do that.”

One of Clinton’s oldest friends and most loyal advisers told me at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia that she was so distrustful, so certain that her enemies would be out to undo her if she’s elected, that she would probably run the most secretive White House in presidential history.

Clinton has said that, like her late mother, Dorothy Rodham, she rarely reveals her innermost feelings, even to her closest friends. At the height of the Monica Lewinsky affair, her longtime friend Diane Blair would later recall, “She would call me, but she never called and said, ‘What should we do about this? I’m going insane. I don’t know what to believe.’ Nothing. And when the other shoe dropped the week of his grand jury testimony—and it was clear that there had been a relationship with Lewinsky … She could not talk to anyone.”

Such intense self-discipline has taken its toll. In 1996, just after she became the first first lady in history to be subpoenaed by a grand jury, Clinton was asked by The Boston Globe whether she thought her tenure “a failure,” and she answered with typical sangfroid, and then, when the reporter left the room, burst into tears.

The former Clinton adviser David Gergen, in his memoir of working for four presidents, recalls a similar burst of emotion when he called Clinton to try to buck her up in early 1994, just weeks after she had rebuffed his strong urging to turn over Whitewater-related documents to The Washington Post. “As we talked,” Gergen writes, “she started crying. ‘You can tell your friends at the Post that we’ve learned our lesson. We came here to do good things, and we just didn’t understand so many things about this town. It’s been so hard.”

With each passing year—and crisis—the shell she developed grew harder, to the point that few people expected tears ever to come again. So when Clinton shows any emotion these days it amounts to a major news story, as happened in New Hampshire in 2008 when a female voter managed to breach the shell with a simple question, “How do you do it?” and Clinton teared up. The headlines were dramatic, and sometimes unsparing. “Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?” Maureen Dowd asked in The New York Times.

Indeed, another longtime Clinton aide suggests that the former first lady’s long-standing propensity to stonewall and dissemble when challenged stems from her disappointment that anyone would doubt the purity of her motives. “I think it relates to her unfailing belief in her own moral compass and surprise, even after all this time, that anyone would question it,” this aide says.

It’s now beyond dispute that Clinton’s reticence has hurt her in this campaign. She has issued rafts of position papers on almost every issue, but her failure to articulate a single bold theme or overarching message (like the “politics of meaning”) has left her with a platform that reads like “One from Column A and Two from Column B.” Her reluctance to engage in public introspection undercuts what should be a natural advantage over Donald Trump, perhaps the least introspective presidential nominee in history. And her initial refusal to let even most of the key aides charged with running her campaign—and shaping her strategy—know that she was being treated for pneumonia lent credence to suggestions by Trump and Internet conspiracy theorists that she must have something to hide.

It’s not clear that Clinton’s inner circle these days is populated by anyone willing to talk tough to her. Her closest aide, Huma Abedin, is dealing with her own role in the email investigation (and the fallout from her separation from her husband, Anthony Weiner), as is her longtime counselor Cheryl Mills. Clinton’s decision to keep campaign aides in the dark about her diagnosis suggests not only that she believed she could power through her illness, but that she didn’t want to hear advice to the contrary.

“I just didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal,” Clinton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Clinton leaves daughter's apartment building after resting on September 11, 2016, in New York. | Getty

Even after video footage of her all but falling into the back seat of her minivan at the 9/11 anniversary commemoration went viral—and she spent some 90 minutes recuperating and rehydrating in her daughter Chelsea’s apartment—she offered no explanation whatever to waiting reporters, not even the simplest, most human one: that she’d felt hot and dizzy and needed water and a place to cool off. Only hours later did her campaign finally acknowledge that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days earlier.

“Everyone has a blind spot, but in the case of the Clintons and the press, it’s a Jackson Pollock,” another former White House aide says, suggesting that great blobs obscure their vision across a wide canvas. “The most ironic thing about this is that she worked on the Watergate Committee. One would think that experience would sear into you the idea that the coverup can have far worse effects than the action. Or maybe that transparency makes sense. Or that it’s worth taking the hit up front instead of letting the fight go the full 15 rounds and end up bloodied and beaten. For some reason— despite extraordinary evidence to the contrary—they don’t get it.”

The aides who staffed the Clinton White House, and the journalists who covered it, liked to think we were operating in a 24-7 news media environment, with the rise of cable television and then the Internet. But Clinton’s aides say that the speed with which information moves today—and then recirculates and is distorted in the darkest corners of cyberspace—has only reinforced Clinton’s conviction that the less said, the better.

Paradoxically (or perhaps, tellingly), the imbroglio over Clinton’s secrecy about her health came barely 36 hours after one of the few times all year when she delivered herself of an unvarnished opinion, declaring at a New York fundraiser that half of Trump’s supporters could be lumped into what she called a “basket of deplorables,” a collection of “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it,” people. She made the comment at 1 of only 6 fundraisers (out of more than 300 she’s held this election cycle) that was open to media coverage. And the swift reaction of much of the punditocracy was all too familiar: How dare she say such a thing?

So Clinton would feel entitled to believe she is damned if she does, and damned if she doesn’t—a sentiment she herself has expressed more than once. Twenty-three years ago, when The New York Times’ Kelly asked why she, as an unelected presidential spouse, should set herself the task of attempting to remake society, she jumped “hard on the point,” as he put it.

The question is “irrelevant to me,” Clinton said then. “I know that no matter what I did—if I did nothing, if I spent my entire day totally disengaged from what was going on around me—I’d be criticized for that. I mean, it’s a no-win deal, no matter what I do, or try to do.”

Such fatalism predicts only one possible result: A plentiful lack of transparency, no matter what happens on Nov. 8. If Clinton loses the race to Trump, she’ll really learn what a “no-win deal” is, and she’d doubtless spend the rest of her days blaming a cynical media and partisan enemies, rather than her own personal judgment. If she wins, on the other hand, the victory will vindicate, in her mind, the stonewalling approach she’s taken for years. And the rest of us will no doubt bear witness to one of the least transparent administrations in American history.