Book may pave way for Clinton’s 2016 campaign

Hillary Clinton’s upcoming book will be called Hard Choices, a title that reflects how the potential 2016 presidential candidate may try to define her record as president Barack Obama’s secretary of state while she considers another White House campaign.

Publisher Simon & Schuster said the new book, to be released on June 10, will offer Clinton’s “inside account of the crises, choices and challenges” she faced as secretary of state and “how those experiences drive her view of the future”.

“All of us face hard choices in our lives,” Clinton writes at the start of the book, according to the publisher. “Life is about making these choices, and how we handle them shapes the people we become.”

Clinton’s State Department memoir will hit bookshelves as the former first lady and New York senator sits atop polls about hypothetical candidates as the leading Democratic contender should she seek the presidency. Since leaving the State Department, Clinton has travelled widely, giving speeches to industry groups, college students and others while joining the foundation led by her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

Clinton’s potential candidacy has been eagerly anticipated by Democrats, who frequently ask Clinton about her intentions and encourage her to try to become the nation’s first female president. A series of Democratic outside groups is already building support for a future campaign, and Republicans are actively critiquing her record.

Republicans have criticised Clinton’s response to the killing of four Americans in the 2012 attacks on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and questioned her handling of relations with Russia. In 2009, Clinton memorably gave Russia’s top diplomat a red button labelled, “reset,” to symbolise how US relations had thawed, but the button was mistranslated into Russian.

In the aftermath of Russia’s bold annexation of Ukraine’s strategic Crimean peninsula, Republicans have suggested it represented a naiveté.

Meanwhile, Chelsea Clinton, 34, is pregnant with first child.

The 34-year-old announced she and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, are expecting their first child this autumn.