Hillary Clinton Had Nothing to Do With My Book About the First Woman to Be Elected President<br />Many Liberian women said they were sure that Mrs. Clinton, upon election, would make Liberia one of the first places she visited, so she<br />and Mrs. Sirleaf could stand side-by-side as two icons of female political empowerment.<br />In this article, Helene Cooper, The Times’s Pentagon correspondent, writes about the "life-changing moment"<br />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.<br />But Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with my book about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,<br />the first woman democratically elected president of an African country.<br />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<br />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.<br />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<br />that of whomever took her place, on a joint agreement enshrining American support for Liberia.<br />When the men in Liberia said "no Weah, no peace" — a threat<br />that the country would return to war if their man wasn’t elected — the women ignored them and fought back.<br />For the first time in history, the women of Liberia rose up as one, and elected a woman president: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
