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.