High school for Hillary included the chance to develop some of the skills and ideas that she would later transfer to the national arena. Class officer and organizer, she learned to speak in front of a student body of several hundred and when she graduated in 1965, classmates singled her out as the girl in her class most “likely to succeed,”15 an accolade that signaled both affability and perseverance. Her political philosophy was still in the making because she combined what appears to have been genuine commitment to social progress with a hearty distaste for big government. As a high school senior, she backed Republican Barry Goldwater for president, and when she entered Wellesley College in September 1965, she did so as a Goldwater Republican.
Four years at Wellesley changed her perspective, but it would be unfair to credit college alone with achieving that shift. By 1968 she was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy16 as he challenged incumbent Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president. McCarthy’s run evolved out of the anti-war movement which, by March 1968, had helped drive Johnson out of the race, but other forces were at work challenging the old order of things. A fledgling feminist movement, a strong civil rights fight, and various other reforms aimed at improving education, cleaning up prisons, and protecting the environment had encouraged many people to rethink their lives.
The late 1960s, when Hillary Rodham was at Wellesley, could qualify as among the most exciting years of the century in which to come of age. A sense of power permeated campuses and encouraged students to think they could do anything they chose—close down a university, end a war, or send a powerful president into retirement. When Martin Luther King was gunned down, and then scarcely two months later Robert Kennedy met the same fate, individuals who had never shown much interest in government decided it was time to get involved. For those who had been nurturing an obligation to help others, the impulse grew too strong to resist.
In college, Hillary Rodham honed the leadership skills she had developed in an Illinois high school and turned them to serve her new convictions. While majoring in political science, she had the opportunity to work out some of her ideas on exactly how societal change could come about, and increasingly she turned to the idea that government should play a larger role. One of her professors wrote, in recommending her to law school, that he had “high hopes” for her. “She has the intellectual ability, personality, and character to make a remarkable contribution to American society.”17
Elected head of campus government, she and her classmates convinced the college president to break an old tradition and let a student speak at commencement. Hillary was chosen. Such student interventions in areas once firmly under the administration’s control were not unique to Wellesley. In the late 1960s many college officials learned to accommodate students’ requests for a larger role—to evaluate professors, help shape curriculum, and decide the sources from which a college got its money and the places it invested. Graduates frequently embellished their academic gowns with anti-war symbols or rejected them entirely in favor of faded dungarees and slogan t-shirts. Audiences often became vocal about their disregard for a particular speaker or for the views expressed. Heckling was common; noisier disruptions not unknown.
At Wellesley’s commencement in June 1969, the principal speaker, Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, had not yet fully recognized the meaning of these changes. Fifty years old and a man of considerable achievement, he had sat through many of these ceremonies where audiences expected to hear trite exhortations about “the road of life.” He gave the kind of speech that he had always given, dealing in generalities and optimism rather than alluding to the problems of the day.
Hillary Rodham, who followed Senator Brooke to the podium, decided to buck old traditions about deference and say what she thought. Her prepared remarks gained no high marks for brilliant organization or polished delivery but did raise eyebrows for their attacks on the old guard. She chastized her elders, saying the choices they had made were no longer acceptable to her generation. Their “acquisitive and competitive corporate life … is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living. … “ Many in the audience, not yet used to hearing young people criticize their elders publicly, were dismayed. Among those attending were several distinguished statesmen, including Dean Acheson, former secretary of state, and Paul Nitze, deputy secretary of defense during the Vietnam years. In reporting on graduation ceremonies across the nation, Life published Hillary’s picture alongside photos of several of her contemporaries who had also spoken out.18
Law school appeared the next logical step, and by the time Hillary applied in 1969, Yale stood high among the possible choices. It had already achieved a reputation for turning out graduates geared to public service rather than profit alone, and it had begun accepting a sizeable number of female applicants. Hillary’s enrollment at Yale led to an important fortuitous meeting during her first year. As a result of a speech she heard by Yale alumna Marian Wright Edelman, an African-American only eight years her senior, Hillary redefined her career plans.
Edelman had accomplished a great deal in the few years since collecting her law degree. After working as an attorney for the NAACP, including four years at the Association’s Legal Defense and Education Fund in Jackson, Mississippi, she had helped start the Washington Research Project, a public interest group in the nation’s capital.19 Much about the quiet but inspiring Edelman appealed to Hillary. Not only did Edelman seem committed to using a prestigious law degree in public service but she evidently meant to combine career with a family of her own. Already married to another attorney by the time Hillary met her, Edelman eventually had three sons.
The Washington Research Project had no funds to pay student workers over the summers, but in 1970 Hillary got a small stipend from Yale and went to the capital. A student intern there in 1968, she now approached her second job in Washington—at age twenty-two. Assigned to study migrant workers, she became most concerned about the welfare of children who moved with their parents from one camp to the next, and by the time classes resumed in the fall, she had narrowed her career focus. Resolving to study child development and the legal issues involved in protecting children’s health and safety, she began to question old traditions, including those holding that a parent always knew best and would—or could—act to protect children. She wrestled with the topic of parental hegemony—when it should be limited and when government could justifiably step in to protect a child’s interests. To inform her answers, she turned to courses in psychology and texts in child development.
This new interest diverted some of her attention from the traditional, required courses and funneled her energy into issues related to family law. She assisted professors writing on the subject and published her own findings. Part of that effort was later incorporated into a Carnegie Council book, All Our Children: Families Under Pressure in the United States, that listed Hillary as a research associate. Much of the book reiterates old arguments about a child’s best interests being served by improving economic conditions for the entire family through better pay and flexible work schedules, but one section deals with the right of minors to challenge decisions that affect them. It advocated “due process” in the case of suspensions from school involving more than one week.20
These pursuits outside the classroom tacked another year on to what would normally have been a three-year-law degree and put Hillary Rodham’s graduation date in 1973, the same as Bill Clinton’s although he had entered one year after her. Fourteen months older than Hillary, he had followed graduation from Georgetown with a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, before returning to the United States to enter law school. The story of their meeting, in the Yale library, is not unique in the history of presidents and their wives. Lou Henry had first encountered young Herbert Hoover in the geology lab at Stanford University, and Lou, like Hillary, had gone on to earn the same degree as her husband earned.
But unlike the Hoovers who evidently decided to link
their lives soon after they met, the Clintons made their decision more slowly. By the 1970s, women had more options than in Lou Hoover’s days. While Bill returned to his native Arkansas, Hillary took a job in Washington working for the House Judiciary Committee investigating the intricacies of President Nixon’s culpability in the Watergate break-in and its aftermath. One of three women on a legal team that totaled 41, Hillary came to the job with high recommendations and plenty of zeal, and she forged friendships there that she would take with her to the White House. The legal team brought impressive credentials, and Hillary later told Washington reporter Donnie Radcliffe that working on it had been a “great experience. … What a gift! I was twenty-six years old. I felt like I was walking around with my mouth open all the time.”21
President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, abruptly ended the work of the investigative team, and Hillary made a momentous, but not irreversible, decision about her future. Although she later admitted she had been cautioned against the effect such a move would have on her career, she relocated to Bill’s Arkansas. They did not marry until November 1975, but she had evidently made her decision a year earlier to fit her professional life around his. Had she contemplated a political career of her own, she would have been better advised to remain in the capital, return to her own state of Illinois, or put down new roots in another state more amicable to the idea of women candidates. But like many of the women who became First Lady, she recognized that political work did not always include holding office in her own name.
As Bill Clinton moved single-mindedly into politics, Hillary Rodham taught at the state university’s law school. When he won his first statewide election to attorney general and moved to the state capital, she gave up teaching and joined the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, becoming the first woman hired by this prestigious old law firm. During her years at Rose, she forged close professional ties with people who would later assist in the campaign for president and then in running the Oval Office. Vincent Foster, a fellow attorney, served as Assistant White House Counsel until his death in the summer of 1993, and another attorney, Webster Hubbell, went to Washington as Associate Attorney General, the third highest rank in the Justice Department.22
Had she never married, Hillary Rodham could have consoled herself in her middle years that she had a remarkably successful career. Work on corporate boards and her legal practice earned her a comfortable six-figure income, thus putting her at the very top among American professional woman at the time. Popular with colleagues at work, she was twice named to the list of “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.”23 Garry Wills, writing in the New York Review of Books, singled her out as “one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades.”24
But like most other women of her generation, Hillary combined this success at work with a full family life—as wife and mother. The birth of Chelsea Victoria Clinton on February 27, 1980, evidently made only a tiny glitch in her mother’s career path. Like other women who were her contemporaries, Hillary had learned to juggle the demands of household management and a stressful job, and although the events in her daily life were not those of every woman—hosting a reception at the Governor’s Mansion and arguing an important case in court—the logistics were identical. Often it seemed she had to be in two places at the same time, but she refused to complain publicly.
When Bill Clinton first announced he would try for the presidency in 1992, few observers foresaw any chance of his winning or showed much interest in his wife. President Bush’s popularity stood at an all-time high at the end of the Kuwait war, and many Americans did not think or hope that he would be denied a second term.
Among the spouses of Democrats who challenged President Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton (as her press releases announced her at the time) did not have a high profile. She had not campaigned in 1988 when so much attention went to candidates’ spouses. The spotlight had actually turned on the women early in that race when Democrats in Polk County, Iowa, decided to sponsor a forum featuring candidates’ wives twelve months before the nominating conventions took place. Invitations went out to the headquarters of all the contenders, and six wives agreed to appear. When they arrived in Des Moines, on July 26, 1987, they found hundreds of journalists, many armed with microphones and television cameras, and an auditorium full of interested listeners.
The forum, moderated by Attorney Ruth Harkin (whose husband served in the U.S. Senate), featured an impressive lineup of speakers: attorney Harriet Babbitt, wife of Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt; attorney Jeanne Simon, spouse of Illinois Senator Paul Simon; author Tipper Gore, who had just written a book decrying sexually explicit lyrics in rock songs; educator Jill Biden, who had completed two master’s degrees and vowed to continue teaching emotionally disturbed children even if her husband won the presidency; Kitty Dukakis, whose list of professional activities and community service totaled four pages; and Jane Gephardt, spouse of Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt and the only speaker to present herself as a traditional wife without a career of her own. Bill Clinton had dropped out of the race one week earlier or Hillary would have participated in this panel of six mothers who were also attorneys, authors, educators, and public advocates.
Hillary’s first big opportunity for national attention came in early 1992, when the Clintons asked for a chance to respond to charges made by an Arkansas woman, Gennifer Flowers. A supermarket tabloid, the Star, had just run large headlines quoting Flowers talking about “My 12-Year Affair with Bill Clinton.”25 Had the story stopped with the Star, it might have been ignored, but when the mainstream media picked it up, Clinton staffers decided that it required a response.
In American political history, it is not unprecedented for a wife to be called on to help defend her husband against charges of marital infidelity—or to deflect the damage by seeming not to care or to have been too hurt if the candidate chooses to acknowledge other liaisons. Memories of Lee Hart’s dejected appearance in front of television cameras when Gary Hart decided to talk about his boat trip with Donna Rice were still fresh in viewers’ minds. Some even remembered Joan Kennedy’s grim expression as she appeared in public with Ted Kennedy after Chappaquiddick. But Hillary assigned herself a more difficult role—she would not only sit beside her husband while he answered questions—she would also speak for herself.
The interview involved considerable risk. Scheduled for the entire broadcast of 60 Minutes on January 26, 1992, it followed the Super-bowl game when the television audience was expected to approach 100 million. Now many of these voters would watch the Clintons closely, looking for discomfort in Hillary or evidence that Bill was lying. To put the Gennifer Flowers story to rest seemed essential to winning the nomination, but the spouse’s part in that effort equaled the candidate’s.
Years of facing television cameras and of public speaking paid off for both Clintons. While he squirmed slightly, choosing his words carefully enough so as to admit “bringing pain” to his marriage without actually confessing what he had done, she charged ahead. In a final touch of defiance that he did not quite match, she challenged voters to consider what the Clintons represented and then if they did not like what they saw, “then heck, don’t vote for him.”26
The Clinton campaign hit other rough spots before Bill captured the nomination but Hillary’s name had become a household word. She remained central to her husband’s campaign, and when candidate Jerry Brown charged that she had gained professionally from her husband’s governorship, she replied that she “could have stayed home and baked cookies” but had chosen not to. Her comment was picked up by the press and repeated out of context to convey the idea that she disparaged women who had no career outside their home and families. In fact, she had gone on to say that she had made her choices with the hope that she could ease the way for other women to have more options. But the “cookies” quote dogged her steps and tagged her, in opponents’ eyes, as an enemy of traditional family values—a woman full of her own importance.27
> Very quickly it became apparent that 1992, dubbed in politics “the year of the woman,” was not the “year of the wife.” Journalists still struggling with how to report on female candidates (and to discuss their ideas instead of their wardrobes) faced new questions when writing about political wives. One like Hillary Rodham Clinton, with a substantial career involved in controversial public issues, invited extra scrutiny. Yet she was not the candidate, and it seemed unfair to hold her spouse responsible for every view she had ever expressed. Candidates’ wives in the past had typically worked for their own causes and projects, but they had done so as committed volunteers and thus were less threatening. They had labored hard for beautification of highways, restoration of the White House, improved mental health benefits, and literacy—all projects that very few of their countrymen would decline to support. Their efforts had made them no enemies, except perhaps among people who disagreed on how much to spend on them.
Hillary Rodham Clinton came to the White House with weighty professional baggage. She had been packing it for twenty years. Since leaving law school she had chaired meetings, argued cases, and taken actions that affected people’s lives and made some people angry. It could not be otherwise for a practicing attorney who had also taken on an advocacy role. Critics looked particularly closely at her work with the Legal Services Corporation, set up as a federally funded non-partisan attempt to provide legal aid to the nation’s indigent. President Jimmy Carter had named Hillary to the board of directors in 1978, and she had chaired it for the next two years. Several of the board’s decisions came under fire, and conservatives were particularly chagrined when stories circulated about federal funds going through the corporation to less than mainstream causes, such as defending requests for transsexual surgery and upholding Native Americans’ claims to ownership of a sizeable chunk of the state of Maine.28
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