NEW YORK • Mrs Hillary Clinton says she will not run for public office again, but the former Democratic presidential nominee is not giving up on trying to make her mark in politics.
"As an active politician, it's over," Mrs Clinton told CBS News in an interview ahead of today's release of What Happened, her memoir about the US election campaign last year and Mr Donald Trump's unexpected win.
"But I am not done with politics because I literally believe that our country's future is at stake."
Ten months after her loss, the former secretary of state and first lady said she was still coping with it.
"I think I am good, but that does not mean that I am complacent or resolved about what happened. It still is very painful," she said in an interview with CBS' Ms Jane Pauley.
Mrs Clinton said she was "amused and surprised" by talk earlier this year that she was considering running for New York mayor. She said she needed to nurture younger leaders in the Democratic Party, adding that she was not going to back down because she lost the presidential race.
"If Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain and Mitt Romney can find positive ways to contribute after their own election defeats, so can I," Mrs Clinton writes in the book.
"I will speak out on the causes I care about, campaign for other Democrats, and do whatever I can to build the infrastructure we need to succeed."
The book includes an accounting for many missteps and strategic errors that Mrs Clinton said she made during the campaign, and for which she explicitly takes responsibility.
"The most important of the mistakes I made was using personal e-mail," Mrs Clinton told Ms Pauley. The book includes a defence of her decision as secretary of state to use an e-mail account hosted on a server in her home for official business.
Another mistake that Mrs Clinton sets out in the book was to deliver paid speeches to Wall Street firms after leaving the State Department. While her speeches "weren't newsworthy," she writes, they gave her opponents ammunition to use against her.
"My opponents spun wild tales about what terrible things I must have said behind closed doors and how, as president, I would be forever in the pocket of the shadowy bankers who had paid my speaking fees. I should have seen that coming," Mrs Clinton writes.
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