Hillary Clinton: A Life in American History (Women Making History) 2020053959, 2020053960, 9781440874178, 1440874174

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Series Foreword
Preface
Introduction: Why Hillary Rodham Clinton Matters
Chapter 1. Early Life
Chapter 2. College Years
Chapter 3. Law School
Chapter 4. Early Legal Career and Marriage
Chapter 5. First Lady of Arkansas
Chapter 6. First Lady of the United States, Part One
Chapter 7. First Lady of the United States, Part Two
Chapter 8. The Junior Senator from New York
Chapter 9. Secretary of State
Chapter 10. The 2016 Election and Beyond
Timeline
Primary Source Documents
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Hillary Clinton

Recent Titles in Women Making History Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life in American History Nancy Hendricks Gloria Steinem: A Life in American History William H. Pruden III

Hillary Clinton A LIFE IN AMERICAN HISTORY Kathleen Gronnerud

Women Making History Rosanne Welch and Peg A. Lamphier, Series Editors

Copyright © 2021 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gronnerud, Kathleen A., author. Title: Hillary Clinton : a life in American history / Kathleen Gronnerud. Description: Santa Barbara, California : ABC-CLIO, [2021] | Series: Women making history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053959 (print) | LCCN 2020053960 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440874178 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781440874185 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Clinton, Hillary Rodham. | Presidents’ spouses—United States—Biography. | Legislators—United States—Biography. | Women legislators—United States—Biography. | United States. Congress. Senate—Biography. | Women cabinet officers—United States—Biography. | Cabinet officers—United States— Biography. | United States. Department of State—Biography. | Presidential candidates—United States—Biography. | Women presidential candidates—United States—Biography. Classification: LCC E887.C55 G76 2021 (print) | LCC E887.C55 (ebook) | DDC 973.929092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053959 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053960 ISBN: 978-1-4408-7417-8 (print) 978-1-4408-7418-5 (ebook) 25 24 23 22 21   1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available as an eBook. ABC-CLIO An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 147 Castilian Drive Santa Barbara, California 93117 www.abc-clio.com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Series Foreword  vii Preface ix Introduction: Why Hillary Rodham Clinton Matters  xiii Chapter 1 Early Life 1 Chapter 2 College Years 11 Chapter 3 Law School 21 Chapter 4 Early Legal Career and Marriage 35 Chapter 5 First Lady of Arkansas 53 Chapter 6 First Lady of the United States, Part One 79 Chapter 7 First Lady of the United States, Part Two 101

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Chapter 8 The Junior Senator from New York 121 Chapter 9 Secretary of State 141 Chapter 10 The 2016 Election and Beyond 163 Timeline 189 Primary Source Documents  197 Bibliography 215 Index 225

Series Foreword

We created this series because women today stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. They need to know the true power their foremothers had in shaping the world today, and the obstacles those women overcame to achieve all that they have achieved and continue to achieve. It is true that Gerda Lerner offered the first regular college course in women’s history in 1963 and that, since then, women’s history has become an academic discipline taught in nearly every American college and university. It is also true that women’s history books number in the millions and cover a wealth of topics, time periods, and issues. Nonetheless, open any standard high school or college history textbook, and you will find very few mentions of women’s achievements or importance, and the few that do exist will be of the “exceptional woman” model, ghettoized to sidebars and footnotes. With women missing from textbooks, students and citizens are allowed to believe that no woman ever meaningfully contributed to American history and that nothing women have ever done has had more than private, familial importance. In such books we do not learn that it was women’s petitioning efforts that brought the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery to Abraham Lincoln’s attention or that Social Security and child labor laws were the brainchild of Francis Perkins, the progressive female secretary of labor who was also the first woman appointed to a presidential cabinet. Without this knowledge, both female and male students are encouraged to think only men—primarily rich, white men—have ever done anything meaningful. This vision impedes our democracy in a nation that has finally become more aware of our beautiful diversity. The National Bureau of Economic Research said women comprise the majority of college graduates in undergraduate institutions, law schools, and medical schools (56% in 2017). Still, women’s high college attendance vii

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and graduation rates do not translate to equal pay or equal economic, political, or cultural power. There can be little argument that American women have made significant inroads toward equality in the last few decades, in spite of the ongoing dearth of women in normative approaches to American history teaching and writing. Hence, this series. We want readers to know that we took the task of choosing the women to present seriously, adding new names to the list while looking to highlight new information about women we think we know. Many of these women have been written about in the past, but their lives were filtered through male or societal expectations. Here we hope the inclusion of the women’s own words in the collection of primary documents we curated will finally allow them to speak for themselves about the issues that most mattered. The timeline will visually place them in history against events that hampered their efforts and alongside the events they created. Sidebars will give more detail on such events as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Finally, the chapter “Why She Matters” will cement the reason such a woman deserves a new volume dedicated to her life. Have we yet achieved parity? We’ll let one of our subjects—the late Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg—remind us that “When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the supreme court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there’d been nine men [for over 200 years], and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”

Preface

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you’ll be criticized anyway.” —First Lady and U.S. Delegate to the UN Eleanor Roosevelt Since the election of her husband, William Jefferson Clinton, as the fortysecond president of the United States in 1992 through her own campaign for the presidency in 2016 as the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a lightning rod for American political debate. She is easily the most identifiable woman in American politics of the twenty-first century thus far. Not surprisingly, many authors—historians and pundits alike— have devoted entire books to various aspects of Hillary’s public and private life. Yet few, if any, single volumes provide a comprehensive look at her life in public service from an objective vantage point. The goal of this book is to fill that notable gap, to provide an informed and informative overview of Hillary’s experiences and choices: her education, her family and marriage, her career as an attorney, and her years in the national spotlight as first lady and then U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of state, and the first female presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party. This biography aims to contextualize Hillary’s contributions to the nation’s political life over more than twenty-five years by incorporating both scholarly research and Hillary’s own observations as expressed in her three published memoirs and numerous media interviews over the course of her time in the political arena. By weaving together the facts of Hillary’s life and career with contemporaneous observations and her own reflections, this biography intends to provide the reader with an introduction to Hillary Rodham Clinton and her impact as a public servant during an era of significant change for the United States. When Hillary first stepped onto the public stage with her ix

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commencement speech to fellow undergraduates at Wellesley College in 1969, she was about to enter the professional realm just as the modern women’s liberation movement gained momentum. In 1969, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age for American women at the time of first marriage was just under twenty-one. Furthermore, in the majority of American households, women stayed home to cook, clean, and care for the children—only 43 percent of women entered the paid workforce, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hillary would be among the growing number of women in the 1970s who elected to stay in school longer and pursue better-paying careers before marriage and children. After she married Bill Clinton in 1975 at nearly twenty-eight years old and became the first lady of Arkansas upon his election as governor in 1978, Hillary continued to practice law full time. She was the first First Lady of Arkansas to pursue a career while living in the governor’s mansion. Once Bill became president in 1993, he appointed Hillary to lead his Task Force on National Health Care Reform, which promised to present plans for a new national health-care system within the year. Both of the Clintons were criticized for Hillary’s direct involvement in leading one of the new administration’s major policy priorities. Although previous first ladies, most notably Edith Wilson in the years after World War I and Eleanor Roosevelt during the New Deal in the 1930s, were known to be close advisors to their presidential husbands and to have at times likely influenced policy decisions, they never officially claimed any substantive role in their husbands’ administrations. Hillary was one of four women elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000, and they joined ten other female colleagues in a chamber that was traditionally occupied by men. According to U.S. Senate records, 1,983 individuals have served in the Senate since 1789, and, through the 116th Congress, only fifty-six of them have been women. In 2009, Hillary became only the third woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State upon her appointment by President Barack Obama—the first was Madeline Albright, appointed by President Clinton just twelve years earlier. And, when Hillary successfully won the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2016, she became the first female major party candidate for the office in the nation’s history. Throughout the triumphs and disappointments of her years in the political arena, Hillary was simultaneously chastised and lauded for daring to pursue positions of power. Her supporters saw her as an example of hardearned strides in the acceptance of professional women by American society throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Meanwhile, her critics questioned if she really deserved any position of power on her own accord, and what was her real motivation—why did she long for powerful positions that had largely been considered the exclusive domain of American men for more than two centuries?

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Over the years that Hillary took on high-profile political roles, the tone and bounds of American political discourse evolved with the birth of twenty-four-hour news coverage and the proliferation of media platforms in the digital age. When Hillary campaigned on behalf of her husband for president in 1992, cell phones had yet to become commonplace, the internet was not a part of the average American’s day, and only one twentyfour-hour cable news network, CNN, existed (MSNBC and Fox News would both launch in 1996). Throughout the 1990s, most Americans relied primarily on the three major television networks and newspapers or magazines for their political news. The limited number of national news outlets resulted in a limited amount of political coverage and the ability, at least to some extent, for political leaders and candidates to anticipate and even control their media coverage. By the time the Clintons left the White House and Hillary ran for election to the U.S. Senate in 2000, the landscape of political news coverage had changed dramatically. The advent of powerful internet browsers in the late 1990s allowed Americans to learn of political victories and missteps instantaneously via an increasing number of traditional and quasi news sources, which by 2016 proliferated even more to include “social media” outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Snapchat, among others. The ability of video caught on a bystander’s smartphone to spark or at least influence national debate about the words or actions of a political figure can now devastate or bolster a political candidate or pending policy decisions. Information about political figures is not only more quickly spread but is often also of a more personal or biting nature. Long gone are the unspoken restraints of patriotism or propriety that were broadly acknowledged in the earlier twentieth century for seasoned reporters and activist citizens alike. As a result of the modern digitalization of American society, the 2016 presidential campaign between Hillary as the Democratic Party nominee and her opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump, produced more media coverage than any campaign in U.S. history to date. Questions about the candidates’ behavior—past and present—literally exploded American pop culture time and again in the months before election day. For Hillary, the need for media savvy outweighed more traditional campaign skills as Americans’ smartphones and computers overloaded with headlines, theories, and insinuations about virtually every aspect of her life and character. Therefore, I deemed it imperative for readers to be able to explore how Hillary’s earlier interactions with the press affected her public “performance” in the 2016 presidential campaign. The changing landscape of media coverage in the United States during the first decades of the twenty-first century is a challenge with which anyone who

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strives to succeed in American politics must wrestle—and ultimately conquer. As the Bibliography herein demonstrates, numerous books on Hillary— her life, campaigns, and marriage—are available, but few of these works are suitable for students and other readers interested in a comprehensive scholarly biography. Some of the works referenced in the Bibliography, as well as others deemed too partisan to be helpful for this project, are very narrow in scope—for example, laser focused on Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign or on her marriage—while others are too opinionated, and even more are incomplete in terms of her career in public service and thereby out of date. After much research, this volume has largely been compiled from official government sources including the archives of the White House, Department of State and the U.S. Senate; contemporaneous news articles about Hillary, including many from the archives of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Politico, and Time magazine; the 2007 biography of Hillary by award-winning journalist Carl Bernstein entitled A Woman in Charge; the archives of the Clinton House Museum and the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum; and Hillary’s three memoirs: Living History published in 2004, Hard Choices published in 2014, and What Happened in 2017. My hope has been to include Hillary’s view of events while not solely relying on her memory or telling of what happened, and to place her political accomplishments and defeats in the context of her time: America’s shifting views and support of women who seek careers in the private and political arenas, and the kaleidoscope effect of around-the-clock “news” about public figures in the age of social media. Heartfelt thanks go out to my husband, Philip, for his unfailing support of my work, as well as to Jillian, Carter, and Davis for always cheering me on, from near or far. I am indebted to my editors, Peg Lamphier and Rosanne Welch, for entrusting me with this project. And finally, to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a fellow wife, mother, professional woman, and politically minded American, thank you for stepping into the public arena so many years ago. As President George Washington noted, the future of our republic has always depended on the involvement of its citizens: “It may be laid down as . . . the basis of our system, that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defense of it” (Washington 1783).

Introduction: Why Hillary Rodham Clinton Matters

Hillary Rodham Clinton was born as part of the post–World War II baby boom. Her suburban Chicago childhood spanned the height of the U.S. Cold War. Her college and law school years coincided with the antiVietnam War and free speech movements that gripped American campuses. She entered the realm of law as the country faced a constitutional crisis in the Watergate scandal. And she became a wife and mother, trying to balance family and career, during the dawn of national conservatism. Finally, she would enter national politics while the Washington press and American voters were—perplexingly—still often skeptical of women who sought to wield influence. Of course, Hillary was not alone in her questioning of the status quo, of the way politics and the law shaped American life; many of her generation would wear their anti-establishment ideology as a badge of courage, and at no point could Hillary’s views be considered radical. However, partly due to character and partly due to luck, at the age of twenty-one, with her commencement speech at Wellesley College, Hillary gained national attention as a voice for her generation, and particularly for her female peers. By no means was Hillary a sole female pioneer in law or politics between the 1970s and early 2000s; rather, she proudly was part of a generation of women that made historic inroads in fields from the sciences to business to public policy. Still, no other woman would come so close to breaking through the zenith of all glass ceilings: the invisible barrier that for more than 230 years has kept a woman from the American presidency. Hillary’s trajectory toward the presidency—whether unintended early on or strategically planned in later years—was recognized by close friends and unacquainted observers alike. How people felt about that trajectory largely caused Hillary to become, simultaneously, one of the country’s xiii

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most admired and most reviled women. (In one camp were those who thought she would rise to high public office and that the country would benefit. They recognized Hillary’s yearning to work within the establishment for change, her leadership and ability to build consensus, as well as the strength of her convictions and willingness to do the hard work. In the opposing camp were those who saw in Hillary’s trajectory a threat to their vision of America. They questioned her motives and perceived in her a disregard for rules that governed others, and they generally mistrusted any woman who appeared driven to interject herself into the traditionally male world of national politics.) Indeed, the battles undertaken by Hillary’s detractors determined to keep her from influencing American politics would end up costing millions of dollars, the careers of numerous devoted public servants, and, at least indirectly, the life of her dear friend Vince Foster. By the time Hillary conceded the 2016 election to Donald Trump, she had become the most recognizable woman in American political history. Though her concession was due to a loss in the arcane Electoral College, it is worth remembering that Hillary won the popular vote for president in 2016 by nearly three million votes. Most importantly, she blazed a trail now far more clearly marked for other women to follow. To be clear, Hillary was not the first American presidential wife to hold sway in her husband’s administration. Abigail Adams, wife of the second president, John Adams, and mother of the sixth, John Quincy Adams, was well versed in politics of the 1790s—as is evident in her correspondence with the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson over the years. She served as her husband’s closest confidant. After President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919, he remain incapacitated for the remaining eighteen months of his term; his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt, imposed what she called “a stewardship” on the presidency. To protect her husband’s health, Edith became his only conduit, besides doctors, with the outside world. She decided which papers addressed to the president should be read to him. Likewise, decisions that required Wilson’s attention were brought to Edith, who would then relay his response. During the 1930s and 1940s, Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and niece of President Theodore Roosevelt), had her own devoted, national following and played a visible role in her husband’s outreach to citizens suffering during the Great Depression and then to soldiers serving overseas during World War II. The year after FDR’s death, Eleanor became the first presidential wife to serve in an official capacity of her own right: in 1946 President Harry Truman appointed her as U.S. delegate to the United Nations. Finally, during the 1970s, Rosalyn Carter, wife of President Jimmy Carter, organized, staffed, and named the modern “Office of the First Lady.” President Carter publicly acknowledged his wife as a close advisor (his “secret weapon”), and Rosalyn was known to attend key cabinet



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meetings and national security briefings. She even traveled as the president’s official envoy in 1977 to Latin America where she participated in direct discussions with foreign leaders. Nevertheless, after Hillary became known as a professional with public policy experience during the 1992 campaign, Washington insiders and the national press expressed great reservations about the possibility of a Clinton “co-presidency.” Even before President Clinton named his wife to chair his health-care task force, the country was awash in questions about how much influence Hillary would have in the administration—with insinuations aplenty that any influence she exerted in policy matters would be an overreach and suspect. The level of suspicion surrounding what they considered Hillary’s ambition and the fear of her as a “feminazi” in the White House was undeniably without precedent. It begs the question: What was so different about Hillary compared to her predecessors that made her seem so threatening? The answer lies not in what Hillary said or did in the twilight of the twentieth century but in what she might become in the new century. Abigail, Edith, Eleanor, and Rosalyn were all strong women to be sure, but no one in the United States during their respective eras was ever concerned about these presidential wives overshadowing or challenging their male peers for power. For all of these first ladies’ assertiveness and involvement, no presidential wife before Hillary could be envisioned as the reason her family might occupy the White House. Once Hillary walked onto the national stage during Clinton’s 1992 campaign, many Americans quickly realized that she was very nearly as qualified as he was to be president. Although many people welcomed this development—the wife with credentials to rival her husband’s—plenty of others saw such a woman as a threat to the status quo. With her Ivy League education, her experience on the Nixon impeachment proceedings, her legal work with a national nonprofit involved in public policy, her earnings as partner at an established law firm, and her successes in education and health-care reform at the state level, Hillary’s resume looked awfully similar to many of the men wrangling for power in Washington. So, regardless of the fact that Hillary chose to marry someone with obvious political ambition and then, for nearly twenty years, willingly played an active yet always supporting role in his career, her proximity to power from 1992 to 2000 proved unnerving for a subset of voters. Relieved as the time neared for the Clintons to vacate the White House, her detractors might have heralded the day when history books would merely mention Hillary as the wronged wife of an impeached president. But she kept going. To their dismay, she successfully embarked on her own political career, and not just in some distant state house or governor’s mansion or even in the House of Representatives (Congress’s “lower” chamber) with its two-year terms, but in the revered “upper” chamber of Congress originally designed by the framers as the clubby realm of wealthy white men with pedigrees.

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When Hillary entered the U.S. Senate in 2001 as the first woman to represent New York, a state founded even before Congress, she became only the twenty-eighth woman in more than two hundred years to serve in the chamber. (Notably, the first three women to serve in the Senate beginning in the 1920s were all appointed to fill seats left vacant when their husbands died, and the fourth woman was appointed by her husband, who was governor of their state, to replace a deceased male senator.) While Hillary was widely praised by her male colleagues and overwhelmingly reelected by her constituents, her detractors labeled her time in the Senate as a blatant power move. From her first Senate campaign in 2000, the internet and right-wing media commentators buzzed with speculation that Hillary’s run was the result of some secret armistice between her and Clinton: “I’ll stay married to you if you support me in my own political career.” In her 2003 memoir Living History, Hillary repeatedly denies any such calculated arrangement; instead, she recounts the difficult, slow work of pushing through her hurt and resentment toward Clinton due to her undeniable love for him. Her appointment to the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee during her second term became more fuel for speculation that she was biding her time in the chamber to build a presidential resume. In 2008, critics painted Hillary’s decision to resign from the Senate to become secretary of state under former campaign rival, Barack Obama, once again as a calculated move. What better way to fortify her official foreign policy experience, the weakest element of her résumé, than as the U.S. emissary to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, those close to Hillary knew she would take the job—or likely any job Obama offered in his cabinet—largely due to her lifelong, heartfelt embrace of the Methodist tenet to do all the good you can, by all the means you can, for all the people you can (paraphrased). Ultimately, that same sense of a calling to public service would compel Hillary to run for the presidency again in 2016. Interestingly, much like her two female predecessors, as secretary of state, Hillary enjoyed very high favorability with American voters—sixty-six percent, according to a March 2011 Gallup poll—higher than President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (Weiner 2011). But as Gina Benevento of Aljazeera noted on November 5, 2016, “a woman appointed to a Cabinet position by a male president— Clinton, Bush, Obama—is quite a different thing than a woman who decides to run for the presidency herself. Running for president screams not public service but . . . Ambition.” Once again, throughout her 2016 campaign, Hillary would be advised not to appear aggressive or “shrill” or too serious—all considered negative attributes for a female. While running for public office has never been easy for women, Hillary’s success at securing the Democratic nomination in 2016 gave rise to



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an unprecedented national conversation about how the deck was stacked against her as a female candidate. In October 2016, Newsweek gathered input from body language and facial analysis experts about the challenge Hillary confronted as a woman in the presidential debates. “Voters have been socially conditioned to associate dominant, strong, reliable attributes with masculinity, Elizabeth Kuhnke, author of Body Language For Dummies, tells Newsweek. The reason they do this, she explains, is because men still tend to be at the top of the majority of industries—especially politics” (Clarke-Billings 2016). The article quotes Kuhnke predicting that “Hillary’s advisors will be telling her to use her ‘grandmother smile’ as much as possible. It works, as well, because she has a nice smile and it brings warmth to her face.” In October 2016, body expert Mary Civiello dissected Hillary’s gestures and her personal interactions with voters for BBC News. Civiello’s conclusion: “She’s not a big hand-shaker. She admits it! I think that Hillary needs to become okay that she is not a really warm person, but I also think the audience needs to become okay with that for her to win. Because the expectation, the stereotype is for women to be warm” (Civiello 2016). Indeed, when Hillary ran for president in 2008, her persona was very much “I mean business.” In 2016, she obviously attempted to soften her image to fit a more womanly, likable stereotype. What is notable is that the reasoning behind this reformation became a topic worthy of debate itself during the campaign. In 2016, pundits actually pondered the question: why does whether a woman is “warm” matter in terms of her ability to be an effective president? “She’s all new—warm and fuzzy and offering bear hugs,” Darlena Cunha of Time wrote about Hillary in early 2016 (Cunha 2016). “And it’s awkward. Because at times, she slips back into who she is—a hard-lined, experienced, ambitious politician who has had to hold her own against men in leadership roles her entire career.” As Cunha notes, “Those slips make people question her authenticity. But they also bring up the question: why does [Hillary] have to spend so much time proving she’s likable?” The personal likability of Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump during the campaign was a nonstarter for most in the media and seemingly for most voters. “To the public, it seems to be given that Sanders or Trump will have the ability to lead. They will have to prove us wrong by messing up, whereas [Hillary] has to prove us wrong by doing the job well,” writes Cunha. By January 2016, even Obama felt compelled to address the fact that press coverage of Hillary during her first run for president had been unfair, something long alleged by many of her supporters. The president stated that the media scrutinized her more than him in the 2008 Democratic primary, an imbalance that favored his campaign (Stein 2016). Of course, Hillary had her own ideas about why questions of warmth versus ambition have shadowed female politicians, and she too was willing to join the

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conversation about it in 2016. Society still fears that women’s ambition “will crowd out everything else—relationships, marriage, children, family, homemaking,” she told New York magazine in May 2016 (Traister 2016). “That level of visceral . . . fear, anxiety, insecurity plays a role” in how America regards ambitious women. Hillary said the sexism was less virulent than it had been in 2008, but still she recalled people on rope lines at her 2016 events who would tell her, “‘I really admire you, I really like you, I just don’t know if I can vote for a woman to be president.’ I mean, they come to my events and then they say that to me.” In her opinion, “Unpacking this, understanding it” is the challenge for journalists and voters alike, before another woman has a serious shot at being elected president (Traister 2016). After her loss to Trump in 2016, some pundits said that Hillary would largely be forgotten by future generations. Glenn Thrush at Politico delivered one such appraisal: “Hillary Clinton is a footnote in history. . . . Clinton will forever be known as one of the worst closers in political history, a woman who was never capable of selling a wary public on herself, on account of her own shortcomings and paranoia.” Then he muses, almost as an afterthought, that it is also possible Hillary lost “as a result of a sexism so ingrained in American culture that women as well as men suffered from it” (Thrush 2016). Other pundits, and Hillary herself in her 2017 memoir What Happened, noted that at least some of the fault for her loss to Trump must be attributed to events outside of her control. As Charles Pierce notes in Esquire, Hillary ran a campaign that succeeded in attracting three million more votes than her opponent. “That is not a ‘bad’ campaign. It was a decent, if flawed, campaign that had more than its share of the bumps in the road customary to such enterprises.” However, as Pierce argues, anyone analyzing her election loss must take into account what went wrong in the final weeks of the campaign: “the bizarre involvement of the FBI’s New York office, the flea-on-a-griddle performance of James Comey, the meddling of Russian cyberwarriors, and, yes, the persistent grudge that has warped the elite political media's approach to the Clintons” beginning with the New York Times’s first, badly conceived story on Whitewater (Pierce 2017). No matter how many times participants or observers attempt to dissect what caused Hillary to lose in one of the biggest upsets in American presidential history, the fact is her candidacy still matters, and she deserves credit as the catalyst for a modern women’s movement. “It’s the latest—and perhaps last—cruel twist in a public life full of them,” writes Amy Chozick in the New York Times. “Her loss to Mr. Trump helped ignite the kind of movement she’d once been poised to lead but that she now mostly watches from the sidelines” (Chozick 2018). When Hillary rose to address her classmates at Wellesley on May 31, 1969, it marked not only the first time that a student spoke at graduation



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but also the last time that a student speaker followed the commencement speaker. Once at the podium, Hillary discarded her prepared remarks to instead respond to the commencement address just delivered by Senator Edward W. Brooke from Massachusetts, who largely focused on the graduates’ roles as future wives and mothers. Hillary’s classmate Jan Piercy recalls, “I really got chills” once Hillary started speaking. Her message was empowering, Piercy says: “You can’t discount us just because of our age or because we are women” (Burstein 2020). Once the speech was picked up by the Boston Globe and then Life, Hillary appeared destined to empower women, notes Chozick. “But over the next several decades, the promise of that young activist collided with the realities of presidential elections and her husband’s personal scandals” (Chozick 2018). It would also run into the wall that was male chauvinism in America. In Hulu’s 2020 documentary Hillary, Bill recalls near the end of law school telling Hillary, “You are the most talented person I know,” and then suggesting that she should go home to Illinois and run for office. Hillary’s response at the time: “Who would vote for a pushy woman like me?” In the 1970s, though a few women dared to make inroads into national politics—like Shirley Chisholm, who won twenty-seven delegates as the first African American woman to seek the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1972—Hillary understood that electoral government was still largely a wealthy, white men’s club. She has said on many occasions that she never saw herself going into politics, leaving one to wonder how much attitudes toward women in the 1970s and 1980s might have dampened her aspirations at the time. Instead of pursuing a career in politics as many of her friends and classmates thought she should, “at the height of the 1970s women’s movement [Hillary] moved to Arkansas to put her own ambitions on hold in furtherance of her husband’s career” (Chozick 2018). Still, twenty years later, while campaigning for her husband for president, Hillary was famously chastised for saying that she chose to pursue a career rather than stay at home and bake cookies. In her campaigns for the Senate as well as in her 2008 run for the presidency, Hillary was reluctant to emphasize her pathbreaking role as a female candidate; but even as she sidestepped the issue of her gender, others, including members of the national media, could not seem to see past it. Then-MSNBC News host (later to move to Fox News) and future Trump supporter Tucker Carlson said of Hillary in 2007, “There’s just something about her that feels castrating, overbearing, and scary” (MSNBC 2007) and “Could you actually live in this country for eight years having to listen to her voice?” (MSNBC 2007). During a guest appearance on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” the day after Hillary’s victory in the 2008 New Hampshire primary, Chris Matthews said, “The reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around” (Friedman 2009).

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Even though Matthews later apologized for his comment as “dismissive” during an episode of his own MSNBC show, Hardball, many women’s groups protested the media’s overall coverage of Hillary in the 2008 election as sexist, even organizing boycotts of certain news organizations. Taking aim from inside the national media, CBS News anchor Katie Couric, who had faced harsh criticism as the first woman to solo anchor an evening newscast, posted a video on the CBS website in early June 2008 about the mainstream media’s coverage of Hillary. “Like her or not, one of the great lessons of [Hillary’s] campaign is the continued and accepted role of sexism in American life, particularly in the media,” Couric said (Seelye and Bosman 2008). Though most national news executives (overwhelmingly white males) shrugged off the criticism as unfounded, some in politics took up the issue and called for a national discussion on sexism. “The media took a very sexist approach to Senator Clinton’s campaign,” said Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party in 2008. “It’s pretty appalling,” he noted in light of the fact that Hillary “got treated the way a lot of women got treated their whole lives” (Seelye and Bosman 2008). Here again, Hillary’s candidacy as president had started a national conversation about an issue that had silently plagued women for decades. In her run for the presidency in 2016, Hillary explicitly stated that one of the purposes of her candidacy was to break the largest glass ceiling in America. Throughout the campaign, she embraced her womanhood much more candidly than in any previous campaign, and she organically talked about the future in terms of the women in her own family. The Associated Press noted early in the 2016 election cycle, “[Hillary] says the birth of her first grandchild has been transformative. She credits her with inspiring her to stay in political life and uses her as a touchstone when she speaks about policy” (Associated Press, April 25, 2015). Indeed, several sources note that Hillary referenced her granddaughter, Charlotte, more frequently during the campaign than she did her husband, a popular former president. Hillary also talked about her mom as a touchstone during the 2016 campaign. During an interview with ABC News in September 2015, Hillary choked up when she talked about Dorothy Rodham, who passed away in 2011. “As you probably know, my mother had a terrible childhood. She was abandoned by her parents. She was rejected by her grandparents. She was literally working as a housemaid at the age of fourteen,” Hillary recalled for anchor David Muir. “And she told me every day, ‘You've gotta get up and fight for what you believe in no matter how hard it is,’” Hillary recounted, her eyes filling with tears. “And I remember that” (Muir 2015). Time and again on a national stage, Hillary made it clear that she embraced her campaign as a breakthrough for American women of all generations and that she was willing to stand up to sexism and to talk about issues important to women and their families on behalf of the silenced, bullied, disenfranchised women who came before her and those to come.



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The morning after Hillary conceded the 2016 election to Trump, she and her family headed to the New Yorker Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where she would address her campaign staff, supporters, and the media. Dressed in the gray and purple suit she had hoped to wear during her first visit to Washington as the president-elect, Hillary told the crowd, “I know how disappointed you feel because I feel it too. . . . This is painful, and it will be for a long time,” she admitted, “but I want you to remember this. Our campaign was never about one person or even one election; it was about the country we love and about building an America that’s hopeful, inclusive, and bighearted.” In the most heartfelt moment of her speech, Hillary addressed her female supporters saying, “to all the women, and especially the young women, who put their faith in this campaign and in me, I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion.” Perhaps thinking of her own mother, who overcame a difficult childhood and raised her daughter to believe that she could do anything her brothers could do, Hillary added, “and to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.” Hillary’s campaign would have power regardless of her loss. “Clinton’s lifetime of political achievements and failures ensure that she’ll be anything but a historical footnote,” writes Jeet Herr in The New Republic. “Some of the biggest political legacies have been left by losing presidential candidates” (Herr 2017). Indeed, it was Barry Goldwater’s losing candidacy for president in 1964 that ushered in the rise of the modern conservative movement and its use of racist innuendo to foment voter fear still dominant within the Republican Party today. Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party’s future conservative standard-bearer and a two-term president, rose to national attention with a 1964 speech he gave in support of Goldwater. Likewise, it was George McGovern’s failed candidacy for president in 1972 that cemented social liberalism “as one of the pillars of the Democratic Party,” where it remains to this day (Herr 2017). As the Democratic nominee, McGovern encouraged feminists and minorities to become more active in the party, and he proposed gay rights be added to the party platform (the proposal failed but was a landmark nonetheless). In the year following Hillary’s loss to Trump, America experienced a groundswell of activist feminism, including the largest single day of protest in U.S. history: the Women’s March on Washington and its “sister” marches across the country, attended by upward of four and half million people, the day after Trump’s inauguration. Women in Hollywood and in corporate America began speaking out as never before about incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault and the systematic attempts to sweep such allegations under the rug. As Chozick noted in 2017, “Political analysts predicted that Mrs. Clinton’s loss would cause women to retreat from

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running for public office.” The logic was that potential female candidates would be turned off by the open combativeness and nasty, blatant attacks ushered in by the bullying Trump. “Instead,” Chozick writes, “data shows the number of women seeking office is rising at every level” (Chozick 2018). That data would correctly predict a wave of new women in American politics. In the 2018 midterm election, the names of 250 female candidates appeared on ballots across the country, from city government to Congress. One hundred seventeen women would win election to Congress—the largest number in history. In all, one hundred and twenty-six women held seats in Congress beginning in January 2019. Likewise, as of 2019, fifteen women, the largest number in history, were sworn in as state governors. And in the run-up to the 2020 presidential race, a historic number of women contenders entered the contest for the Democratic nomination, including senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Though none of the women prevailed in the 2020 Democratic contest, the party’s eventual male nominee, Joe Biden, promised that spring to name a woman as his vice presidential running mate. In January 2021, Joe Biden was sworn in as the forty-sixth president, and Kamala Harris, his running mate. Besides the optics, why does this trend of more women in elective office matter? Because even though the United States has yet to elect a female president, gains by women at all levels of electoral politics have proven to be transformative for society. “Political science research has found over and over again that women legislators are more likely to introduce legislation that specifically benefits women,” writes Sarah Kliff for Vox. “They’re better at bringing funding back to their home districts.” And they get more done: “A woman legislator, on average, passed twice as many bills as a male legislator in one recent session of Congress” (Kliff 2017). The laws and policies that women legislators usher in combined with the funding they secure for local districts impact millions of women and families in the form of expanded early education programs, services for abused women and children, and more workplace flexibility for all employees with newborns and young children, just to name a few. Women’s issues and concerns have a much better chance of being recognized and formally addressed when more women hold elected office. And what of the long-term effects of young girls coming of age in a country where women in positions of power are as commonplace as men? The United States is not there yet, but it is making progress, and Hillary has been an important part of that progress. “She not only embraced feminism as a political cause, but made it central to her campaign. She refused to be bullied by sexist opponents,” as Herr notes (Herr 2017). The biggest sexist bully in 2016 was Donald Trump. Throughout the campaign (and



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during his presidency), he regularly degraded women by calling them dogs and pigs and, in the case of his own daughter, Ivanka, a nice piece of ass. Hillary acknowledges in What Happened what such toxic masculinity means for too many women: fear and violence. “Something I wish every man across America understood is how much fear accompanies women throughout our lives,” she writes. “So many of us have been threatened or harmed.” After the release of What Happened in March 2017, one of Hillary’s most cited passages was her description of Trump’s attempt to bully her during their second presidential debate: “This is not okay, I thought. . . . Trump was looming behind me,” she writes. “Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin was crawling.” Unfortunately, too many women can relate their own similarly unsettling experience. The need for more women, more minorities, more diversity in general in American leadership is not simply about optics—as Hillary understood, it is about a more promising future for all Americans. At some point, the nation will have its first female president, and she can thank Hillary for helping clear her path. As Herr notes, “That’s a significant legacy that no loss, however devastating, can ever tarnish” (Herr 2017). A few months after President Trump’s inauguration, Hillary was invited to deliver the 2017 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College. Nearly fifty years after her own graduation and student speech in 1969—the speech that first launched her into the national spotlight—Hillary shared with the audience the following reflection and advice: One of the things that gave me the most hope and joy after the election, when I really needed it, was meeting so many young people who told me that my defeat had not defeated them. . . . When I graduated and made that speech, I did say. . . . “The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.” That was true then. It’s truer today. I never could have imagined where I would have been fortyeight years later—certainly never that I would have run for the presidency of the United States. . . . Because just in those years, doors that once seemed sealed to women are now opened. They’re ready for you to walk through or charge through, to advance the struggle for equality, justice, and freedom. So whatever your dreams are today, dream even bigger. Wherever you have set your sights, raise them even higher. And above all, keep going.

In the end, Hillary Rodham Clinton matters because she has been a vessel—albeit perhaps imperfect, as all humans ultimately are—for progress, for much-needed debate, and for a greater national focus on the sexism that still plagues American society. In October 2017, writing for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates declared Donald Trump to be “the first white

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president” due in part to the way he presented himself as a tonic for those unnerved by Barack Obama, a Black man in the White House. By similar measure, Trump can also be called the first male president: the first candidate to intentionally present himself as masculine, even misogynistic, in contrast to Hillary, a proud card-carrying woman seemingly destined for the presidency in 2016 (Herr 2017). At the highest levels of power, Hillary brought gender bias to the forefront of America’s conscience, and she helped further clear the path for women behind her in politics. In addition to a lifetime of service and heartfelt dedication to others who thought that no one with power heard them or cared, this is Hillary’s legacy, her gifts to the yet-imperfect country she loves.

1 Early Life

I was blessed with a hardworking father who put his family first and a mother who was devoted to me and my two younger brothers. —Hillary Rodham Clinton, It Takes a Village, 1996 The suburban community of Park Ridge, Illinois, lies fourteen miles northwest of downtown Chicago. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, just over 37,000 mostly white residents live in Park Ridge with a median family income of $85,000. More than 80 percent of Park Ridge families own their single-family homes, and the community touts its quality schools, abundant parks, and open spaces (U.S. Census Bureau 2011). Though much about the character of Park Ridge has not changed over the years, its political alignment has. In recent elections, a majority of Park Ridge voters supported a state ballot measure to legalize marijuana and also supported Democratic candidates for local, state and national offices. This marks a dramatic shift from the community’s conservatism during the 1950s when Hugh and Dorothy Rodham chose to buy their first home and raise their three children in Park Ridge. Hugh E. Rodham was born in the working-class factory town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1911, the middle son of an English immigrant and a daughter of a long line of coal miners. His father, Hugh Sr., came to the United States with his parents and ten siblings and began work in the 1

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Scranton lace factories by the age of eleven. Over the next fifty years, Hugh Sr. worked his way up to the position of supervisor, married Hannah Jones, and raised three sons of his own: Willard, Hugh, and Russell. Hillary Rodham Clinton describes her grandfather Hugh Sr. as a “gentle, soft-spoken man” who “worshipped” his tough-as-nails wife (Clinton 2003). Hillary recalls that her grandmother, Hannah Jones Rodham, who came from generations of Welsh coal miners transplanted to Scranton, “owned and ruled her family and anyone else within her reach” right up until her death in 1952 (Clinton 2003). (Hannah also insisted on using both her maiden and married names, an example that Hillary would later follow.) After Hannah’s death, Hugh Sr. would continue to live in the family’s Scranton duplex, where Hillary and her brothers often visited him; as children they also spent nearly a month most summers with Grandpa Hugh at the simple cabin he built on Lake Winola, about a thirty-minute drive northwest of Scranton. Hillary has fond memories of playing games with her paternal grandfather, whom she describes as “kind and proper,” always wearing suspenders and a coat, with his golden watch from fifty years of service in the lace mill on a chain in his pocket (Clinton 2003). Hugh Sr. and Hannah’s oldest son, Willard, an engineer for the city of Scranton, lived at home and never married; their youngest son and supposed favorite, Russell, was a high achiever as youth, became a doctor, served in the army, married, and settled with his family back in Scranton. However, in 1948, Russell became so depressed that he tried to kill himself. Hillary’s father, Hugh, who had just returned to Scranton at the request of his worried parents, found his brother Russell hanging in the family’s attic just in time to cut him down and save his life. Hugh, who was now married with a young family and job in Chicago, moved Russell to stay with them so that he could receive psychiatric treatment at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Chicago. Russell gave up practicing medicine but remained in the Chicago area, even after Hugh moved his family out of the city to the suburb of Park Ridge in 1950. Russell died in 1962 when his apartment caught fire from a cigarette he left burning. The Rodhams were devoted Methodists, and even after Hugh Rodham left Scranton—by hopping a train to Chicago to look for work without forewarning his parents—he kept close ties with the church and his family back home. As a father, Hugh would see to it that Hillary and her brothers were baptized at the same Methodist church in Scranton where he worshipped as a child. Founded by minister John Wesley and his brother, Charles, who wanted to see reforms within the Church of England in the mid-1700s, the Methodist church is a Protestant sect of Christianity. In the tradition of Wesley’s “Holy Club” that met weekly at Oxford to take communion and read the Bible, Methodists place great value on faith through deliberate action. Time and again in her memoirs, Hillary relates how central her



Early Life 3

Christian faith is to her life and how influential Methodist teachings have been to her career, particularly the expression of faith: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, for as long as ever you can” (Clinton 2003). Hugh would also raise his children to expect no free rides or special treatment. According to Hillary’s memoirs and published accounts by childhood friends, her dark-haired, thick-browed father was a hardworking small businessman who was slow to praise his children and not opposed to spanking them. Although he had worshipped his own mother and yearned for her praise, he was often sarcastic, to the edge of cruelty, toward Hillary’s mother, even in front of their children (Clinton 2003; Bernstein 2007). Standing at six-foot-two and weighing 230 pounds, Hugh Rodham had followed his best friend upon graduation from Central High School in Scranton to attend and play football for Penn State University in 1931. He earned a degree in physical education there in 1935 and then fled Pennsylvania—and perhaps the heavy hand of his mother—for a job he found in Chicago selling drapery fabrics throughout the Midwest. During World War II, Hugh had served as a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy, stationed an hour north of Chicago, and was responsible for the physical fitness of thousands of new recruits before they shipped off to duty in the Pacific. (He was sidelined from active combat by a knee injury sustained in college.) After the war, he started a drapery fabric business named Rodrik Fabrics with offices in the historic Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago, to which he continued to commute in his Cadillac once he moved his family to Park Ridge. He regularly worked fourteen-hour days, due to his lifelong “fear of poverty,” according to Hillary (Chozick 2015). When not at work, according to several published accounts, Hugh ran his household with a firm grip and loud voice, constantly raising the bar for Hillary and her brothers in the name of character building. “By all accounts he was kind of a tough customer,” said Lissa Muscatine, a longtime friend and adviser to Hillary. “Hard-working, believed in no free rides, believed you had to earn what you’re going to get, believed his kids could always do better” (Chozick 2015). Politically, Hugh was a self-described staunch conservative who hated labor unions, tax increases, and most government aid programs, according to Hillary biographer Carl Bernstein (Bernstein 2007). Upon Hugh Rodham’s death in 1993 at the age of eighty-two, his son-in-law Bill Clinton eulogized him as “tough and gruff,” according to the New York Times, saying the Hugh “thought Democrats were one step short of Communism—but that I might be OK” (Chozick 2015). Hugh Rodham first saw Dorothy Howell, his future wife, while on a sales call to a Chicago textile company. She was there to apply for a job as a clerk typist. According to Hillary’s account in Living History, her mother was “attracted to his energy and self-assurance and gruff sense of humor” (Clinton 2003). Dorothy and Hugh dated for five years before getting

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married in early 1942. Dorothy worked as Hugh’s secretary during part of their courtship. They would wait another five years, while World War II raged and then Hugh began his fabric business, before starting a family of their own. Hillary, their oldest, was born less than a year before they moved from their small Lincoln Park neighborhood apartment in Chicago out to the suburbs; and soon would follow two boys, Hugh Jr. and Tony. Once the children were born, Dorothy became a stay-at-home mom devoted to creating a pleasant household and nurturing her children. Hillary remembers her as always busy about the house, yet Dorothy also made time to teach Sunday school at the family’s church, help her kids with homework, read to them, and encourage their imaginations by helping them make up games or lying with them on the grass while they found shapes in the clouds overhead (Clinton 2003; Bernstein 2007). Dorothy Howell’s own upbringing is a tale of abandonment and adversity. She was born in 1919 to a young fireman, Edwin Howell Jr., and his wife, Della Murray. In a 2008 article, the Los Angeles Times cites 1920 U.S. Census records that show the Howells lived as one of five families in a Chicago boarding house “on a tough stretch of Michigan Avenue” (Matthews 2008). By 1926, Edwin filed for divorce claiming that Della, on three separate occasions, hit him in the face and scratched him. The Times article cites Cook County records of the divorce, including testimony by Della’s sister that “she had a violent temper” and indeed had abused her husband and abandoned her two young daughters (Matthews 2008). Della did not bother to appear in court to contest the divorce. In 1927, Edwin was granted a divorce and custody of the two little girls. He then put eight-year-old Dorothy and her threeyear-old sister, Isabelle, on a train by themselves for a four-day trip to his parents and their new home in Southern California. Edwin Howell Sr., a former British sailor, and his wife Emma had only moved to California a few years earlier. Edwin Sr. was busy as an auto plant machinist and a city street department worker. The couple rented a home on Park Street in Alhambra, where they reluctantly took on the responsibility of raising their granddaughters. In Living History, Hillary describes Emma as “a severe woman who wore black Victorian dresses and resented and ignored my mother except when enforcing her rigid house rules.” She writes that Edwin Sr. all but ignored Dorothy and Isabelle as well (Clinton 2003). In 1932, the Howells bought a home in what today is Temple City, and two years later, Edwin Jr. moved to join the family in California. However, court records from 1936, cited by the Los Angeles Times, show tough economic conditions for the family as the Great Depression gripped the country. The records indicate that Dorothy’s grandparents had no means of income and were getting by solely on assistance from relief agencies (Matthews 2008). That same year, Dorothy moved out of the Howells’ home to work as a housekeeper in nearby, more affluent San Gabriel.



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Records from the time indicate that her employers were James and Mary Kinlock (Matthews 2008). While Dorothy lived and worked in San Gabriel, she would walk to attend Alhambra High School. She had little time for extracurricular activities or socializing outside of her housekeeping and babysitting duties, but Dorothy did belong to the high school’s Scholarship Society and the Spanish Club. Hillary says that Dorothy often told her that the experience of living with a strong, loving family in her teens was what instilled the skills she later used to run her own household and raise Hillary and the boys (Clinton 2003). Upon graduation from high school, Dorothy planned to attend college in California. Then, Della contacted her for the first time in ten years. She asked Dorothy to come live with her and her new husband, Max Rosenberg, in Chicago; and she promised that they would pay for her to attend college there. Hoping that her mother would finally love her, Dorothy moved to Chicago. The Times cites a senior class survey where Dorothy reported that she would attend Northwestern University, just north of Chicago (Matthews 2008). However, once she was back with her mother, Dorothy’s dreams were crushed. Della only wanted Dorothy around as a housekeeper, and no money for college ever materialized. (Much later in life, Dorothy took an array of college courses once she relocated to Arkansas to be near Hillary and son-in-law Bill Clinton.) As Hillary recalls, Dorothy stayed in Chicago at the time because she “had nowhere else to go” (Clinton 2003). Dorothy found office work for five and a half days a week and moved into her own small apartment. Grandfather Edwin Howell died in 1947 before Hillary and her brothers were born, but Grandma Della did babysit them occasionally. Hillary remembers Della as largely self-absorbed and more interested in television soap operas than the real world. Still, sometimes her grandmother would engage and take the kids to see movies or to a local amusement park (Clinton 2003). Della died in 1960, “unhappy” and an enigma, according to Hillary (Clinton 2003). Hugh Rodham moved his family in 1950 to a brick, two-story home at the corner of Elm and Wisner Street in Park Ridge. He paid $35,000 in cash for the house. The neighborhood was typical of post–World War II suburbs across America where thousands of white, young, male veterans moved to buy houses with help from the GI Bill and start families. The bedroom community, like similar ones across the country, had no Blacks, no Hispanics, no divorces, and very few Democrats (Jenkins 2007). Hillary and her brothers were part of the postwar population boom—the Baby Boom. She recalls in her memoir that at one point her mother counted more than forty-five children living in their square block in Park Ridge (Clinton 2003). The Rodham kids spent much of their time outdoors with the neighbors, playing well-known childhood games like the basketball game HORSE or making up their own. Hillary could walk to and from

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Hillary Clinton

elementary school and regularly came home to eat lunch with her mom. The family had only one car, which Hugh used to commute to his office and to call on customers, so Dorothy and the kids would walk to do household errands. Her mom took Hillary to the public library every week to encourage a love of reading, while limiting her children’s time spent in front of the family television. Dorothy disdained people who thought themselves better or of higher moral standing than others, according to Hillary (Clinton 2003). While Hugh was routinely the taskmaster of the household and expected a lot out of his children, Dorothy also expected them to stand up for themselves and have pride in being their own individuals. In Living History, Hillary recalls that shortly after they moved to Park Ridge, she came in from playing with the neighborhood kids crying to her mom. One of the older girls was giving Hillary a tough time, and her mom swiftly told her to get back outside and be ready to hit the girl back if necessary—to stand her ground and claim her spot in the neighborhood gaggle (Clinton 2003). Dorothy supported her daughter as a Brownie and Girl Scout but told her to resist the peer pressure so common among groups of young girls. Hugh was very tight with the family budget, and Dorothy knew the importance of limiting appeals by Hillary for new clothes or party dresses to truly special occasions (Jenkins 2007). As a teen, Hillary felt conspicuous wearing the thick glasses she needed to correct her eyesight, so she often ditched them and thereby earned a reputation for being stuck up for not acknowledging her peers when passing by (Clinton 2003). Hillary attended public school through twelfth grade, first at Eugene Field School, then Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High, and finally Main Township High Schools East and South. She thrived in academics and took pride in earning leadership positions among her peers, from cocaptain of the safety patrol in elementary school to the Cultural Values Committee at Main Township High School East. Hillary describes her high school as stereotypical of so many suburban American communities during the late 1950s and early 1960s; most students were white, middle class, and Christian. Still, some groups like the athletes or “jocks” found reasons to criticize and mock others—like the kids who took auto shop class, known as the “greasers” (Clinton 2003). Her role on the Cultural Values Committee was to work with other members representing a cross section of the student body to raise awareness about their similarities and break down preconceived notions about each other. Hillary was also elected to the student council and to the position of junior class vice president. Her class was split at the start of her senior year, and for half of it, she attended the newly opened Main Township High School South. Once there, she ran for student body president but lost to one of her male competitors—an outcome she claims did not surprise her (Clinton 2003).



Early Life 7

In high school, Hillary began to notice how cultural gender norms— sexist norms by today’s standards—from her parents’ and previous generations were seeping into hers. For example, some of her girlfriends tried to downplay or hide their academic successes for fear of offending less academically successful boys whom they were dating. She had some girlfriends who were completely willing to give up the pursuit of a college education or career to instead marry and start a family right out of high school. Hillary knew early on that was not what she wanted to do. Despite her father’s gruff nature toward her mother at times, Hillary claims that both of her parents encouraged her from a young age to believe that she could achieve anything she set her mind to—specifically, that she could do anything her brothers could, whether that be to throw a curveball or pursue a career as an astronaut, if she so desired (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). While her mother raised her to be confident yet caring, her father contributed to Hillary’s toughness, her ability later in life to face one political battle after another. “He was such a force in the family, and there’s a lot of him in Hillary,” said Lisa Caputo, a friend and former White House press aide who knew Mr. Rodham. “The discipline, the tenacity, the work ethic, a lot of that’s from him” (Chozick 2015). As Hillary herself reflects in her 2017 memoir What Happened, “When I feel wronged, I get mad, and then I think about how to fight back” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Still, Hugh Rodham had a soft spot for his only daughter, and friends speculate that his encouragement of her interests, from schoolwork to football, was his way of showing her love (Bernstein 2007). Hillary credits her ninth grade history teacher, Paul Carlson, for encouraging her early activism in politics—he was conservative and suggested she read Senator Barry Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative (Clinton 2003). She ended up writing a seventy-five page report on it. In the 1964 presidential election, Hillary supported Goldwater as the Republican nominee, largely due to both her history teacher and her father’s boisterous allegiance to the Republican Party. Like many teens growing up in what are called red counties and states today, Hillary’s early political views were largely borrowed from the influential adults in her life. She admits in her first memoir to “parroting the conventional wisdom” of Park Ridge politics (Clinton 2003). Still, Hillary did not just talk about supporting the candidate favored by her community and father; she and a friend actually answered an ad calling for Republican volunteers to search out voter registration fraud after John F. Kennedy won the presidency in November 1960. Without telling her parents, Hillary went with complete strangers the next morning to knock on doors in South Side Chicago neighborhoods to compare voter registration lists. Though her father thought Kennedy had stolen the election with the help of Chicago’s corrupt Democratic mayor, Richard J. Daley, he was still livid at his daughter

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Hillary Clinton

A Goldwater Girl Republican Barry M. Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election to incumbent Democrat Lyndon Johnson in a landslide. Still, the fact that Goldwater even became the nominee marked a turning point for the Republican Party. Many Republicans, including former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, considered Goldwater a radical. As a five-time senator from Arizona, Goldwater favored free enterprise and smaller government; he criticized what he called the new welfare state; and he called for an uncompromising stance against communism. He rose to national attention with the 1960 publication of Conscience of a Conservative, a short book that not only summarized his ideology but also laid out how it could translate into public policy. Goldwater’s prospects in the 1964 primaries improved markedly after his defeat of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the favorite of the East Coast Republican establishment, in the California primary. Although Goldwater wrestled the nomination from the mainstream of the Republican Party, his ideals were more right wing than those of most Americans. However, one of his most ardent supporters in 1964, Ronald Reagan— an actor and cochairman of the California Republicans for Goldwater—would go on to ride the conservative groundswell that Goldwater started into the California governor’s office in 1968 and the White House in 1980. In fact, many historians pinpoint a 1964 speech by Reagan in support of Goldwater for the launch of Reagan’s political career. In her memoir Living History, Hillary admits she was a Young Republican and Goldwater supporter in high school, right down to her cowgirl outfit and straw hat emblazoned with the candidate’s slogan (Clinton 2003). Her freshman history teacher encouraged her to read Conscience of a Conservative; Hillary liked Goldwater’s rugged individualism and how he “swam against the political tide” (Clinton 2003). She knocked on doors in Chicago to help root out possible voter registration fraud for his campaign, but Hillary was never able to cast a vote for Goldwater—she was not yet of voting age, which in 1964 was twenty-one.

for taking such a personal risk as a young girl. Interestingly, in Living History, Hillary comments that she believes her mother was a Democrat all along but largely kept silent and let her father rant about his conservative views at the dinner table, from his fear of Communists infiltrating the government to his hate for tax increases and government “hand-outs” to help the poor, many of whom happened to be African American (Clinton 2003). As if put in her life to counter the conservative influence of her high school history teacher, a new youth minister at her family’s Methodist church also made a big impression on Hillary during her teen years (Clinton 2003). Reverend Don Jones came to the First United Methodist Church of Park Ridge straight out of seminary and four years in the U.S. Navy.



Early Life 9

Reverend Jones led the church’s biweekly youth fellowship sessions under the name “the University of Life” (Bernstein 2007). Hillary would keep in touch with Jones throughout most of her life, writing him letters about her shifting political views in college. In What Happened, she recalls reaching out to Jones in the 1990s when her marriage was in trouble, and she writes that she found comfort after her 2016 election loss by revisiting a sermon that she first heard from Jones in the church basement back in Park Ridge (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). As Hillary recalls in her memoir, he hoped to teach his flock about the real world outside of their suburban bubble. He took the teens to socialize with youth groups at Black and Hispanic churches in metropolitan Chicago; he introduced them to poetry and activist art such as Pablo Picasso’s gigantic painting Guernica, which the artist painted in 1937 as a plea against the horrors of war; and he took a group of them to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak as part of the Chicago Sunday Evening Club program at the city’s Orchestra Hall, most likely in April 1962 (Clinton 2003). (This date is based on records kept by the program, although several Hillary biographers have cited other dates.) Hillary recalls that hearing Dr. King speak was really her introduction to the civil rights struggle taking place in the American South (Clinton 2003). “King’s address was ‘Sleeping through the Revolution,’ and in his vibrato he decried suburbanites who passed the poor by. Jones introduced the children to King personally” (Jenkins 2007). Hillary was so moved by King’s speech that she began volunteering to babysit and teach children in a migrant farmer camp near Park Ridge. By Hillary’s junior year of high school, a tug-of-war had been waged for her and fellow students between the moral lessons and liberalism of Jones and the anticommunist, conservative teachings of Carlson. Her neighbor Ernie Ricketts is quoted as saying, “Don represented the questioning of values, and Paul Carlson was the values being questioned” (Jenkins 2007). When the high school Organizations Committee that Hillary headed decided to stage a mock presidential debate in 1964, the government teacher in charge assigned her to play Democratic President Lyndon Johnson and one of the few Democratic students she knew to play Republican candidate Senator Barry Goldwater. Hillary credits her mock debate preparation as her initial education in the Democratic Party’s position on health care, poverty, civil rights, and foreign affairs. Coincidently, she notes in Living History that both she and her debate opponent ended up switching their political affiliations by the time they graduated from college—Hillary, the Park Ridge Republican teen, would become a Democrat over the next four years (Clinton 2003).

2 College Years

We arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn’t a discouraging gap and it didn’t turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Wellesley College Commencement Address, 1969 Wellesley College lies just thirty minutes by car southwest from downtown Boston, but the pastoral New England campus feels light years away. Built to hug the northern shore of a glacial lake surrounded by wooded hillsides, the campus features a mixture of neo-Gothic architecture— brick and stone buildings with tall pointed arches, large vertical windows and prominent exterior pillars—winding paths, meadows of native plants and groves of trees. Most of the college’s buildings and twenty-one dorms allow for frequent views across Lake Waban and the wooded Wellesley Hills. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., known as the father of American landscape design and the planner of both New York’s Central Park and the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, designed a 1902 master plan for the Wellesley campus and described it as “not merely beautiful, but a marked individual character not represented so far as I know on the ground of any other college in the country” (Wellesley College 2020). 11

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At the urging of two of the female student teachers at Maine Township South, during her senior year, Hillary applied to both Wellesley and Smith, their alma maters. Both colleges are part of the Seven Sisters, a collection of prestigious private, East Coast, liberal arts women’s colleges that also includes Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Radcliffe (which is now part of Harvard). Hillary received acceptance letters to both Smith and Wellesley, but she chose Wellesley based on photos of the campus; in Living History, she recalls that Lake Waban reminded her of Lake Winola in Pennsylvania, where she had spent summers at her grandfather’s cabin (Clinton 2003). Philanthropists Henry and Pauline Durant founded Wellesley in 1870. The school’s motto translates from Latin to read, “Not to be ministered unto, but to minister,” which, according to its website, captures the institution’s emphasis on service and leadership (Wellesley College 2020). For 2020, U.S. News & World Report ranked Wellesley College as the third best National Liberal Arts College. (Only Williams College and Amherst, both of which are also private schools in Massachusetts, ranked higher.) When her parents dropped her off at Wellesley in September 1965 to move into in her Stone-Davis dorm room, Hillary knew no one on campus. She recalls feeling, like many college freshman do their first week, “lonely, overwhelmed and out of place” (Clinton 2003). During her first month, she struggled in challenging math, geology, and French courses, and she felt like an outsider among so many girls who came from private boarding schools, had traveled extensively, and fluently spoke languages other than English. In October, homesick and doubtful of her ability to succeed at Wellesley, Hillary called her parents collect from a school pay phone. According to her own accounts, Hugh told her to come home if she wanted, but Dorothy told her not to be a quitter, to give it some time (Clinton 2003). Over the months to come, Hillary began to find her footing and some lifelong friends. She joined the Young Republicans on campus and was elected president as a freshman. Over the next two years, Hillary would develop her own political beliefs—separate from her dad’s or the Park Ridge consensus—and ultimately step down as president of the club. Early in her time at Wellesley, Hillary began to recognize the sense of freedom that an all-women’s college afforded her and her classmates. Without boys on campus to impress with makeup and mannerisms or contend with for leadership positions or athletic achievements, Hillary believes Wellesley provided her and her friends the freedom to “take risks, make mistakes” and develop their interests in ways that they might have missed at a coed college (Clinton 2003). Like many all-women colleges in the mid-1960s, Wellesley still enforced a student dress code, a curfew, and only allowed male visitors in dorm rooms for a few hours on Sundays, and even then room doors had to remain ajar, and the “two feet” rule was



College Years 13

enforced—two out of the couple’s four feet had to be on the floor at all times (Clinton 2003). Students wishing to leave campus had to sign in and sign out, and provide details of where they were going and why. Such in locus parentis rules were enforced to help protect student reputations. As coed interactions, along with many social norms, became less formal in the later half the 1960s, Wellesley students began to demand changes to the seemingly parental authority that the school administration claimed over them. By Hillary’s senior year, when she served as student government president, the school finally repealed a number of its socially restrictive rules. Hillary spent the summer after her freshman year in a cabin on the shore of Lake Michigan, hired as a babysitter and researcher for a former Wellesley professor who was editing part of a book. He was asked to leave the college, supposedly due to his antiwar activism; the book he was working on was The Realities of Vietnam: A Ripon Society Appraisal (Bernstein 2007). The Ripon Society was founded in 1962 by a group of young Republicans concerned about the outdated conservative views of many party leaders. The group took its name from the purported birthplace of the Republican Party: Ripon, Wisconsin. Upon the death of President John F. Kennedy and the ascension of Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a more traditional liberal, to the presidency in 1963, the Ripon Society issued “An Open Letter to a New Generation of Republicans.” They posited, “Since 1960 John F. Kennedy had moved to preempt the political center. . . . Now the very transfer of power means that the center is once again contestable. We believe the Republican Party should accept the challenge to fight for the middle ground of American politics” (Bernstein 2007). Hillary’s boss gave her several books to read in her free time, and, according to biographer Carl Bernstein, by the end of the summer, she firmly opposed the American war effort in Vietnam. No longer a Goldwater Girl, she now identified herself as a Rockefeller Republican, so named for the moderate views of Nelson Rockefeller, four-time governor of New York and a presidential hopeful in 1960, 1964, and 1968. Once back at Wellesley in the fall, Hillary began her foray into college government as a class representative in the student senate. “Her knack for public speaking was obvious to anyone who saw her onstage at an outdoor demonstration in her sophomore year” that focused on the curriculum and whether Wellesley’s administration should adopt a pass/fail grading system. “‘She had this formidable quality of poise, of self-control, of selfcontainment, which caused some resentment among the more bohemian and rebellious students,’ said Robert Pinsky, a former professor and later poet laureate” (Sellers 2016). Geoffrey Shields, Hillary’s Harvard boyfriend during her early years at Wellesley, told Carl Bernstein that she had a seriousness and intensity to her “that was unusual with most women”

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(Bernstein 2007). Shields recalled that Hillary enjoyed having serious conversations, discussing weighty issues, and going to movies that addressed real-life matters. Her approach to life, as Shields viewed it, was to set goals—either personal goals for herself or to advance a cause that mattered to her—and then work to achieve them (Bernstein 2007). When describing her time at Wellesley in her memoirs, Hillary emphasizes how central discussions of the Vietnam War were to her and her classmates—a centrality she is not sure younger readers can comprehend now that the United States has an all-volunteer military. She explains that their discussions about the war became a much broader debate about the concept of patriotism and the different ways citizens believe they should best express it. In Living History, she warns readers that some writers and politicians today “would have us believe that the debate was frivolous, but that’s not how I remember it. Vietnam mattered, and it changed the country forever” (Clinton 2003). The war had particular resonance for Hillary and her friends in the Stone-Davis dorm on campus. “Down the hall from Hillary, a fellow student was corresponding with a brother fighting in Vietnam. Clinton and a group of friends who have remained close ever since rallied around the dorm mate” (Sellers 2016). As the presidential election in 1968 began, Hillary volunteered for the antiwar campaign of Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. She and her dorm mates would drive north to Manchester, New Hampshire on the weekends to stuff envelopes at the McCarthy campaign headquarters or walk precincts to talk about his platform with potential voters. During her junior year, Hillary also continued in campus leadership as chairman of the “Vil Juniors”—a prestigious position for juniors selected because of their maturity and dependability to serve as freshmen advisers (Sellers 2016). While time consuming, the position was largely considered a stepping-stone to the student government presidency. “‘She was determined to make something of herself,’ recalled Sarah Malino. ‘She was choosing leadership position after leadership position’” (Sellers 2016). Few single years in American history have been as pivotal as 1968. On January 31, the North Vietnamese military, the Viet Cong, began a series of attacks on South Vietnamese cities and U.S. military outposts known as the Tet Offensive; by mid-February, the death toll from the attacks reached five hundred American soldiers per week. On March 5, hundreds of Mexican American high school students began to walk out of classes in Los Angeles to protest rundown schools and indifferent or poorly trained teachers—within a week their numbers would swell to more than twentytwo thousand as newspapers nationwide carried their story. On March 31, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection— he realized that his escalation of the Vietnam War and dishonesty about it with the American public now jeopardized his prospects for another term.



College Years 15

On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis by a white supremacist; for days afterward, riots erupted out of frustration and anger in poor, largely Black neighborhoods of more than one hundred U.S. cities. That same spring, antiwar protests on college campuses and in cities like Washington, New York, and San Francisco became more and more violent. Student protesters shut down Columbia University, and other colleges suspended classes. Then, on June 5, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the slain president, was assassinated in Los Angeles just after winning the California Democratic primary for president. Hillary Rodham was deeply affected by these tumultuous events. In particular, the death of Dr. King moved her to action. In her memoirs, she recalls being filled “with grief and rage” when she heard of King’s murder—flinging her books against the wall and shouting aloud when she heard the news, it was a rare moment where Hillary lost her composure, at least temporarily (Clinton 2003; Jenkins 2007). She sought out one of the few Black students on campus, with whom she had become friends, to offer her sympathies. The next day, she participated in a protest march in downtown Boston and returned to school with a black armband and anxiety about the country’s future. Hillary was one of thirteen students selected for the Wellesley Internship in Washington for the summer of 1968. Much to her dismay, given her evolving political views, she learned that she would be assigned to the House Republican Conference (Clinton 2003). For nine weeks, Hillary answered phones and ran errands as one of thirty interns for the conference chairman, Congressman Melvin Laird of Wisconsin. Toward the end of her time in Washington, another member of the conference, Congressman Charles Goodell, a moderate Republican from New York, asked Hillary and a few other interns if they would be interested in working for Governor Rockefeller at the Republican Convention in Miami Beach. Rockefeller was planning a long-shot, last-ditch effort to deny former Vice President Richard Nixon the party nomination for president. Hillary jumped at the opportunity. Though Hillary’s convention days as a staffer in the Rockefeller campaign suite at the luxury Fontainebleau Hotel were marked by heady experiences like a meet and greet with superstar Frank Sinatra and an elevator ride with actor John Wayne, she knew before she went that Rockefeller’s long shot would not pan out (Clinton 2003). As expected, the convention nominated Richard Nixon and thereby seemingly closed the door on the shrinking moderate wing of the Republican Party. The Democratic Convention in Chicago planned for August 1968 guaranteed to be less predictable. Vice President Hubert Humphrey had emerged as the party’s frontrunner after the death of Robert Kennedy; but Eugene McCarthy was still in the race, and he had the backing of growing antiwar forces within the country. Thousands of antiwar protesters were expected to descend on Chicago with plans to disrupt the convention; meanwhile, Mayor Richard M. Daley wanted the city to shine in the

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national spotlight. He authorized Chicago police to arrest protesters and even assault them as necessary to maintain control. Meanwhile, Hillary had returned home to an empty house in Park Ridge for the last few weeks of summer—the rest of the family was on the annual drive to Lake Winola. Hillary and one of her childhood friends, Betsy Ebeling, decided to drive into Chicago to witness the confrontation outside the Democratic Convention firsthand. Without telling their parents where they were headed, Betsy drove her family’s station wagon to the edge of Grant Park, where the police had set up barricades. As the two proceeded on foot, they found themselves in a violent melee: police with nightsticks brutally beat young male and female protesters, random fires burned, tear gas hung in the air, and some protesters yelled profanities and threw rocks at the police. The girls could not believe their eyes—college students their age sat bloodied and bruised, awaiting treatment by volunteers at emergency first aid stations. As Betsy recalls in the 2020 Hulu documentary Hillary, the two looked at each other and knew “we need to come back tomorrow night to hear what they are really saying!” (Burstein 2020). Hillary recalls, “By the time we got to Grant Park, it was crazy! For me, 1968 was just a watershed. My then boyfriend was a conscientious objector” (Burstein 2020). Hillary and Betsy did return for the second and third nights of the convention; they came to see the police violence against the young protesters in the streets as a mirror image of the violence they saw on TV against young American soldiers in Vietnam. Hillary became deeply concerned about the obvious disconnect between the government’s use of authority and its duty to protect and account to its citizens. For Hillary, her contrasting experiences attending both party’s conventions that summer convinced her that the place to be was inside, where the power was (Burstein 2020). “‘With her, it wasn’t a theoretical discussion. She really believed she could obtain power,’ her high school friend John Peavoy says. ‘A lot of us didn’t. We believed we could protest, but the idea that we could get into the system, that seemed like a world we couldn’t enter’” (Jenkins 2007). She headed back to Wellesley for her senior year, committed to nonviolent protest and more active, campus-wide support of the antiwar movement. As the president of the student government, Hillary worked to bring her classmates to meaningful action on the Vietnam War but in a nonviolent, managed way. Eleanor “Eldie” Acheson, granddaughter of former secretary of state Dean Acheson, recalls that Hillary was a person who got what the system was (Sellers 2016). She collaborated with the college administration to organize “teach-ins” to protest the Vietnam War as an alternative to public protests that might bring police and chaos to campus. In her new role, Clinton met regularly with college president Ruth Adams and Wellesley’s vice president, Philip M. Phibbs, a political science professor. She was an



College Years 17

“honest broker” for the students, Phibbs recalled, but didn’t rock the boat (Sellers 2016). “She was concerned about the college,” Phibbs said. “She didn’t want to see student concerns articulated in a way that was disruptive of the college” (Sellers 2016). Here Hillary stepped up as an intermediary between upset students, the faculty, and the college administration to organize some form of action, some way of addressing the issues reverberating from the outside world, without letting an “us-versus-them” mentality take hold (Sellers 2016). After Dr. King’s death, she had supported Black student–led efforts to increase recruitment of minority faculty and students and create an African American Studies department; now, she worked to create civil forums for students to learn about the war, the arguments for and against it, and to discuss them. Clinton circulated a note asking students for ideas. She wanted to create an “activist forum from which no ideas are excluded” (Sellers 2016). Her composure was her signature as president of the Wellesley student government. “‘She’s anchored by it,’ says Alan Schechter, her college adviser. ‘She was the sort of person who thought the way to win goals at a place like Wellesley was to go to people who held power and reason with them’” (Jenkins 2007). At the start of her senior year, Hillary marched into her adviser’s office and announced her intention to devote herself to social equality. According to Schechter, she was the most passionate he had ever seen her (Jenkins 2007). He helped her conceptualize a thesis comparing the effectiveness of intervention models: the grassroots approach espoused by Saul Alinsky, community organizer from Chicago who she had previously met, compared to top-down government support (Sellers 2016). Alinsky believed in empowering people to help themselves—teaching them how to confront business and government entities to get the support they need to thrive. He believed that change, big change, had to come from outside the political-economic system, whereas Hillary came to believe that the most effective path to change was from inside the existing framework. She drew her conclusions largely from her own visits to poor neighborhoods in Chicago, where she evaluated the effectiveness of local action programs when the residents set the goals, planned the implementation, and controlled the funding. Such programs had been at the heart of President Johnson’s War on Poverty when begun in 1964, but by 1969, many of the local control programs came to be criticized for poor financial management and accountability. Hillary came to a similar conclusion: for local programs to work, residents needed more than just an influx of funding; they needed on-the-ground expertise, usually best provided by the federal government (Clinton 2003). She also interviewed Alinsky twice for her thesis and noted in the final copy that he had offered her a job in Chicago, which she turned down to pursue law school. Her thesis, entitled “There Is Only One Fight,” earned her an A, but its focus on Alinsky would later cause political

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headaches as her critics, including Republican presidential hopeful and eventual U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, would cite it as proof that Hillary was a political radical (Sellers 2016). Hillary knew that she wanted to attend law school after Wellesley. But sitting for the law school admissions test (LSAT) proved to be a rude awakening to what lay ahead, beyond the bounds of an all-women’s college. In What Happened, Hillary recounts how when she and a friend went to take the LSAT, they were the only two women in the room. Some the young men in the room began to harass them before the test started, taunting them with questions about why they were even there—“Why don’t you go home and get married?” (Clinton 2003). Regardless of the attempts to unnerve the two of them, Hillary says she reminded herself that they would get “no points for being emotional, no points for speaking up for yourselves” (Burstein 2020). She scored well and was admitted to both Harvard and Yale. While trying to decide between the two programs, she attended a cocktail party at Harvard Law School. When a male friend introduced her to one of his law professors as a prospective student, the professor gruffly responded that Harvard did not need any more women (Clinton 2003). Hillary chose to attend Yale in the fall. Before 1969, Wellesley had never featured a student speaker at its commencement ceremony; nonetheless, Hillary’s friend Eldie Acheson became the ringleader of a group of seniors who demanded their own class speaker. President Adams initially said no. Adams finally obliged when she learned that Hillary would be the students’ choice for speaker (Keith 2016). Hillary sought input from her classmates as to what she should say, and she was still working on the final version of speech the night before the ceremony. “She didn’t see it as her speech,” said Jan Piercy, who recalls Clinton tapping fellow students on the shoulder, asking, “What should I say?” (Burstein 2020). Another friend, Ann Rosewater, described Hillary’s preparation as “a listening tour” (Burstein 2020). The responses poured in. Piercy saw Clinton surrounded by “a skirt of paper notes” in her dorm room. “And she was like, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to pull all this together?’” (Burstein 2020). In Living History, Hillary writes that she stayed up working all night to finalize her remarks (Clinton 2003). And though she shared a draft with Schechter and asked Acheson for comments, she refused to show President Adams her speech (Sellers 2016). The commencement ceremony held on May 31, 1969, on the Wellesley campus was attended by more than two thousand guests. The official guest speaker that day was Senator Edward Brooke, a Republican and the Senate’s only African American member at the time, who had been the overwhelming choice by the graduates. Some of the students considered Brooke’s speech on student unrest to be patronizing. Hillary recalls that he seemed out of touch with the times and with his audience. By the time he finished



College Years 19

speaking, Hillary explains in Living History that she felt her job now was to address what he did not: “an acknowledgement of the legitimate grievance and painful questions so many young Americans had about our country’s direction” (Clinton 2003). President Adams introduced Hillary to speak as “cheerful, good humored, good company, and a good friend to all of us” (Sellers 2016). As Jan Piercy recounts in the documentary Hillary, the administration didn’t know entirely what they were getting. She realized, “Whoa, we are off script here,” soon after Hillary took the podium and made a gesture of setting aside her carefully prepared remarks (Burstein 2020). Hillary turned to address Brooke: “We’re not in the positions yet of leadership and power,” she began. “But we do have that indispensable element of criticizing and constructive protest” (Sellers 2016). Then she mused about how much she and her classmates had experienced, how much the country had experienced in the four years since they first stepped foot on campus. Their precollege, mostly sheltered lives had fallen away as they came to realize the uncertainty and complexity of the future before them. Unlike their parents, their lives were not shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. More recent or still unfolding events would shape their lives—like the Vietnam War, which needed to end. Hillary told her peers that “the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible” (Clinton 1969). Her classmates gave her a standing ovation, while some parents and alumnae looked on, displeased. Acheson, who was seated in the front row, avoided eye contact with Adams, knowing that the president must have felt betrayed. Still, according to Acheson, her classmates were proud of Hillary and proud of themselves (Sellers 2016). Hugh Rodham was in the audience, but Hillary’s mother was not—she had been suffering from some health problems for which a doctor had prescribed blood thinners and advised her not to travel. “In typical Hugh Rodham fashion,” according to Hillary in Living History, her father flew into Boston the night before and stayed a hotel by the airport, rode the subway out to the ceremony and lunch in Wellesley, and then promptly headed straight back home (Clinton 2003). Though he was most certainly proud of his daughter for selection as the student speaker, Rodham likely was not as pleased about her message. Since her sophomore year, Hillary had been pushing back from her father’s rigid political views: they now regularly argued about the Vietnam War and civil rights. Her father likely would not have understood how Hillary and her generation “wanted to feel like we were part of something bigger than ourselves” (Clinton, What Happened 2017). Hillary’s speech from Wellesley was one of several cited by Life magazine in its June 1969 roundup of the year’s student commencement addresses. Under the callout quote “Protest is an attempt to forge an identity,” and accompanied by a photo of Hillary, the article included an excerpt of her sometimes-rambling attempt to explain her generation’s fears and

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hopes going forward. (Ironically, the student speech featured next to Hillary’s in Life was that of Ira Magaziner, delivered at Brown University. Magaziner would later serve as a policy advisor to President Bill Clinton and work closely with Hillary in her role as head of the President’s Task Force on Universal Health Care [“The Class of ’69,” Life 1969].)

3 Law School

[I]n the fall of 1970, I decided to concentrate on how the law affected children. —Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History, 2003 Yale Law School traces its origins back to the early 1800s and the law library of Seth Staples, a lawyer in New Haven, Connecticut. Staples accepted apprentices to study in his offices, which soon housed the New Haven Law School. Over several decades, the New Haven Law School affiliated with nearby Yale College, having been founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School; and in 1843 Yale granted its first bachelor’s degree in law. Under its first full-time dean, appointed in 1869, Yale Law School built its library, initiated a law journal, and introduced its Master of Law degree. Merely by accident, in 1885 the school admitted its first female student after she applied using only her initials—Yale Law School assumed she was a man but, even once the mistake was realized, allowed her to attend and complete her one-year course of studies. However, it would not be until 1919, the same year that Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing all American women the right to vote, that Yale Law School officially opened its door to women. When Hillary Rodham arrived to begin her studies at Yale Law School in the fall of 1969, only 26 out of her 234 classmates were women. (Coincidentally, that same fall, women began 21

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undergraduate studies at Yale University for the first time ever, accounting for one-fifth of the freshmen class.) Though the women’s rights movement was making strides in access to education, health care, and employment opportunities by the late 1960s, Hillary knew that being a woman both in law school and then in practicing law would not be easy. Just sitting for the law school admissions test (LSAT) during her senior year at Wellesley had provided a rude awakening to what lay ahead, in the world beyond the classrooms and corridors of an allwomen’s college. Hillary recounts in What Happened how when she and a friend went to take the LSAT, they were the only two women in the room. Although they withstood verbal harassment before the test began from some of the young men seated near them, Hillary’s test scores, combined with her grades and leadership at Wellesley, gained her admission to both Harvard and Yale. Hillary likely chose to attend Yale’s law school because it was much more a part of the movement coming out of the civil rights movement that saw the courts and litigation as the most effective tool in pushing social change. (Her dismissive encounter with one Harvard law professor at a cocktail party for prospective students, as mentioned in chapter 2, may have also made Yale seem the better choice as a woman.) In the 1950s, civil rights lawyers began to slowly but successfully force desegregation of public schools, public transportation, and public facilities. In this vein, Yale was a better fit at the time than Harvard for Hillary’s hope to right the wrongs she saw in society through legal advocacy and civil rights protection within America’s existing socioeconomic and political structures. Hillary came to Yale with a reputation as an activist, at least among her classmates. Many had seen her pictured in Life magazine’s college commencement roundup and heard about her leadership at Wellesley. “Hillary Rodham was a star,” recounts classmate and now radio host Michael Medved. “Everyone knew about her speech and talked in reverential tones about the extraordinary wisdom and eloquence that her address had displayed” (Heilemann 2007). According to biographer Carl Bernstein, based on interviews he conducted with former Yale classmates, many assumed that Hillary would pursue a career in politics; and much like at Wellesley, fellow law students at Yale were drawn to her as someone at the center of action, whatever might be happening (Bernstein 2007). By the spring of 1970, plenty was happening at Yale. Large-scale anti–Vietnam War protests and free speech demonstrations had gripped college campuses across the United States for several years by 1970. Many college campuses were also hotbeds of debate over social and economic issues from racial inequality, police brutality, poverty, and a general questioning of authority and the “status quo.” In the spring of 1970, during Hillary’s first year at Yale Law School, the Yale campus



Law School 23

became a microburst of many of the anti-establishment movements of the time. First, four members of the New Haven chapter of the Black Panther Party, as well as national director and cofounder Bobby Seale, were put on trial in April for the murder of a fellow local Panther, whom members had suspected was an FBI informant. Thousands of protesters flooded New Haven to voice their support for Seale and the other defendants. Many protests believed that the suspects had been set up by the government or that no African American who openly advocated Black Power could receive a fair trial in the country’s structurally racist justice system. A large-scale May Day rally had been scheduled for weeks to show support for the Black Panther defendants. Provocative flyers had encouraged college students up and down New England to come to New Haven to express their rage at the injustice of the Panthers trial. Late in the night on April 27, word reached Hillary that the International Law Library in the basement of Yale’s Gothic style brick and stone law school was on fire. She rushed to join the bucket brigade of students and staff working to put out the flames and save as many books as possible. Once the fire was extinguished, the law school dean asked for student volunteers to organize twenty-four-hour security patrols to watch over the school property. For the remainder of the semester, Hillary took her turn on patrol shifts (Clinton 2003). On April 30, the day before the planned rally, President Richard Nixon went on television and announced that he had authorized an expansion of the war in Vietnam. Nixon, who had promised in his 1968 election campaign to end the conflict, announced that U.S. combat troops were being sent from South Vietnam as part an “incursion” into neighboring Cambodia, in an effort to halt North Vietnamese attacks from strongholds there. The New Haven May Day demonstration would now become larger and angrier as protesters voiced their opposition to Nixon’s decision as well. Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, unlike administrators on other college campuses like UC Berkeley and Harvard, had tried to strike a tone of understanding and compromise with students during previous protests. Facing the very real prospect of violence at the May Day rally, Brewster agreed to student demands that classes be suspended and dorm cafeterias be opened to feed even nonstudent protesters. Much like President Brewster, Hillary was seemingly careful as she maneuvered through the storm of events whipping up around her. Like many of her classmates, Hillary did not see herself as part of the Establishment, yet she also did not see her future as a violent revolutionary. So, Hillary threw herself into the action on campus, but she embraced the middle ground, able to listen to both sides and helping them to better hear one another. In a 2007 New York profile, writer John Heilemann aptly describes Hillary at Yale as a “mediator,” a kind of “translator” between parties in conflict over viewpoints or the best course of action. “‘It was almost like [she was] being a translator,’

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her classmate Kristine Olson recalled. ‘Somebody would say something in the typical rhetoric of the time. She would say,’ ‘I hear you saying this.’ Or, ‘If you could be in a room with Professor So-and-so, is this what you would say?’” (Heilemann 2007). Although many law students earn recognition through selection to their school law review—and the law reviews at Harvard and Yale are considered the gold standard—Hillary chose instead to help establish an alternative law journal, The Yale Review of Law and Social Action. The debut issue, timed for the spring of 1970, featured an introduction by Hillary and her fellow editors stating that the publication would be dedicated to “areas beyond the limits of traditional legal concerns” and “to present forms of legal scholarship and journalism which focus on programmatic solutions to social problems” (Bernstein 2007). For Hillary, work on the publication aligned with her interest in use of the law to help the poor, women, and children—those with the least representation in the Establishment hierarchy. For example, the first issue of the Review featured articles about feeding the poor and rent strikes. Though Hillary has not expressed her views on the New Haven Panther trial in her memoirs, she did attend some days of the proceedings as part of an effort by students in her civil liberties class to monitor and analyze what happened in the courtroom. Later that year, the second issue of the Review featured several articles detailing the trial proceedings. Although she obviously shared the concerns of the May Day protesters about the Panthers’ chances for a fair trial and against Nixon’s expansion of the war, much like while at Wellesley, Hillary chose a moderate, pragmatic course of reacting. Once again, her peers felt her convictions and noticed her ability to calm others by listening to them and then translating their concerns in a rational, balanced manner. More than one Yale classmate has described Hillary—even at twenty-something years old and five feet five inches tall, usually dressed in bell-bottom jeans, a casual shirt, and large eyeglasses—as “grounding” or having “a forceful presence” (Bernstein 2007). The May Day demonstration in New Haven, which attracted some fifteen thousand protestors, passed as a generally peaceful event, although much of the city had braced for chaos with businesses closed, store windows boarded up, and the National Guard stationed to protect the Yale campus. However, four days later, at Kent State University in Ohio, an antiwar protest turned violent. On May 4, following three days of clashes between antiwar protesters and police and then National Guardsmen on and near the Kent State campus, two thousand protesters—some students and some commuters— gathered on the campus commons in defiance of the school’s administration. National Guardsmen fired tear gas, determined to force the demonstrators to disperse. When that failed, they marched forward with bayonets fixed to their rifles and forced the protesters to retreat, eventually



Law School 25

onto a practice field that was fenced in on three sides; the Guardsmen fired more tear gas into the crowd, but again the demonstrators refused to disperse, instead throwing rocks and insults at the soldiers. The Guardsmen then appeared to back up, retracing their steps as the crowd too moved off of the field. Then the Guardsmen turned, and twenty-eight of them opened fire; they fired nearly sixty-two shots in the next thirteen seconds, killing three university students and one high school student who was on campus to visit her boyfriend. Nine more were wounded. One survivor would be paralyzed for life. University faculty members were able to intervene between the angry, shocked students and the agitated Guardsmen to defuse the situation and get medical attention on site. Kent State was closed immediately, and regular classes would not resume until summertime. Hillary recounts in Living History her emotional reaction to seeing the iconic photographs from Kent State the next day: “The photograph of a young woman kneeling over the body of a dead student represented all that I and many others feared and hated about what was happening in our country” (Clinton 2003). (That photo by Kent State student photographer John Filo would be featured on the cover of the New York Times and later awarded the Pulitzer Prize.) On May 7, Hillary was in Washington, D.C., to address the banquet attendees at the fiftieth anniversary convention of the League of Women Voters. She had been invited to speak months earlier, part of the legacy of media coverage after her Wellesley commencement speech. After appearing in Life, Hillary was invited to attend a League-sponsored conference for youth activists in October 1969; while there, she so impressed the organizers that they asked her to address their upcoming anniversary convention. In Washington, she wore a black armband in tribute to the students killed at Kent State as she tried to keep her emotions at bay and convince the audience why the recent expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia was “illegal and unconstitutional” (Clinton 2003). She also tried to explain for the older crowd the effect that the Kent State killings had on college students across the country and why students at Yale Law School had overwhelmingly voted to join more than three hundred schools in a national strike. Students, she said, were distraught and therefore felt the need to protest “the unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged” (Bernstein 2007). Whereas President Nixon had just days before the Kent State shootings discredited student protesters as bums, Hillary tried to convey the seriousness of her generation’s concerns—about the stranglehold of corporations on American workers, the destruction of the natural environment, and the loss of governmental accountability to its citizens—to her elders assembled at the convention. The keynote speaker at the convention was Marian Wright Edelman, a civil rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and organizer with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Hillary had first heard about Marian from

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Hillary Clinton

her husband, Peter Edelman, the associate director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, when she attended the conference for youth activists sponsored by the League of Women Voters. She and Edelman had served together on the steering committee. He had told Hillary about Marian’s plans to build a nonprofit advocacy organization to fight poverty and suggested she should talk to Marian. When Marian visited Yale to speak about the current state of the civil rights movement (with Dr. King deceased and a Republican president in the White House) and her plans to start an advocacy organization focused on children, Hillary introduced herself and asked about the possibility of working for Marian that summer. Hillary needed a job to help pay the cost of attending law school, but Edelman had no funds available; so Hillary persuaded the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council to give her a grant to allow her to work as an intern for Marian. In June, Hillary moved to Washington to begin interning at the Washington Research Project under Marian, who would become her professional mentor. Marian Wright, one of five children born to a South Carolina Baptist preacher, graduated from Yale Law School in 1963 and became the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar. She directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi. When New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy came to tour Mississippi on a fact-finding mission to understand the extent of poverty in the Deep South in 1967, Wright was one of the senator’s guides through the Mississippi Delta. Peter Edelman, the son of a Jewish lawyer raised in Brooklyn, New York, was a Harvard Law School graduate and aide to Senator Kennedy specializing in civil rights; he and Wright met when he accompanied his boss to Mississippi. Kennedy was shocked by the poverty and hunger he witnessed, the dilapidated shacks and starving children, and immediately sought action from President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The next year, Wright moved to Washington to help organize the Poor People’s Campaign for Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a coordinated series of protest activities in Washington, and simultaneous demonstrations across the country, meant to draw national attention to the plight of children born into poverty. The campaign failed to create a national groundswell of advocacy as it faced challenges from a very rainy Washington spring and was largely overshadowed by the assassination of Dr. King in April and then Senator Kennedy in June of 1968. Peter and Marian married in July 1968 in Virginia, becoming only the third interracial couple allowed to legally marry in the state after its antimiscegenation law was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving vs. Virginia. Now going by her married surname of Edelman, she assigned Hillary to research the education and health of migrant children, particularly in the



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South. Hillary’s research would be part of an investigation into the living and working conditions of migrant farm workers being conducted by a Senate subcommittee, headed by Senator (and future vice president) Walter Mondale of Minnesota. In an effort to avoid court-ordered desegregation, many all-white schools in the South had become private segregated schools since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka. As a result, most migrant children in the South were denied a quality education because white migrant families could not afford the private tuition and colored children were denied admission due to race. Hillary compiled data about access to education as well as to decent housing and sanitation. As she notes in Living History, the Senate investigation aligned with the ten-year anniversary of journalist Edward R. Murrow’s groundbreaking television documentary Harvest of Shame, “which shocked Americans in 1960 with its exposure of the deplorable treatment migrants endured” (Clinton 2003). She also points out that while Cesar Chavez organized the National Farm Workers Association among California field workers in 1962 to fight for better conditions, migrants’ living and working conditions in the rest of the country had changed very little by 1970. In her childhood, Hillary had gained a glimpse of the plight facing migrant children. Several children from migrant farm families had attended her elementary school in Illinois for a few months each year, and on Saturdays during the fall harvest, Hillary and other members of her Sunday school class would go the nearby migrant camp to babysit the younger children while their parents and siblings over the age of ten left to work in the fields. As she now detailed the filthy living conditions that migrant workers faced while working the citrus groves in Florida or the lush fields of other Southern states, Hillary saw again how those who suffered the most were the children left often unsupervised in the unsanitary camps, often hungry and without access to education, medical care or proper housing. She attended some of the Senate hearings in July 1970 to witness testimonies by advocates, farm workers, and employers; she also ran into several Yale classmates who were attending as interns for law firms that represented corporations being questioned by the Committee. (One such corporation would be the Coca Cola Company, having recently acquired the Minute Maid brand with citrus operations in Florida.) By the end of the summer, Hillary knew that she was not interested in corporate law. According to Heilemann, she would later call her time with Edelman that summer, delving into issues of migrant children’s health and education, a “personal turning point” (Heilemann 2007). When she returned to Yale in the fall, she says she decided “to concentrate on how the law affected children” (Clinton 2003). The idea of children’s rights as a legal issue separate from family law or decisions made on their behalf by their parents was just emerging in the 1960s. In November 1959, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously voted

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to approve its Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which defined ten principles including the rights to special protection for a child’s physical, mental, and social development; adequate nutrition, housing, and medical services; understanding and love by parents and society; and protection against all forms of neglect or cruelty. Through the 1960s and 1970s practitioners in a diverse range of fields would urge for an agenda on children’s rights in the United States. One such practitioner, Rosalind Ekman Ladd, in Children’s Rights Re-Visioned: Philosophical Reading 2 noted that the children’s rights movement was a natural extension of liberation movements by women and African Americans—it emerged “riding the wave of concern for unfairly treated groups” (Ladd 1995). Indeed, in Hillary’s first scholarly article entitled “Children Under the Law,” published in the Harvard Law Review in 1974, she points out that childhood as an institution, much like marriage and slavery, has historically been rationalized as a means to care for members of society generally assumed to be incapable of caring for themselves. Hillary argues that abused and neglected children, regardless of age, are still citizens and therefore entitled to the same legal rights as adults under the U.S. Constitution. When parents or families are guilty of abuse or neglect, then children must have the right to seek protection elsewhere, including possibly emancipation, under the law (Clinton 1974). When Hillary returned to Yale in the fall, the campus and the surrounding town were oddly calm: much of the turmoil that had gripped colleges and universities in the 1960s, ended with Kent State. So now, with a sense of focus to her studies, Hillary turned her energy and attention to children’s issues (Heilemann 2007). As Hillary notes in Living History, her views about the rights of children in cases of abuse or neglect largely took shape from her coursework and exposure to the treatment of children during her second year of law school (Clinton 2003). With the encouragement of two professors, in the fall of 1970, she undertook a year of studies in child development at the Yale Child Study Center. She persuaded the Center’s Director, Dr. Al Solnit, to let her observe clinical sessions with children and then attend the case discussions with their doctors. Solnit and Joe Goldstein, one of Hillary’s law professors, asked her to serve as their research assistant for a book, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, on which they were collaborating with Anna Freud, daughter of the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud. Hillary also began work at the Yale-New Haven Hospital. She consulted with the medical staff to develop legal procedures for when they suspected cases of child abuse involving their patients. In her memoirs and her 1996 book It Takes a Village, Hillary time and again states her belief in a natural parent’s presumed right to raise his or her child; however, she also acknowledges that her work at Yale-New Haven Hospital convinced her that sometimes it is in a child’s best interest to be removed from a natural parent’s care (Clinton, It Takes A Village, 1996).



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Hillary also volunteered at the New Haven Legal Services office, part of a federally funded program providing legal aid to low-income residents. There, a young lawyer named Penn Rhodeen asked her to assist him in representing a middle-aged African American foster care mother who wanted to adopt the two-year-old, mixed race girl she had raised since birth. The woman had already raised two grown children of her own, but the Connecticut Department of Social Services denied her adoption of the young girl because of its policy that forbade foster parents from adopting. Instead, the child was removed from the woman’s care and placed with a more “suitable” family. Rhodeen and Hillary sued the state. They argued that the foster mother was the only parent the little girl had ever known and that removing her from the woman’s care would cause lasting harm to the child. They lost the case, but it further spurred Hillary’s interest in exploring ways that the legal system might protect children’s rights and their development needs. She identified a connection between the neglect her own mother suffered as a child and the children she encountered in New Haven who needed someone to step in when their parents failed to protect and care for them. She had found her professional calling—little could she have imagined then how her work advocating for children would be used against her once she entered the national political spotlight. During the 1992 presidential campaign, conservative critics of her husband would use Hillary’s legal writings to portray her as antifamily and a woman who compared marriage to slavery; such out-ofcontext citations ran completely counter to the high regard her writings garnered in the field of family law. Bill Clinton arrived at Yale Law School in the fall of 1970 after attending Oxford for two years as a Rhodes Scholar. According to Robert Reich, Bill’s good friend and classmate at both Oxford and Yale who would later serve as his secretary of labor, Bill and Hillary met on the first day of classes. Reich recalls introducing them in the cafeteria without much reaction from either party (Burstein 2020). Bill and Hillary both recall their initial meeting happening differently than Reich’s introduction. While Hillary remembers noticing Bill early in the fall semester largely due to his long, curly hair and a reddish brown beard that she says made him look like a Viking, both she and Bill recall the first time they actually met as a spring evening in the Yale law library. According to Hillary in Living History, Bill was in conversation with a classmate but kept looking at her seated across the library, something she had noticed him doing many times before that semester. So, she “stood up from the desk, walked over to him and said, ‘If you are going to keep looking at me, and I’m going to keep looking back, we might as well be introduced. I’m Hillary Rodham’” (Clinton 2003). As Bill recounted during his speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, “I was so impressed and surprised that, whether you believe it or not, momentarily I was speechless” (“Bill Clinton Addresses Democratic

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National Convention”, July 26, 2016). He had noticed her earlier that semester in their Political and Civil Rights class with Professor Thomas Emerson and likely knew her name and reputation as a rising star from fellow law students. According to both of their memoirs, Bill and Hillary did not talk again until the last day of the spring semester, when they happened to walk out of Professor Emerson’s class at the same time. Bill asked Hillary where she was headed, and when she replied that she was going to the registrar to sign up for fall classes, Bill offered to walk with her. Once there, the registrar assisted Hillary and then asked Bill why he was there, as he had already registered. Bill confessed to Hillary that he had simply wanted to spend time with her. As she tells the story in Living History, they then took “a long walk that turned into our first date” (Clinton 2003). They walked to the Yale Art Gallery to view an exhibit by abstract painter Mark Rothko but, due to a campus-wide labor dispute, found the museum closed. Bill talked their way into the building by offering to pick up the litter that had piled up in the museum courtyard. His persuasiveness and knowledge of twentieth-century art surprised and impressed Hillary; they sat in the gallery courtyard, talking until dark. Hillary invited Bill to an end-ofsemester party that she and her roommate, Kwan Kwan Tan, were hosting in their dorm room; Bill gladly attended. Hillary already had a boyfriend, and Clinton was just coming out of a relationship with another law student in the spring of 1971. When Bill remained largely quiet at her and Tan’s dorm room party, Hillary recalls that she “didn’t have much hope for us as a couple” (Clinton 2003). Indeed, she and her beau headed to Vermont that weekend, as they regularly did, with another couple. Upon returning to New Haven, Hillary was fighting a bad cough and cold. Bill phoned and could tell that Hillary was sick; within the hour he showed up at her dorm room with orange juice and chicken soup, she recalls in Living History. As Bill began talking about a wide range of topics “from African politics to country music,” Hillary came to realize that this six-foot-two-inch Viking from Arkansas was more complex and interesting than he first appeared. Soon after, in Hillary’s words, the two “became inseparable” (Clinton 2003). Mutual friends and Bill’s housemates at the time recall encouraging the relationship, as both Clinton and Hillary seemed to be smitten—and their relationship seemed so natural (Bernstein 2007). However, their approach to their studies was very different. “Her hand was always in the air, and her answers were usually cogent, thoughtful, and direct,” Reich remembers. “Bill, on the other hand, didn’t attend most classes, and when he did, he’d rarely read the cases” (Heilemann 2007). They shared the same values and ambitions and obviously enjoyed each other’s physical and intellectual company. As summer approached, the two discussed their plans. Bill had been asked to organize Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign in the South, and while



Law School 31

he had previous experience on Congressional campaigns in Arkansas and Connecticut, this was a great opportunity to help build a presidential campaign from its beginning. Hillary was headed to Oakland, California, to clerk for Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein, a law firm that many considered radical for its defense of labor movement leaders who were thought to be members of the Communist Party and some leaders of the Black Panthers. Hillary likely found her way to the firm through Professor Emerson, who was a longtime friend of Robert Treuhaft and identified with its work in defense of constitutional rights and civil liberties (Bernstein 2007). Bill told Hillary that he wanted to go to California with her for the summer. Though she was thrilled, she wondered aloud why he would want to give up his opportunity with the McGovern campaign. She recalls his response as, “For someone I love, that’s why” (Clinton 2003). According to Hillary in Living History, Bill told her that they were destined to be together. Soon, they moved into a small apartment together near the campus of the University of California, Berkeley (Clinton 2003). Hillary spent the summer working for Mal Burnstein on a child custody case while Bill read a lot and explored Berkeley, next-door Oakland, and San Francisco across the Bay Bridge. On the weekends, he became her local tour guide, and the two experimented with cooking and took long walks together. Before leaving for California, Bill and Hillary had spent an evening in the kitchen of the house that he shared with three classmates on Long Island Sound discussing their plans after graduation. Bill wanted to return to his native Arkansas and run for public office. Hillary knew she wanted to pursue a career in child advocacy and civil rights but recalls that she could not see her exact path forward. She tells a story in Living History about their summer in Berkeley that seems to foreshadow her realization that someday Bill would become president. Though she denies seriously thinking that until years later, she does remember his conviction about returning to Arkansas and entering elected politics (Clinton 2003). From their first months together, Hillary knew that Arkansas and Bill’s political career would loom large in her life if she chose to stay with him. Bernstein argues that during their early months together, Bill recognized a toughness in Hillary that he knew he lacked—and that without it in his life, he could have never become president. Bernstein cites close advisors to the couple as describing Bill as accommodating, always wanting to persuade people, whereas Hillary had a quality of strength, even toughness, about her that would demand study of the conflict ahead and then charge straight to greet friends and battle foes (Bernstein 2007). In the fall of 1971, the couple returned for classes at Yale and together rented the ground floor apartment at 21 Edgewood Avenue in New Haven. Two milestones of Hillary’s third year in law school included Bill visiting her family back in Illinois and the first public display of the couple’s

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budding political partnership during the 1972 Prize Trial at Yale. Over winter break from classes, Bill drove from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Hillary’s home in Park Ridge. Although Bill had met her parents briefly the previous summer, Hillary admits that she was nervous about what her ardently conservative, Republican father might say to her Southern Democrat of a boyfriend who dressed like a hippie. When Bill later eulogized Hugh Rodham upon his death in 1993, he described him as “tough and gruff” (Bernstein 2007). Hillary’s mom tried to frame her husband’s behavior by telling Hillary that in his eyes, no man would ever be good enough for her. While Bill hoped to soften relations with Rodham during his visit by watching football games together and playing cards, Dorothy warmed up to Bill much more quickly. He had good manners, helped with the dishes, and engaged her in a lengthy discussion on philosophy after he noticed her college textbook on the subject. Back at Yale for the spring semester, Hillary and Bill teamed up to compete in the annual Barristers’ Union Prize Trial. They were assigned the role of the prosecution in a murder trial. The case involved a Kentucky police officer who had a record of hostility toward young people who looked like hippies. He stood accused of beating and killing his victim. Hillary and Bill spent more than a month preparing for the trial. They gathered their citations, practiced their arguments, and planned their tactics. They did not win the prize, but their peers who watched in fascination could clearly see the extent of their partnership. They played on each other’s strengths to create a united front that was sharp yet collegial, aggressive yet affable. To those who knew them best, Hillary and Bill were obviously in love and becoming an intellectual partnership to be reckoned with. After the semester ended, Hillary returned to Washington, D.C., for the summer to work again for Marian Wright Edelman. As mentioned earlier, many school districts in the South had turned their all-white public schools into private academies in an effort to avoid constitutional mandated desegregation in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Now, Edelman’s organization was trying to prove that the Nixon Administration was failing to enforce the legal ban on granting tax-exempt status to such private segregated schools. (Nixon was known to be attempting to build a new Republican political coalition in the South by wooing segregationist Democrats away from their party—called the Southern Strategy by his campaign.) Hillary’s fact-finding work for Edelman took her to Dothan, Alabama, where she posed as a young mother interested in enrolling her imaginary child in the local all-white private academy. In a meeting with the school administrator, Hillary went through a planned list of questions and received assurance that no Black students would be enrolled in the school. This was exactly the kind of proof that would help Edelman’s case. Meanwhile, Clinton had a full-time job with the McGovern presidential



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campaign in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention in Miami. Once McGovern secured the party’s nomination for president on July 13, Campaign Chairman Gary Hart asked Bill to help oversee the McGovern campaign in Texas. Bill asked Hillary to go to Texas too. Though she wanted to join Bill in Texas, Hillary writes in her memoir that she would go only if she had a specific job (Clinton 2003). Soon, through an earlier campaign contact in Connecticut, Hillary had a job offer to head McGovern’s voter registration drive in Texas. She arrived in Austin, Texas, in August, knowing no one there except Bill. McGovern’s nomination came from the growing antiwar movement, and his base of supporters was notably younger than Nixon’s. So, Hillary spent much of her time in Texas trying to register eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds who had just been granted the right to vote by ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1971. She also spent time in southern Texas, working to register African American and Hispanic voters. After the period for voting registration closed in October, Hillary was asked to help run operations in San Antonio for the remaining thirty days of the campaign. Her partner there was Sara Ehrman, a middle-aged housewife originally from Brooklyn who took a leave from her job on Senator McGovern’s legislative staff to work on the campaign. She had earlier moved to Texas to organize field operations. Now, the oddball team of her and Hillary worked for weeks to ensure a large crowd for a planned campaign appearance by McGovern in front of the Alamo. As McGovern’s advance team swooped into town with dozens of immediate needs and promises of later reimbursements, Hillary and Ehrman also turned their efforts to fundraising. On the night of the event, McGovern appeared before a crowd of San Antonio voters with the Alamo in the background. Hillary recalls in Living History that she and Ehrman raised enough money to pay all of their local vendors; however, they knew that their candidate would lose Texas in the election (Clinton 2003). (In November, McGovern won 33% of the vote in Texas to Nixon’s 67%; the national results were just as devastating.) For her part, Ehrman says that Hillary’s electoral savvy was quickly apparent that summer. “She got to the point,” Ehrman recalled years later. “‘Where’s the Anglo vote? Where’s the Hispanic vote? Where’s the liberal vote?’ She was no novice in any respect” (Heilemann 2007). Hillary does not write about her relationship with Bill during the months in Texas; however, Bernstein states that they occasionally dated other people and were frequently seen arguing by other staffers (Bernstein 2007). In comparison to her romantic relationship, Hillary definitely built strong connections with Ehrman and another campaign organizer, Betsey Wright, during her time in Texas. These women recognized in Hillary a great potential for electoral politics—indeed, Wright thought Hillary could become America’s first female president (Bernstein 2007).

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Bill still had one more year of law school to finish, and Hillary had deferred her graduation to remain at Yale one more year and graduate with him. So, after a brief vacation together on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, Hillary and Bill returned to Yale to begin the fall classes for which they had registered but not yet attended. She studied child development at the Yale Child Study Center, and he attended law classes and worked. After their graduation in spring of 1973, Hillary traveled to England with Bill, where he showed her London, Oxford, and other places he had traveled while a Rhodes Scholar. Hillary recalls that they spent hours at Westminster Abbey, museums, and historical sites in London. They visited Stonehenge and traveled through the countryside. Then one evening, while strolling in the English Lake District, the picturesque landscape of northeastern England that once inspired Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, Bill asked Hillary to marry him. Hillary writes in her memoirs that although she “was desperately in love with him,” she was “scared of commitment in general and of Bill’s intensity in particular. I thought of him as a force of nature and wondered whether I’d be up to the task of living through his seasons” (Clinton 2003). She said no, explaining that she needed more time. Even Bill admitted that marriage to him would be “a high-wire operation” (Heilemann 2007). Still, he would ask her again and again, and each time she would say no. Arkansas and what her future might look like there loomed larger than ever in Hillary’s imagination.

4 Early Legal Career and Marriage

He offered me a staff position, explaining that the job would pay very little, the hours would be long and most of the work would be painstaking and monotonous. It was, as they say, an offer I couldn’t refuse. —Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History, 2003 Before graduation, Hillary Clinton accepted a job offer with Marian Wright Edelman’s newly founded Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), a first of its kind national nonprofit dedicated solely to advocating the legal rights and interests of children. In July 1973, Hillary moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to start her new job. She rented the top floor of an old house, where she would live alone for the first time in her life—Bill Clinton was in Arkansas, where he had accepted a law school teaching job. Still, Hillary had many friends from college and law school in the area, whether at Harvard University or in nearby Boston. Soon, she was sent to help investigate living conditions for juveniles incarcerated in adult prisons, which was a common practice at the time, especially in Southern states. Hillary drove a car borrowed from a local civil rights lawyer all over South Carolina to interview parents of boys as young as thirteen years old who were in prison. She quickly came to see that whether these convicts were first-time offenders guilty of minor crimes or repeat offenders of a more serious nature, they were still children in need of certain protections. Her research would be used for a CDF lawsuit filed to end the practice of 35

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incarcerating teenagers among adults on the basis that they too easily became prey or students to adult cellmates, who might be convicted felons. The CDF also worked to streamline the process for children in the criminal court system, which resulted in the national Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974. On another assignment in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Hillary went door to door in a working-class, largely Portuguese American neighborhood to help discern why the number of school-aged children counted in the census did not match local school enrollments. As she recalls, “Knocking on doors was revelatory and heartbreaking” (Clinton 2003). She found children who were not in school due to physical disabilities, such as being blind or bound to a wheelchair, and others who stayed home to babysit younger siblings while both parents went to work. The research she collected about these unaccounted-for students became part of a larger survey and subsequent report that the CDF submitted to Congress. As a result of such advocacy by the CDF and like-minded organizations, Congress authorized the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 that mandated all public schools make accommodations for students with disabilities, including physical, emotional, or learning disabilities. In What Happened, Hillary describes her work with the Children’s Defense Fund as crystallizing how the system could be changed through hard work and reform. Sometimes while at Yale, she felt uneasy about choosing to attend a law school historically associated with America’s ruling class during such a time of upheaval for the country—she questioned whether attending such an Establishment school was “a morally defensible choice” or if she and her classmates were “selling out” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). However, she describes her early legal work for the CDF as “thrilling” if not very glamorous because “it felt meaningful and real” (Clinton 2017). After years of studying social justice, she was now actively working to make it happen. Again in What Happened, she explains how her experiences with the CDF showed her that the way to make real change is often a slow, deliberative process: “step by step, year by year, sometimes door by door. You need to stir up public opinion and put pressure on political leaders. . . . And you need to win elections. You need to change hearts and (sic) change laws” (Clinton 2017). In spite of her energizing work, Hillary felt lonely in Cambridge. While she and Bill shared lengthy phone calls, she missed him dearly and recalls that she felt as if her heart was pulling her toward him and Arkansas. Before moving to Cambridge, Hillary had traveled with Bill to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to visit his family: his mother, Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire (later Kelley); his half brother, Roger Clinton; and his stepfather at the time, Jeff Dwire. Hillary admits that when she and Bill’s mother first met a year earlier at Yale, they “were bewildered by the other” (Clinton



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2003). Hillary regularly wore jeans and oversized work shirts, cut her own hair, and did not use makeup, whereas Virginia Kelley, with her whitestreaked hair and fingers covered in rings, never left the house without applying false eyelashes and bright red lipstick. Although the two women did not exactly hit it off (and neither did Bill’s brother approve of his choice in a girlfriend), Dwire was more supportive of Hillary’s presence—he told her that Virginia would come around. “It’s just hard for two strong women to get along,” Hillary recalls, especially if both women shared love for the same man (Clinton 2003). Bill had been trying for some time to sell Hillary on the idea of life in Arkansas. He talked about his home state in laudatory terms and made sure to show her the highlights of Little Rock, the capital, on her visit. Still, Hillary remained uncertain about a future in Arkansas, even with Bill. Needless to say, Hillary was thrilled when Bill came to visit her in Cambridge over Thanksgiving in November 1973. The two explored Boston and talked about their future. Bill enjoyed his job teaching at the University of Arkansas law school and was living in a small, beautifully designed house he rented in the countryside outside of Fayetteville. However, electoral politics were once again garnering the bulk of his attention as he tried to recruit a Democrat to run against the state’s only Republican congressman, John Paul Hammerschmidt, a popular four-time incumbent in northwest Arkansas. Hillary could tell that Bill was considering whether to run as a candidate himself, and their future as a couple was still unclear when he left Massachusetts. They agreed that Hillary would visit him in Arkansas after Christmas so that together, they could revisit their plans. By the time she arrived in Fayetteville in late December, Bill had decided to run for Congress. By the end of 1973, President Richard Nixon, a Republican serving his second term in office, was under increasing national scrutiny due to his possible involvement in what became known as the Watergate scandal. More than a year earlier, in the run-up to the 1972 presidential election, five well-dressed burglars were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. They were carrying extensive wiretapping and other surveillance equipment. The following day, the Washington Post carried a story by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in which they identified one of the burglars as a former CIA employee and current security aide to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP), which was headed by Nixon’s former attorney general and confidante, John Mitchell. In the months that followed, Woodward and Bernstein continued to trace connections between the burglars and payments from CRP, eventually reporting that the FBI had identified links between Nixon White House aides and the Watergate burglary. In December 1973, the House Judiciary

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Committee appointed highly respected attorney John Doar as Special Counsel to direct an inquiry into the possible impeachment of President Nixon. Hillary and Bill Clinton both admired Doar for his work to end desegregation while he served in the Justice Department under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. In spring of 1973, as directors of the Barristers’ Union at Yale, Hillary and Bill had invited Doar to serve as a judge in the union’s Prize Trial. Now, as Hillary was drinking coffee with Bill in his Fayetteville kitchen, he got a call from Doar asking him to come to work on the impeachment inquiry. Yale Law Professor Burke Marshall had recommended a short list of graduates to Doar, which included both Bill and Hillary. “That job required not just brightness but some sense of balance, some discretion, prudence and integrity,” Marshall later recalled (Bernstein 2007). Bill respectfully declined the offer because, as he told Doar, he was running for Congress. Doar next called Hillary and offered her a yearlong staff position. Although he described the job as low-paying, long hours, and tedious, Hillary jumped at the opportunity to be part of history. “Any lawyer in the country would have wanted to work on this,” recalls Hillary’s colleague Fred Altshuler about their experience (Welch 1992). From Fayetteville, Hillary excitedly called Edelman to discuss Doar’s offer. Edelman told Hillary that working on the impeachment inquiry was too important to turn down, and she could always come back to the CDF. Hillary returned to Cambridge just long enough to pack and then moved to Washington, into a spare bedroom of her friend, Sara Ehrman from the McGovern campaign. In Living History, Hillary describes her work for Doar as “one of the most intense and significant experiences of my life” (Clinton 2003). She was one of three women among the forty-plus attorneys working on the impeachment inquiry. “The staff that was put together was so professional, experienced. They were some of the greatest lawyers I’ve ever worked with,” Hillary related in 1992. “I was just a fresh, young law school graduate, and I got to work with these people” (Welch 1992). Hillary was twenty-six years old when she reported to her job as “counsel.” In total, ninety staffers worked seven days a week in makeshift offices set up in the old Congressional Hotel on Capitol Hill that was commandeered for their use. Doar’s staff worked independent of the permanent staff of the House Judiciary Committee—they were to be a party of and to themselves. To avoid media leaks and ensure confidentiality, Doar forbade his staff from keeping any personal notes or diaries about their work. They were not to discuss the inquiry with anyone outside, and Capitol police controlled access to and from the building. Due to their twelve- to eighteen-hour workdays and virtual sequester from the rest of Washington, many staffers created deep friendships as they ate their meals together and only went home for a few hours of rest before returning to work at dawn.



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Hillary found kinship with Terry Kirkpatrick, one of her fellow female attorneys, who was from Arkansas; Tom Bell, her officemate who worked with Doar at his law firm in Wisconsin; supervisor Bernard Nussbaum, a graduate of Harvard Law and former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who would later serve as counsel to the president during the Clinton administration; and Joe Woods, an attorney serving as senior associate special counsel. Hillary spent many nights on the phone with Bill, and former colleagues on the impeachment inquiry recall her frequently talking about him and his campaign for Congress in Arkansas. Only one other president, Andrew Johnson in 1868, had ever been impeached, and the last impeachment trial in the House of Representatives had been of a federal judge in 1936. Acutely aware of the historical significance of his current undertaking, Doar was methodical and forward thinking in his management of the inquiry against Nixon: he was determined to oversee an investigation that Americans at the time and in the future would judge as unbiased, thorough, and professional. He assigned the work in such a manner that only a handful of his most trusted aides fully understood the scope and structure of the inquiry. At Hillary’s level as a staff attorney, she was assigned one piece of the puzzle at a time: her first was to research the procedures used in American impeachment cases. One of her colleagues, Dagmar Hamilton, a lawyer and professor from the University of Texas, was assigned research on English impeachment cases. Hillary then worked with Joe Woods to draft procedural recommendations for the House committee members. When Doar attended a public meeting of the committee to present the procedures for adoption, Hillary accompanied him and Woods and had a seat at the counsel’s table. It would be a rare public appearance for Hillary during her time on the impeachment inquiry staff. Hillary’s next assignment was to research the legal basis for a presidential impeachment. Entrusted with this important work by Doar and Nussbaum, she collaborated with other attorneys to draft a lengthy memo explaining the precise standards used in previous impeachment cases. Their report focused on the meaning of the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” as grounds for presidential impeachment. Article Two, Section Four of the U.S. Constitution states: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Hillary and her colleagues considered whether grounds existed for a president to be impeached for offenses that are not necessarily indictable criminal conduct. Interestingly, the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” dates back to ancient English history— an article by the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School cites the phrase as first being used in the impeachment of the Earl of Suffolk in

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1388. During the debates about U.S. presidential impeachment at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, elder Virginia statesman George Mason objected to simply listing “treason or bribery” as impeachable offenses, because the phrase did not encompass all conduct that should result in removal from office. Mason suggested adding “other high crimes and misdemeanors,” which the delegates adopted without any further recorded debate. On February 21, 1974, the New York Times reported that a fifty-page brief prepared by Doar’s team on the definition of impeachable misconduct would be issued to the House Judiciary Committee the next day (Naughton 1974). The report, which Hillary coauthored, contended that the Constitution provides a view of impeachment broader than just criminal offenses; rather, a president can be impeached for conduct that is not criminal but is found to be contrary to the public interest. In the 2019 House impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and the intent of its inclusion by the Constitutional Convention delegates were again central to the arguments presented by both sides of the aisle. While Hillary and her colleagues in Washington continued to compile evidence in the case against President Nixon, they amassed hundreds of thousands of index cards, each neatly typed with one fact and its source. The staff could cross-reference the cards with others and look for patterns. As Hillary notes in her memoirs, in the days before personal computers, this was Doar’s system of choice. Considering her earlier campaign work for Democratic presidential hopeful George McGovern and her antiwar stance, Hillary likely arrived in Washington with little doubt that Nixon deserved to be removed from office. However, Doar insisted that everyone on his staff focus on compiling their assigned material and wait to draw conclusions until the investigation was finished. In early July 1974, Hillary and other staffers were assigned to listen to the tape recordings that Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski (who replaced Archibald Cox once Nixon ordered him fired) had finally obtained from the White House. Nearly a year earlier, in one of the more shocking turns of congressional public hearings on the Watergate scandal, Nixon’s former appointments secretary, Alexander Butterfield, had testified that since 1971, the president had recorded all of the conservations and phone calls in his office. For months after, Cox had battled the White House to obtain copies of the recordings. At the end of April 1974, the White House released more than 1,200 pages of edited transcripts from the Nixon recordings, but investigators were not satisfied. They wanted access to the unedited tapes, which the Supreme Court granted in a unanimous ruling vote on July 24, 1974, one day before the House Judiciary Committee was set to open debate on proposed articles of impeachment. Hillary recalls in Living History that it was difficult to decipher the spoken words on the tapes as she listened,



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“alone in a windowless room,” for hours on end. Still, she vividly recalls hearing Nixon on one tape where he was listening to earlier tapes and commenting on his conversations. She recounts that he would say things like, “What I meant when I said that was. . . .” It was clear to her that the president was trying to justify and rationalize his previous conversations in order to minimize his involvement in the ongoing White House coverup of his top aides’ ties to the Watergate burglary. Hillary was convinced of Nixon’s involvement and impending impeachment by the House of Representatives, still she was likely surprised at the speed of the events that followed (Clinton 2003). Doar presented proposed articles of impeachment to the House Judiciary Committee on July 19, 1974, three of which the committee approved after several days of debate. The approved articles cited obstruction of justice, misuse of power, and contempt of Congress, and notably, the votes to pass them were all bipartisan. Then, less than a week later, the White House released transcripts of three conversations between Nixon and his chief of staff, Robert “Bob” Haldeman, from a recording on June 23, 1972. The tape is often referred to as the “smoking gun” because it reveals Nixon’s direct approval of a cover-up involving hush money paid by CRP to the Watergate burglars. Predicting his own impeachment by the House and removal from office by the Senate, President Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. Hillary and her colleagues, suddenly jobless, gathered for a last dinner together before they began to leave Washington. Hillary contemplated pursuing a career as a trial lawyer, but as she explains in her memoirs, “I chose to follow my heart instead of my head. I was moving to Arkansas” (Clinton 2003). In early 1974, Hillary had taken a few days off of work on the impeachment inquiry—to the annoyance of Doar—to visit Bill in Arkansas. While there, Hillary met with UA Law School Dean Wylie Davis and several other faculty members. Clinton biographer David Maraniss quotes Davis: “I mentioned to her before she left that if she were ever interested in teaching here, she should give me a call” (Maraniss 1995). Once Nixon resigned, Hillary called Davis to see if his offer still stood. With a teaching job secured for the fall, she told her friend and roommate, Ehrman, of her plans to move to Arkansas to be with Bill. Hillary recalls Ehrman’s shock: “Are you out of your mind?” Ehrman, then fifty-five years old, feared that her young friend was about to throw away her very bright future as an attorney; nevertheless, she agreed to drive Hillary down South (Clinton 2003). Maybe, Ehrman thought, she could convince Hillary to change her mind on the drive. But as Hillary notes in her memoirs, her decision to head to Arkansas was not just some whim. The year before, she had sat for both the Arkansas and the Washington bar exams to keep her options open. Though a career and life as an attorney in Washington was probably

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much more appealing and imaginable, she did not pass the Washington bar exam—an embarrassing fact for such a star student that she never shared it with even her closest friends until she mentioned it in Living History. Perhaps it was Providence that she only passed the Arkansas bar. “I had fallen in love with Bill in law school,” she writes. “I knew I was happier with Bill than without him” (Clinton 2003). So she piled her belongings into Ehrman’s banged-up 1968 Buick, and they drove more than a thousand miles to a place where she had never imagined living and had no connections other than Bill. Every twenty-five to thirty miles along their road trip, Ehrman recalls she would ask Hillary, “Do you know what you’re doing?” Hillary answered time and again that she loved Bill and wanted to be with him. As she notes in her memoirs, “my heart told me I was going in the right direction” (Clinton 2003). The two women drove into the college town of Fayetteville to find it overrun with rowdy football fans on the weekend of a major rivalry football game: the University of Arkansas Razorbacks were hosting the University of Texas Longhorns. The town was swarming with UA supporters sporting pig-shaped hats to mimic the school’s mascot. Ehrman recalls in a 2016 New York Times interview that once in town, she broke down crying at the thought of Hillary living there. She felt so out of her element and believed Hillary would too. Before Ehrman returned to Washington, she and Hillary went to hear Bill speak at a campaign stop. Ehrman was impressed. She remembered how young and handsome Bill was from their overlap during the McGovern campaign in Texas, but now she understood why Hillary was willing to move to Arkansas for him. As Ehrman told the New York Times some forty-two years later, “Hillary is a very practical, pragmatic person. . . . She wanted to be with him, but she also saw a future for him and herself” (Chozick, October 28, 2016). Hillary arrived just days before fall classes would begin at the UA law school, and only then did she learn what courses she would be teaching. At twenty-seven, Hillary was barely older than most of her students and had never taught before. She began with criminal law her first semester and was also assigned to run the local legal aid clinic and prisoners’ assistance project. Over her three years as an associate professor, Hillary would add criminal procedure and trial advocacy courses to her load. She would receive largely positive performance reviews for the substance and style of her teaching from senior faculty members. She also received recognition as a challenging yet fair teacher from a number of her former students. When Bill had decided to run for Congress, he approached the dean for permission to continue teaching while he campaigned. As a result, many of Hillary’s students also were enrolled in Bill’s courses, and some biographers have made much of comparisons between their teaching styles and reputations among the students. Hillary was obviously well respected by



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her colleagues and students, and she soon became comfortable living in Fayetteville. Perhaps the quaint downtown was reminiscent of her hometown in Illinois, or maybe the friendly people and slower pace were a welcome contrast to life in turbulent New Haven and politically charged Washington. In Hillary’s own words, she loved life in Fayetteville. Before she even arrived, Bill contrived to have the accomplished women in town welcome Hillary. At his request, Margaret Whillock was the first to invite Hillary over, and the two ladies dined on a lunch of gumbo. “We had a meeting of minds, I guess you’d say,” Whillock told the Guardian (Pilkington 2015). On campus, Hillary soon befriended Elizabeth “Bess” Osenbaugh, the only other woman on the law school faculty. Hillary recalls in her memoirs how they often ate lunch together and discussed problems in the law (Clinton 2003). Ann Henry, another of Hillary’s newfound friends and one of the few female lawyers in town, was active in the community as the mother of three kids and also in politics along with her husband, Morriss Henry. Hillary’s closest friend in Arkansas, and eventually one of her dearest friends for life, was Diane (Kincaid) Blair, a professor of political science at the university, who was also a transplant, having followed her first husband to Arkansas in 1965. Hillary and Blair were both academics and feminists; as the nation debated whether or not to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), Blair would debate ultraconservative anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly before the state General Assembly in 1975, with debate prep help from Hillary. With Blair, Hillary shared book recommendations, played tennis, ate lunch in the Student Union, and talked about life in Arkansas as an outsider. All of these Fayetteville women would remain friends with Hillary for decades to come. Just as classes were getting underway in the fall of 1974, Bill’s stepfather, Jeff Dwire, died suddenly from heart failure at the age of forty-eight. Virginia, now widowed for the third time, was devastated, as was Roger, who was only a teenager but had now lost his second father. Dwire, whom Virginia had married five years before, was the owner of the most popular beauty salon in Hot Springs and suffered from diabetes before his death. Bill Clinton drove to Hot Springs to take care of the funeral arrangements and comfort his mom. Virginia’s life had already been full of tragedy. Her first husband and Bill’s dad, William Jefferson Blythe, died in a car accident four months before their son was born in 1946. Virginia then made the difficult decision to leave her two-year-old son in the custody of her parents in the small town of Hope, Arkansas, while she went to New Orleans to train as a nurse-anesthetist. She returned to Arkansas after completing her training and soon married Roger Clinton, a car dealer in Hot Springs. With him, she gave birth to her second son, Roger Jr., and at the age of fifteen, Bill Clinton legally took his stepfather’s last name. Virginia’s second marriage was a violent one, marred by Roger’s alcohol abuse and drunken beatings. They were

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married for a total of seventeen years, with a divorce and remarriage mixed in, until his death from cancer. About six months later, Virginia began a relationship with Dwire, her hairdresser. When Bill returned from his visit to Hot Springs, he went back on the campaign trail. In the spring, he had garnered 44 percent of the vote in the three-way Democratic primary and had gone on to win the Democratic runoff in June, with 69 percent of the vote. From his campaign headquarters in an old house on College Avenue in Fayetteville, he traveled to every corner of the largely rural Third Congressional District of Arkansas in his 1970 Gremlin, knocking on doors and talking to people for eight months. With Republicans nationwide hampered by the Watergate scandal and rising food and fuel prices, Bill talked about a fair tax system, anti-inflation measures, and national health insurance. Many of his friends and family members actively supported his campaign, whether through monetary donations or time volunteered to walk neighborhoods; Hillary’s father and brother drove down from Park Ridge in Hugh’s Cadillac that May to volunteer—an important sign to Hillary that her conservative, sometimes combative father was warming to her boyfriend (Clinton 2003). Even while Hillary worked in Washington, she had actively supported Bill’s campaign, discussing strategy with him and phoning his campaign manager, Rod Addington, a UA graduate assistant, sometimes daily. With her earlier work on campaigns in New Hampshire and Texas and current exposure to Washington, Hillary had more political experience than many of Bill’s staffers, which they recognized. She also understood the candidate better than anyone, and his campaign deputies knew how much he valued her instincts and suggestions. Still, they better understood Arkansas—its people, its political culture, and its quirks—which sometimes led to strong differences of opinion with Hillary. Bill would often be caught in the middle and usually sided with Hillary, either because he trusted her more or because he wanted to avoid confrontation whenever possible. As Betsey Wright, a longtime Clinton loyalist, and other 1974 campaign staffers have told biographers, Hillary and Bill had their share of heated arguments during the fall, often in front of the staff. Under the pressures of the campaign Bill’s temper could flare, but unlike other staffers Hillary was willing to go toe-to-toe with him in tone and language. They always made up once their ire cooled—but this dynamic would repeat itself throughout future political campaigns. By October, Bill Clinton was gaining momentum in the polls and endorsements from several newspapers, including the Arkansas Gazette. As Election Day neared, Hammerschmidt finally started to actively campaign while his supporters aggressively worked to defeat Bill. Rumors swirled around Bill: claims that he was a womanizer, that his youthful campaign was a den of drug use, that he had climbed a tree as a one-man antiwar protest when



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President Nixon attended a UA football game in 1969 (even though he was at Oxford that year), that he was gay, and simultaneously that he was living in sin with his girlfriend (even though Hillary lived alone in a house she rented). By election night, a Clinton upset seemed plausible with only the votes from one county remaining to be reported. It was after midnight when Clinton campaign headquarters learned that he had lost the election by just six thousand of the one hundred and seventy thousand votes cast—it was the closest any Democrat had come in twenty years to defeating Hammerschmidt. Hillary as well as other campaign staffers suspected foul play when they learned of the unlikely large margin Hammerschmidt reportedly won in the last remaining county. Though questions remain about the legitimacy of Hammerschmidt’s victory, Addington told Newsweek in February 2008 that Hillary’s enraged reaction was too “by the book” for a grassroots Arkansas congressional campaign. She wanted action, to do something to be sure the Republicans did not steal the election. But as Addington explains, “In Arkansas, you don’t go and challenge the legality of the county courthouse counting the vote” (Darman 2008). Bill conceded the race to Hammerschmidt in a friendly telegram and was on the courthouse square in Fayetteville early the next morning, shaking hands and thanking his supporters. Shortly after Bill’s defeat, Nancy Bekavac, a law school classmate who was driving across the country, looked up Hillary in Fayetteville. As Bekavac relates in a PBS Frontline interview, she was heading to California from Washington where she and Hillary had overlapped for their jobs and met for dinner several times. Bekavac recalls that while still in Washington, Hillary had been contemplating moving to Arkansas to teach. Now, as she visited Hillary in Fayetteville, Bekavac says it became apparent that for Hillary to be there was a sacrifice. She recalls sitting at Hillary’s house after a thank-you dinner for Bill’s volunteers and telling her friend, “You can’t do this. You can’t stay here.” Bekavac perceived Arkansas as stuck in the 1950s with outdated attitudes about men and women’s proper roles. “I felt she was trapped. She clearly felt this relationship was worth it, and when you saw them together it was, of course,” Bekavac says, “but I hadn’t thought about the cost” (Bekavac 2016). Bekavac was a pragmatist and believed that every law school graduate who took a legal job had to learn a new set of rules and norms, but she felt that for Hillary to conform to such outdated, misogynistic social norms was just too much. As for Bill, Bekavac remembers him talking about his recent election loss and taking it in stride: “Here is the history; here is (sic) the analytics; this is what we know; I think this is where it happened; that’s not going to happen to me again” (Bekavac 2016). It was obvious to Bekavac that Bill would continue to pursue electoral politics and succeed at it. Indeed, after falling into a funk for several weeks in late 1974, Bill began to talk about his loss as a good thing— rising in Arkansas politics might be a better route to the presidency than

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serving in Congress. Meanwhile, Hillary confided in several Fayetteville friends that Bill had renewed his offers of marriage, but she was still unsure—more about life in Arkansas than about her desire for a future with Bill. When the UA semester ended in spring 1975, Hillary went on a soulsearching trip for several weeks to visit Chicago and the East Coast. She planned to see friends and contact a few people who had offered her jobs. She admits in Living History, “I still wasn’t sure what to do with my life” (Clinton 2003). After a few weeks, she says she knew that she wanted to return to Bill and her life in Arkansas. More than thirty years later in Living History, Hillary writes, “All I know is that no one understands me better and no one makes me laugh the way Bill does. Even after all these years, he is still the most interesting, energizing and fully alive person I have ever met” (Clinton 2003). Upon her return to Little Rock, Bill picked her up from the airport; and on the way back into Fayetteville, he asked if she remembered the little red brick house with a “For Sale” that she had pointed out on their drive to the airport weeks before. Bill told her that he had bought it, “so now you’d better marry me because I can’t live in it by myself” (Clinton 2003). This time, Hillary said yes. Bill drove her directly to the one-bedroom, one-bath house where he had already moved in an antique wrought-iron bed with flowered sheets and towels from Wal-Mart. Hillary wanted little fanfare about their wedding, including no need for an engagement ring, but Bill wanted a big, fun event. Hillary agreed to an engagement party in early October in Hot Springs. Then on October 11, 1975, Hillary and Clinton were married in their living room at 930 California Boulevard before a small group of family and friends. A local Methodist minister, Reverend Vic Nixon, who, along with his wife, had volunteered on Bill’s campaign, presided over the ceremony. Hillary wore an off-therack, Victorian lace and muslin dress by the designer Jessica McClintock that she and her mother purchased the day before at Dillard’s in the Fayetteville mall. By all accounts, Hillary had been more interested in fixing up her new home than planning for her wedding. When Virginia, Bill’s mother, arrived shortly before the wedding and saw the small, one-story house for the first time, she was taken aback by the buckets of paint, light fixtures, and other do-it-yourself items scattered about the place. The day after the ceremony, Ann and Morriss Henry hosted a reception for the newlyweds with a couple hundred guests in their large backyard. Not surprisingly, considering the festivities took place in Arkansas, more friends of Bill than Hillary were in the crowd from Yale, Wellesley, Georgetown (Clinton’s undergraduate alma mater), Oxford, Park Ridge, and Hot Springs. Notably, a lot of local Democratic Party players were in attendance as well as a number of the state’s prominent businessmen—many of whom took the opportunity to urge Bill to run for office again. The biggest



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surprise came when Hillary informed the guests that she would not be taking Bill’s last name. Hillary had always planned to keep her name since she was young—long before the practice became a feminist statement. As she later explained to her friends, it would help ensure she always remained a person in her own right rather than a sacrificial wife. This was quite a shock to the sensibilities of the native Arkansans at the reception, including Virginia, who supposedly cried at the news when Bill told her the morning of the ceremony. Paul Fray, one of Bill’s campaign deputies in 1974 who was urging him to run again, is said to have told Bill not long after the reception that Hillary keeping her own name would become his political Waterloo (Bernstein 2007). Early in the morning after their reception, the newlyweds were awakened at home by a phone call from the county jail. Hillary’s brother, Tony Rodham, had been stopped by state troopers and subsequently arrested for drunk driving. Bill went down and bailed him out, as they were now family. At the end of the fall semester, Hillary and Bill finally went to Acapulco, Mexico, for their honeymoon. Hillary’s mother had actually seen an advertisement for a vacation package, so the entire Rodham family spent the week at the same hotel as the newlyweds. Reflecting on her wedding to Bill more than forty years later in What Happened, Hillary writes: I hesitated to say yes because I wasn’t quite prepared for marriage. I hadn’t figured out what I wanted my future to be yet. And I knew that by marrying Bill, I would be running straight into a future far more momentous than any other I’d likely know. He was the most intense, brilliant, charismatic person I had ever met. He dreamt big. I, on the other hand, was practical and cautious. I knew that marrying him would be like hitching a ride on a comet. It took me a little while to get brave enough to take the leap. (Clinton 2017)

Shortly after returning from the honeymoon, Hillary would often find herself alone in their Fayetteville house. In January 1976, Bill set up his new campaign headquarters in Little Rock; he was running for the Democratic nomination as state attorney general. The current attorney general, Jim Guy Tucker, planned to run for Congress and helped convince Bill to run to replace him. Two of Bill’s childhood friends, Vince Foster and Mack McLarty, helped him meet leaders in the Little Rock business community and tap them for support. Bill spent months traveling around the state, often in the company of one of Hillary’s two brothers, Tony and Hugh Jr., both of whom had moved to Arkansas. The Arkansas Criminal Code had been completely rewritten in 1974 and 1975, and on the campaign trail, Bill emphasized his support for assistance to law enforcement agencies in understanding the new code, work release programs for state prisoners, compensation laws for crime victims, and stronger consumer protections and antitrust laws. In May, Bill won the Democratic primary against two

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opponents with 55.6 percent of the vote. As no Republican candidate had filed to run in the general election, Bill stood unopposed and therefore would win unanimously. Hence, the main political focus for both Bill and Hillary in 1976 became the presidential race between Democrat Jimmy Carter and incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford. Hillary and Bill had both met Carter the year before when he came to the University of Arkansas to give a speech. At the time, he was the governor of Georgia. Throughout the 1976 primaries, Carter pursued the Democratic nomination as a Washington outsider and a man of strong Christian faith who could bring trust and morals back to the post-Watergate White House. As a family peanut farmer from Georgia, he also presented himself as a man who could appeal to voters throughout the South. In July, with their spring teaching assignments finished, Hillary and Bill headed to New York City for the Democratic National Convention. They wanted to talk to Carter and his staff about working for his general election campaign. While there, they also enjoyed rubbing elbows with party leaders at many of the social events around the convention; like Carter, they hoped to rise in national politics as part of the leadership of the “New South.” From New York Hillary and Bill headed to Europe for, as she called it, “a glorious twoweek vacation” that included a “pilgrimage” to the Basque town of Guernica in Spain, which inspired Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece antiwar painting (Clinton 2003). Ever since Don Jones had shown a copy of the painting to Hillary’s Methodist youth group, she had wanted to visit the town. In 1937, while the Spanish Civil War raged, the country’s fascist dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco convinced Adolf Hitler to send his air force, the Luftwaffe, to destroy Guernica as bombing practice. Now, the newlyweds explored the rebuilt city and enjoyed coffee in the central plaza. History was of interest to both Hillary and Bill as the lessons of the past animated their drive to enact change for their generation and their country. Once back in Fayetteville, they both dove into work on the Carter presidential campaign: Bill as the Arkansas state chairman and Hillary as the field coordinator in Indiana, an overwhelmingly Republican state in which Carter believed his farming background might make some inroads. Hillary headed to Indianapolis, where the campaign office was set up across the street from the city jail in a building that previously housed an appliance store and a bail bonds company. Her role in the campaign was to find local people in every county of Indiana—ninety-two in all—who would work under the supervision of regional organizers, most of whom would be brought in from out of state with some prior campaign experience. She would be responsible for recruiting hundreds of volunteers to work out of local storefront offices on a very tight budget. Hailing from Illinois right next door, Hillary felt as though she understood Indiana voters, plus her experiences in earlier campaigns and in Washington gave her confidence



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to interact comfortably with state Democratic leaders, union representatives, and volunteer senior citizens alike. On Election Day, though Carter did not carry Indiana, he did garner 46 percent of the state’s popular vote and win the presidency with 50 percent of the vote nationwide. Back in Arkansas, Bill overwhelmingly won election for attorney general. Hillary spent election night celebrating Carter’s success with fellow staffers in Indianapolis; once she returned to Fayetteville, it was evident that she and Bill would have to move—Little Rock, Arkansas’s capital, was calling. As she and Bill packed up their belongings in Fayetteville, Hillary knew that she would have to end her teaching tenure at UA Law School. About a month after the election, Hillary had found a small house in the uppermiddle-class neighborhood of Hillcrest, not far from downtown Little Rock, for them to purchase. The commute back to campus would be too far. Hillary had really come to enjoy teaching, and she gained immense satisfaction from watching her students succeed. She knew that she would miss her university life but also thought it might be time to consider corporate law as a way to start saving money for the future. Hillary and Bill knew that they wanted a family someday, and Bill’s salary as state attorney general would be just $26,500 (that included a recent raise approved by the state legislature). Vince Foster, one of Bill’s childhood friends, was now a partner at the state’s most prestigious law firm, Rose Law Firm, with offices in Little Rock. Bill and Foster first met as kindergarten classmates in Hope, where the backyard of Bill’s grandparents bordered that of Foster’s family. Foster was president of his senior class at Hope High School, attended Davidson College, and then enrolled in Vanderbilt University Law School. He completed law school at UA in Fayetteville because it was closer to weekend training once he enlisted in the Arkansas National Guard during the Vietnam War. Foster joined Rose Law Firm in 1971 and became a full partner three years later. As chair of the Arkansas Bar Association’s committee on legal assistance, he first met Hillary in Fayetteville when she was working to revive UA’s struggling legal aid clinic. Foster recognized Hillary’s talent—and potential network as wife of the state’s next attorney general—and, when he went back to Little Rock, told his partners at the firm that they needed to hire her before a competitor did. To mute any possible objections by other partners to hiring her, Foster obtained protocols from the American Bar Association that the firm could put in place to avoid any conflicts of interest between Hillary’s work on behalf of their clients and Bill’s work as the newly sworn in state attorney general. The firm offered Hillary a job as an associate in February 1977. The Rose Law Firm was an old-school men’s club: it had never had a female associate, all of its prominent clients were male, and all of the nine full partners were white men. Hillary, with a starting annual salary of $25,000, was assigned to the litigation team overseen by Phil Carroll, but

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The Oldest Law Firm West of the Mississippi River Hillary worked as a corporate litigator and eventual partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas for fifteen years. The prestigious firm probably seemed a natural choice in 1977 for a young lawyer just relocated to the state capital. The Rose Law Firm’s client list included many of Arkansas’s largest corporations, including Walmart and Tyson Foods. Indeed, the firm claims to be the oldest continuously operating law firm west of the Mississippi River. Chester Ashley and Robert Crittenden established the firm in 1820, before Arkansas achieved statehood. Crittenden was appointed by President James Monroe to serve as lieutenant governor of the Arkansas Territory, and he later ran for Congress. After he lost the election, Crittenden challenged his opponent to a duel over comments made during the campaign, in which he mortally wounded the Congressman. Ashley and Crittenden dissolved their partnership in 1832, although Ashley took on a new partner five years later. In 1865, the firm added the name Rose in recognition of partner U.M. Rose, one of the founders of the American Bar Association. The company adopted its modern moniker, “Rose Law Firm, A Professional Association,” in 1980. When Hillary was recruited, most of her colleagues were male, and some worried about her abilities and professional dedication—they speculated, what would happen once Hillary and her husband started a family? Although Hillary continued her career after Chelsea’s birth and Bill’s election as governor, she did not accrue as many billable hours as other partners. She could not invoice anyone for the hours she dedicated to her husband’s campaigns or the time she volunteered as chairwoman of the Legal Services Corp. and the Children’s Defense Fund. Still, by 1991 Hillary earned just over $100,000 as a partner, whereas Governor Clinton earned $35,000 the same year (Meckler and Nicholas 2016).

her closest colleagues would become Vince Foster and Webster Hubbell. Foster and Hillary had corner offices next door to each other and shared a secretary. Hillary recalls Hubbell as a “creative litigator” whose memory for and understanding of the law she admired. Whereas Foster was thin, an immaculate dresser, a connoisseur of fine wines, and known for his discretion in all matters, Hubbell, according to Hillary, “looked like a good ol’ boy” (Clinton 2003). Arkansas born and raised, measuring six feet five inches tall and nearly 300 pounds, Hubbell had been a football star at UA in Fayetteville and was drafted by the Chicago Bears, but he never played pro ball due to a career-ending knee injury. Foster, Hubbell, and Hillary would come to refer to themselves over the next few years as the Three Amigos. In Living History Hillary explains that “one of the reasons Vince and Webb became such good friends is that they accepted me for who I was.” Of their frequent Italian lunches together at the Villa restaurant in



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Little Rock, she writes, “It was fun to exchange war stories about our battles in the Arkansas court system or just to talk about our families” (Clinton 2003). Hillary faced an uphill struggle to fit into the firm’s male-dominated culture and the social norms of Little Rock. According to biographer Bernstein, many of the firm’s secretaries gossiped about Hillary behind her back, mostly about her casual appearance and then attempts at femininity for days in court. Meanwhile, many of her associates and clients found Hillary to be intimidating at times, probably because she was selfconfident and rarely deferential, like the men mostly expected a woman to be (Bernstein 2007). Although the capital of the state, Little Rock was less progressive than Fayetteville. In Fayetteville, similar to many small college towns across the country, the university attracted more non-native residents per capita and a concentration of young people, who, regardless of era, are generally harbingers of new cultural trends and social norms. Once she transplanted to Arkansas, Hillary found her way in Fayetteville society rather easily by building personal connections with colleagues and new friends based on common interests and viewpoints. Her move to Little Rock was more difficult. Though she was friendly with the wives of her colleagues at company events, she turned down their attempts to have her join various women’s charitable groups. She knew that to align herself too closely to the partners’ wives would diminish the men’s view of her as their professional peer. Both Foster and Hubbell recognized Hillary’s dilemma and often looked out for her. Hubbell connected Hillary with his brother-in-law, Beryl Anthony, who was also an attorney, to once again take up some legal work in child advocacy pro bono. Hillary soon recognized the need for a statewide organization in Arkansas dedicated to children’s rights and advocacy. She would join with Dr. Bettye Caldwell, a well-known professor of child development at UA at Little Rock, and other prominent residents to establish the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families (ACFF) in 1977. Such personally fulfilling work would help sustain Hillary as she came to understand the “expectations and unspoken mores of life in the South” so prevalent in Little Rock (Clinton 2003). For example, in Living History she acknowledges that even her workday lunches with Foster and Hubbell sometimes raised eyebrows, as married women in town did not usually dine out with men who were not their husbands. Being the wife of a politician came with its own set of expectations, but in the late 1970s, many Arkansans would not have recognized Hillary on the street. She did make the occasional speeches across the state to tout his consumer-friendly policies, at the bequest of his office. While Bill enjoyed his new job and worked to advocate for the concerns of consumers and workers, he also answered the call from President Carter to help vet

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possible appointments of Arkansans to federal positions, including judges. Meanwhile, Hillary gained appointment by Carter to the board of the national Legal Services Corporation (LSC) in 1978, based on her work experience and her service to Carter’s campaign. Congress had established the corporation as an independent nonprofit in 1974 to provide federal funds to legal aid bureaus across the country and thereby help low-income Americans who cannot afford an attorney. The board, to which the U.S. Senate approved Hillary’s appointment, distributes funding to 132 legal aid programs, like the UA Law School Legal Aid Clinic, which she had resuscitated while on faculty. At the time Hillary was appointed to the board, the LSC had five thousand lawyers working on one million cases each year. After a few months on the board, Carter named Hillary as the first woman to chair the LSC board—again, the Senate approved her nomination. During her four-year term as chairperson, Hillary went to battle against Republican candidate and eventual president, Governor Ronald Reagan of California, in his attempts to defund LSC in California and then nationwide. Once president, Reagan tried to convince Congress to limit funding to LSC while also appointing new members to the board who opposed the idea of federally funded legal aid for the poor. Hillary hired Foster to successfully secure a restraining order to keep the new members from meeting before their approval by the Senate, while she met with Senate Democrats to convince them not to approve Reagan’s appointees. By the time her term ended as chairperson, Hillary had guaranteed the safety of federal legal aid and tripled the annual appropriation from Congress for LSC. Though the average bystander might not yet have recognized Hillary as a political mover and shaker in early 1978, both her and Bill’s stars were rising within the national Democratic Party, and his was about to shoot across the state of Arkansas.

5 First Lady of Arkansas

Fast-forward . . . to early 1991. I’d gotten what I’d always dreamed of—a loving family, a fulfilling career, and a life of service to others— plus more that I had never imagined. I was the First Lady of Arkansas. —Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, 2017 In 1977, while serving as Arkansas attorney general, Bill began to plan his next political move—a run for governor or for the U.S. Senate. Longtime Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan had announced his retirement at age eighty-two and told Bill that he should replace him. Bill wasn’t sure. According to political consultant Dick Morris, Bill really wanted to be governor because there was a lot to be done in his home state. Morris, who would become integral to many of Bill’s future campaigns, first worked for him in the fall of 1977 when he conducted a poll to help predict the likelihood of his success as candidate in 1978, whether he ran for the governor or the Senate. Perhaps at least partly based on the outcome of Morris’s polling, Clinton decided to run for governor (Bernstein 2007). At thirtyone years old, he declared his candidacy in front of a small press corps in the state capitol building in Little Rock, surrounded by Hillary, his mother, and his brother. According to Morris and Clinton’s campaign director Rudy Moore, Hillary played an important role in her husband’s first 53

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campaign for governor but did so largely behind the scenes. In the South in the 1970s, political wives were not expected to give speeches on the campaign trail but rather to smile and wave as an accompaniment to their husbands. Hillary was hardly the average political wife, even in 1978. In fact, the single most memorable attack that Bill’s Republican opponent, Lynn Lowe, and his supporters made during the campaign was actually an attack on Hillary for not changing her name once married—the “name issue,” as Bernstein calls it in A Woman in Charge (2007). Though much of the discussion in Arkansas of Hillary’s choice to keep her maiden name was wrapped in the topicality of the women’s liberation movement and ongoing national debates about passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, Hillary claims in her memoirs that she had decided as a young girl that she wanted to keep her family name whenever she married. As Bill reiterated to The New Yorker in May 1994, “Hillary told me she was nine years old when she decided she would keep her own name when she got married. It had nothing to do with the feminist movement or anything” (Bruck 1994). Perhaps it was an attempt to keep some sense of her own identity in marriage; or maybe she saw it as her professional name through her work at the CDF, on the impeachment inquiry in Washington, and most recently at the Rose Law Firm; but whatever her reasoning, Hillary’s decision made her in 1978—for the first time but definitely not the last—a polarizing political figure. Meredith Oakley, a political columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, took a swipe at Bill via Hillary during the campaign, saying some people thought that even Bill’s wife did not like him enough to take his last name (Bernstein 2007). Meanwhile, conservative critics also attacked Hillary for pursuing her own career as a corporate lawyer in the state while her husband served as attorney general. They contended that her clients won special favors from the state government due to the Bill’s relationship. While no one dared advise Hillary to quit her job for the sake of Bill’s bid for the governorship, Bernstein notes that both within the Clinton campaign and among his supporters, some people did directly address the name issue with Hillary. Despite Hillary and Bill’s choice to largely ignore the name issue, Bill easily won the Democratic primary and then, in November, the governorship with 63 percent of the vote. At thirty-two years old, Clinton would become the United States’ youngest governor since 1938. Once again, Hillary and Clinton had to move their household, this time a short distance to the governor’s mansion in downtown Little Rock. The stately home dated back to 1950. Built with a symmetrical Georgian design, the mansion featured a facade of red brick with a centered, two-story, white portico surrounded by Greek revival columns and matching chimneys to balance the sides of the house. The mansion came with a small staff, including: longtime cook Eliza Ashley, her assistant, a maid, landscape worker, and



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the salary for a mansion manager—Carolyn Huber, whom Hillary hired from the Rose Law Firm. Hillary’s workday routine remained largely the same regardless of her new surroundings. She arose early to get ready for work, and then drove herself to her law office, usually arriving by 7:30 a.m. She continued to carry a full caseload and in 1979 was made a partner at the firm, the first woman ever to do so. She traveled to Washington every few months to continue her pro bono work with the Children’s Defense Fund and to attend board meetings for the Legal Services Corporation. Besides her work as chair of Bill’s newly created Rural Health Advisory Committee, Hillary largely moved through her new public life as professionally separate from the governorship. Many observers note that during Bill’s first term as governor, Hillary actively helped him to shape his policies, but she did not regularly host or attend ladies’ luncheons, travel with him to greet constituents or give speeches. She largely remained a mystery to many Arkansans— an outsider brought in by Bill with an East Coast education, thick eyeglasses, apparent disdain for makeup, and a supposedly feminist attitude. Unknown to the public was the fact that Hillary spent much of their first year in the governor’s mansion worried about her ability to conceive and carry a child. Hillary and Bill both always wanted to have children, to create a loving family environment, and perhaps share with their own offspring more supportive, close relationships than they had with their own fathers. Bernstein reports in his biography that Hillary suffered from endometriosis, a medical condition that can make conception difficult and may cause infertility. At the time, some doctors also believed that the condition could cause miscarriages. By summer of 1979, Hillary and Bill decided to book an appointment with an infertility specialist in San Francisco, which they scheduled for July after a planned getaway to Bermuda. As it turned out, they did not need the specialist’s services—they soon learned that Hillary was pregnant, with conception likely happening during their vacation— “proving once again the importance of regular time off,” as Hillary notes in Living History (Clinton 2003). The couple signed up for Lamaze classes in anticipation of Hillary’s natural childbirth, where together they practiced breathing techniques alongside other soon-to-be parents. At nearly seven months pregnant, Hillary traveled in January 1980 to New York with a group of trustees and doctors from the Arkansas Children’s Hospital to help secure a high bond rating in anticipation of funding a large hospital expansion. Shortly thereafter, her doctor told her that she could no longer travel. In late February, she was disappointed to have to miss the National Governors Association meeting in Washington and its final night White House dinner for governors hosted by President and Mrs. Carter. Bill returned to Little Rock after the dinner, on the night of February 27. Fifteen minutes later, Hillary’s water broke while at home in the governor’s mansion. It was still three weeks until her due date, so no bags were packed

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yet for the trip to the hospital. Hillary recalls, “That threw him and the state troopers into a panic. Bill ran around with the Lamaze list of what to take” (Clinton 2003). After Bill told the troopers to bag some ice cubes for Hillary to suck on, per Lamaze instructions, a trooper returned with a ridiculously large trash bag full of ice, which was thrown with the other bags into the trunk of a patrol car. Hillary hobbled into the car, and within minutes they were at the hospital. The doctors informed Hillary and Bill that the baby was breech, upside down in the womb, which meant that Hillary would be prepped for a cesarean section. Never having been hospitalized before, Hillary became very nervous about the idea of surgery. Bill urged the hospital administrators to let him accompany her into surgery, even though policy forbade fathers to be in the delivery room during such operations. As Hillary suggests in Living History, the fact that Bill was governor “certainly helped convince Baptist Hospital to let him in” (Clinton 2003). (Shortly thereafter the hospital changed its policy to allow fathers to be present for the surgical birth of their babies.) With Bill holding Hillary’s hand, the doctors got to work, and at 11:24 p.m., a healthy baby girl weighing just over six pounds was delivered. Her parents named Chelsea Victoria Clinton after singer Judy Collins’s version of the song “Chelsea Morning,” written and first recorded by Joni Mitchell. Hillary and Bill heard the song while in Chelsea, England, on their Christmas 1978 vacation. Likely due to their anxiety over conception and then the stressful circumstances of her delivery, in the months and years ahead, Hillary and Bill would often refer to Chelsea as their “miracle” (Clinton 2003). While Hillary was in recovery after the birth, Bill, as the proud father, paraded his baby girl around the hospital to show her off to the staff, his mother, and friends who had gathered. Although the Rose Law Firm did not have a formal parental leave policy—likely because it had no mothers in senior positions—her partners told Hillary to take as much time off as she needed. Some in the firm assumed she would resign after giving birth, but they had also assumed she would resign when Bill became governor and again when she became pregnant. Hillary ended up taking four months off to stay home with Chelsea, although, as she notes, with less income because most of her earnings came from fees generated by casework, not her salary. Her parents came from Park Ridge to stay with the new parents, to adore and cradle their first grandchild. Very quickly, the women on the governor’s mansion staff became a built-in support system for the new mother and baby. Hillary describes herself as “mystified” by her newborn and recounts the mantra she created to help her through Chelsea’s crying spells and other tough new-mom moments: “Chelsea, this is new for both of us. I’ve never been a mother before, and you’ve never been a baby. We’re just going to have to help each other do the best we can” (Clinton 2003).



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Raising a family as a politician is not easy. How much or how little one’s children are exposed to press coverage and the public is a decision that comes with the job—even more so in the modern age of cable news and social media. Hillary and Bill both wanted press coverage of Chelsea to be limited from the very beginning: Arkansas newspapers had to wait more than a week to get an official photo of the family following Chelsea’s birth. Both parents would go to great lengths throughout their daughter’s childhood and school years to ensure her privacy and to allow her as normal a life as possible, considering the circumstances of almost exclusively growing up in the governor’s mansion and then the White House. They limited Chelsea’s appearances at campaign stops, enrolled her in local schools known for discretion, and, once in the White House, negotiated an unwritten agreement with the Washington press corps that their daughter’s personal life was off limits. As a young adult, Chelsea would attend Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, again largely shielded from press coverage of her regular activities or whereabouts. While Hillary and Bill adjusted to their new lives as parents, Bill was also running for reelection as governor. As a candidate in 1978, he had made promises on a diverse range of issues to the people of Arkansas— promises based on ideas that he had been collecting for years about how to improve life in his home state. However, once governor, the reality of state politics had kept him from delivering on many of those promises. The budget was limited, as Arkansas has not historically been a wealthy state— according to USA Today, even in 2018 Arkansas ranked forty-eighth out of all states in median household income (Suneson 2018)—and many members of the state legislature were beholden to Arkansas’s leading industries for their seats. In an attempt to finance a much-needed highway reconstruction program, during his first term, Governor Clinton had raised the state car-tag fee nearly tenfold. Meanwhile, state news outlets reported a number of seemingly frivolous expenses by state officials, including hundreds of dollars per month for office plants and $2,000 for a departmental lakeside retreat. Bill had one challenger in the 1980 Democratic primary: a seventy-seven-year-old turkey farmer with a history of running for public office, Monroe Schwarlose. Schwarlose had also run for governor in 1978, when the Arkansas Gazette noted that he was “not regarded a serious candidate” because his campaign focused solely on the legalization of gambling and establishment of a state lottery (Bernstein 2007). To the complete shock of many pundits, in the 1980 primary, Schwarlose won 31 percent of the vote after hammering Bill on the car tag increase and government spending abuses. Bill Republican opponent in the 1980 general election was Frank D. White, a large, loud savings and loan executive, who by early October was leading in the polls. White ran a largely negative campaign targeting

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Governor Clinton with the slogan “Cubans and Car Tags.” President Jimmy Carter was becoming increasingly unpopular even among fellow Democrats by the summer of 1980, and some of his decisions would come home to roost problems for his friend and political ally, Governor Clinton. Carter’s administration had secretly been working for months to improve relations with Fidel Castro, the communist president of Cuba, when Castro suddenly announced on April 20, 1980, that he would open the port of Mariel, Cuba, to allow residents to leave the island. Floridians from Key West to West Palm Beach sent private boats to Mariel to be paid by families and friends to transport the fleeing Cubans ninety miles across the ocean to Miami. Castro then surprised U.S. officials again when he opened Cuban jails and mental institutions and allowed prisoners and patients to join what quickly became known as the “Mariel Boatlift” (Maraniss, July 1, 1992). Thousands of small boats overpacked with desperate Cubans embarked on the dangerous journey across the rough waters of the Florida Strait. In total, approximately 125,000 refugees arrived in Florida. The Carter administration dispatched them to four military encampments for assimilation. One of those resettlement camps was Fort Chafee in northwest Arkansas, which received some 18,000 Cubans. While Governor Clinton initially supported Carter’s decision to welcome and aid the refugees, he became frustrated that no federal funds or personnel were sent to Arkansas to assist with their housing, feeding, and processing—and many nervous Arkansans began to stockpile guns and ammunition. The Clinton House Museum in Little Rock quotes Bill at the time pronouncing: “I know that everyone in this state sympathizes and identifies with [these refugees] in their desire for freedom. I will do all I can to fulfill whatever responsibilities the president imposes upon Arkansas to facilitate the refugees’ resettlement in this country” ( “1980” 2020). However, apprehension among residents over the Cubans’ presence would soon rise. In late May, as many as 300 refugees escaped Fort Chafee through an unguarded gate and dispersed throughout the countryside. As the federal troops stationed at Fort Chafee had no authority off the base, state and local law enforcement had to work for several days to detain the refugees and return them to camp. On the night of June 1, 1980, more than 1,000 refugees rioted at Fort Chafee. They charged the gate with little to no resistance from the federal troops on-site, who were not technically empowered to forcefully detain the refugees. About 200 of the Cubans, some brandishing sticks and bottles, ran down Highway 22 toward the community of Fort Smith. By all accounts, Governor Clinton handled the situation calmly and swiftly; he sent state troopers and National Guardsmen to gain control of the situation and assure residents of their safety. Still, sixty-two people suffered injuries, and five refugees were shot before the night ended. A frustrated Bill Clinton blamed the Army command at Fort Chafee for the unrest,



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and, according to Hillary in Living History, he gained assurances from President Carter that no more refugees would be placed in Arkansas (Clinton 2003). In August, the president broke that promise as he closed camps in other states and sent their refugees to Fort Chafee. By the fall, local television channels carried a constant stream of negative ads by White’s campaign that featured footage of angry, dark-skinned Cuban rioters and pronounced, “Bill Clinton cares more about Jimmy Carter than he does about Arkansas” (Clinton 2003). Hillary notes that she could soon gauge the effectiveness of the ads by the questions she began fielding at her public appearances—questions like, “Why did Governor Clinton let the Cubans riot?” She became concerned about Bill’s chances for reelection. With just a week left before election day, Hillary called political consultant Morris—whom Bill had fired after becoming governor because so many on his staff despised him—in an attempt to help salvage Clinton’s reelection. Though Morris agreed to come to Arkansas, he told Hillary that he thought the campaign was doomed. Morris had tried to dissuade Bill from the car tag increase due to the negative political optics, and he believed White’s negative television ads had successfully replaced reality with their version of events in the minds of too many residents. In her memoirs, Hillary notes that such negative ads were “all too common in 1980,” largely due to funding in campaigns nationwide by the newly formed National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). This new Republican strategy “where truth was turned on its head,” she writes, “convinced me of the piercing power of negative ads to convert voters through distortion” (Clinton 2003). On election night 1980, Bill lost a second term as governor by 52 to 48 percent. Of the 840,000 votes cast, White beat Clinton by nearly 35,000. White became only the second Republican governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction in the 1870s, and Clinton became the first Arkansas governor to lose reelection since 1954. Hillary and Bill received the election returns at the governor’s mansion, not at campaign headquarters. Bill was angry—at himself, the media, President Carter, his campaign staff, the Republicans—then crushed by the defeat. After they went to campaign headquarters, it was Hillary who addressed the large hotel room filled with stunned supporters and members of the press that evening, and she invited them to the governor’s mansion the next morning to hear from the candidate. The following day, much of the same crowd gathered on the back lawn of the governor’s mansion in what Hillary describes as an event “like a wake.” Still, as Bill told the Washington Post in 1992, “There was absolutely no doubt that I would run again. . . . The very moment I was conceding defeat, my mind was spinning with ideas about what I had to do to stay active and get back” (Maraniss, July 15, 1992). From that loss moving forward, as Hubbell noted, Hillary and Bill would always run their campaigns themselves, “going on their gut instincts,” and

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they would never again fail “to hit back fast when the situation demanded it.” As one of Bill’s early campaign managers told The New Yorker in May 1994, part of Hillary’s contribution to her husband’s success was to naturally complement his personality with her own. “She has much more ability than he does to see who’s with you, who’s against you, and to make sure they don’t take advantage of you.” According to Moore, who ran Clinton’s 1978 campaign, “He’s not expecting to be jumped, but she is. So she’s on the defensive” (Bruck 1994). Hillary herself admits in What Happened, “When I feel wronged, I get mad, and then I think about how to fight back” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Where she might have tempered that urge before, after Bill’s unexpected loss in 1980, Hillary would help protect her husband from attacks; but she also learned another important lesson from his 1980 loss. In the future she would also work to define Bill’s policy ideas and then translate them into actionable governance—focused, specific achievements that voters could see. As Clinton explained their new tactic to Maraniss in 1992, “If you want to be for change, you have to render that change in ways people can understand and relate to” (Maraniss, July 15, 1992). Change would play a large role in Hillary’s life in the months after Bill’s defeat. Within a week of Bill’s loss, Hillary found an old home to buy in the same Hillcrest section of Little Rock where they had lived while he was attorney general. She decorated the home with secondhand furnishings from local thrift and antique stores, and she built shelves for Bill in his new study. She also converted the attic into a nursery for Chelsea. Once his term as governor expired, Clinton took a job at a local law firm, Wright, Lindsey, and Jennings, where he worked on a few antitrust cases. Hillary took a brief leave of absence from work to manage her family’s transition, but once back at the Rose Law Firm, she had to learn to juggle raising a small child with holding down a career. She was still the major breadwinner in the family, and many of the firm’s other partners now saw Hillary as a liability in attracting future clients. It must have been a difficult transition as a new mother, for even as much as Bill loved to dote on Chelsea and his mother offered to babysit, Hillary would need to log more hours at work to prove her worth to colleagues. Friends describe Bill as depressed after his loss, a situation that must have further weighed on Hillary. She had moved to Arkansas because of his political future, and in early 1981, that seemed in danger—and the stakes for Hillary were even higher now as they shared a child. Hillary knew that Bill would run again for the governorship in two years, and it was imperative—to his happiness, their marriage, and their shared goal to have an impact in the public arena—that he win. To this end, Hillary once again called Dick Morris. She wanted him to work with her to piece together a strategy for Bill’s comeback. She also made the difficult decision to change her name. As she notes in her memoirs, “I learned the hard way that some voters in Arkansas were seriously



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offended by the fact that I kept my maiden name” (Clinton 2003). The White campaign had used the issue of her maiden name against Bill. “I decided it was more important for Bill to be governor again than for me to keep my maiden name,” she writes. “So when Bill announced his run for another term on Chelsea’s second birthday, I began calling myself Hillary Rodham Clinton” (Clinton 2003). As Betsey Wright reflects, it hurt Hillary personally that the people of Arkansas, whom she had so invested in trying to understand, had not even tried to understand her side of the name issue (Bernstein 2007). According to Hillary in Living History, her choice to use her maiden name was a personal one, “a small (I thought) gesture to acknowledge that while I was committed to our union, I was still me” (Clinton 2003). She argues that she was also being practical as she was already trying legal cases, teaching, and publishing as Hillary Rodham. Still, as Wright remembers, in 1981 Hillary told her that she couldn’t bear it if her name issue cost Clinton the election—“if we’re going to do this, let’s try to win” (Bernstein 2007). The fact that her appearance was a campaign consideration must have also hurt Hillary personally. For all of the empowerment that she and her classmates at Wellesley had felt as young women in the progressive times of the late 1960s, the world that greeted them after graduation still seemed to demand that they “know their place” as women. And although many of her classmates at Yale and peers in Washington embraced the more casual, lenient dress and grooming standards of the hippie culture, most Arkansans had set expectations for their political figures—especially their first lady. So, when Bill announced his candidacy for governor again with Hillary by his side, she wore a modest suit and a styled, permed haircut. During this period, she also ditched her signature glasses for contact lenses when in public. As former Arkansas First Lady Gay White recalled to the New York Times in 2016, Hillary changed everything about herself for Bill’s comeback campaign: “her whole appearance, her wardrobe. She started wearing makeup. She took Bill’s last name. They did the things they needed to do” (Draper 2016). By the time Bill announced his candidacy in February 1982, Hillary had been working for months to prepare for the campaign. Hillary had encouraged him to call Betsey Wright, who was working on women’s issues in Washington, to come help him close down his office as governor and get organized for another campaign. Both Hillary and Bill knew Wright from their work on the McGovern campaign. Wright soon arrived in Little Rock—where she would remain to work for Bill for the next eleven years— to find his staff listless, demoralized, and anxious about their futures. Bernstein aptly describes Wright’s arrival as the beginning of a partnership between her and Hillary to get Bill’s political career back on track. For years, Bill had made a habit of creating note cards for each of his political

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contacts and contributors; Wright and Hillary knew they needed to catalog those note cards as indispensable pieces of Bill’s political development and possibly his future. Not surprisingly, during this stressful time of financially and psychologically supporting her husband and juggling work expectations with raising a toddler, Hillary joined the First United Methodist Church in Little Rock. Her faith had been an integral part of her upbringing, and as an adult, she would often find strength and comfort in her religious beliefs. (In the years to come, she would serve on the church’s board and do pro bono legal work on its behalf.) Her collegial friendships with Hubbell and Foster in particular also became a refuge of sorts for Hillary. For the next twenty years, she and Foster shared a special bond that was noticed by many friends and coworkers. Even Bill remarked at one point that Foster probably understood Hillary better than anyone else. And while some people vaguely suspected at times that Hillary and Foster might be lovers, those who knew them both the best never believed such rumors. Hillary and Foster shared a pragmatic view of the world and were often seen by their peers as the adults in the room. Though no one besides them knows just how much Hillary confided in Foster, he would have been a likely choice as her confidante based on his simpatico character and reputation for discretion. By the fall of 1981, Bill’s campaign was well underway. With Hillary and Morris leading the development of strategy and policy, Bill spent much of his time traveling around the state to engage with voters. At times Hillary and Chelsea accompanied him, at other times he traveled with Wright or Bruce Lindsey, his law partner and good friend. The campaign revolved in large part around the portrayal of Bill as an empathetic person, which he was at his core, who understood the importance of listening to people. At Hillary’s insistence, Bill took the campaign tack of actually apologizing to the people of Arkansas for being too arrogant during his first term as governor. He acknowledged that he had pushed too many policy initiatives that he believed would be good for the state without regard for how they might upend norms and values that the people held dear. In turn, as he toured small towns and visited ordinary people in their homes, streets, and grocery stores, they told him time and again that they were sorry they had voted against him and that he had lost. The consensus was that Arkansans did not really want White as their governor, but they had wanted to teach Bill a lesson. Hillary recalls in Living History, “I’ve always liked campaigning and traveling through Arkansas, stopping at country stores, sale barns and barbecue joints. It’s a continuing education in human nature, including your own” (Clinton 2003). For all of her public handshaking and door-to-door campaigning for Bill in 1982, many observers have noted that Hillary played an even larger role behind the scenes. She involved herself in hiring, staffing, and scheduling decisions in addition to the larger



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issues of strategy and policy—and she would push Clinton to be aggressive when he might otherwise have hesitated. As Bernstein notes in A Woman in Charge, Hillary was motivated by what was at stake: “if Bill lost this election, his political career—theirs—was finished” (Bernstein 2007). Bill Clinton won election as governor in 1982, a position he would retain for four consecutive terms until running for president in 1992. His victory over White, with 55 percent of the vote, must have been a huge relief for Hillary; she had invested so much of herself in his campaign, and now her world was right side up again. In the months leading up to Governor Clinton’s 1983 inaugural, he huddled with Hillary and Morris to define the policy priorities and legislative strategy of his term. As Hillary notes in Living History, “a humbler, more seasoned governor returned to the State House, though no less determined to get as much done as possible in two years. And there was so much to be done” (Clinton 2003). But Hillary and Bill had learned an important lesson in his 1980 defeat that they would not forget going forward: it is not enough to enact needed policy; to stay in office, a good politician had to be sure that voters agreed with their goals and were not turned off by the means to achieve those goals. While Bill and Hillary welcomed the opportunity to help the people of Arkansas, they also understood that they would have to sell their plans to the people in order to stay in the governor’s mansion longer than two years this time. Clinton had talked about a number of issues during the campaign, one of which was the need to bring Arkansas’s workforce into the modern digital age. Future generations of Arkansans would need at least high school diplomas as well as the abilities to analyze data, problem-solve and think globally. With support from polling conducted by Morris, Hillary and Bill agreed that educational reform would be his signature initiative once in office. Just months after his 1983 inauguration, Governor Clinton announced creation of an Education Standards Committee to recommend reforms to the state’s public education system. Though Hillary and Bill relate conflicting accounts as to whose idea it initially was, they came to agreement that Hillary should chair the committee. As Bill explained when he announced her appointment to the press, “I will have a person who is closer to me than anyone else overseeing a project that is more important to me than anything else” (Kruse 2015). The decision made good political sense in other ways: Hillary was a mother, someone with a personal, vested interest in her three-year-old’s future education, and she was a woman, as were most of the state’s teachers and school administrators. Voters saw volunteer work in the realm of children’s education as perfectly appropriate for their first lady. Hillary prepared for her new role with in-depth research. She studied the curriculum of every school district in the state; she studied state statistics about student outcomes; and she compared data on Arkansas’s educational system to national averages and other states. Her assessment was bleak. As Michael Kruse of

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Politico recounts, “The schools in Arkansas were dismal, by many measures the worst in the country—last or close in per-pupil expenditures, teacher salaries, the percentage of high school graduates who went on to college. The state had more illiterates than college graduates” (Kruse 2015). Hillary’s committee held its first meeting in a conference room at the Arkansas Department of Education in Little Rock in May 1983. The committee consisted of fifteen members, including teachers, college professors, and administrators, some women and some men, some white and some Black (Kruse 2015). They would meet in subcommittees and as a full committee many times stretching through the summer. Most of them knew Hillary only by reputation—as the governor’s wife, the only female partner at the state’s most powerful law firm, and part of the task force that had brought the first neonatal clinic to Arkansas. They were soon introduced to her high standards, no-nonsense style, and professional demeanor. Several members recall Hillary as a very inclusive leader, allowing members with different opinions to be heard, but she was always in control. On July 5, the committee held a public hearing in Little Rock that lasted nine hours during which they heard from representatives of more than fifty interest groups representing students with special needs to gifted students to school principals (Kruse 2015). The committee members next spread out across all seventy-five counties in the state to hold public hearings in whatever local spaces were available. By the time they finished, members had gathered input from more than 75,000 citizens. Committee member and later state senator Charlie Chaffin recalled in 2015, “It was long and grueling, but there wasn’t a person who felt like they hadn’t been heard. Hillary let everybody say what they wanted to say” (Kruse 2015). One longtime Clinton aide summed up Hillary’s approach as combining policy discussions with “retail politics, one on one, small town to small town.” When Hillary concluded a presentation of her committee’s preliminary findings to a joint session of the state legislature that summer, one colorful member told the room, “Well fellas, I think we’ve elected the wrong Clinton!” (Kruse 2015). As summer turned to fall, the committee prepared to present their recommendations to the public. Come September, Hillary was ready. At a press conference, she told reporters, “The world outside the classroom will punish the illiterate soon enough; for our schools and teachers to play an indefinite game of ‘let’s pretend’ with students who are not learning constitutes a failure of nerve we can no longer afford. . . . We Arkansans,” she said, counting herself as one with her audience, “have to quit making excuses” (Kruse 2015). Key components of the committee’s proposal included a uniform, state-designated core curriculum, standardized tests for students to gauge competency, a longer school year, a twentyto-one student-to-teacher ratio in classrooms, and increased accountability for schools and districts.



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Still, one part of Hillary and Clinton’s plan to overhaul public education— what Hillary refers to as “the cornerstone” of the plan in her memoirs—had not been mentioned in committee meetings or public hearings: competency testing for teachers. Bernstein notes in A Woman in Charge, “Hillary said she kept hearing stories about grossly incompetent teachers who could hardly read or spell” (Bernstein 2007). Clinton called the head of the state’s teacher union, the Arkansas Education Association, about the teacher-testing proposal the night before Hillary’s reform package was made public. Obviously, the official was not happy. The surprise inclusion of a teachertesting component angered some of Hillary’s committee as well. Committee member and assistant executive secretary of the Arkansas Education Association Cora McHenry recalled in 2015, “It hit me like a ton of bricks. It was never discussed in our meetings” (Kruse 2015). Once Hillary announced the committee’s package of proposals in September 1983, she took a step back and let her husband take over guiding the reforms through the state legislature. Many groups within the state Democratic Party fought the teachertesting proposal: the teachers union argued against testing as an insult to their profession, and civil rights groups argued that the testing would likely be most detrimental to African American teachers. The Arkansas Education Association would fight the testing requirement in the courts for the next eight years, with Hillary’s committee and the state as defendants in the case. Meanwhile, many Republicans and conservatives supported the idea of the competence tests for teachers. They argued that in many other professions, job readiness and competency played integral parts of employee reviews and advancements—the same should be true for teachers. As Hillary explains in Living History, “we felt there was no way around the issue. How could we expect children to perform at national levels when their teachers sometimes feel short?” (Clinton 2003). In order to pay for the reform package that Hillary and her committee proposed, Governor Clinton asked the legislature to raise taxes—never a popular proposition for an elected official. The state’s department of education estimated that $200 million would be needed to implement the proposals, including to hire more teachers, school administrators, and support staff—librarians, counselors, and nurses—and build thousands of new classrooms. Bill asked the legislature to pass a one-cent sales tax increase, the first sales tax hike in twenty-six years. Bill masterfully sold the education reform package and the necessary tax increase as something that all residents needed to support equally: “Everyone always wants someone else’s ox to be gored,” he said, “but this is a program for all Arkansans, and all Arkansans should pay for it.” And he tied the teacher-testing component to the tax hike as a way for citizens to know that their money was going toward serious reform; the tests, he said, were “a small price to pay for the biggest tax increase for education in the history of the state and to

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restore the teaching profession to the position of public esteem that I think it deserves” (Kruse 2015). Hillary and Bill got their educational reforms. The new standards were approved as was the sales tax increase. Morris’s early polls had been correct: while 50 percent of voters said they would support a tax increase to fund improved education, that number jumped to 85 percent when teacher testing was included as part of the reform package. Although Hillary states in her memoirs that by the end of Bill’s term in office, the state had in place a plan to raise standards and give teachers a pay increase, those standards would not take effect until 1987, which would delay the ability to actually track results. Once the new standards were fully implemented, the results of Bill’s educational reforms were promising, with a 12 percent increase in the number of high school graduates who went on to college, reduced class sizes across all grades in all districts, statewide adoption of curriculum standards, and offerings throughout the state in foreign languages, science, and advanced math. Still, the simple fact that their proposals had become law gave Clinton a success to tout in his 1984 reelection as governor, and the teacher-testing component in particular helped him win Republican and independent votes. With his reelection in 1984, Bill began to enjoy a heightened profile on the national political stage. Republican President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, Terrell Bell, praised Bill’s education reforms and called the governor “a prime leader in education” (Clinton 2003). Meanwhile, national Democratic leaders saw Bill as someone who might be able to energize a party largely demoralized by incumbent President Carter’s loss in 1980. However, just months before his 1984 reelection, Bill would face a family crisis and ensuing personal introspection. As Hillary recalls in Living History, she had just finished lunch with some friends at a Little Rock restaurant when Bill’s chief of staff called and said the governor was on his way there. Once Bill arrived, the couple sat in the car while he told her that his little brother, Roger, was under police surveillance. The head of the state police had informed Bill that they had videotape of Roger selling drugs to a police informant. They had a choice: officers could arrest Roger now or continue the operation against him and use the evidence they collected to pressure him into revealing his supplier, who was their real target. As governor, Bill felt compelled to let the operation play out. In the end, Roger was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to a year in federal prison. While both he and his mother were very upset with Bill for his approval of the sting operation despite the consequences Roger would face, they came to peace as a family through counseling. As Roger later recalled to Newsweek, after the death of his father and Bill’s stepfather, Roger Sr., he “spun out.” His drug use became a serious issue in the two years before his arrest (“His Brother’s Keeper” 1992).



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Through counseling the family came to realize the unspoken damage done by Roger Sr.’s alcohol abuse and violence. As Bill’s brother recalled, “‘Our father would come in and be so drunk he would lose total control. . . . He’d take his belt off—that was the signal—hit my mother, jerk me around.’ Once in high school, Clinton was big enough to stand up to his stepfather, telling him one night, ‘If you want to hit them, you’ll have to go through me’” (“His Brother’s Keeper” 1992). But soon, Bill moved away to college, and Roger lost his protection. Interestingly, Bill is not alone as a president with an absent father or dysfunctional father-son relationship—just in the past century, he can count Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama as company. As Clinton biographer David Maraniss notes, children of alcoholics often take on the role of “family hero,” meaning that they assume early leadership responsibilities and become “a vessel of ambition and the repository of hope” for their family by excelling in the world (Maraniss, January 26, 1992). In 2012 Slate magazine researched recent politicians with absent or neglectful fathers and concluded that for children who grow up without a stable father figure, “there is the hunger for attention and the gaping psychological need to be loved . . . many of the people willing to keep going [in the fishbowl that is electoral politics] must be, in some sense, broken inside and driven to salve their emotional pain by courting the adulation” of others (Youngsmith 2012). Indeed, as Hillary notes in Living History, during the family’s time of self-evaluation after Roger’s drug conviction, “Bill realized that living with alcoholism and the denial and secrecy that it spawned had also created consequences and problems for him that would take years to sort out. This was one of many family crises we would face” (Clinton 2003). By 1987, Bill was contemplating a run for the presidency. He was only forty years old, but he had just won his fourth term as governor, this time for four years due to a change in Arkansas state constitution. He had also just become the chair of the National Governors Association. Betsey Wright, Bill’s chief of staff since 1982, took a leave of absence from her position so that she could coordinate an exploratory presidential campaign. In April Bill flew to New Hampshire and gave a speech to the state’s Democratic Party, a traditional way for potential candidates to test the waters in the early primary state. Hillary’s parents bought a condominium in Little Rock, perhaps to be available to babysit Chelsea while her parents campaigned; however, Hillary says it was because her father had recently suffered a stroke, and they moved so that she could help them during his recovery. According to biographer Bernstein, by spring 1987 Hillary herself started calling and even traveling to meet with politically advantageous contacts to gauge support for her husband’s candidacy. Bill reserved the ballroom of the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock for July 15. Friends and supporters began to make plans to be in attendance for Bill’s anticipated

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“A Strong-Willed Young Lady” In 1986, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first woman to serve on the board of Walmart, America’s largest company. Sam Walton, founder of the Arkansas-based retail giant, was under pressure from shareholders—and his wife—to end the “men’s club” era of the boardroom. Hillary was a logical choice. She was a partner at the respected Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, where her husband just happened to be the governor. During her six years on the Walmart board, Hillary championed the need for more women in management. At the annual meeting in 1987, Walton informed shareholders that they now had “a strong-willed young lady” on the board who was vocal about needed improvements in the recruitment and advancement of women. Hillary also pushed Walmart on the environmental front. She swayed Walton to create an environmental advisory group under her leadership. The group sent far-reaching plans to the board, many of which it adopted. In 1993, many of the initiatives could be seen in a prototype Kansas Walmart that featured energy-saving features such as skylights. Though some criticized the store as more expensive than average to build, a number of its innovative features became standard in future stores. One issue into which Hillary refused to wade was the conflict with labor unions. Since the company’s start in 1962, Walton and others in management had actively combated efforts to unionize Walmart workers. According to the New York Times, one board member who served with Hillary concluded that she was not vocal on the issue of labor because “she was smart enough to know” that if she had supported efforts to unionize, she would have been the only one—something that she already was in so many other ways (Barbaro 2007). Besides being the only woman in the boardroom during her tenure, Hillary was also the youngest, the most liberal, and had the least business experience among her colleagues.

announcement. In her memoirs, Hillary writes that Bill ultimately decided not to run in 1988 for one reason: Chelsea. “The 1986 governor’s campaign was the first one she had been old enough to follow. She could read and watch the news and be exposed to some of the mean-spiritedness that politics seems to generate.” Hillary also writes that she “thought it was the wrong time in our lives” and told Bill that she was not convinced he could win (Clinton 2003). She thought that Vice President George H. W. Bush, President Reagan’s chosen successor, would be hard to beat, plus she cited recent developments with her dad, Roger, and the difficulties Bill’s mother was facing in her nursing practice. Many observers think Bill’s decision not to run in 1988 was largely based on revelations made by the national press in May 1987 about Democratic presidential nominee, and Bill’s mentor in the McGovern campaign, Senator Gary Hart’s extramarital affair with a young woman named Donna Rice.



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Carl Bernstein, an award-winning reporter for the Washington Post for years before writing his biography of Hillary, points out that “the coverage by the mainstream press of Hart’s extramarital life was a departure from journalistic tradition, which had allowed presidents [like Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy] and leading politicians considerable running room in keeping their affairs private, out of the papers and off the air” (Clinton 2007). A shift was apparent in the belief that news about a politician’s sex life might inform voters about that individual’s character and judgment once elected to office. Hart had lied about his affair and, in the view of some, displayed selfishness in continuing the affair even while asking the American people to put their trust in him. Hart was forced to end his candidacy, and Bill was quite possibly forced to rethink his own intent to run in light of this emerging political reality. According to Wright, Clinton had affairs with numerous women while she was his chief of staff. Furthermore, Bernstein in A Woman in Charge cites Wright: “Hillary had long ago made some peace with his womanizing and the trade-offs. . . . She was aware as I was that those women were not people that he wanted any deep relationship with” (Bernstein 2007). If Bill did have any affairs in Arkansas, those closest to him—who recognized and believed in his political potential—assumed that such women simply filled some need he had to feel wanted and attractive to the outside world. Wright claims that she visited Bill at the governor’s mansion two days before his anticipated announcement and advised him not to run for president; she believed possible revelations of his own extramarital affairs would be devastating to his campaign, his marriage, and his daughter. On July 15, 1987, with Hillary by his side, Bill informed the crowd gathered in the Excelsior Hotel ballroom that he would not be a candidate for president in 1988: “I hope I will have another opportunity to seek the presidency when I can do it and be faithful to my family, my state, and my sense of what is right” (Bernstein 2007). The statement released by his office that afternoon stated that the most important reason for his decision was “the certain impact this campaign would have had on our daughter.” It mentioned the traveling and pressures that would likely envelope him as a candidate and Hillary as his spouse: “I made a promise to myself that if I was ever lucky enough to have a child, she would never grow up wondering who her father was” (Bernstein 2007). Although he won reelection as governor again in 1990 and gained national attention through his chairmanship of the country’s governors and the Democratic Leadership Council, the years between 1987 and 1991 were rough for Bill and, thereby, likely rough for Hillary. Wright has stated that she believes Bill entered a deep depression or even experienced a midlife crisis after his decision not to run for president in 1988. He delivered the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, which should have been a great opportunity for national recognition. Instead, the

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speech—dubbed by at least one reporter as turning the convention hall into “The Numb and the Restless”—turned into a national embarrassment due to its length and language as largely dictated by the staff of the party’s nominee, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts (Bernstein 2007). Many close to Bill, including Wright, observed that he seemed to lose interest in his job as governor after 1988. She recounts to Bernstein that Bill was having a flagrant affair at the time with a woman named Marilyn Jo Jenkins, with whom he thought he was in love. Bill debated whether or not to run for governor again in 1990, but he eventually did at the encouragement of many former governors he consulted across the country. Many of them had been termed out of office and saw Clinton’s chance to run again as one he should not pass up—Americans did not have much use for ex-politicians, they told him. After a fairly nasty campaign during which a fired state employee and likely surrogate for Bill’s Republican opponent sued the governor for allegedly having affairs with five women, Bill was reelected by the people of Arkansas. During a campaign debate, he promised voters that if elected, he would serve all four years of his term. Still, by early 1991, he was exploring what the blowback might be if he decided to break that promise. While on a family vacation in Canada during the summer of 1991, Hillary says she and Chelsea, then eleven years old, both gave Bill their blessings to run for president. She writes, “We figured: What did we have to lose? Even if Bill’s run failed, he would have the satisfaction of knowing he had tried, not just to win, but to make a difference for America. That seemed to be a risk worth taking” (Clinton 2003). According to Maraniss, the couple “spent several nights” going over the stories they might have to endure during a presidential run about his alleged sexual affairs. “Hillary later said she told her husband that if they stood together the stories would fall away” (Maraniss, July 15, 1992). And Bill acknowledged that by 1991, he and Hillary “were close enough that we could talk about that. . . . It would have been much more difficult if we didn’t have the kind of relationship that we had” (Maraniss, July 15, 1992). On October 3, 1991, Clinton stood in front of the Old State House in Little Rock, with Hillary and Chelsea by his side, and announced that he was running for president. In a July 1992 Washington Post article, Maraniss writes that among Clinton’s advisers, there was hope that marital infidelity simply would not come up in the presidential campaign; and by all accounts, any affair between Clinton and Jenkins had ended years before, and Clinton had dedicated himself to saving his marriage. Plus, for years, rumors had circulated around Washington about President Bush, the presumptive Republican candidate, possibly having an affair with a government employee, and no reporter had touched the story (Maraniss, July 15, 1992). In 1992, one of Hillary’s closest friends, television producer Linda Bloodsworth-Thomason, would describe Hillary and Bill’s relationship to Vanity Fair: “These two people are intertwined on



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every level, as a man and woman, as friends, as lovers, as parents, as politicians. . . . This is a love story” (Sheehy 1992). Bill’s campaign for president in 1992 would test their love story and shine a national spotlight on Hillary like never before. In Living History, she writes, “If the first forty-four years of my life were an education, the thirteen-month presidential campaign was a revelation . . . we were unprepared for the hardball politics and relentless scrutiny that comes with a run for the presidency” (Clinton 2003). While Bill assembled his campaign staff, Hillary broke with tradition and began to assemble her own staff of women to handle her schedule, advance work, and trip planning. Her longtime friend Brooke Shearer, who had a background in the Washington media, volunteered to travel with Hillary during the campaign. As Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was one of the Democratic contenders, the Clinton campaign decided to skip the Iowa Caucuses, the longstanding first round in any presidential election cycle, and instead go straight to New Hampshire, the home of the nation’s first primary election. There they quickly learned how “innocent comments or jests erupt into controversies within seconds of being reported on the news wires” (Clinton 2003). One evening, while introducing Hillary to a group of supporters, Clinton joked that because of his wife’s decades of legal and political work for children and families, he should have the campaign slogan: “Buy one, get one free.” The press nationwide soon repeated the comment and some pundits claimed it was evidence that Hillary wanted a “copresidency.” Though Hillary and Bill felt the comment was being repeated out of context, they realized that candidates and the national press corps have a symbiotic relationship: candidates need the press to get their message to the people, and the press needs access to candidates to do their job well. “Thus, candidates and reporters are at once adversarial and mutually dependent,” Hillary writes in Living History. “It’s a tricky, delicate and important relationship, and I didn’t fully understand it” (Clinton Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1992. (Library of Congress) 2003).

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Hillary recalls that she was campaigning in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 23, 1992, when she received an ominous phone call from Bill: he wanted her to know that the Star tabloid newspaper was about to run a story in which Gennifer Flowers, a cabaret singer from Arkansas, alleged that she had a twelve-year affair with him. Bill promised Hillary that the claim was not true. For her part, Hillary would have recognized Flowers’s name; she was one of the five women named in the lawsuit filed against Clinton during his 1990 run for governor, in which a disgraced public employee claimed knowledge of a slush fund used to pay off Clinton’s mistresses. When those allegations first aired, Hillary and Wright worked together to track down the women named in the case. With the assistance of Foster, Hubbell, and another attorney Wright knew, they then secured signed statements from all of the women, including Flowers, that the allegations of any sexual affairs were untrue. Still, Clinton’s campaign staff “went into a tailspin over the story,” according to Hillary (Clinton 2003). She says she asked campaign manager, David Wilhelm, to set up a conference call so that she could talk to everyone. While she attempted to bolster the staff and tell them to “get back to work,” Bernstein contends that Hillary also formed a special defense team to deal with the allegations. As his source, Bernstein points to the vast records collected by political scientist Diane Blair from members of the campaign staff (Bernstein 2007). At the time, Blair planned to write a book about the 1992 campaign, which she was sure Clinton would win, but she died after a struggle with cancer in 2000, and the book was never written—her binders filled with firsthand accounts of the campaign’s mechanizations now reside at the University of Arkansas and are accessible to the public. With the New Hampshire primary just weeks away and the national media now covering the Gennifer Flowers story, key members of Bill’s campaign staff, along with family friend Harry Thomason, recommended that Hillary and Bill agree to an interview on the news show 60 Minutes, which was to air right after the Super Bowl telecast. This would allow them to be seen by the largest television audience possible, as the Super Bowl broadcast attracted nearly eighty million viewers in 1992. Hillary remembers debating the exposure such an interview might cause their parents, brothers, and Chelsea, but “finally, I was persuaded that if we didn’t deal with the situation publicly, Bill’s campaign would be over before a single vote was cast” (Clinton 2003). The interview was set for January 26 in a suite at a Boston hotel. Their interviewer, Steve Kroft, asked them a series of questions about their marriage and then commented that most Americans would likely find it admirable that the two had stayed together, that they seemed to have reached “some sort of an understanding and an arrangement.” That is when Bill immediately cut Kroft off. “Wait a minute,” he said sternly. “You’re looking at two people who love each other.



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This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage. That’s a very different thing” (60 Minutes 1992). Despite Bill’s strong performance during the interview, it was Hillary’s performance that most people would remember. She came across as a devoted wife, an equal partner, and the main defender of her husband against allegations of extramarital conduct by other women. “She was her husband’s ultimate character reference,” according to her friend Shearer (Sheehy 1992). Many in the press praised Hillary after the interview, but some of the American public was not as impressed. Hillary faced fallout over her ref­ erence to singer Tammy Wynette and her famous song, “Stand by Your Man.” Hillary admits in her memoirs, “Of course I meant to refer to [the song], not her as a person. But I wasn’t careful in my choice of words, and my comment unleashed a torrent of angry reactions. I regretted the way I had come across” (Clinton 2003). After the interview, Hillary once again

After All, He’s Just a Man Shortly after Gennifer Flowers, an Arkansas lounge singer, publicly alleged she had an extramarital affair with presidential candidate Bill Clinton, Hillary agreed to an interview with her husband on 60 Minutes. Their interview aired immediately after the Super Bowl on January 26, 1992, and was watched by fifty million Americans. Seated beside Bill on a gold loveseat, in a green sweater set with simple earrings and a black headband, Hillary confidently stated that she believed his denial of any affair, she loved him, and she respected him. If that was not good enough for some people, then they could choose not to vote for him. Hillary’s presence and defense of her husband saved his candidacy. During the interview, Hillary referenced the song, “Stand by Your Man,” by Tammy Wynette. When it was released in 1968, Wynette’s ballad about remaining a steadfast partner to a less-than-perfect man topped the country charts for three weeks and crossed over to reach number nineteen on the U.S. pop charts. Hillary denied that she was “some little woman”—like Wynette— standing behind her man regardless of his behavior (60 Minutes 1992). To many viewers, it was clear that Hillary heard Wynette’s song as coming from a place of female weakness and resignation. This was not the first time Wynette had been labeled as antifeminist for her lyrics; she had experienced such backlash when the song first released in the midst of the emerging women’s lib movement. Yet according to Wynette’s publicist, Evelyn Shiver, in an interview on NPR (Bugg 2000), the singer never meant her song to suggest a woman should be a doormat. Rather, Wynette believed that if you love someone— man or woman—you support them because everyone makes mistakes. As her lyrics say toward the end of the song: “’cause after all, he’s just a man” (Bugg 2000).

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addressed Bill’s campaign staff via conference call. She was happy to share with them poll results that showed 80 percent of Americans thought Bill should stay in the race. Twenty-three days later, he was the number-two vote getter in the New Hampshire primary. Most insiders on Bill’s campaigns in Arkansas and on the national stage in 1992 seem to agree that Hillary was the more aggressive of the two whenever Bill faced any kind of negative attack. In A Woman in Charge, Bernstein states matter-of-factly that Hillary and Bill made some political enemies in Arkansas, and those enemies followed them into the national political arena. He cites Stan Greenberg, a political consultant who first worked for Bill in the 1990 general election for governor, talking about Hillary’s defensive role in protecting her husband from such enemies’ attacks: “She does believe that there are forces out there that aren’t right, that are determined to take him down, and I think she views herself as the strong, defiant force that deals with them” (Bernstein 2007). In early March 1992, just two weeks before the primaries in Illinois and Michigan, the New York Times published a front-page story about a failed land investment that Hillary and Bill had made back in 1978 with their friends Jim and Susan McDougal. The story also noted that the Rose Law Firm had done legal work for a savings and loan that McDougal owned while Bill was attorney general and then governor. Although McDougal bought the savings and loan company years after his land deal with the Clintons, the article raised the question of a conflict of interest between Hillary’s work and Bill’s government position. This time it would be Bill who would go on the defensive for his wife. Bill planned to participate in a televised debate for the Democratic candidates on March 15. Members of his campaign advised him that if any of the other debate participants brought up Hillary’s work, Bill should go after them immediately. Toward the end of the debate, California Governor Jerry Brown addressed the press coverage about McDougal and Hillary’s law firm, saying about Bill, “I think he’s got a big electability problem. . . He is funneling money to his wife’s law firm for state business.” Clinton’s face flushed as he wagged his finger at Brown standing next to him and said, “Let me tell you something, Jerry, I don’t care what you say about me . . . but you ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife.” He continued, “You’re not worth being on the same platform as my wife.” When Brown then asked Bill if the press was lying about the conflict of interest, Clinton stated unequivocally, “I’m saying I never funneled any money to my wife’s law firm. Never” (1992 Presidential Debate 1992). The next morning, Bill and Hillary were greeting diners in the Busy Bee Coffee Shop in Chicago with a group of reporters in tow. One of the reporters asked Bill whether there were not inherent conflicts of interest with his wife working for a law firm that did business with the state. “Ask her



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anything you want,” said Bill, as Hillary was standing right behind him drinking coffee from a disposable cup (Bernstein 2007). An NBC reporter then asked Hillary if there was anything she should have done differently to avoid even the appearance of any conflict of interest while her husband was in public office. Hillary answered, “You know, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life. And I’ve worked very, very hard to be as careful as possible, and that’s all I can tell you” (Bernstein 2007). As she admits in Living History, it was not her most eloquent moment. What she meant to say was that she could have limited herself to the usual hostess duties of an Arkansas first lady; but what she actually said spread like wildfire through the media as an insult to stay-at-home moms, especially those who left careers in order to stay home and raise their kids. What was missing from the news coverage was what Hillary had said next to reporters, which really gave her comments context: The work that I’ve done as a professional, as a public advocate, has been aimed in part to assure that women can make the choices that they should make—whether it’s a full-time career, full-time motherhood, some combination, depending on what stage of life they are at—and I think that is still difficult for people to understand right now, that it is a generational change. (Clinton 2003)

Hillary’s “stay home and bake cookies” comment seemed to blend together with her Tammy Wynette reference in the minds of conservative Republicans, who soon began referring to her as a “radical feminist” whose policy influence in her husband’s presidency would threaten the nuclear family. Of course, this was far from the truth: Hillary was a devoted mother and strong believer in marriage, and she had never embraced many of the more socially radical ideas that were popular among her college and law school peers. After Bill won the California, Ohio, and New Jersey primaries in early June, he became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. In the general election, he would face incumbent President George H. W. Bush as the Republican nominee and Ross Perot, a millionaire businessman from Texas, who was running as a viable independent candidate. At the Republican Party national convention in August, conservative Pat Buchanan, a former speechwriter in the Nixon White House, attacked Hillary directly during his prime-time televised speech. He ranted that her legal opinions were an affront to traditional parent-child relationships and to marriage—if Bill was elected, she would surely push him toward a radical feminist agenda. On September 14, Time ran a cover article about Hillary and the controversy that surrounded her. The magazine cover featured a close-up photo of Hillary, in which she is smiling at

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And the Winner Is . . . Chocolate Chip Oatmeal After Hillary’s now-famous campaign statement during her husband’s 1992 presidential bid about her choice not to stay home and bake cookies but rather pursue a career outside the home, the women’s magazine Family Circle saw a public relations opportunity. The publisher invited Hillary and Barbara Bush, wife of the Republican candidate, President George H. W. Bush, to take part in the first-ever first lady cookie bake-off. Both women agreed to submit their favorite cookie recipes, so that readers could then try them and vote for their favorite. Hillary’s chocolate chip oatmeal cookies beat out Bush’s chocolate chip cookies. Hillary’s chocolate chip oatmeal recipe would go on to win a total of three such bake-offs, although the last one in 2016 was renamed by Family Circle as the “Presidential Cookie Poll” because, for the first time, it featured a potential “first gentleman” competing for the Democrats. In 1996 when Bill Clinton ran for reelection as president, Hillary’s recipe won over the one for pecan cookies submitted by Elizabeth Dole, wife of the Republican nominee Bob Dole. Then in 2016, with Hillary as the Democratic nominee for president, Bill submitted the recipe for a third time under the moniker “The Clinton Family’s Chocolate Chip Cookies.” The recipe triumphed over one for star-shaped sugar cookies with a touch of sour cream submitted by Melania Trump, wife of Hillary’s Republican opponent, Donald Trump. The Clinton victory in the 2016 cookie bake-off did not translate into an election victory that year, which likely came as a surprise to many cookie bake-off followers. Since its inception in 1992, the cookie contest had correctly predicted the next occupant of the White House five out of six times.

the camera, her face softly framed by blond, shoulder-length hair and wispy bangs; she is wearing a forest-green top and matching blazer with simple gold jewelry peeking out. But the cover reads: “The Hillary Factor, Is She Helping or Hurting Her Husband?” Such a question must have stung. She had quit her job at the Rose Law Firm and resigned from all of the charities and boards on which she served, including Wal-Mart and the Children’s Defense Fund, to campaign for Bill. The irony of the controversies surrounding Hillary that summer—over her pursuit of a career, the fact that she made more than her husband, that she did not take his name when they married, and that she would speak up on behalf of herself or to defend her family—was that for the first time in her life, during the 1992 campaign, Hillary was simply “the wife of” Bill Clinton. She had forfeited any identity of her own in order to support her husband’s career. What could be more traditional for a woman to do? As Bill’s opponents continued to attack Hillary for supposedly controlling her husband or advocating for a new world order run by women, the



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Clintons’ closest advisors suggested that the campaign should work to “soften” Hillary’s image. If conservative Republicans were going to attack her, let them appear as bullies and their chosen victim as an undeserving target. Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason used their Hollywood connections to bring in three consultants to remake Hillary’s image: one for her makeup, one for hair, and one for wardrobe. Their goal, as quoted by Bernstein, was to give Hillary “a softer, natural, honey-blonde look” (Bernstein 2007). Her signature headbands were gone, and she increasingly took a visibly supportive role to her husband on joint campaign stops—at one stop she even held an umbrella over him while he addressed a crowd in the rain. When she appeared alone on behalf of the campaign, it was largely on college campuses, at public libraries, or in smaller media markets—places where likely supporters could more easily connect with her and see a warmer side of her than they did in the national press with the cookies and Wynette incidents. The Democratic Party held its national convention in July in New York City, where Bill was formally nominated for president. He selected Senator Al Gore of Tennessee as his vice-presidential running mate. Gore was similar to Clinton in many respects: they were both from the South, Ivy League educated (Gore graduated from Harvard), part of the Baby Boom generation, married with children, and members of the Baptist church. Unlike Clinton, Gore had a background in national politics: he had followed his

Hillary Clinton with President Bill Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore, Jr., and Mary “Tipper” Gore in 1992. (Library of Congress)

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father into the U.S. Senate and was well respected by his colleagues there, as well as within the Democratic Party. The morning after the convention concluded, Hillary and Bill, joined by Al and his wife, Tipper, undertook a weeklong bus tour through five states considered battlegrounds in the upcoming general election. In What Happened, Hillary recalls the bus tour as “one of my favorite weeks of the entire ’92 campaign. We met hardworking people, saw gorgeous country, and everywhere we went felt the energy of a country ready for change” (Clinton 2017). Hillary and Bill continued to travel the country well into the fall. They spent the last day of the campaign on a whirlwind series of stops in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado and then flew back to Little Rock on November 3 to cast their own votes with Chelsea in tow. That evening family and friends gathered at the governor’s mansion to await election returns. Just before 11:00 p.m., the television networks declared Bill the winner. In Living History, Hillary writes, “Though I had expected a victory, I was overwhelmed” (Clinton 2003). Soon, she and Bill headed out to the Old State House—where the campaign had begun months before—to meet the Gores in front of a large crowd of friends, family, and supporters. Hillary and her family would soon be moving again, only this time it would be to the most recognizable home in the United States: the White House.

6 First Lady of the United States, Part One

After seventeen years of marriage, we were each other’s biggest cheerleaders, toughest critics and best friends. . . . We had worked together for so long, and Bill knew he could trust me. We always understood I would contribute to my husband’s administration. —Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History, 2003 Hillary was involved in every stage of preparations for her husband’s administration. As they anticipated their move to Washington and his inauguration in January 1993, Hillary helped vet candidates for Bill’s cabinet in their Little Rock kitchen. Bill selected Christopher Warren and Vernon Jordan as chairmen of his transition into the White House, yet Hillary did not relinquish her role as her husband’s sounding board and most trusted advisor. She helped him select his White House staff and to strategize policy initiatives. Most noticeably, just as she had broken with tradition during the 1992 campaign when she assembled her own campaign staff, Hillary planned to break with tradition once in the White House by occupying an office in the West Wing. While America’s first ladies shared a long tradition of volunteer service and hostess duties, their work had always emanated from dedicated offices in the East Wing; the rarified 79

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space of the West Wing was reserved for those among the highest ranks of the president’s staff. But as Bill’s press secretary Dee Dee Myers explained during the transition, Hillary would have an office in the West Wing because “the president wanted her to be there to work. She’ll be working on a variety of domestic issues. She’ll be there with other domestic policy advisers.” Indeed, when the New York Times reported on the Clintons’ first full day in the White House—January 22, 1993—the article stated, “Mrs. Clinton was right behind her husband when he made his first appearance in the Oval Office today, between sessions of greeting the public together” (Pear 1993). Almost immediately, both the president’s chief of staff and his communications director began hinting as to Hillary’s role in the administration: she would be involved in the drafting of a proposal to overhaul the nation’s health-care system. George Stephanopoulos, head of White House communications, told the New York Times: “I think she’ll be closely involved in developing health-care policy with the President, and she’ll be part of those discussions. We don’t have any final decisions on structures right now, but I’m certain that she’ll be involved” (Pear 1993). Also during President Clinton’s first week on the job, his chief of staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty told the Today show, “Hillary Clinton has been a strong advocate over the years, as first lady in Arkansas, on a number of domestic issues.

Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton stand beside Bill Clinton while he takes his oath of office as president of the United States in 1993. (Library of Congress)



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She’ll be involved, I think, in a very constructive way, and I’m certainly looking forward to working with her” (Pear 1993). As Hillary recounts in Living History, even before his inauguration, Bill asked her “to oversee his health-care initiative” (Clinton 2003). During the campaign, Bill had promised to address the inequities of the country’s health-care system as too many Americans did not have health insurance, including tens of millions of people with full-time jobs. Bill had talked about federal mandates to force all employers to offer health insurance, tax credits to help small businesses cover their costs, and increased use of health maintenance organizations (HMOs) to help control health-care expenditures. Hillary

A New Year’s Eve House Party Unlike Any Other In December 1981, Philip and Linda Lader invited sixty guests and their families to a four-day New Year’s “house party” on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. They named the gathering “Renaissance Weekend,” and their first guest list included high-profile members of the press, members of Congress and the White House staff, professional athletes, investment bankers, entrepreneurs, university chancellors, Ivy League professors, attorneys, doctors, and prominent nonprofit leaders (Renaissance Weekend 2020). The event was a success—the Laders, later joined by their two daughters, have hosted similar New Year’s gatherings ever since. Their official website describes a Renaissance Weekend as an intellectual family reunion, a chance for leaders in diverse fields to come together in conversation and learn from each other (Renaissance Weekend 2020). Many Americans first heard of the Laders and their Renaissance Weekend in 1993 when president-elect Bill Clinton and his family prepared to attend the tenth New Year’s gathering. As the New York Times explained in its coverage of the Clintons’ weekend, perhaps the greatest value for attendees was not the organizers’ promise of “personal and national renewal” but rather access to the network of people assembled at the event (Jehl 1993). Invitations have always been selective, with weekend veterans nominating prospective attendees for evaluation by the organizers. The Renaissance Weekend has always been promoted as free of political ideology (Renaissance Weekend 2020). Still, the Clintons’ attendance while occupants of the White House apparently led to political connections. Clinton recruited Philip Lader to serve in his administration as deputy White House chief of staff, assistant to the president, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, and then in his Cabinet as head of the Small Business Administration. Meanwhile, Clinton also recruited fellow attendee David Gergen, who in 1981 was White House director of communications for President Ronald Reagan, to join his White House staff in 1993 as special counsel to the president.

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explains that in the month after his election, Bill decided to centralize his policy making for health care by asking Ira Magaziner “to coordinate the process inside” the administration that would develop the legislation and asking her to “head up the initiative to make it law” (Clinton 2003). Based on her previous work as the head of Bill’s task forces on rural health-care and public education reforms while she was First Lady of Arkansas, neither Hillary nor Bill thought that her working on a national health-care initiative would be controversial. The people of Arkansas had readily accepted her involvement in policy making on topics with which she was personally familiar. As Hillary notes in Living History, “When it came to political spouses, we certainly didn’t expect the nation’s capital to be more conservative than Arkansas” (Clinton 2003). From their own experience during the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary and Bill should have expected some criticism about her very visible role in crafting new national health-care policy. Early in the 1992 campaign, when Clinton had joked “vote for one, get one for free,” Hillary had suffered backlash that she was power-hungry; campaign advisers had scrambled to stifle such criticism by attempting to soften Hillary’s image and portray her as a supportive spouse, a traditional wife and mother (Pear 1993). Now she was about to become the first First Lady to occupy a West Wing office and head an interagency government task force to advise the president on potentially sweeping policy reforms. In his biography of Hillary, Bernstein reports the internal battle within the administration over these major changes. Vernon Jordan argued that the Washington press corps, Republicans and Clinton critics would pounce on such evidence of a “co-presidency.” Meanwhile, Susan Thomases and Hillary’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, vehemently argued that such moves would be both symbolically important and highlight the administration’s priorities. Bill listened to both sides, and as Bernstein notes, “to the surprise of no one who knew Bill and Hillary well,” the president decided in favor of his wife (Bernstein 2007). Hillary’s White House staff included twenty people; and while the visitors’ office, social secretary, and personal correspondence functions of her staff remained housed in the East Wing, the rest moved into new offices in the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building just across the driveway. Her staff would soon begin to refer to themselves—and the nontraditional space they occupied—as “Hillaryland” (Clinton 2003). The internal controversy over whether Hillary should maintain office space in both the more “social” East Wing and the policy-dominated West Wing befits the duality of her role in the White House and public perceptions of her as first lady. In the lead-up to the Clintons’ first formal White House dinner on January 30 for the nation’s governors, Hillary granted an exclusive interview to a reporter from the New York Times



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who routinely covered such events, Marian Burros. Burros inquired about the menu and other plans for the dinner. Hillary recalls in Living History that she saw the interview as a chance to talk about her intention to “make the White House a showcase for American food and culture” (Burros 1993). She had hired a chef experienced in American cuisine and planned to serve more food and wine purchased from domestic sources. After Burros’s story ran a few days later on the front page of the New York Times next to a photograph of Hillary in a black evening gown from the dinner, Hillary admits that she was caught off guard by the critical reactions from both her supporters and Clinton naysayers: “If I was serious about substantive policy issues . . . why was I talking to a reporter about food and entertainment? Conversely, if I was really worrying about floral centerpieces and the color of table linens, how could I be substantive enough to head a major policy effort?” (Clinton 2003). Like so many professional women in the late twentieth century, Hillary would deal with this personal juggling of roles and public pressure to pick one identity for herself, whether traditionalist or feminist. Much like Hillary, many of her female peers were career women, bosses, employees, volunteers, hobbyists, wives, sisters, confidantes, mothers, household accountants, short-order cooks, part-time tutors, and unofficial child therapists all in one. And in Living History, she admits that like many of her peers, she lived with “nagging voices” questioning the choices she made every day between often simultaneous demands on her time, and that those choices were often trailed by guilt and second-guessing. While she and Bill worried about problems they would face once they occupied the White House, she states, “I never expected that the way I defined my role as First Lady would generate so much controversy and confusion.” Very quickly she realized that she was now a symbol, “and that was a new experience.” And she admits that she contributed to some of the perceptions about her: “It took me awhile to figure out that what might not be important to me might seem very important to many men and women across America”—a trait many Washington insiders would label as being “tone deaf.” Hillary deftly notes that during the 1990s, some people still were not ready to accept women in positions of power and political leadership. “In this era of changing gender roles,” she writes in her memoirs, “I was America’s Exhibit A” (Clinton 2003). Indeed, she would remain a lightning rod for discordant public perceptions of women’s intellectual and interpersonal fitness for leadership as well as the likability and trustworthiness of women who seek power for decades to come. Carl Bernstein, in A Woman in Charge, notes that “no incoming first lady since Jackie Kennedy had received the kind of frenzied attention Hillary [got] from the press and public” (Bernstein 2007).

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Hillary’s new role as a litmus test for public views about women in power would run counter to her hopes for some semblance of a private life once in the White House. Many of Hillary’s friends and former staffers have noted that although not a shy person, Hillary has always been a private person. Outside of her marriage, she rarely confides in others about her ambitions, fears, self-assessments—or issues within her family. During Bill’s presidency, Hillary’s tendency for privacy struck many observers as an attempt to avoid transparency, raising the question: Hillary Clinton dances with President Bill Clinton What did she have to hide? at the inaugural ball in 1993. (Library of Congress) “All politicians present an idealized version of themselves and their families, of course,” writes Matt Bai of Yahoo News. “All modern candidates are in some part performance artists. But with the Clintons, the artifice isn’t incidental; it was born of necessity, and it’s integral to their political identities” (Bai 2015). Bai explains that because of the way the media began to cover politicians as celebrities toward the end of the twentieth century, “the Clintons had to stage their marriage in a way that no previous president and first lady, most of whom had less than perfect unions themselves, had ever been forced to do” (Bai 2015). The transformative time in national politics during which the Clintons rose to power—marked by the shift from post–World War II political ideology and social traditionalism to the activism and questioning of the status quo ushered in by baby boomers and their more liberal views of social roles and norms—also dictated that the Clintons carefully craft their public personae. As Bai contends, “We think they’re always hiding something essential about themselves, because they always have. The truth is that an America cleaved by generational and ideological change would never have accepted them any other way” (Bai 2015). Hillary admits in Living History that the newfound public scrutiny awaiting her as first lady “was overwhelming”



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(Clinton 2003). As Bernstein points out, the Clintons came into the White House having already acquired some formidable political enemies, with many Americans disinclined to share the couple’s professed values and views on the proper scope of the government—57 percent of American voters had cast ballots for either Bush or Perot. Still, most of the country was fascinated by Hillary. One of Hillary’s heroes, and perhaps an unspoken role model, was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. “Like Eleanor . . . who had also been marked by the vitriol of her enemies, [Hillary] was determined to use every bit of her unprecedented dominion for the public good,” writes Bernstein. “Eleanor had been a woman ahead of her time, a time that harshly circumscribed her potential and her ability to act. Hillary was determined to locate and assert the remote reaches of her own potential . . . soon enough she would become an icon to millions and a hated target for millions of others because of it” (Bernstein 2007). On January 25, with Hillary seated next to him, Bill announced his creation of the President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform and named his wife as chairperson. Gathered in the Roosevelt Room at the White House for what the official schedule called “a task force meeting,” members of Bill’s cabinet, key staffers, and journalists were surprised by the president’s announcement (Clinton 2003). Not only did Bill reveal the formation of the task force and Hillary’s appointment, but he also told his audience that a health-care plan would be ready to present to Congress in just one hundred days. The plan would build on the ideas that he had suggested throughout the campaign with the goal “to provide health care for all.” As Hillary notes in Living History, as soon as Clinton announced his approach to health-care reform that day, “heat came from all directions” (Clinton 2003). White House staffers were surprised by Hillary’s appointment, and not all agreed with Bill’s decision. Even some who thought her appointment was a great idea did not like being surprised with groundbreaking news. Hillary reflects, “Maybe we should have told more staff members, but sensitive internal information was already flowing out of the White House, and Bill wanted to break the story himself and answer the first questions raised” (Clinton 2003). Even before Bill’s announcement, he, Hillary and Magaziner had discussed the fact that one hundred days might be too tight of a timeline. Magaziner had shared with the others that he was getting input they would need no less than four or five years to piece together a health-care reform package that could actually pass Congress. As Hillary remembers, “The biggest problem seemed to be the deadline that Bill announced” (Clinton 2003). Still, in her memoirs, she notes that Bill won the presidency with 43 percent of the popular vote—less than a majority—and therefore their thinking was that “he couldn’t afford to lose whatever political momentum he had” at the beginning of his administration (Clinton 2003).

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Bill’s marker of one hundred days was likely inspired by the historic start to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term as president in the depths of the Great Depression. During his first one hundred days in office, FDR sent sixteen major pieces of legislation through Congress to grant the federal government vast new powers in regulating the economy, creating jobs, and providing direct aid to struggling Americans. As historian Anthony Badger writes in his seminal study, FDR: The First Hundred Days, “The first hundred days of the New Deal have served as a model for future presidents of bold leadership and executive-legislative harmony” (Badger 2008). As only the second Democrat to occupy the White House since the 1960s, Clinton surely intended his first three months to signal his priorities and his party’s effectiveness to the American people. Bill was a student of history, and as Badger notes, “Roosevelt left his successors a model of a dynamic, activist presidency that could not be ignored”; furthermore, FDR’s success at rapidly implementing his New Deal plans changed the very way U.S. history is viewed—forever after “through the lens of presidential administrations” (Badger 2008). Indeed, as Badger points out, “All subsequent presidents, especially liberal Democrats, have labored in the shadow of FDR” (Badger 2008). Hillary claims that soon after Clinton announced the health-care task force, Democrats in Congress, particularly Speaker of the House Richard “Dick” Gephardt of Missouri, also began urging her and Magaziner to act quickly. Numerous congressional Democrats already had at least outlines for their own health-care reform plans, and many hoped that their ideas might become a part of the framework for the president’s proposal. Hillary and Bill knew that they wanted to construct a “quasi-private system” that they called “managed competition” (Clinton 2003). Unlike the single-payer system used in Canada and many European countries that relied on tax payments to fund a government-run, public health-care system, the task force wanted to build on the existing private, employer-based system already covering millions of Americans. And though some members of Congress supported an expansion of Medicare to eventually cover all Americans not insured through an employer plan, Bill and his task force wanted to keep the government’s role much smaller. Private insurance companies would remain the primary providers and even expand coverage to more Americans. The government would be involved only as much as necessary to help organize cooperatives through which individuals could buy private coverage and to set standards for the benefits packages offered by the various private players. The task force had a model for such purchasing co-ops in the organization that already covered some nine million government employees and allowed them to choose among an array of insurance options. Two points were of particular importance to Hillary and Bill from the start: first, individual patients must have the ability to select their own



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doctors within whatever plan covered them; second, managed competition was necessary to end the practice of hospitals and doctors finding themselves on the hook for caring for patients who were uninsured. Hillary and Magaziner began a series of one-on-one meetings with the Democratic congressional leadership to determine the best way to secure eventual passage of their proposals by the House and Senate. Hillary believed the consensus to be that even though the Democrats held majorities in both chambers, health care was such a historically debated topic that it would be difficult to garner enough votes to guarantee straightforward passage of any reform bill; Republican senators would surely filibuster any such attempt, and with only a two-seat majority in the Senate, Democratic leaders doubted their ability to muster the sixty votes required to override a filibuster. Instead, Hillary agreed with Gephardt, and together they worked to convince Bill that the best course of action would be to attach their health-care reform proposal to the annual budget bill usually passed in the late spring or early summer, known as the Budget Reconciliation Act. “Reconciliation makes passing major legislation much, much easier than is normally the case. The biggest benefit is that the Senate can’t filibuster reconciliation bills, as debate is limited to twenty hours no matter what” (Matthews 2016). Hillary notes in Living History that she soon came to understand what an uphill climb getting any comprehensive health-care reform through Congress was going to be, and she knew that health care was not the president’s only priority. Bill had taken office in the midst of an economic downturn and been blindsided by the depth of the national deficit he was to inherit from the Reagan and Bush administrations; therefore, some form of economic stimulus for the country was an immediate political necessity. While the road ahead for health-care reform looked difficult to maneuver, it was also clear that there was not enough room for it and an economic stimulus package to pass simultaneously. Indeed, the 1993 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which passed both chambers of Congress on strictly partisan votes and was then signed into law by Bill in August, became known as Clinton’s Deficit Reduction Act. Though the administration was able to use the reconciliation process to pass legislation on one of the president’s priorities, it was not health care. For Hillary and her task force, instead of completing work on their health-care proposal within one hundred days as planned, their work would continue into the fall and then into the following year as she hit one snag after another. First, by all accounts, the task force that Hillary and Magaziner organized was massive and unwieldy. They wanted to be inclusive of key stakeholders in all aspects of health care; the result was a working group of more than five hundred consultants reporting to Magaziner. He divided the working group members—doctors, nurses, economists, hospital administrators, members

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of Congress, and representatives of numerous federal agencies and healthcare organizations—into thirty-four smaller teams tasked to develop recommendations on specific aspects of health-care reform. The teams were scheduled to present their conclusions in a series of meetings for the greater working group. Under their original one hundred days timeline, many team members worked very long days with maybe one day off each week. Their temporary offices were housed in the Executive Office Building, in cramped spaces, often without enough desks or chairs for everyone. When it was time for the teams to report their conclusions, as many task force members as could fit would crowd into the Indian Treaty Room, with some overflowing into the hallway outside. Hillary attended as many of these meetings as she could, where she spent hundreds of hours listening and taking notes. Though a vast amount of information was discussed in these meetings, which often lasted until late at night, very few conclusions were actually reached. And all of this work was conducted in private. The Clinton White House would not share with the press or other interested parties who constituted the working group or the scope of their work. Although a number of political pundits point out that such secrecy was not surprising or out of the ordinary for presidential policy making, the guise of secrecy played into the hands of Bill’s Republican opponents and those in the health-care industry who stood to lose money in a reformed system. Cries of foul play arose from the opposition already circling Hillary’s yet unwritten reforms. Hillary, Magaziner, and Bill should have anticipated such attacks; they knew that health-care reform was one of the most politically charged policy issues of their time, and they all knew the history of health care in U.S. politics, which dates back to the early twentieth century. Numerous presidents before Bill broached health care as a necessary policy issue, but none was able to pass a meaningful, comprehensive plan. On February 24, 1993, Hillary and her health-care efforts hit their second big snag when three groups within the health-care industry sued the task force to compel public meetings and the release of names of the more than five hundred consultants involved in the process. Just weeks before, Republican William Clinger Jr. on the House Government Operations Committee had charged that the process Hillary and Magaziner were using was illegal. He cited the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which was passed in 1972 to ensure that advice received by government advisory committees was objective and publicly accessible, and he asked the General Accounting Office to verify whether Hillary, as a nongovernment employee, was allowed to conduct task force meetings in private. The lawsuit filed by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and two other groups newly formed to oppose any Clinton healthcare reforms, was based on this same question. Similar to how the American Medical Association had worked to kill President Harry



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Truman’s health-care reform efforts in the 1940s, the medical establishment now was taking on Hillary. As she admits in Living History, “It was a deft political move, designed to disrupt our work on health care and to foster an impression in the public and the news media that we were conducting ‘secret’ meetings” (Clinton 2003). The press, which of course wanted access to the task force meetings, covered the unfolding story of the lawsuit for the next several weeks. Meanwhile, Hillary tasked three administration lawyers with whom she had deep ties to fight on behalf of the task force in court: Vince Foster, who was deputy White House counsel; Foster’s boss, White House Counsel Bernie Nussbaum; and Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell. “Within several days, more than one hundred Justice Department lawyers were working under their supervision” to research every element and precedent for the case, explains Bernstein. “Then 150 were working. Hillary was constantly on the phone asking questions, following up” (Bernstein 2007). Unfortunately for Hillary, the work of all those government lawyers did not turn the case in her favor. On March 10, a U.S. district judge ruled that Hillary was not a government employee but rather an “outsider” working on behalf of her husband’s administration, and therefore the task force must open their fact-gathering meetings to the public. The working group teams could continue to meet in private, as could the task force if drafting policy or advising the president; but Hillary and Magaziner would have to make public their list of consultants. The very next day brought more bad news for Hillary and her task force: the senior Democrat in the Senate and the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, called Bill to let him know that no “extraneous” material would be allowed in the budget reconciliation process that year (Bernstein 2007). Hillary’s health-care proposal, even if it could be completed in time, would not be permitted as an addition to the budget. Byrd told Bill that health care was too complicated and too divisive of an issue to not be properly debated through the normal legislative channels. In Living History, Hillary admits that her frustration and narrow focus on delivering policy in the time frame announced to the American people temporarily blinded her to the political realities before her. “In retrospect and based on my service in the Senate, I agree with [Byrd’s] assessment,” she writes. “Hastily, we held meetings with members of the House and Senate to nail down elements of the plan we would deliver to Congress. We didn’t see that Byrd’s opinion on reconciliation was a giant red flag” (Clinton 2003). She admits that she was trying to do too much too fast; an overhaul of the healthcare system “would fundamentally alter American social and economic policy for years to come. And we were already losing the race” (Clinton 2003). The Clinton administration got off to a very rocky start by any measure. As the first Democratic president since 1968—with the exception of the

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brief post-Watergate interlude of President Carter—Bill brought with him into the White House a staff largely comprising young, idealistic, smart, hardworking members who had little if any experience with the Byzantine inner workings of the capitol: Congress, federal agencies, business interests, and the Washington press corps. Bernstein, a former member of the Washington press corps, describes the Clintons’ new surroundings as “the difficult terrain and culture of political and social Washington” (Bernstein 2007). Without enough seasoned veterans sprinkled among the White House staff, the administration, and Hillary in particular, made some unfortunate missteps in the beginning. The Clintons’ relationship with the press would take a long-lasting hit from her seeming naivety. Once the new administration moved into the West Wing, the two hundred plus reporters who covered the White House daily were surprised to find the corridor that usually gave them unfettered access to the office of the communications director was closed off to them. George Stephanopoulos, the White House communications director who thought the move was a bad idea, was left to explain it to the press and to the president himself when Bill inquired about the closure later that day. What Stephanopoulos told Bill, but avoided telling the press, was that Hillary had ordered the corridor closed. Bernstein cites Bill as many years later describing the plan as “a terrible mistake” without ever mentioning that it came from Hillary (Bernstein 2007). Indeed, neither Hillary nor Bill mention the fiasco in their memoirs, but at the time it was widely seen as an affront by the White House press corps, who believed they were entitled to access within the West Wing. Indeed, some reporters had been working in the White House for decades, and such a bold attempt to limit their access, to limit their ability to do their job, proved to alienate them even during the so-called “honeymoon period” between the press and a new administration. Numerous sources agree that after reporters latched onto stories about Gennifer Flowers and Bill’s evasion of the draft during the 1992 campaign, both Hillary and Bill began to treat the national media differently. Although they recognized the national media as an unavoidable associate in the business of U.S. politics, they now believed it was not to be trusted but rather kept at a distance as much as possible. But when the Clintons “tried to chain up the White House press corps, the correspondents rebelled” (Weisberd 1993).They filed pointed, even negative stories that largely contributed to the president’s low approval ratings in the summer and forced him to kick George Stephanopoulos upstairs and bring in spinmaster [and Republican White House veteran] David Gergen. In 1993, one journalist described the White House press corps as the “White House Beast”: Welcome to the largest gap between perception and reality in journalism, the White House beat. In theory, it’s the palmy height of professional



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achievement for a reporter, the vital conduit through which the president communicates with the public and the public holds the executive branch accountable. In practice, it’s a collection of spoiled and talented individuals pacing a cramped, ill-lit corridor, waiting for a hapless government official to vent their frustrations upon. (Weisberd 1993)

On March 19, Clinton’s economic stimulus plan passed the House—a small but much-needed victory for the president and at least a consolation prize for Hillary, who hoped that once the economic stimulus plan was approved by Congress, the administration’s focus could return to health care—but even this good news would be overshadowed by another setback for Hillary, and this one hit very close to home. Hugh Rodham, Hillary’s father, suffered a massive stroke at home in Little Rock. As a distraught Hillary hurried to pack and fly to Arkansas, Rodham lay unconscious in the intensive care unit at St. Vincent’s Hospital. “I can’t remember landing in Little Rock that night or driving to the hospital,” she writes in Living History. “My mother met me outside the intensive care unit, looking drawn and worried but thankful to see us” (Clinton 2003). Hillary was accompanied to Little Rock by her brother, Tony, and Chelsea, as well as two White House staffers who were close to the first lady. They soon heard from her father’s physician that Rodham had slipped into a deep, irreversible coma. Hillary’s brother, Hugh, joined the family at the hospital later that night after flying in from Miami, Florida. On Sunday, March 21, Bill arrived for a short visit, and soon his mother and her husband also arrived; the Clintons’ friend Harry Thomason had tracked down Virginia and Dick Kelley, whom the Clintons assumed were out of town on vacation, and arranged their flight back to Arkansas. Thomason pulled Hillary and Bill aside to share with them that although Virginia Kelley had sworn him to secrecy, he thought they should know that the Kelleys had been in Denver to explore new treatments for Virginia’s breast cancer, which had spread in spite of surgery two years earlier. Hillary notes in Living History that her duties as first lady and chair of the health-care task force felt a world away while she passed the hours with family and friends who came to visit at the hospital. “I just couldn’t leave my parents,” she reflects. “Normally I am able to handle a great many things at once, but I couldn’t pretend that this was a normal time” (Clinton 2003). Once Bill returned from Washington the following weekend, the family met with doctors to consider their options. Knowing Rodham’s wishes as expressed after his heart surgery in 1983, all of the family agreed to remove him from the respirator that was breathing for him. Although the doctor advised them that Rodham would likely pass away within twenty-four hours, he surprised everyone by continuing to breathe on his own, his heart beating, for more than a week; still, he never regained consciousness. Bill and Chelsea had to return to Washington for work and school, and

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after much consternation, Hillary agreed to keep a prior commitment to speak at the University of Texas in Austin as part of the Liz Carpenter lecture series on April 6. They all returned to Little Rock on April 8 for Rodham’s memorial service. The family then flew Rodham’s body back to his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where years earlier he had selected and paid for his gravesite. Once the Clintons returned to the White House and Hillary stepped back into her duties as first lady and head of the Task Force for National Health Care Reform, the hundredth day of Clinton’s presidency soon came and went without a health-care proposal ready for Congress. Throughout the remainder of spring and summer of 1993, Hillary would find herself on the defensive about a plan that had yet to formally drafted: the president’s economic advisers were concerned about the impact any new federal commitments to health-care expenditures for the uninsured would have on the stimulus plan they had created, and some members of Congress were upset that they had not been consulted about health-care reforms earlier in the process. While she and Magaziner worked through a labyrinth of suggestions and possibilities to start to lay down specifics in a reform package, Hillary was still processing her father’s death, enduring seemingly endless leaks about the health-care task force in the Washington press, and managing her duties as first lady—including the traditional Easter Egg Roll at the White House, official dinners, and speaking engagements. Also, as Bernstein aptly points out about the Clintons’ first few months in the White House, “to an even greater extent [than her husband] perhaps, Hillary was finding herself a prisoner of the presidency. For the first time since she and Bill were married, she had no independent life, no identity to pursue separate from his, no outside job, no agenda of her own, no escape” (Bernstein 2007). As one of the most tested public citizens in American history, this transition had to be difficult for Hillary. “Since January her every move and word had been scrutinized. She had no privacy. She had to whisper in the corridors of the White House lest she be overheard by servants or security people” (Bernstein 2007). She no longer could easily take Chelsea on Saturday outings or talk shop over a weekday Italian lunch with Hubbell and Foster. As Hillary notes in her memoirs, “I was still learning the ropes and still discovering what it meant to be America’s First Lady. The difference between being a governor’s wife and a president’s is immeasurable” (Clinton 2003). The feeling of living under a microscope must have become even more intense for Hillary when the first in a series of so-called scandals that would roil the Clinton White House emerged in May 1993. The White House Travel Office (WHTO) was staffed by seven employees tasked with coordinating flights and booking hotels for members of the press who accompanied the president, vice president, first lady, and other top administration officials when they traveled. During the spring of 1993, Harry



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Thomason talked to the Clintons about how poorly run the WHTO seemed to be. As part of his pledge to the American people to reduce the national deficit, Bill had said that he would help cut government spending by reducing the White House staff. If there was proof that the WHTO was wasting money, replacing its staff with a smaller, more efficient operation could mean positive press coverage for the president. After an informal, internal inquiry revealed potentially careless accounting by WHTO staffers, the FBI was asked to open a formal investigation to look for any criminality. On May 19, seven workers in the travel office were fired due to lapses in ethics and financial record-keeping improprieties. The first problem for Bill and Hillary was that many members of the White House press corps considered the fired staffers to be their friends or at least helpers, and thus took offense at the charges publicly leveled against them. Critics soon took to the airwaves accusing the Clintons of getting rid of the seasoned government workers to make room for Arkansas cronies—including Bill’s distant, twenty-something cousin, Catherine Cornelius, who had joined the WHTO staff in January and been advocating for promotion to director of the office. So, although the Clintons had thought the firings would garner them positive press coverage, instead they now looked like seedy politicos using power to help their relatives—even though it is perfectly legal for a president to fire at-will employees within the White House and replace them with whomever he or she chooses. The second problem for the Clintons was that Foster’s deputy in the White House counsel office had directly called FBI agents he knew to open the investigation into the WHTO. He apparently was unaware that ever since Watergate, White House officials were required to inform the head of the Justice Department before they contacted the FBI. “Travelgate,” as all of this became known, soon engulfed the Clinton White House. In the end, as NPR summarizes in a June 2016 article: the Justice Department, at least one congressional panel, and two special prosecutors all investigated the reason for the firings. “Independent Counsel Ken Starr found no blame rested with Bill Clinton. Another independent counsel scrutinized Hillary Clinton’s involvement and statements about the firings but seven years after the event, he found no basis to bring any charges against her” (Bernstein 2007). It must have been impossible for Hillary to realize in 1993 that questions of what she did and said related to the travel office firings would reappear in the news for more than twenty years; her critics and right-wing conspiracy theorists would not let them go. One more immediate result of the negative press surrounding “Travelgate” would be a personal tragedy for Hillary. On July 20, 1993, her dear friend Vince Foster, suffering from a deep depression that many of those closest to him had only begun to recognize, killed himself. Foster had left his White House office at lunchtime; that evening the U.S. Park Police

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found his body in a Virginia park, northwest of the capitol. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, his father’s Colt revolver was still in his hand. Chief of staff McLarty called Hillary that night with the news; she and Chelsea were in Little Rock visiting her mother. “I remember crying and questioning Mack. I just couldn’t believe it,” Hillary writes. “I stayed up all night crying and talking to friends. I wondered ceaselessly whether this tragedy could have been prevented” (Clinton 2003). In the weeks and months to follow, more about Foster’s slide into depression would become evident. Foster had not been particularly excited about the move to Washington, but he and Hubbell had agreed that if Bill asked them to serve, they would go. For much of his time in the capitol, Foster’s wife and kids stayed behind in Little Rock—they had only recently moved into a townhouse in the Georgetown area of Washington. In his role as deputy White House counsel, Foster came to the capitol to personally serve his friends, the Clintons, and by July he felt that he had let them down. Foster had been asked to guide the vetting and selection of several of Bill’s early nominees for Justice Department leadership positions, three of whom had turned into negative news stories for the president. Colleagues noted that Foster seemed particularly unnerved by a series of Wall Street Journal editorials that skewered him for the botched WHTO firings and the embarrassment that “Travelgate” brought on Hillary and Bill. Though Hillary recalls telling Foster that nobody in Washington paid any attention to the WSJ editors, Foster commented separately to a friend that all of his former partners at the Rose Law Firm read the WSJ cover to cover. In the days just before his death, Foster was having trouble eating and sleeping. He had lost weight and looked exhausted. On July 16, he called his sister and told her that he was depressed but afraid that if he met with a psychiatrist he might lose his security clearance. His sister recommended a few local psychiatrists and urged him to make an appointment. He did call one doctor, but he got an answering machine. His doctor back in Little Rock sent him a prescription for antidepressants, which Foster started the night before his death. On July 26, a member of the White House counsel office found scraps of a torn up piece of paper in the bottom of Foster’s briefcase, which he had left in his office. While it was later referred to as a suicide note by the press, the handwritten sheet was actually an attempt by Foster to acknowledge all that was troubling him—his wife had suggested that he try writing his thoughts down. “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport,” he wrote (Baker 2018). Some Congressional Republicans and, again, right-wing conspiracy theorists made claims of foul play surrounding Foster’s death even before the first official investigation was finished and its findings, including the text of the so-called suicide note, were made public in early August. Did the Clintons order Foster’s murder because of what he knew about the



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travel office firings and the earlier Whitewater land deal? In the end, five investigations by the U.S. Park Police, the FBI, the Justice Department and special prosecutors Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr all concluded that Foster committed suicide. As for Hillary, in the months after Foster’s passing, she switched into what she calls “automatic pilot” in Living History: “I threw myself into a schedule so hectic that there was no time for brooding. . . . If I met someone who reminded me of my father, or I ran across a nasty comment about Vince, I would feel tears well up in my eyes. I’m sure that I sometimes appeared brittle, sad and even angry—because I was.” This would not be the first time in her life that Hillary “kept going on sheer willpower” (Clinton 2003). Travelgate would prove to be only the first in a series of media-perceived scandals—some more serious than others—that Hillary would have to muster through as first lady and later as a candidate for president. During her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, the New York Times aided by Bill’s foes in Arkansas raised questions about a real estate investment that the Clintons had made in 1978 in partnership with Jim McDougal and his wife, Susan. Bill and McDougal had first met years before when McDougal worked in Senator Fullbright’s office; McDougal had since become a successful, if colorful, businessman in Little Rock. So, when he asked the Clintons if they were interested in investing in 220 acres of property along the White River in Arkansas’s Ozark Mountains, Hillary and Bill said yes. The two couples formed the Whitewater Development Corp. and took out a loan to develop a tract of vacation homes. Two years later, McDougal bought a small savings and loan in Arkansas and renamed it Madison Guaranty. After a few years, federal regulators began to question the financial stability and lending practices of Madison Guaranty. McDougal hired Rose Law Firm to do legal work for his failing business; Hillary claims that although her name was on the account for billing purposes, all work for Madison Guaranty was actually performed by an associate partner. Hillary notes in Living History that by 1986, she and Bill became concerned about their half in the Whitewater land deal, which had never made any money. (According to a report commissioned by the Clinton campaign in 1992, Bill and Hillary actually lost $46,000 on Whitewater.) “For the first time since we became partners in 1978, I demanded to see the books.” When McDougal refused her request, Hillary became more concerned and spent the next few years tracking down Whitewater documents with the help of Susan McDougal, who had recently left her husband. “I realized that the records were in disarray and that Whitewater was a fiasco,” Hillary writes. “I decided that Bill and I had to get everything in order” and then get themselves out of the investment (Clinton 2003). In fall of 1993, as Hillary tried to refocus the administration’s efforts on health-care reform, questions surrounding Whitewater, Madison Guaranty,

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and the Clintons’ relationship with James McDougal would reappear as frontpage news. The Washington Post reported that the Resources Trust Company, the government agency created in 1989 to examine failed savings and loans, was investigating whether McDougal had used Madison Guaranty to funnel illegal funds to political campaigns in Arkansas, including Clinton’s 1986 campaign for reelection as governor (Bernstein 2007). After much internal debate over the best way to handle the news feeding frenzy that ensued, the Clinton White House decided in December 1993 to turn over all Whitewater files to the JusFirst Lady Hillary Clinton during her presentation tice Department, hoping at a congressional hearing on health care reform that this would quiet press requests for information on in September, 1993. (Library of Congress) the matter. (In fact, the Justice Department was gearing up to subpoena all records relative to the RTC probe.) By January, editorial writers and Republican members of Congress were calling for the attorney general to appoint a special counsel to investigate any wrongdoing on the part of the Clintons in Whitewater or their dealings with McDougal and his failed savings and loan. Even while he, Hillary, and Chelsea traveled back to Arkansas to bury his beloved mother, Virginia, after she lost her battle with cancer, pressure in Washington continued to mount for Bill to request appointment of a special counsel. On January 20, 1994—exactly one year into Bill’s presidency—Attorney General Janet Reno, at the reluctant request of the president, appointed New York Republican lawyer and former federal prosecutor Robert Fiske as special counsel to investigate Whitewater and the Clintons’ dealings with McDougal. Fiske promised a thorough yet quick investigation; he also announced that he would investigate any links between Vince Foster’s suicide and the Whitewater matter. Fiske served as special counsel until early August 1994, when the U.S. Court of Appeals refused to renew



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his appointment over concerns that he could not be impartial, because he was originally selected by the president’s attorney general. Instead, Kenneth W. Starr, a former federal appeals court judge and U.S. solicitor who worked in the Reagan and Bush administrations, was named to replace Fiske as the independent counsel to investigate Whitewater-Madison matters. In his preliminary findings released in June 1994, Fiske concluded that no one in the White House or the Department of the Treasury had tried to influence the RTC investigation of Madison Guaranty and McDougal. Fiske agreed with the FBI and Park Police investigations that Foster’s death had indeed been a suicide, and he found no link between the suicide and Whitewater. Starr replaced Fiske less than two months later and went on to conduct a multipronged investigation until November 1998, during which time he

The Pink Suit Press Conference In October 1978, Hillary invested one thousand dollars in cattle futures at the encouragement of Jim Blair, who was engaged to her good friend, Diane Kincaid. Blair was outside counsel for Tyson Foods at the time, but he made more money from his investments. He studied cattle futures as a client of Robert L. (Red) Bone, a former Tyson vice president turned broker with Ray E. Friedman & Company (Refco). Blair would sit in during Bone’s after-market calls with Chicago Mercantile Exchange pit traders, cattle buyers, and Refco Chairman Thomas Dittmer, who co-owned one of the world’s largest cattle feed companies. Blair brought so much business to Bone that the broker extended preferential treatment to all of Blair’s referrals. This meant Hillary was able to trade futures “on margin”—meaning that she essentially borrowed money from Refco to invest more than she had on deposit. With Blair’s guidance and Bone’s information, Hillary netted ninety-nine thousand dollars in the ten months she had an account with Refco. Because Bone did not issue margin calls on Hillary’s account as a referral from Blair, she was able to ride out some frightening downturns without risking any more money. (In 1977, the Mercantile Exchange had sanctioned Bone for failing to adhere to margin requirements.) In March 1994, the American public learned of the first lady’s stunning success in the roller-coaster commodities market. Many experts in the field questioned how such a novice investor could do so well. After a press conference by Bill failed to end speculation about Hillary’s investment success, Hillary scheduled her own press conference, held in the State Dining Room of the White House and carried on live television. Looking polished in a pink suit, Hillary stayed until every reporter’s questions were answered. Many viewers found her sympathetic, seated alone in front of all the cameras, being drilled by the press for more than an hour. Her staff, as well as Bill’s, considered the press conference a smashing public relations success.

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would interview the Clintons, members of the White House staff, members of Bill’s previous campaigns, Clinton friends and associates in Arkansas, and, for the first time, subpoena a sitting president to testify in a civil lawsuit before a grand jury. (After longtime Clinton friend and Hillary’s former law partner, Webb Hubbell, suddenly resigned from his job at the Justice Department in 1994 and subsequently pleaded guilty to mail and tax fraud in connection with overbilling the firm and former clients, he served eighteen months in federal prison. Starr would continue to investigate Hubbell and what he might have known about Whitewater until 1999.) As Hillary writes in Living History, she is convinced that “Whitewater signaled a new tactic in political warfare: investigation as a weapon for political destruction.” She argues that “the purpose of the investigations was to discredit the president and the administration and slow down its momentum. It didn’t matter what the investigations of Bill were about; it only mattered that there were investigations” (Clinton 2003). Both Hillary and Clinton have complained over the years that Republican conservatives are out to get them, and many pundits agree that there definitely are powerful people who hated the Clintons. They also agree that “the independent counsel’s office, particularly under Kenneth Starr, showed a stupendous lack of concern for the need to keep the investigation under control and conclude it in a timely fashion” (Clinton 2003). However, many observers in the media and in Washington contend that the Clintons’ way of responding to accusations of potential wrongdoing hurt their case in the court of public opinion, time and again. “The Clintons’ strategy of denials and evasions,” as the New York Times editorial page called it in 2002, would lead much of the American populace to distrust Hillary and Bill, even when the facts exonerated them (“The Lessons of Whitewater” 2002). While the cloud of the Starr investigation, which would be joined by simultaneous Senate Whitewater Committee and House Banking Committee investigations (both chaired by Republicans), loomed over the White House, Hillary continued through the fall and winter to fight for a package of health-care reforms. Opponents ramped up their attacks on the Task Force’s recommendations in a series of television ads featuring conversations between two fictional retirees, Harry and Louise, concerned about proposed health-care changes and out-of-pockets costs. The ads were based on scare tactics, but they were very effective in stirring public doubt. In response, Hillary rallied supporters to fundraise for a public awareness campaign under the Health Care Reform Project, but the resulting budget was much smaller than that of the insurance companies and medical industry groups opposed to reform. Then, during the summer of 1994, Hillary kicked off the Health Security Express in Portland, Oregon, and health reform advocates headed out on a cross-country bus tour to explain key advantages of the reform plan directly to the American people;



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at almost every stop, the tour was met by well-organized, well-funded protesters. Come fall, Hillary and her team in Washington desperately tried to explain the benefits of their 1,342-page proposal to members of Congress and to work out a compromise with key Republicans. She knew it was an uphill battle. Nearly a year before, in September 1993, Hillary had become the first First Lady to appear before a congressional committee as the lead witness on such a major piece of legislation. She had testified before three House committees, including the House Ways and Means Committee, and two Senate committees. During those hearings and in any number of subsequent meetings with congressional members, Hillary realized how few really understood the maze that was the existing American healthcare system and what a hot-button political issue health-care reform was. Still, it was difficult for Hillary to watch her health-care proposal “fade with barely a whimper” as the midterm congressional elections approached in November 1994 (Clinton 2003). Without a single Republican supporter, health-care reform appeared doomed. Hillary argued for a last-ditch effort to resuscitate it, but too many voices within the administration were saying that the president did not need another controversy, like the prospect of a failed attempt to rally public pressure through a national address. “After twenty months, we conceded defeat,” Hillary writes in Living History. “I knew I had contributed to our failure, both because of my own missteps and because I underestimated the resistance I would meet as First Lady with a policy mission” (Clinton 2003). She and the president would not make the same mistake again. For the remainder of Bill’s years in the White House, Hillary would largely focus on issues within her realm of professional expertise—like women’s and children’s issues, which also happened to be more traditionally acceptable areas of focus for America’s first ladies—and travel as an emissary for her husband’s administration.

7 First Lady of the United States, Part Two

My on-the-job training during the first term had taught me to use my position more effectively. . . . Looking ahead to Bill’s second term, I planned to speak out publicly to help shape White House policy on issues affecting women, children and families. —Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History, 2003 The midterm elections in November 1994 were a rebuke of the Clinton presidency thus far. Republicans gained control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in forty years. Furthermore, many of the new Republicans elected to Congress from Southern states were deeply conservative, far right of those who had come to power previously, which would present Bill Clinton with real challenges to his legislative agenda. And the election carnage extended beyond Washington: in nine out of the country’s ten most populous states, Republicans won governorships. Two highprofile Democratic governors, Mario Cuomo of New York and Ann Richards of Texas, lost their reelection bids. Hillary took the losses personally. “I wondered how much I was to blame for the debacle: whether we had lost the election over health care; whether I had gambled on the country’s acceptance of my active role and lost,” she writes in her memoirs (Clinton 2003). As Hillary worked to reshape her role in her husband’s presidency over the next few months, she sought the advice of other women, inside 101

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and outside of the White House. Two women in particular, Mary Catherine Batson and Jen Houston, an anthropology professor and a writer on women’s history, respectively, helped Hillary see that although the first lady is a largely symbolic role, symbolic actions could help advance “the Clinton agenda.” Shortly after the November election, Dick Morris advised Hillary to find her voice, to find avenues of communicating her knowledge and compassion around issues affecting women, children, and families. In March 1995, Hillary embarked on her first official trip without her husband. Chelsea, who had just turned fifteen and was on spring break from school, accompanied her mom on the twelve-day trip through five countries in South Asia. Hillary hoped to use the trip to highlight two important messages: first, she wanted to stress how women’s progress was tied to a country’s social and economic progress; and second, she wanted to highlight the impact that U.S. foreign aid had in the developing world in light of proposed cuts to such aid by the new Republican majority in Congress. And by traveling with her teenage daughter, Hillary hoped to shine a spotlight on the value of women, especially young women, in societies across the globe. They visited Islamabad, Pakistan, where they dined with the country’s female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and visited with female high school and college students; but they also went to a rural school for girls in Lahore, Punjab. Next they traveled to New Delhi, India, where they toured one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages, the Taj Mahal, and Mahatma Gandhi’s home; but Hillary also delivered an address on women’s rights and visited the Self-Employed Women’s Association in the state of Gujarat. In Kathmandu, Nepal, they were received by the king and queen but then spent the next day visiting a women’s health clinic. In Bangladesh they stayed in the capital, Dahaka, but also traveled to two rural villages to visit a primary school that was encouraging families to educate their girls and to visit Grameen Bank, a source of microloans for small, womenowned businesses. The trip was considered a success by Hillary and Chelsea, the White House, and the State Department; and it would set the example for future overseas trips by the first lady—including her trip to Africa two years later, again accompanied by Chelsea. Hillary’s 1995 trip “to the Far East,” as she described it to her friend Diane Blair, helped recast the first lady in a supporting role to the president; any sense of a co-presidency was gone after the 1994 election (Bernstein 2007). In his 2004 memoir Rewriting History, Dick Morris, who was back as a political consultant on the payroll for Bill in 1995, relates what his research revealed about public perceptions of Hillary at the time: the more power she was thought to have, the less power the president was thought to have. So after the midterm elections, “she withdrew from all White House strategy meetings. She just stopped coming. . . . She was less involved in decision making than she had been at any point since the early



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two-career couple days of the late 1970s,” according to Morris (Morris 2004). More than anything, Hillary wanted her husband’s presidency to be a success. So, while Hillary took a step back from involvement in the administration’s strategy, in 1995 Morris stepped in. In Living History, Hillary credits Morris with helping Bill develop a strategy to garner legislative wins in the face of Republican obstructionism in Congress and the new House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s zeal to impose a conservative legislative agenda known as “The Contract with America.” Multiple White House officials have since related that in the first three to four months of 1995, the Clinton administration seemed stalled, and the president was disconsolate and angry. As David Gergen recalled on PBS’s Frontline, “[Clinton] was angry at the Republicans, he was angry at the consultants. And he felt that if this the way that politics is going to be played in Washington, by God, he’d play it this way” (Gergen 2000). Gergen says Bill saw Republicans in the capitol as cynical about politics. “They come in here and they don’t stick to their guns, they just do the things that are political so they can get reelected.” Bill believed that he, in contrast, had tried for nearly two years “to do the right thing for the country,” and he got his head handed to him (Gergen 2000). According to Gergen, after the president’s failed attempt at health-care reform and the Democrats’ thunderous defeat in the 1994 midterms, Clinton decided, “By God, I’m not going to do that again. I’ll do what basically I need to do. He was very much fighting back to get elected” (Gergen 2000). Though many of Hillary and Bill’s closest advisors were aware that the two at been at odds during the fall over whether to compromise on health care, if they should fulfill Whitewater document requests, and how best to handle the press and the administration’s priorities, it was evident by spring 1995 that the Clintons agreed on a strategy of “small steps,” as Hillary called it (Clinton 2003). With Republicans holding a majority in the Senate for the first time in eight years and a majority in the House for the first time in over half a century, the Clintons understood that the administration would have to work hard for small victories, to find common ground, no matter how scarce, with moderate Republicans and Congressional Democrats whenever possible. And knowing that she was a lightning rod—even if she did not understand why—Hillary was determined not to be a liability for her husband’s presidency again. In July 1995, Hillary began writing a syndicated weekly newspaper column called “Talking It Over.” Eleanor Roosevelt provided a model for this way of reaching the American people with her “My Day” column, which she began as first lady during the Great Depression and continued to write six days a week for more than twenty-five years. “The exercise of putting my ideas on paper gave me a clearer sense of how to recast my role as an advocate within the administration as I began to focus on discrete domestic projects that were more achievable than massive undertakings such as

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Hillary Clinton meeting Joyce McCartan and other members of the Women’s Information Drop-In Center in Ireland, 1995. (Clinton Presidential Library)

health-care reform,” Hillary writes in Living History (Clinton 2003). The topics of her column over the next five years would vary from the history of Earth Day to the Kennedy family’s legacy in America, but many dealt with the issues on which she focus in her remaining years as first lady: children’s health and safety issues, women’s issues, education, and the arts. In 1995 Hillary also signed on for a book project with publisher Carolyn Reed and editor Rebecca Salotan at Simon & Schuster. She explains in her memoirs that the new Republican majority in Congress, largely under the steerage of Gingrich, was eagerly pushing for cuts in the name of smaller government and more personal accountability to many federal programs that she and Bill believed were critical to protect and aid the most vulnerable citizens: America’s children. She viewed the Republican proposals as “uncompassionate and elitist” and therefore wanted to describe her vision of a world that ideally would care for all children (Clinton 2003). At her publisher’s suggestion, Hillary began working with a journalism professor from Georgetown University, Barbara Feinman, “to help prepare the manuscript” for her book (Clinton 2003). The two worked together for about eight months to collect Hillary’s thoughts, incorporate policy discussions that Hillary deemed relevant, and organize her content to be compelling for readers. As she drafted page after page, Hillary also consulted with members of her staff and, most importantly, with Bill. Simon & Schuster published Hillary’s first book, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, in



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early 1996. That February, Hillary sat for an interview on C-SPAN where she described the book as “filled with a lot of my views about how children and political decisions intersect, because I do think that all of us in whatever role we’re in have a responsibility for children. And I don’t just mean electoral politics,” she continued. “I mean, politics with a small P: how we organize ourselves in neighborhoods and communities and churches and businesses and schools” (Booknotes 1996). As she explains in its opening chapter, the premise for her book is that “children exist in the world as well as in the family” (Clinton, It Takes a Village, 1996). Unlike in generations before, Hillary contends that children no longer live in one village most of their lives surrounded by a static group of adults—extended family members and neighbors—who will look after them. Instead, “the village can no longer be defined as a place on the map, or a list of people or organizations, but its essence remains the same: it is the network of values and relationships that support and affect our lives,” and therein, the lives of children in the United States and around the globe (Clinton, It Takes a Village, 1996). As the world that children enter continues to become more complicated and global, solutions that worked in the past, in some so-called “golden era” of the family, will no longer work the same, she argues. “Our challenge is to arrive at a consensus of values and a common vision of what we can do today, individually and collectively, to build strong families and communities” (Clinton, It Takes a Village, 1996). This central assertion of It Takes a Village aligned with what Hillary and Bill claimed his presidency was all about: a new politics of meaning, one built to promote individual responsibility and caring for others—a government that recognized and worked to strengthen the ties that already bound American citizens of all ages to one another, ties of family, friendship, business, faith, and community. Hillary notes in her memoirs that the response in 1996 to It Takes a Village and its message “was brutal” from some quarters (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Republicans and other Clinton enemies criticized her appeal for stronger families and communities “as a broad attack on the nuclear family and parental rights to control your child’s upbringing, and even an implicit endorsement of mothers returning to work instead of being housewives,” explains Amanda Marcotte of Slate. More than a decade after It Takes a Village was published, conservative pundits would still refer to it as a touchstone for big-government liberalism; in 2009 conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh complained, “The town doesn’t raise a child, village, or what have you. . . . That was just code word for the parents don’t really matter” (Limbaugh 2009). In 1996, after It Takes a Village made the New York Times best-seller list throughout the spring and early summer, the Republican presidential nominee, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, made perhaps the most famous attack on Hillary’s book. In his August 15, 1996, acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, Dole did not mention the first lady by name, but he clearly

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referred to her ideas and posited that what she really was promoting amounted to intrusive government meddling in the very private work of nuclear families. Dole told his audience, “We are told that it takes a village, that is, a collective, and thus the state, to raise a child.” He continued, “And, with all due respect, I am here to tell you it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.” The energized Republican crowd loved it (Dole 1996). It Takes a Village then became the theme for Hillary’s speech at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, held just ten days later in Chicago. “For Bill and me, there has been no experience more challenging, more rewarding, and more humbling than raising our daughter. And we have learned that to raise a happy, healthy, and hopeful child, it takes a family. It takes teachers. It takes clergy,” she told the crowd. “It takes business people. It takes community leaders. It takes those who protect our health and safety. It takes all of us. Yes, it takes a village” (Clinton, August 27, 1996). As the delegates assembled in the United Center applauded loudly, she continued: And it takes a president. It takes a president who believes not only in the potential of his own child, but of all children; who believes not only in the strength of his own family, but of the American family; who believes not only in the promise of each of us as individuals, but in our promise together as a nation. It takes a president who not only holds these beliefs, but acts on them. It takes Bill Clinton. (Clinton, August 27, 1996)

The stakes for Hillary’s convention speech were high for the Clinton campaign and for her personally. A recent CBS/New York Times poll showed her 39 percent disapproval rating as higher than her approval, which came in at 35 percent. As CNN reported in its August 27 convention coverage, “Though some are ambivalent about the president’s wife, tonight she was greeted as a conquering hero by jubilant delegates. Applause rocked the cavernous hall as she beamed for minutes at the podium.” For the past twenty months, Hillary had retreated from policy discussions and West Wing strategy meetings in an effort to reinvent herself as a more traditional first lady in the eyes of U.S. voters. Her reception at the convention must have bolstered her spirits. If only her approval ratings at home could mirror those of overseas, Hillary might well be able to have a more positive legacy from her husband’s presidency. Her international travels during 1995 and 1996 had shown her that to many citizens in other countries, she was more than just another first lady bearing gifts for their monarch or president—as Carl Bernstein notes, “she was a figure of enormous respect around the world, regarded with fascination and treated as a new kind of statesperson” (Bernstein 2007). Indeed, Hillary’s international trips since the midterm election had allowed her to focus attention on many of the same issues to which she had dedicated her



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professional life, while also signaling to the world that the United States under President Clinton understood its role as a leader of progressive change and a promoter of greater equality. In September 1995, Hillary was scheduled to travel to China as honorary chair of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, a more-delicate-than-normal foreign policy assignment for a first lady. However, the arrest of civil rights activist Harry Wu by the Chinese government quickly threw Hillary’s travel plans into limbo. The Chinese government hoped that hosting the conference would generate positive public relations for them around the world. Meanwhile, cries for a boycott among human rights groups grew at home, and the U.S. government stated unequivocally that Hillary would not attend the conference if Wu remained under arrest. Finally, just weeks before the conference was to begin, the Chinese government brought Wu to trial where the court found him guilty of trumped-up charges of spying and banished him from the country. (Wu, who had been held for nineteen years as a political prisoner in a Chinese labor camp before moving to the United States, had been arrested with a valid passport trying to reenter the country.) According to Hillary in Living History, she and Bill discussed at length the pros and cons of her attendance at the conference in light of the Chinese treatment of Wu. In the end, she notes, “he supported my view that once Wu had been released, the best way to confront the Chinese about human rights was directly, on their turf” (Clinton 2003). Hillary accompanied Bill to Hawaii for fiftieth-anniversary observances of World War II’s V-J Day and attack at Pearl Harbor; then she met up with the rest of the delegation on their way to China. While most passengers aboard the Air Force jet slept across the Pacific Ocean, Hillary and her speech team kept reworking her remarks. As Hillary recalls, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had asked her earlier what she wanted to accomplish with the speech, to which Hillary replied, “I want to push the envelope as far as I can on behalf of women and girls” (Clinton 2003). Hillary credits Albright and other foreign relations experts in the delegation who reviewed drafts of her remarks, keeping her “out of trouble” while being “careful not to intrude with a heavy hand” (Clinton 2003). Meanwhile, the Chinese government had made their expectations clear: they welcomed the first lady’s presence at the conference but hoped she would “appreciate China’s hospitality” (Clinton 2003). Hillary admits that she was nervous as she entered the Plenary Hall in Beijing on September 5; she knew that the stakes were high, and she wanted to make her country, her husband, and herself proud. She wanted to convey how important it is for women to be able “to make choices for themselves” in light of the stark fact that injustices in access to education, health care, economic opportunities, legal rights, and political participation disproportionately hinder women around the world (Clinton 2003). Hillary

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used her remarks to challenge the Chinese government on its human rights violations, while not naming the country directly. Still, everyone in the hall and those who read her speech afterward would have known that she was calling out the Chinese regime. The Chinese government, which blacked out the speech on its state-controlled radio and television, must have been taken aback at her forceful message: “For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words” (Clinton 1995). She then went on to call out as “a violation of human rights” many of the accepted practices designed to control women by afflicting physical or social harm, for example, killing babies because they are girls, selling girls as slaves into prostitution, raping women as prizes of war, and forcefully mutilating the genitals of young girls. “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights . . . and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all” (Clinton 1995). She ended her remarks after twenty minutes with a call to action for the attendees to return to their countries and demand action on social justice for women and girls. After a slight delay for the delegates from nearly two hundred countries who were receiving translations in their headsets to realize that Hillary was finished, the hall erupted in applause and cheers as the attendees gave her an enthusiastic standing ovation. The next day, media outlets around the world covered her speech as front-page news. At home, a New York Times editorial on September 6 declared, “Mrs. Clinton delivered . . . yesterday in an unflinching speech that may have been her finest moment in public life.” It noted that while “many in Washington had argued that the First Lady should not attend this conference . . . Mrs. Clinton demonstrated that a clear and forthright speech makes a far more powerful point than staying home in sullen protest” (“Mrs. Clinton’s Unwavering Words” 1995). In A Woman in Charge, Bernstein quotes Hillary’s speechwriter, Lissa Muscatine, about the significance of her Beijing remarks: “It kind of legitimized her as an ambassador” on the systemic inequities and inequalities that hinder women and girls around the world (Bernstein 2007). The widespread positive reception to her speech must have bolstered Hillary’s confidence that she could effectively advocate for causes that she cared passionately about, even if she never took the helm of a major White House policy initiative again. Indeed, since early in Bill’s first term, Hillary had vocally supported a variety of legislative efforts in Congress to help women, children, and families. The Atlantic points out in an April 2016 article, “As first lady, she was a powerful advocate for the Family and Medical Leave Act, which became one of the first that Bill Clinton signed into law as president in 1993” (Zhou 2016). The act, which was sponsored by Representative William Ford of Michigan, was a victory for America’s working women as one of the



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earliest federal laws to require companies to offer parents and caregivers up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Even while entangled in her healthcare reform efforts a year later, Hillary still made time to actively support passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, which was introduced by then-Senator Joe Biden of Delaware to provide financial and technical assistance to states to help them develop programs aimed at stopping domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. Hillary then endorsed the creation of the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence against Women the following year, “to provide federal leadership in developing a national capacity to reduce violence against women and administer justice for and strengthen services to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking” (Clinton 2003). Another area of concern Hillary was particularly proud to help shine a light on was the challenges and vulnerabilities of orphan children. Beginning with an article she wrote on the topic in 1995 (actually, in response to comments made by Newt Gingrich) and then through a series of public events, Hillary worked to raise the issue’s national importance. She attended policy meetings with Health and Human Service officials and private foundation leaders, and she helped draft potential legislative proposals. Then in 1997, Hillary actively lobbied legislators in support of the Adoption and Safe Families Act. The act allows states and local agencies greater flexibility in how they spend federal funds to help facilitate the adoption of foster children. In a subsequent effort, she lobbied Congress for the 1999 Foster Care Independence Act to aid older foster kids’ transition into adulthood. The bill was sponsored by Republican Senators John Chafee of Rhode Island and Tom DeLay of Texas and nearly doubled federal spending for educational and job training programs aimed to help teenagers emancipated from foster care once they turn eighteen years old. Although her attempt to pass across-the-board health-care reform failed in 1994, Hillary did have smaller, important successes in the areas of children’s and women’s health care. In 1997, she advocated for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a federal effort that provided states financial support to provide health coverage for approximately ten million children whose parents made too much to qualify for Medicaid but could not afford private health insurance. “She wasn’t a legislator, she didn’t write the law, and she wasn’t the president, so she didn’t make the decisions,” Nick Littlefield, then a senior health adviser to Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, told the Washington Post in 2007, “But we relied on her, worked with her and she was pivotal in encouraging the White House to do it” (Fouhy 2007). Once the CHIP bill cosponsored by Kennedy and Republican Senator Orin Hatch of Utah became law, Hillary helped make sure it was put into action. On February 23, 1999, once most of the states had created their CHIP systems, she and Bill hosted a White

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House event to kick off a national enrollment drive. As Hillary said during her remarks at the event, “At least half of all uninsured children are eligible for federal-state health insurance programs, but too often their parents don’t know or don’t believe they qualify” (Clinton, February 23, 1999). She and Bill also hosted numerous White House conferences related to children’s health. In April 1997 she hosted the White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning: What New Research on the Brain Tells Us about Our Youngest Children, followed later that year by the first-ever White House Conference on Child Care. In May 1999 Hillary and the president hosted the White House Conference on School Safety in the aftermath of Colorado’s Columbine High School shooting that left fourteen students, including the two gunmen, and one teacher dead. At the conference, the president announced that the Surgeon General would conduct a study of the potential causes of youth violence, from peer pressure to popular culture to mental illness. In a statement released before the conference, the Surgeon General noted, “Violence is a serious public health issue that claims the lives of more than 13 young people in the United States every day,” and while studies of youth violence had been conducted before, they did not take into account the role of new potential factors: violent video games or the internet (Bernstein 2007). Hillary explained her concern about youth violence as part of children’s overall health and well-being on ABC’s Good Morning America on June 4, 1999: “We have to ask ourselves, what is it that leads a young person to feel so alienated, to feel so much hatred, to have unmet needs that would push them over the brink” (Clinton, June 4, 1999). One women’s health issue to which Hillary dedicated constant attention as first lady is breast cancer. Shortly before Bill’s election in 1992, Hillary agreed to stand in for her husband, who was suffering from an acute sore throat, at a meeting with representatives from the National Breast Cancer Coalition. During the meeting at the Williamsburg Inn in Virginia, which lasted twice as long as planned, Hillary listened to the stories of the advocates, many of whom were battling breast cancer. As Fran Visco, president of the coalition recalled in a March 2016 interview, “Her people were clearly trying to pull her out of the room but she was determined to stay and hear from everyone” (Scott 2016). According to Visco, who would become one of the first lady’s top advisors on the issue, Hillary was not just being polite that day; she was truly shocked and upset by the women’s stories and wanted to discuss how the government could help. “That’s not a conversation we had very often in those days,” explains Visco, “because people didn’t really understand the political implications and the public policy needs” (Scott 2016). One year later, the President’s Cancer Panel released an extensive report on breast cancer research and treatment. Of course, both Hillary and the president would soon have a very personal connection to the disease:



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Clinton’s mother, Virginia, lost her life to breast cancer in January 1994. Throughout her subsequent years in the White House, Hillary would advocate for women to receive regular mammograms as the best way to screen for early signs of breast cancer, push for better Medicare coverage of mammograms, and lobby Congress for breast cancer research funds. In September 1996, Hillary also hosted a White House breakfast to raise funds for breast cancer research. Attendees included Washington socialites, fashion designers and the first lady’s special guest, Princess Diana of Wales; many of the guests would also attend “Super Sale 1996” that evening, a shopping extravaganza and gala dinner planned by designer Ralph Lauren and Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour to fund breast cancer research at Georgetown University. On October 25, 1997, Hillary joined Clinton on his weekly radio address to call for a stepped-up breast cancer awareness campaign to encourage women over forty years old to seek regular mammograms. “Mammography can mean the difference between life and death for millions of women,” Hillary explained. Recalling her own conversations with women across the country, she said that too few of them thought they needed regular screening or knew that private insurance and Medicare covered mammograms. In 1998, Hillary hosted a White House East Room event to unveil the Breast Cancer Research Stamp, the first semipostal stamp in U.S. history. Congress authorized creation of the stamp for the specific purpose of raising funds from the American public to assist in finding a cure for breast cancer in 1997 (the stamp was reauthorized by President Barack Obama in 2015, and according to the U.S. Postal Service website, by 2018 more than one billion of the stamps had been sold raising more than $87.8 million for breast cancer research). Finally, Hillary strongly supported passage of the Breast Cancer and Cervical Cancer Prevention and Treatment Act, which was sponsored by Republican Representative Sue Wilkins Myrick of North Carolina and signed into law by President Clinton on October 23, 2000. The law allowed states to use Medicaid funds as needed to cover cancer treatments for qualifying low-income women. (Interestingly, Bill did not hold a public signing ceremony for the bill because the sponsor of the first version had been Republican Representative Rick Lazio of New York, who was Hillary’s opponent in her 2000 bid for the Senate; and with the election only two weeks away, the White House feared a ceremony attended by both candidates would be awkward.) While Hillary tried to focus a national spotlight on causes that she cared about, causes that she believed needed the attention and resources of the federal government, she also found herself dedicating hundreds of hours to fight public relations and legal challenges to her reputation and her husband’s presidency. Since Bill’s campaign in 1992, the couple faced one potential scandal after another. Though most gained press attention but never resulted in any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the first

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couple, Hillary took the lead in coordinating their legal team and media responses. Early controversies involved the Clintons’ investment in the Whitewater, Arkansas, real estate project with their friends, Jim and Susan McDougal, and the suicide of their dear friend and White House assistant counsel, Vince Foster. Then in January 1996, the newly appointed special prosecutor, Ken Starr, subpoenaed Hillary to testify before the grand jury about billing records for her work at the Rose Law Firm on behalf of Jim McDougal that had gone missing. In Living History, Hillary recalls that both she and Bill were frustrated by what they believed was Starr’s partisan “misuse of the criminal process” in hopes of ruining their credibility with the American people (Clinton 2003). She writes that she could not sleep or eat for a week before her grand jury appearance, and as she prepared for her testimony, she was actually most worried about how to control her anger at Starr and the lawyers working for him. On the afternoon of January 26, 1996, Hillary answered questions from one of Starr’s deputies while the grand jury listened for more than four hours. The old billing records about which she was quizzed had been among hundreds of records subpoenaed by the Whitewater special prosecutor two years earlier. No one in the White House could locate the Rose billing records until Carolyn Huber, who worked for the Clintons to coordinate their personal correspondence, discovered the papers on January 4, 1996, in one of a series of boxes she had moved from the White House third floor storage to her office months earlier for eventual sorting. Huber later testified that once she discovered the missing records in her office, she remembered unwittingly having added them to the box before moving it—the records had been folded and lying loose on a table in the storage room, so she had scooped them up. As Hillary pointed out during a White House interview with Barbara Walters in January 1996, conservative critics and other Clinton opponents had cried foul when the documents could not be found—and then cried foul once they turned up. But the simple fact that the records had been subpoenaed and not turned over for eighteen months raised questions about evasion and trickery orchestrated by Hillary. Though she had hoped to spend much of early 1996 promoting It Takes a Village, instead, she found herself answering questions about the billing records, Jim McDougal, and Whitewater at every interview and media event. In his profile “Hating Hillary” for the New Yorker in February 1996, Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. described the mood in Washington at the time of Hillary’s grand jury testimony: To judge from the way many conservatives talk, what they’d really like to do is impeach her. Some Republicans who weathered the Senate hearings of the Nixon era may have decided that one good scandal deserves another. Watergate, of course, had all the hallmarks of the modern scandal: it was, in



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essence, not about the precipitating illegality but about the act of covering it up. Whitewater, in turn, is the perfect postmodern scandal: the latest and most serious charges allege an act of covering up an act of covering up, while so far nobody has unearthed an original sin. (Gates 1996)

After Hillary’s grand jury testimony, one White House attorney—by then, the Clintons had a team of lawyers working for them—is quoted by Bernstein as telling him that the first lady was “angry, agitated, worried.” She felt as if everyone was out to get her: the Congressional Republicans and their investigations, the special prosecutor, the media; “Starr had forgotten about Bill Clinton basically” (Bernstein 2007). In reality, more trouble began to brew for Bill, too, in early 1996 when an appeals court ruled that he could be sued even while the sitting president by Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee who accused him of sexually harassing her during a 1991 encounter while Bill was governor. Jones had filed a civil suit against Bill for $700,000 in damages back in May 1994, two months after first going public with her accusations against the president at a press conference that was organized by a conservative group. The president had asked for the trial to be postponed until he was no longer in the White House; now he appealed the court’s decision that the trial could go forward. In May 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court would unanimously uphold the appeals court decision; and shortly thereafter, the trial date for Paula Jones v. Bill Clinton would be set for May 27, 1998. But first, Bill Clinton had to run for reelection. In 1995, in preparation for the reelection campaign, Dick Morris identified several areas where the president could preempt traditionally Republican issues: crime, welfare reform, and the federal budget. Clinton was able to find ways to compromise with Republicans in Congress and claim small victories, albeit sometimes more symbolic than notably substantive, in the leadup to the Democratic National Convention in August 1996. Though Hillary gave a well-received prime-time speech at the convention, during most of the campaign she kept a low profile or strategically appeared only in front of diehard Clinton crowds. One week earlier at the Republican National Convention, nominee Bob Dole selected former Congressman Jack Kemp of New York as his running mate; but it was Dole’s wife, Elizabeth—president of the American Red Cross and former secretary of labor—who captured much of the public interest surrounding the Republican ticket. (Incidentally, Elizabeth Dole would go on to pursue the Republican nomination for president in 2000, but she would lose to Governor George W. Bush of Texas; she would then successfully run for the Senate from North Carolina in 2002 and serve until losing reelection in 2009.) In September 1996, the general election for president hit full stride. Bill continued to emphasize his support of policies meant to aid the middle class. Both Bill and Dole tried to present

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themselves as moderates within their respective parties, closer to the middle of the political spectrum as they avoided appearing too aligned with ultraconservative Republicans or liberal Democrats. The most obvious difference between the two candidates was their ages: at seventy-three and as a veteran of World War II, Dole came across as much older and often old-fashioned compared to Bill, with his Baby Boomer aura. Throughout the fall, it appeared that Bill would easily defeat Dole. Morris’s polling seemed to show that voters did not care much about the Whitewater investigations; however, their opinions of Hillary were very low. On election day in November, the Clintons returned to Arkansas to cast their ballots and await results in a hotel suite in downtown Little Rock, surrounded by friends and family. In the end, the Clinton/Gore ticket won the popular vote by 8 percent and garnered twice as many electoral votes as the Republicans. After Dole called Bill shortly after midnight to concede, the president, Hillary and the Gores greeted thousands of supporters in front of the Old State House, where Bill had first launched his presidential run. Hillary recalls in her memoirs that she was much more relaxed when Bill took the oath of office as president for the second time in January 1997. “I felt I was entering this new chapter of my life like steel tempered in fire: a bit harder at the edges but more durable, more flexible” (Clinton 2003). She remarks that at fifty years old, Bill was finally showing his age yet growing

First Lady Hillary Clinton and her daughter Chelsea arrive at Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia on March 25, 1996 to support U.S. soldiers engaged in peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans. (Department of Defense)



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into his presidency. “Even though we’d had our share of problems,” she writes, “we still made each other laugh. That, I was certain, would get us through another four years in the White House” (Clinton 2003). Bill had found the 1996 campaign energizing, and he entered his second term with a slightly more favorable makeup in Congress: Democrats had picked up a few seats in both the House and the Senate after the 1996 election, although not enough to regain a majority. After months under investigation, Newt Gingrich was reprimanded and fined by his fellow Republicans in control of the House Ethics Committee; Bill could reasonably hope that Gingrich’s transgressions might somewhat hinder his effectiveness going forward. Meanwhile, Hillary continued to focus her energies on working within the existing system of governance and using her unique platform as first lady to support legislative efforts to aid women, children, and families. Still, the private residence upstairs in the White House was bound to feel different during Bill’s second term as Chelsea would graduate from high school and then, in September 1997, move to California to attend Stanford University. When Hillary turned fifty that October, she notes that the rite of passage “felt insignificant compared to living without Chelsea. . . . We were now empty nesters” (Clinton 2003). (In anticipation of Chelsea moving out, Hillary had bought Bill a dog, a brown Labrador puppy aptly named Buddy, as he quickly became the president’s constant companion.) Once they returned from moving Chelsea to college, Bernstein notes that “those who saw [the Clintons] together noted a renewed closeness, and . . . a lessening tension in the White House” (Bernstein 2007). After four years of scrutiny by the independent counsel, first Fiske and then Starr, subpoenas for thousands of records, two Congressional committee investigations, testimonies before the grand jury, and too many attorneys’ bills, it seemed as though the Clintons were almost, finally, finished with Whitewater. In fall 1997, Starr had determined that Vince Foster’s death was indeed a suicide (as Fiske had concluded three years prior), and his investigations into the Whitewater real estate deal—and Hillary’s subsequent work at Rose Law Firm on behalf of Jim McDougal—had not led to any charges. Even Starr’s investigation of the latest so-called scandal, referred to as “Filegate” by the Washington press, was wrapping up without a bang. In 1996, investigators looking into a different scandal found the Clinton White House in possession of hundreds of FBI files on former White House workers from the Reagan and Bush administrations; the information also covered the backgrounds of some Republicans serving in Congress. “A midlevel White House employee in the Office of Personnel Security had blundered by using an outdated list to order FBI file summaries for current staff,” Hillary explains in Living History, “and had inadvertently been sent files on some security pass holders” in the previous Republican administrations (Clinton 2003). Eventually, two staff members

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who originally obtained the files quit their jobs, but the independent counsel uncovered no wrongdoing or proof of a conspiracy in “Filegate” that involved the Clintons themselves. On January 14, 1998, with her attorney seated next to her in the White House Treaty Room, Hillary answered a few last questions for the independent counsel’s office about the FBI file mishap. At the time, the “most active litigation” the Clintons were facing, as Hillary recalls, was the Paula Jones civil lawsuit unrelated to any independent counsel investigation (Clinton 2003). With trial set to begin in May, Jones’s attorneys were issuing subpoenas to collect depositions from witnesses. Bill had been subpoenaed and was scheduled to give his deposition, under oath, on January 17; Hillary writes, “I waited up for him in the residence, and when he came back, he looked agitated and exhausted” (Clinton 2003). On the morning of January 21, 1998, Bill woke Hillary up early. He sat on the edge of their bed and said, “There is something in today’s papers you should know” (Clinton 2003). He went on to tell her that there were news reports about an affair he had with a twenty-two-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. As if that were not enough of a shock, he told her there were press reports that he had asked Lewinsky to lie about the affair to Paula Jones’s lawyers. Starr had requested, and the attorney general had granted, permission for the special investigator to expand his Whitewater investigation into the possibility that Bill was guilty of criminal misconduct. According to Hillary’s account in her memoirs, she questioned Bill repeatedly about the allegations. She admits that after six years of “baseless claims” against her and her husband, this latest story seemed “like just another vicious scandal manufactured by political opponents.” As she writes in Living History, “I will never truly understand what was going through my husband’s mind that day. All I know is that Bill told his staff and our friends the same story he told me: that nothing improper went on. . . . I believed my husband when he told me there was no truth to the charges, but I realized that we faced the prospect of another horrible and invasive investigation” (Clinton 2003). Both Hillary and Bill determined that they needed to continue with their planned schedules despite the news reports. She writes that she knew the White House staff would be watching her for cues on how to react and that “the best thing I could do for myself and those around me was to forge ahead. . . . No doubt my armor had thickened over the years. That may have made things endurable, but it didn’t make them easy,” she explains. “It was, for me, an isolating and lonely experience” (Clinton 2003). Very quickly, much of Washington was obsessed with the Lewinsky scandal, and speculation swirled about how it might affect Bill’s upcoming State of the Union address (it did not; the president did not mention the scandal in his speech). In a previously scheduled interview with NBC’s Today show on January 27, 1998, Hillary introduced to the American public her belief that



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Starr was politically motivated and aligned with conservative opponents of her husband, and she pointed out that the Whitewater investigation had now been active for four years and cost taxpayers more than $30 million. Still, Starr had not found any criminal misconduct or impeachable offenses. Then in February, Starr subpoenaed the Secret Service agents assigned to the president to testify before the grand jury; it was now obvious that he was looking for some way to contradict the president’s own testimony in the Jones case. In April, the judge in the Jones case decided to throw the lawsuit out of court because it lacked factual or legal merit; and by June, she ruled there was “probable cause” to believe that Starr’s office had been leaking information, which was illegal in grand jury proceedings. All the while, ever since awakening his wife on that January morning, Bill had been vigorously denying any sexual affair with Lewinsky to his family, his friends, his staff, and the American people. On August 6, after negotiating an immunity deal with Starr, Monica Lewinsky testified before the grand jury about her affair with the president. Hillary and Edith In July 1998, Hillary embarked on a four-day bus tour of historical sites from Washington, DC, to Seneca Falls, New York, to promote the Save America’s Treasures initiative, a public-private partnership that the first lady spearheaded to restore and protect endangered national artifacts and monuments. Her tour began in Washington, where the president joined her, to view the flag that flew over Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812 and inspired Francis Scott Key to pen the lines of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The capstone of the tour was an event at the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls to mark the 150th anniversary of the women’s suffrage movement. Along the way, Hillary stopped at novelist Edith Wharton’s mansion, The Mount, in western Massachusetts. Wharton, who was born into New York’s aristocracy in 1862 and married into Boston’s in 1885, became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1920 for her novel, The Age of Innocence. (She was also the first woman granted an honorary doctoral degree by then-all-male Yale University in 1923.) Wharton’s real world—and the lifelike one she portrayed in her writing— was dominated by men’s money and the appropriateness of women’s behavior. Indeed, as Maureen Dowd pointed out in the New York Times, “[Wharton] wrote about women forced to narrow their lives or disguise their natures or choke down indignities because of double standards.” Dowd aptly notes, “Mrs. Clinton’s modern Washington is still strikingly like Mrs. Wharton’s old New York” (Dowd 1998). Wharton, who filed for divorce from her banker husband in 1913 and subsequently spent much of her time in self-exile in Europe, once said of marriage, “I don’t know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting” (Wharton 1905).

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After that, the special counsel was determined to subpoena Bill to testify, and political pressure began to mount once more for the president. If he refused to be interviewed under oath, people would think he had something to hide. Another Congressional election was only three months away and the Democrats hoped to gain more seats. On August 15, a Saturday morning, Bill once again awoke his wife early, only this time he did not sit beside her on the bed. As he paced their bedroom, he confessed that he and Monica Lewinsky had been intimate several times in the White House. He realized that he would have to testify and to tell the truth, and therein contradict himself in sworn testimony. According to Bill, he had originally lied to Hillary because he was too ashamed to admit what he had done. “I could hardly breathe,” Hillary writes in Living History. “Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him . . . I was furious and getting more so by the second. He just stood there saying over and over again” how sorry he was, that he had been trying to protect her and Chelsea. “I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I’d believed him at all” (Clinton 2003). She soon realized that they would have to tell Chelsea before she learned the news elsewhere. Hillary told her husband that he had to be the one to tell their daughter what he had done. On Monday, Bill testified before the grand jury for four hours; then he prepared to address the nation that night. As advisers offered up their opinions on what he should say, what tone he should take, whether or not he should criticize Starr’s investigation, Hillary simply interjected, “Well, Bill, this is your speech. You’re the one who got yourself into this mess, and only you can decide what to say about it” (Clinton 2003). She and Chelsea then left the room. The next day, the Clintons left for a scheduled vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. Just before the first family departed for their coastal vacation, Hillary’s press secretary made a statement on her behalf: “Clearly this is not the best day in Mrs. Clinton’s life. This is a time when she relies on her strong religious faith” (Clinton 2003). Indeed, Hillary’s Methodist background and faith provided important grounding for her through many of the difficult times in her life. Some critics have suggested that she seems to adopt religion at convenient times, perhaps to make herself more relatable or virtuous to the American people. But those who know Hillary well often speak to the fact that her faith is an important part of her life and greatly influences how she sees the world and her place in it. During this particularly difficult, personal time exacerbated by the fishbowl of the presidency, Hillary says she found great counsel in her former youth minister and longtime friend, Don Jones. He helped her remember that “grace happens,” not when we want it to, but when it is time. She slowly came to realize that until grace happened, “my main job was to put one foot in front of the other and get through my day” (Clinton 2003). As the days turned into weeks, Hillary realized that although she was unsure of the future of her marriage, she knew that she still loved her



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husband. And although she was angry at him as her husband, she did not think what he had done signaled anything about his ability to be a good president. Hillary writes in Living History, “I believe what my husband did was morally wrong. So was lying to me and misleading the American people about it. I also knew his failing was not a betrayal of his country” (Clinton 2003). The majority of Americans agreed. In early February, as the media frenzy around the supposed affair first engulfed Washington, a Washington Post/ABC poll showed that just over two-thirds of Americans approved of Bill’s job as president, and nearly 60 percent believed that his political enemies were conspiring to destroy him. Remarkably, Bill’s approval ratings would remain nearly as high even after he admitted to the nation that he had indeed had an intimate affair with Monica Lewinsky. As the Clintons now returned to Washington from Martha’s Vineyard, Bill’s approval rating was holding steady at 62 percent. When Starr finally issued his 445-page Whitewater report to Congress on September 9, he reported eleven possible grounds for impeachment against the president—including perjury, abuse of office, and obstruction of justice—to the House Judiciary Committee. By October the full House voted with support from thirty-one Democrats to proceed with a formal impeachment investigation. With the midterm elections quickly approaching, many Republicans were campaigning on impeachment, and even some Democrats considered calling for at least a censure of the president. Still, the majority of the American people approved of Bill’s job in the White House, and one poll in late October found more than two-thirds of Americans disapproved of Congress’s handling of the issue of impeachment. Bill must have felt vindicated, even briefly, by the midterm election results; despite the scandal and impending vote on impeachment, Democrats gained five seats in the House and held their ground in the Senate. That same month, a Time public opinion poll showed Hillary with her highest-ever approval ratings at 70 percent. Right after the midterm election, the esteemed senior senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, announced that he planned to retire in two years when his current term ended. That same night, Congressman Charles Rangel, who represented the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, called Hillary to ask her to consider running to replace Moynihan—he was not the first person to approach Hillary with the idea. Hillary told Rangel that she had other, more immediate matters both public and private that needed her attention, but she did not say no. On December 11, the House Judiciary Committee approved four articles of impeachment against Bill. After a failed attempt by Democratic leadership to have the full House vote for a formal censure of the president rather than impeachment, Republicans in the House passed two articles of impeachment on strictly partisan votes, one for lying under oath and one for obstruction of justice. As the U.S.

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Constitution dictates, Bill’s trial for removal from office then moved forward in the Senate. After a five-week-long trial, the verdict in the Senate came down as largely expected: Bill was acquitted on both charges as Republicans failed to muster the two-thirds vote necessary for passage—not one senator from the president’s party cast a vote against him on either count. Just past 12:30 p.m. on February 12, 1999, the combined Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky saga finally ended for the Clintons.

8 The Junior Senator from New York

I promise you tonight that I will reach across party lines to bring progress for all of New York’s families. . . . Today we voted as Democrats and Republicans—tomorrow we begin again as New Yorkers. —Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senate Victory Speech, November 7, 2000 Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her intent to run for the U.S. Senate to represent the state of New York on July 7, 1999. She joined the incumbent senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at his sprawling farm in rural northwestern New York that afternoon to officially announce the formation of her exploratory campaign committee in front of several hundred reporters. Moynihan, a former Harvard professor whose political career reached back to positions in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, had announced his retirement the previous fall. Securing his endorsement to fill the Senate seat he had occupied for four terms was the last step in Hillary’s preparation to become the first president’s wife to seek elected office. While her husband’s impeachment trial ran its course in Congress, Hillary had diligently done her homework about New York politics. She had felt mounting pressure from some Democrats and press speculation to seriously consider the question of a campaign. By her own account, she had been thinking about her post–White House options for some time as she received various 121

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offers: “I had been approached about running foundations, hosting a television show, assuming a college presidency or becoming a corporate CEO,” Hillary writes. “These were appealing choices and far more comfortable than the prospect of a tough Senate race” (Clinton 2003). On February 12, 1999, the same afternoon that the U.S. Senate would vote to acquit her husband of the impeachment charges against him, Hillary met in the White House private residence for hours with Harold Ickes, a trusted Clinton advisor who knew New York politics inside and out. More than anyone else, Ickes gave Hillary a clear idea of what would be involved to run a successful campaign in the state. Ickes had left Hillary with a list of one hundred New Yorkers to contact as part of her homework; but even as she reached out to speak with each one, she remained undecided on whether or not to run. During her July 7 announcement with Moynihan, she acknowledged, “I suppose the questions on everyone’s minds are: Why the Senate? Why New York? And why me?” (Clinton 2003). She had spent the last six months or more answering the same questions for herself, and now she was ready to convince New York voters that she was the right choice. Ultimately, Hillary’s decision to run for the Senate was both personal and political. By the time the Senate acquitted Bill, Hillary had decided to remain married to him (as most of her close friends had expected she would). Many years later, Hillary would cite her decision to stay in the marriage as “the gutsiest thing I’ve ever done.” As she recalled on ABC’s The View in 2019, “In my case, after really hard, hard thinking about it, counseling, praying, all the things that I did and that we went through, I just decided it was the right decision for me but that doesn’t mean it was an easy decision” (Clinton 2019). Together, Hillary and Bill had already decided to move to New York at the conclusion of his presidency; they both loved the city, and the location made sense for Bill’s anticipated travels for speaking engagements and international work on behalf of his Clinton Foundation. Though many of Hillary’s friends and professional associates suggested that she could be most effective as an advocate for women’s and children’s causes in some international capacity, Hillary believed that Congress was still the crux of American policy making and thereby her best opportunity to gain ground on causes she supported. As her lifelong friend Diane Blair says, “Being a U.S. Senator gives her an ongoing forum in which to pursue the agenda she’s always been interested in ever since I’ve known her” (Newton-Small 2014). And according to her friend Sara Ehrman, Hillary still believed that she was going to shape the world, and she was going to have a place to do it once in the Senate. Both friends could have just as easily been talking about the Clintons as a pair; if Hillary could be elected to the Senate, she could seek redemption for the agenda they had shared when they entered the White House and the legacy they would share once they left. She could influence policy aligned with their vision of



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good governance and rescue the family name politically from the grips of Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, and the other scandals that had rocked Bill’s presidency. Bill wholeheartedly supported the idea that Hillary run for the Senate. In his memoirs, Bill notes that he was ready to assist his wife the way she had him for his entire political career. Meanwhile, Hillary notes in Living History, “Once he had given his advice, it was my decision to make. We both knew that if I ran, I would be on my own as I had never been before” (Clinton 2003). Ultimately, Hillary’s run for the Senate was her chance to step into the spotlight, no longer simply the wife of an attorney general, governor, or president but a powerful political figure in her own right. As biographer Gail Sheehy notes, “It took a Hillary to raise a president. It took a Hillary to swallow the most public worldwide humiliation and save a president,” and with her successful run for the Senate, Hillary would enable “the Clintons to dominate the Democratic Party for more than a quarter of a century” (Sheehy 2015). From the Moynihans’ New York farm, Hillary embarked on what she called a “listening tour” across the state “to get out and listen and learn from the people of New York,” she explained that day, “and demonstrate that what I’m for is maybe as important, if not more important, than where I’m from” (Clinton 2003). She knew that one hurdle early in her campaign would be the fact that she was not a native New Yorker and had never lived there. During the summer of 1999, Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea went on two househunting trips to Westchester County. According to the New York Times that September, “the Clintons, trailed by a Presidential-size entourage of assistants, Secret Service agents and reporters, toured homes in New Rochelle, Greenburgh, Purchase, Mamaroneck and Pound Ridge” (Nagourney 1999). That same month, the Clintons paid $1.7 million for a 5,000-square-foot Dutch colonial style home on just over an acre of land at the end of a culde-sac—15 Old House Lane in Chappaqua, a wealthy neighborhood in the town of New Castle. Built in 1899, the home had five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a pool, and a barn situated across the back lawn, a likely outpost for their Secret Service detail. “Right in the center of Westchester, Chappaqua is where the county begins to feel more semi-rural than suburban,” noted the New York Times (Nagourney 1999). Despite its wooded setting, in Chappaqua the Clintons would still be within a reasonable commuting distance from midtown Manhattan, just thirty-eight miles to the south. The Clintons had to have one of their associates help them secure a mortgage loan as they had not owned a house in over sixteen years and were more than $5 million in debt from legal fees incurred fighting the scandals they faced while in Washington. Still, the Times noted a “clear sense of relief” about the purchase among Hillary’s advisers, who were concerned that charges of being a “carpetbagger” could hurt her during a Senate campaign (Nagourney 1999). New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Hillary’s likely Republican

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opponent, had repeatedly attacked her on the issue of residency. The Chappaqua house would become a refuge of peace and quiet for Hillary throughout her ensuing political career. When she began her New York listening tour, Hillary notes that she never imagined how much she would enjoy the campaign. She planned to visit all sixty-two counties in the states, to see the diverse communities firsthand, to meet local residents and hear from them, and to learn the history and intricacies of New York’s past challenges and successes. Of course, Hillary also still had many commitments in Washington and elsewhere as first lady. “But instead of feeling tired,” Hillary notes in Living History, “I found that I drew energy from the campaign. . . . I was finally moving beyond my role as a surrogate campaigner and allowing myself to operate on my own” (Clinton 2003). Though she felt as if many residents across New York saw her as a curiosity during her initial visits, as the months passed, she began feeling real connections to many voters. Indeed, her New York listening tour would become an effective model for her future presidential campaigns. One group on which she felt a particular need to focus was women, specifically married women who were upset by her choice to remain with Bill after the Lewinsky affair. Rather than broach the subject in speeches to large audiences, Hillary met with small groups of women to answer their questions about her marriage and her campaign. After finding her campaign footing and laying important groundwork toward convincing New Yorkers that she was a serious candidate, Hillary formally announced her run for the Senate on February 6, 2000, at the State University of New York in Purchase, nine miles south of her new home in Chappaqua. Senator Moynihan introduced her to the crowd of supporters while Bill, Chelsea, and her mother, Dorothy Rodham, stood on the stage next to her. “I may be new to the neighborhood, but I’m not new to your concerns,” Hillary told the crowd (Clinton 2003). She then gave a forty-minute speech primarily devoted to laying out her detailed agenda and highlighting issues of particular concern to women in the state, such as health care and education. At the time of her speech, the most recent statewide poll showed the Republican frontrunner, Giuliani, ahead of Hillary among all voters 47 percent to 40 percent and among white women by 52 percent to 34 percent. She had her work cut out for her. In May, the New York Democratic convention in Albany formally nominated Hillary as its candidate for the U.S. Senate; then, just days later, as she writes in Living History, “a seismic shift rattled the New York political landscape” (Clinton 2003). Giuliani announced his withdrawal from the Senate contest due to his recent diagnosis with prostate cancer and press revelations about his long-running extramarital affair with drug company executive Judith Nathan. (Nathan would become Giuliani’s third wife in 2003 until she filed for divorce in 2019, based on allegations of him having another



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extramarital affair.) Though the announcement signaled the exit of Hillary’s toughest opponent, it also threw her campaign strategy into disarray. She would now have to reshape her message to New York voters in terms of a new adversary: Republican Congressman Rick Lazio, who announced his run the day after Giuliani announced he would no longer run. The fortytwo-year old Lazio had represented New York’s Second District, which includes Long Island, since 1993 but had little name recognition beyond. “Many observers speculated Republicans’ chances would be damaged by Lazio’s late entry into the race,” according to ABC News on election night. “But others argued the congressman, a lesser-known but far less polarizing figure than the man he replaced, offered a better chance of victory in a race against a woman who is a lightning rod for Republicans and conservatives who dislike her husband” (The 2000 Vote 2000). Indeed, earlier on, Lazio ran what many journalists referred to as a stealth campaign where he kept a low profile in hopes that Hillary’s disapproval ratings as first lady would doom her campaign. Rather than talk about his stance on issues, Lazio’s campaign ran attack ads about Hillary. For her part, Hillary focused on Lazio’s voting record in Congress in an attempt to portray him as a foot soldier for Newt Gingrich and thereby too conservative for most New Yorkers. The first debate between the two candidates in Buffalo on September 13 gave Hillary’s campaign a new way to attack Lazio: sexism. As Hillary tells it in Living History, “Near the end of the debate, from behind his podium, Lazio began hectoring me about soft money and challenging me to ban large Democratic Party contributions in my campaign” (Clinton 2003). Indeed, their Senate race would end up being labeled the “race of the century” for becoming the most expensive Senate race to date. Hillary continues, “I could barely get a word in when he marched over to me, waving a piece of paper—called the ‘New York Freedom from Soft Money Pact’—and demanding my signature.” She declined and offered to shake his hand instead. “He pressed closer, shouting, ‘Right here, sign it right now!’” (Clinton 2003). Then the moderator, Buffalo’s own Tim Russert of NBC News, announced that the one-hour debate had come to a close. Immediately following the debate, Hillary and her team were unsure about her performance or how her opponent’s aggressiveness would be received by voters. At first, most press reports were that Lazio had won the debate. But that view changed over the next few days. Gail Collins wrote in the New York Times on September 15: “Rick Lazio . . . was supposed to be the likable candidate. Then this week, at a debate in Buffalo, the Congressman morphed into a political predator. . . . He called Hillary Rodham Clinton ‘shameless,’ and invaded her space, stalking across the stage waving a campaign finance pledge.” She noted, “When a question about her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky left her looking as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her, Mr. Lazio eagerly piled on with a verbal kidney punch. Now this is a guy

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who’s supposed to be romancing the suburban women voters” (Collins 2000). Columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times added on September 20, “Many of the women who had liked the glowing Long Island congressman recoiled from his glowering performance in Buffalo. . . . A man who felt confident of his own masculinity, of course, would never have marched over to bluster at the first lady.” She concluded, “The Republicans should stop worrying about Hillary as the angry woman, and start worrying about Ricky as the angry man” (Dowd 2000). (Over subsequent years, Lazio’s debate tactic, perceived as bullying and chauvinistic, would cement his place in political history as an example of what to avoid during a debate with a female opponent, known as “a Lazio moment.”) While the Lazio campaign continued to largely run against Hillary’s reputation, her campaign message shifted to highlight the issues that she was committed to working on for New Yorkers: jobs, health care, education, and more. After the USS Cole was attacked by terrorists in Yemen with explosion that killed seventeen American servicemen in October, the New York Republican Party ran a television ad and telephone campaign claiming that Hillary had accepted a campaign donation from “a Mideast terrorism group—the same kind of terrorism that killed our sailors on the USS Cole.” The donation in question came from a fundraiser sponsored by the American Muslim Alliance, a national organization whose support “has long been actively courted by politicians of both parties,” according to the New York Times (Nagourney and Murphy 2000). Hillary’s campaign returned the $50,000 donation “after the group’s leader was quoted as defending a United Nations resolution that he said allowed for the use of armed force by Palestinians against Israel” (Nagourney and Murphy 2000). George W. Bush had just secured the alliance’s endorsement as the Republican candidate for president in 2000. Still, to counter the controversial phone calls on Lazio’s behalf, Hillary’s campaign made a last effort to secure the vote of suburban women. They asked campaign volunteer and breast cancer survivor Marie Kaplan, a resident of Long Island in Lazio’s home district, to record an ad for Hillary. “Rick Lazio is my congressman, and on breast cancer, you need to know Rick Lazio walked away from us. He tried to gut our funding,” Kaplan said in the ad (Birnbaum 2000). Though Lazio was the sponsor of the Breast and Surgical Cancer Treatment Act, as the New York Post wrote on November 5, “Democrats argued that the final version of the legislation didn’t have the proper state funding incentives.” Kaplan went on in the ad for Hillary to say, “I have friends with questions about Hillary. I tell them, ‘Get over it. I know her.’ On breast cancer and health care and education and a woman’s right to choose, Hillary would never walk away. She’ll be there for us” (Birnbaum 2000). On election day, Bill and Chelsea accompanied Hillary to vote at their local polling station in Chappaqua. She recalls in her memoirs, “After seeing Bill’s name on ballots for years, I was thrilled



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to and honored to see my own” (Clinton 2003). Later that evening, as Hillary got ready in her hotel room, Chelsea rushed in to tell her mom that she had won with 55 percent of the vote to Lazio’s 43 percent. After receiving a concession call from Lazio at 10:40 p.m., Hillary headed downstairs to address her supporters in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt Hotel near Grand Central Terminal in New York City, in time to make the eleven o’clock local news. Flanked by Bill (who was seen wiping tears from his eyes), Chelsea, and Dorothy Rodham, Hillary thanked her supporters and campaign workers: “Sixty-two counties, sixteen months, three debates, two opponents and six black pantsuits later, because of you, we are here!” (Clinton 2003). As she notes in Living History, “after eight years with a title but no portfolio,” she would now become Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (Clinton 2003). She was the first woman to ever represent New York in the Senate and the only first lady to ever hold elected office. Hillary’s Pantsuit Nation Hillary Rodham Clinton’s White House portrait, revealed in 2004, is noticeably different from those of her predecessors. In stark contrast to the formal gowns and pearl necklaces of many first ladies, Hillary appears dressed for work in a simple black pantsuit and gold necklace. In her memoir What Happened, Hillary admits that pantsuits basically became her uniform during her campaign for the Senate and two runs for president—“a simple pantsuit, often black, with a colorful shell underneath. I did this because I like pantsuits” (Clinton 2017). She liked the way they made her look and feel put together, and they served as “an anti-distraction technique” because in pantsuits she visually fit the norm of male politicians (Clinton 2017). More practically, pantsuits freed her from worrying about awkward photos taken with views up her skirt or dress, as had happened while she was first lady. Hillary’s penchant for pantsuits during the 2016 campaign—red, white, and blue ones for the three debates versus Donald Trump, a white one by designer Ralph Lauren for her acceptance of the Democratic nomination, and a black and purple one for her concession speech—garnered more media coverage than all of her male opponents’ clothing choices combined. The cast of NBC’s Saturday Night Live made jokes about her pantsuits; memes about her pantsuits went viral on social media; and Halloween stores sold Hillary costumes, complete with a pantsuit and mask. About three weeks before election day, a stay-at-home mother in Maine set up a Facebook group named “PantSuit Nation.” Her goal was to foster discussion among thirty or so Hillary supporters she knew; by the end of the election, the group boasted nearly three million members and had raised more than $200,000 for Hillary’s campaign. On election day, tens of thousands of supporters donned pantsuits to head to the voting booth, where they took selfies and posted to the Facebook group or to Twitter under #pantsuitnation, creating a social media sensation.

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On January 3, 2001, Bill, Chelsea, and Dorothy sat with other family members in the visitor’s gallery of the Senate chambers to watch Hillary be sworn in as the newest Senator from New York. She brought with her the same bible on which Bill took his oath of office for the presidency, and her oath was administered by Vice President Al Gore, who had just lost his bid to be president to George W. Bush in one of the stranger presidential election in American history. The Baltimore Sun quoted Hillary telling reporters, “It sunk in today. . . . It felt great. I was in awe of being in the chamber and sitting there. You know, it made me just feel like it was Hillary Clinton and President Bill Clinton pose so right” (Gamerman 2001). next to the White House Christmas tree for their Meanwhile, Bill told reportofficial Christmas portrait in 2000. (Clinton Presers his mood was “ecstatic” idential Library) (Gamerman 2001). For the next two weeks, Hillary would be both a senator and the first lady. There was no protocol for how she should be addressed or expected to fulfill her dual duties—she was truly walking on uncharted ground. As Hillary began her duties as a freshman senator, “her presence totally overshadowed that of the other ninety-nine members,” writes Bernstein (Bernstein 2007). She came to the chamber with a national constituency; spectators vied for seats in the visitors’ gallery just to see her; and many female employees of other senators filed applications to join her staff. In December 2000, Simon & Schuster had announced that it would publish a memoir by Hillary about her years as first lady; for the project, she would receive the second largest nonfiction book advance to date—$8 million. Because her publisher was owned by the Viacom media conglomerate, some sources familiar with book contracts criticized the deal as presenting a potential conflict of interest. Although the deal was negotiated before Hillary was sworn in as a senator, the large advance could be seen as questionable. So, although the Senate Ethics



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Committee later approved the royalties provisions of the deal, a number of newspaper editorials criticized Hillary for accepting such a large advance right before she joined the Senate. Even if she had not acted unethically, the editorials argued, she appeared to be blind to common decency. To some in Washington, Hillary seemed to be entering the Senate with the Clintons’ same old assumption that rules for other people did not necessarily apply to them. In A Woman in Charge, Bernstein credits Hillary for her modesty and deference upon her arrival to Capitol Hill. When assigned a typical freshman’s office in the Capitol basement, she did not complain. And the first colleagues she sought out for advice or casual conversation were largely those senators who had most ardently opposed her husband—and even voted to impeach him. “She was determined to show them how serious she was. . . . She didn’t seek the limelight,” writes Bernstein. “She learned the ways of the Senate” (Bernstein 2007). In a sense, she took the campaign tactics of her listening tour and applied them to the Senate. And it largely worked. In 2016, NPR’s congressional reporter Susan Davis would describe Hillary’s tenure in the Senate as “a time and place where her personality and governing style were widely praised, even among her political opponents.” Davis writes, “Republicans I interviewed who served with [Hillary] during her eight years on Capitol Hill say they were often surprised by how easy she was to work with. She had real policy expertise, and she knew how to cut a deal” (Davis 2016). As a senator, Hillary got to be a policy wonk, a role she truly enjoyed. She liked diving into the details of issues and nuisances of governance; and past policy-heavy endeavors, such as her work on rural health care and education in Arkansas, had won her accolades from elected officials and voters alike. Some fellow senators of her own party initially worried that Hillary might arrive with an entourage or an oversized ego, but they too were pleasantly surprised. During her first term, she really concentrated her efforts on addressing the needs of her New York constituents. She likely remembered her husband’s experience as governor with the car tag fiasco many years before and wisely determined never to overlook the impact that “big picture” decisions in the Senate might have on the day-to-day lives of voters back home. When Hillary took her seat at the opening of the 107th Congress (2001–2003), she received assignments on three committees: Environment and Public Works; Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; and Budget, all of which allowed her to direct federal funds to the state of New York. Less than a year into her first Senate term, on September 11, 2001, the radical Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airplanes, with hundreds of civilian passengers and crew on board, and flew two of them into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City, one into the Pentagon just outside of Washington, while the fourth plane crashed into a wooded area of Pennsylvania after the passengers attempted

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to overwhelm their hijackers. Close to three thousand people were killed in the attacks and subsequent collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. Efforts to rescue survivors, clear the rubble, and rebuild the World Trade Center area would take years and an immeasurable toll on many New Yorkers. Hillary and Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from New York, would dedicate much of their time and effort to secure recovery services and funds for New York City. The day after the attacks, Hillary and Schumer boarded one of the few planes allowed to land in New York. Once at LaGuardia Airport, they boarded a helicopter that took them into the city. They then walked to Ground Zero to visit the emergency workers searching for survivors in what would become known as “the pile,” the two-by-four-city-block site of twisted metal, broken glass, and cement debris, with fires still burning beneath it, where the twin towers had stood. Fifteen years later, Hillary told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that the images of that day are seared in her memory: “It was as close to a depiction of hell that I’ve ever personally seen” (Clinton, September 11, 2016). Richard Alles, a firefighter from Brooklyn who arrived at Ground Zero just after the second tower collapsed and was still there when Hillary visited the next day, told WNYC News that what struck him most about the senator was her compassion: “She really went out of her way to speak to the first responders on the site to reassure them. I never forgot it” (Bernstein and Pilkington 2016). And, like many other emergency workers who have suffered health problems linked to their work on the pile, Alles recalls how quickly Hillary grasped the potential health risks and how doggedly she pursued treatment for those who suffered. “We all knew from the get-go that the air was contaminated, but we had a job to do so we kept on working,” said Alles. “Senator Clinton was at the forefront over dealing with it, she showed herself to be a fighter” (Bernstein and Pilkington 2016). In the days and weeks after the attacks, Hillary along with Schumer would personally lobby President George W. Bush for funds to help the city rebuild. Problems lingered for New York residents well past the immediate carnage of September 11, including health problems caused by the debris and toxic air that filled downtown; many of the victims who survived the attacks were left with long-term injuries. By the time the cleanup at Ground Zero officially ended in May 2002, thousands of workers had moved more than 108,000 truckloads—approximately 1.8 million tons—of rubble to a Staten Island landfill; and many of those of workers would develop serious health problems and die in the years to follow. “To this day we’re still losing officers each and every year from the effects of 9/11,” NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan told ABC News in 2018 (Monahan 2018). Though the Bush administration in the aftermath of the attacks repeatedly told New Yorkers that the air above Ground Zero and the area surrounding it was safe, Hillary thought otherwise. Having declared 9/11 to be an



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attack on all Americans during her visit to Ground Zero, Hillary soon found that the national response was not entirely united or favorable to her constituents, who were struggling to recover. Christine Todd Whitman, then head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), insisted that the air was safe even as early as three days after the towers collapsed, as did the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, despite worries in his office that the city might face thousands of liability claims. In contrast to these high-level denials, Hillary was one of the most powerful voices warning of an impending health crisis. Then in 2003, she learned that the Bush administration had instructed the EPA to lie about the air quality, even while officials suspected from the beginning that it likely was toxic, filled with asbestos, cement and glass dust, heavy metals, fuels, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are highly toxic, man-made industrial compounds. She was furious and demanded that the administration do more to help those suffering the long-term and sometimes fatal consequences of breathing the toxic air. In the weeks after the attacks, Hillary worked with Schumer and others to secure $12 million in federal funds for a pilot health screening program at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital, which aided nine thousand 9/11 cleanup workers. Philip Landrigan, who hosted the early medical program at Mount Sinai, largely credits Hillary with the continuing success of the program. In a 2016 interview with WNYC News, he recalled, “She was angry at the Washington political leaders who would come to Ground Zero, have photos taken and then go back to DC and do nothing” (Bernstein and Pilkington 2016). Throughout her time in the Senate, Hillary continued to secure funding for the city to rebuild and increased funding for 9/11 survivors, first responders, and cleanup workers. “The heartbreak of it was almost too much for her,” recalled Bill Clinton about Hillary’s work with the New York Congressional delegation to ensure national support for her constituents. “She’s tough, but she’s also incredibly human” (Bernstein and Pilkington 2016). Hillary’s schedule while in the Senate did not allow time for much outside of her work. She spent weeknights and some weekends at the large home on Whitehaven Street NW, near the Naval Observatory, in Washington that the Clintons purchased for nearly $3 million in advance money from her book deal with Simon & Schuster. According to a January 2002 profile in the Washington Post: “A small security detail, which includes both Secret Service agents and Capitol police, drives her to work each morning around 8:30. She usually holds a conference call with staff on the ride in” (Harris 2002). Hillary regularly worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days, six or even seven days a week. “In her heart of hearts, she’s a policy wonk, and she loves going to and from committee meetings,” Patti Solis Doyle, who had worked for Hillary for ten years, told the Post. “She seems really happy” (Harris 2002). Unlike when she was first lady, reporters covering her work as a senator

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mostly asked Hillary questions about substantive issues, “rather than about her marriage or her hair or her legal controversies” (Harris 2002). And Hillary took pride in proving to doubters that she was content to be a working senator, not a diva, not a star. As the New York Times pointed out in a December 2001 profile, “For the first eight months of her tenure, [Hillary] consistently turned down invitations to prattle away on the Sunday morning talk shows. She said no to CNN, no to Tim Russert. Then came September 11, and she started saying yes” (Bruni 2001). But even then, it was not about her visibility or her ego. “It was not only appropriate now; it was mandatory, because getting help for New York meant broadcasting the city’s horror to the rest of the country” (Bruni 2001). As a senator from New York, it was her job to draw attention to her constituents’ needs and to pressure the federal government for resources and funding to help address them. By most accounts, she was effective at her job and widely respected by her fellow senators for her work ethic and congeniality. Shortly into her Senate tenure, Hillary began using her and Bill’s Washington home to host fundraising events for Democrats, with people paying as much as $25,000 apiece to attend. “This established her as probably the party’s second most potent draw for donors—her husband being its first,” according to the Times. “She raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee” (Bruni 2001). (And for Hillpac, her own political action committee, she amassed a sum estimated to exceed $1 million in just its first year.) Besides hosting fundraisers, Hillary largely avoided after-hours socializing in Washington, and Bill spent most of his time in New York, setting up new offices in Harlem for his foundation and writing his memoir. During the first year, they would see each other when their schedules coincided. One of the few semisocial commitments that Hillary kept was the exclusive Senate prayer group that she was invited to join. Hillary had taken part in a Washington women’s prayer group as first lady that included a number of senators’ wives. The invitation to now join many of her most conservative male colleagues must have felt like a vindication of her genuine religiosity by some of her toughest former critics. As Bernstein writes of her time in the White House, “Not surprisingly to those who knew her best, and without calling any public attention to it, Hillary turned to prayer under duress”; then she “would later be accused of cynically becoming religious and adopting more traditional values for the purpose of political advancement after her election to the Senate” (Bernstein 2007). For all of her work to win over or at least neutralize her and her husband’s critics on Capitol Hill, Hillary was still a polarizing figure for the country at large. And in New York, she was still not as well received as senior Senator Chuck Schumer. A state poll in early October 2001 showed his job approval rating at 69 percent, ten points above hers. Meanwhile, a higher percentage of



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New York voters had a favorable impression of Schumer than of Hillary as a person, and a higher percentage had an unfavorable impression of her than of him. Although Hillary’s political following was narrower, it was deeper than Schumer’s in New York: “she taps especially fervent support among women, minorities and party activists. He works a broader, more centrist spectrum,” as the New York Times explained in its December 2001 profile (Bruni 2001). Still, during her tenure, Hillary attempted to address a number of issues that she believed would prove benefi- Hillary Clinton served as a United States senator cial for a majority of New representing the state of New York from 2001–2009. Yorkers, not just for her die- In 2009, Clinton became the secretary of state in the hard supporters: she worked Barack Obama administration. (U.S. Senate) to create economic development opportunities for her constituents; increased access to health care and education; energy independence through development of alternative fuel and energy resources; and security at home and abroad. She won support for legislation to clean up industrial pollution, for economic development, to ensure the safety of children’s medicine, and to repair and modernize schools. On October 10, 2002, the Senate voted in favor of authorization for President George W. Bush to use military force against Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein. Debate in the House and then Senate on the measure was heated. Many Democrats were concerned that the authorization gave Bush too much leeway to launch an aggressive war. They wanted the administration to pursue more multilateral diplomacy through the United Nations Security Council. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman pointed out on NPR’s Washington Week days after the vote, many Americans were unclear about why the United States might need to declare war on Iraq. Unlike the war underway in Afghanistan to topple a regime that was known to harbor Al-Qaeda members and the group’s mastermind, Osama Bin Laden, any immediate threat Iraq posed for the United States was seen as vague. For her part, Hillary voted to support authorization based on her

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belief that it was necessary for the president to have the power to declare war in order to more effectively negotiate with Hussein to allow UN weapons inspectors into Iraq. Her speech on the Senate floor the day of the vote made it clear that she wanted the country to appear united behind Bush in his attempts to negotiate with Iraq or to declare war if he must. Years later, as it became apparent to many Americans that the invasion launched by Bush in Iraq was becoming a painful quandary, Hillary, as well as other Democrats who voted for the authorization of force, were called to defend their decisions. By her campaign for reelection to the Senate in 2006, Hillary repeatedly stated that Bush had “misused” the authority Congress gave him. She claimed that rather than believing the United States would be going straight to war with Hussein, she had cast her vote after assurances from the White House that Bush would do whatever was necessary to get UN inspectors back into Iraq to determine if the country was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). (No proof of an Iraqi cache of WMDs has ever been found, but more than four thousand five hundred American soldiers have died in the Iraq war, with approximately five thousand still stationed in the country as of January 2020.) At the start of the 108th Congress in January 2003, Hillary left the Budget Committee and became the first New Yorker ever appointed to serve on

Senators Hillary Clinton and Jack Reed visit Kirkuk Air Base in Iraq on November 29, 2003. (Department of Defense)



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the Senate Armed Services Committee. Bernstein points out that appointment to the coveted committee is highly unusual for a freshman senator. For a profile in the New Yorker in October 2003, reporter Elizabeth Colbert asked Hillary why she wanted to be assigned to the committee. “I concluded that the war on terrorism is a long-term challenge, and that it will be important to understand what our military response will be and to satisfy myself we’re as well defended as we need to be,” answered Hillary. “It’s also clear that this administration has a strategy to starve the federal budget of everything but defense,” she continued. “I think that it’s a mistake to turn our backs on so many of our important domestic and international priorities, but since that is the direction that these deficits and this huge debt load are taking us, I wanted to have some understanding and influence over how that money was going to be spent” (Kolbert 2003). In A Woman in Charge, Bernstein offers another explanation: “It was clear from conversations I had with her advisers that Hillary’s membership on the Armed Services Committee was intended to be the centerpiece of her new credentials for the presidency” (Bernstein 2007). Some of her colleagues, including fellow Democrats, seemed to agree with Bernstein. When Hillary joined the committee, the chairman was Virginia Senator John Warner. In April 2016, he recalled to NPR’s Susan Davis, “She did her homework, and she was wellprepared. When she spoke, she spoke quite intelligently and factually and persuasively” (Davis 2016). As a member of the Armed Services Committee, Hillary partnered with a former Republican foe, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and two other Democrats in a bipartisan effort to extend access to the military’s health-care benefits to members of the National Guard and Reserve. (Before becoming a senator, Graham served in the House, where he was one of the House managers who presented the case against Bill for impeachment to the Senate.) Hillary made two other moves in 2003 that were seen by many observers as strategic for someone with future plans to run for president. In January, after only two years in office, she was selected to chair the Senate’s Democratic Steering and Coordination Committee. The position officially made her part of the Democratic leadership in the Senate, giving her a prominent role in shaping the party message and how it would be communicated to the American public. In June, Simon & Schuster released Hillary’s first memoir, Living History, about her early life and years as first lady. Kolbert notes in her New Yorker profile that Hillary wrote the book—with a team of ghostwriters—nights and weekends, as her schedule in the Senate allowed. “I asked her how she had managed to remember everything she recounts in the book,” Kolbert writes, “whether she had kept some sort of diary she could refer back to. She turned to me and said, matter-of-factly, ‘No. Because it would have been subpoenaed’” (October 2003). The book sold more than 200,000 copies in the first week. Hillary actively promoted her memoir on a

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multicity book tour during her summer recess from the Senate. By the time Hillary won reelection to the Senate in 2006, she had raised $21 million— second only to her husband’s $33 million haul—for Democrats nationwide and made more than a hundred appearances for fellow Democratic candidates. And her election night numbers across the state of New York showed increased support from 2000; she defeated her Republican opponent, John Spencer, with 64 percent of the total vote. On January 20, 2007, in a video on her new campaign website, Hillary announced her candidacy as the Democratic nominee for president—fourteen years to the day after Bill took his oath of office as president, and two years to the day before the next president would be administered the same oath. Seated alone on a sofa in her living room, Hillary talks directly to the camera in the nearly two-minute-long video. “I’m not just starting a campaign, I’m starting a discussion with you,” she says. “After six years of George Bush, it is time to renew the promise of America . . . so let’s talk, let’s chat. Let’s start a dialogue about your ideas and mine, because the conversation in Washington has been just a little one-sided, don’t you think?” (Clinton 2007). The field was crowded in both major parties for the 2008 presidential race. Hillary would be the only woman running for the Democratic nomination alongside Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa; Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico; Dennis Kucinich, congressman from Ohio; John Edwards, former senator from North Carolina; Christopher Todd, senator from Connecticut; Joe Biden, senator from Delaware; Evan Bayh, senator from Indiana; and Barack Obama, senator from Illinois. Hillary, with her name recognition and years in the political spotlight, was considered an early frontrunner along with John Edwards, the party’s candidate for vice president in 2004. During the first three months of the campaign, Hillary raised over $36 million, more than any other Democratic contender; but by the end of June 2007, six months into the campaign, Obama would surpass Hillary’s fundraising pace and remain ahead of her throughout the remainder of the campaign. The Democratic candidates met at Drexel University in Philadelphia for their first debate on October 30. Hillary went into the debate as the frontrunner in public opinion polls, so she knew that her opponents, particularly Obama and Edwards, would come after her. Early in the debate, Obama criticized Hillary’s vote to authorize war against Iraq: “She voted for a war, to authorize sending troops into Iraq, and then later said this was a war for diplomacy. . . . Now, that may be politically savvy, but I don’t think that it offers the clear contrast that we need” (C-Span 2007). Obama, as the freshman senator from Illinois, had voted against the measure in 2002. Several of her opponents, including Obama, Dodd, and Edwards, criticized her for voting too often in line with the Bush administration’s wishes. And when she appeared to give a rambling, unclear answer to a



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question about issuing some type of driver’s license to illegal immigrants, her opponents jumped on her contradictory message. Overall, most of her opponents’ attacks did little damage, and she remained the perceived frontrunner until her surprising third place finish in the January 2008 Iowa caucuses, the first contest of the campaign, behind Obama and Edwards. Less than a week later, Hillary won the New Hampshire primary by 3 percent, where many pundits attributed her success to rallying the women’s vote. On January 30, the Democratic field thinned to just Hillary and Obama, as Edwards announced his withdrawal from the race “so that history can blaze its path” (Bosman and Zernike 2008). On Super Tuesday, February 5, twenty-four states and the U.S. territory of Samoa held Democratic primaries, but the results proved inconclusive: Hillary won more electoral votes, but Obama won the popular vote in more states. The next weekend, Obama swept all five primary contests to open up an electoral count lead. Hillary would lose eleven more state contests during the month of February, with pundits beginning to doubt her ability to bounce back. “The truth is Obama has momentum,” Jim Vandehei of Politico told NPR on February 11. “The popular vote and delegate count may be too close to call, but Obama has been winning states.” Finally, on March 4, Clinton got some positive news: “The Senator from New York won three of four March 4 primaries, including two big wins in Ohio and Texas—must wins for her,” reported NPR’s Mara Liiason (Liiason 2008). That same day, Obama won the primary in Vermont and continued to hold a lead in the overall race for convention delegates. But Hillary was able to stop his winning streak at twelve contests “and put an emphatic end to the talk that she might pull out of the race” (Liiason 2008). For the next three months, Hillary and Obama would fiercely compete for delegates across the country. Hillary’s victory in Pennsylvania on April 22 bolstered her argument that Obama would have trouble winning white, blue-collar votes in important battleground states against the presumptive Republican candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona. On May 8, Hillary won by her largest margin yet over Obama in Kentucky, but he won in Oregon the same night, which gave him a majority of all the delegates available in the country’s primaries and caucuses. His campaign then began pressing the party’s superdelegates to commit their support even before the final primary contests on June 3. In his nomination victory speech that night, Obama seemed to pivot away from Hillary as his rival; instead he clearly began to look ahead at the general election contest against McCain. Obama even praised Hillary for her campaign and its significance: “We’ve had our disagreements during this campaign, but we all admire her courage and her commitment and her perseverance. And no matter how this primary ends, Senator Clinton has shattered myths and broken barriers and changed the America in which my daughters and your

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daughters will come of age, and for that we are grateful to her” (Parker 2008). On June 7, 2008, before a crowd of supporters in Washington, D.C., Hillary ended her bid for the presidency. In her 2014 memoir Hard Choices, Hillary describes the atmosphere at the event as “a bit like a wake, charged with sadness and anger to be sure, but also with pride and even love” (Clinton 2014). She admits that delivering her concession speech was difficult. Of the approximately 37 million Democrats who participated in the 2008 primary season, roughly 18 million had supported Hillary. She did not reach the historic milestone of becoming the first female candidate for president by one of the major parties, but she had been a serious contender. “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it has about 18 million cracks in it and the light is shining through like never before,” she told the crowd. Then, she asked her supporters to unite the Democratic Party and elect Obama in the general election. “Today as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won, the extraordinary race he has run and I throw my full support behind him—and I ask all of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me” (Clinton 2014). Throughout the primary season contest between Hillary and Obama, he had successfully portrayed himself as the real agent of change, much as Bill Clinton had done in 1992. By early 2008 the U.S. economy was quickly deteriorating as jobless claims rose along with home foreclosures. Many Americans were tired of the human toll and expense of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And though Hillary could tout her experience in Washington and her firsthand knowledge of the ways the government could help people, Obama’s message of generational change and his calm, cool demeanor proved more appealing to voters. Several weeks after her concession speech, Hillary met Obama for their first joint campaign appearance in Unity, New Hampshire. A few days later, as Hillary recalls, Obama and Bill had a long phone conversation to smooth over some of the tensions from the primaries, and the men agreed to campaign together as well. At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, in August, Obama asked Hillary to formally nominate him during a primetime televised speech. That night, Chelsea introduced her mom, who devoted her speech to encouraging party unity in the face of a shared opponent. “Whether you voted for me, or you voted for Barack. . . . We are on the same team, and none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines. This is a fight for the future,” Hillary told the crowd. “Barack Obama is my candidate. And he must be our president” (Clinton 2008). Although she thought her role in the convention would end with her speech, the Obama campaign approached her about coming back the following day to interrupt the roll call of the states and move for Obama’s immediate nomination as the party candidate. It seemed that some of Hillary’s delegates still wanted



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to vote for her in the roll call. She agreed that such a spectacle on national television would be divisive. The Obama campaign kept her appearance a surprise until she appeared just as New York was called upon to announce its votes. She moved to suspend the roll call and nominate Obama by acclaim; the crowd loudly expressed its approval. Come election day in November, Barack Obama would make history as the first Black man elected to be president of the United States. For her part, Hillary looked forward to returning to the Senate to continue advocating for the people of New York. She truly enjoyed studying policy, and being her own boss, with her own agenda. Still, within days after the election, the media began reporting rumors that Obama wanted Hillary to serve in his cabinet. Bill thought the rumors were likely true, as did several people on Hillary’s staff. On November 13, Hillary flew to Chicago to meet with Obama at his transition team offices. Once the two were alone in a sparsely furnished conference room, Obama skipped the small talk and asked her to be his secretary of state. Hillary claims she was “floored” by the offer and asked if he had considered a number of more seasoned diplomats (Clinton 2014). Obama explained that he would likely have to focus most of his attention on the economy, so he needed someone he knew could hold their ground on the international stage. Hillary tried to decline the offer, but Obama would not take no for an answer; they agreed that she would think about it. Late on November 20, the two spoke again by phone. Hillary had been consulting with her family, some of her colleagues in the Senate, and trusted others who knew both her and the president-elect for advice. Most of them thought she should accept the job offer, but she still was not ready to say yes that night on the phone. Overnight, she kept thinking about the idea of a call to service. “When your president asks you to serve, you should say yes,” she writes in Hard Choices. “As much as I loved my work in the Senate and believed I had more to contribute there, he said he needed me” (Clinton 2014). In the morning, she called Obama and accepted his offer. Hillary resigned from the Senate in January 2009 to become the sixtyseventh U.S. secretary of state. According to David Hawkings at Roll Call, who analyzed all of Hillary’s votes while a senator, “the two thousand three hundred and sixty-four roll call votes she cast between 2001 and 2008 reflect a center-left and slightly hawkish ideology” (Hawkings 2016). He points out that while “she voted with today’s Democratic mainstream far more often than not, [Hillary] strayed from party orthodoxy just frequently enough to create space on her liberal flank” (Hawkings 2016). Hillary’s time in the Senate exactly overlapped with George W. Bush’s term in the White House, and Hawkings notes that she voted in support of the president 252 times and opposed his wishes 259 times; in other words, “she supported the Republican president forty-nine percent of the time,” which

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was similar to many of her Democratic colleagues (Hawkings 2016). On a more personal note, Bernstein writes in A Woman in Charge that after Hillary’s election to the Senate, much of the anger and unhappiness White House staffers had noted in her seemed to dissipate. “Thereafter, for the first time since her wedding day, she began to eclipse and succeed in the public consciousness—and the Democratic Party—the dominating presence of her husband. It was her turn” (Bernstein 2007). And it was still her turn as she left the Senate for higher ground at the start of 2009.

9 Secretary of State

If you lose, you go forward and figure out how to continue helping, how to make a contribution. And so, when the president asked me to be Secretary of State, I was very surprised, very honored, and decided that I wanted to both serve my country and my president. —Hillary Rodham Clinton on Dahsyat (Indonesian talk show), Jakarta, 2009 On December 1, 2000, at a press conference in Chicago, President-elect Barack Obama formally announced Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as his choice for secretary of state: She is an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who knows many of the world’s leaders, who will command respect in every capital, and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world. Hillary’s appointment is a sign to friend and foe of the seriousness of my commitment to renew American diplomacy and restore our alliances. (Associated Press, July 5, 2015)

When prodded by reporters for more details on how he chose Hillary for the most senior position in his cabinet (and fourth in line to the presidency), Obama responded, “It was not a lightbulb moment. I have always admired Senator Clinton.” He continued, “I extended her the offer, and she accepted. I know that’s not as juicy a story as you were hoping for, but—but 141

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that’s all you’re going to get” (Baker 2008). Hillary’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 13 lasted for five hours. Eight days later, the full Senate voted ninety-four to two to confirm her appointment, and that afternoon she was sworn in during a private ceremony in her Senate office with her husband holding the Bible. The next day, she entered the State Department building in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington to a rousing welcome by department staff crowded into the lobby. After a few greetings to her assembled colleagues, she headed up to her new office on the seventh floor. The suite is known internally as “Mahogany Row” for its distinct woodwork and features a hallway lined with portraits of past secretaries of state. Once at her desk in her private office, Hillary opened the letter left there for her by Condoleezza Rice, her Republican predecessor. Rice wrote that she was confident she was leaving the department in good hands and told Hillary, “You have the most important qualification for this job—you love this country deeply” (Clinton 2014). From the time Obama first offered Hillary the job as secretary of state, he seemed determined to put the rivalry of the primary campaign behind them. Hillary recalls that once she accepted his offer, Obama said, “Contrary to reports, I think we can become good friends” (Clinton 2014). And she points out that despite her millions of miles of official travel to more than one hundred countries, during her four years at the State Department she would be at the White House more than seven hundred times. In November 2011, Time would note, “[Hillary]’s voice is heard: she meets weekly with Obama one on one and also weekly with his National Security Adviser and Secretary of Defense. And in daily, formal National Security Secretary of State Hillary Clinton congratulates Council meetings, she makes President Barack Obama on the House vote to her arguments” (Calabresi pass health care reform on March 22, 2010. (The 2011). When they first took office, both Obama and White House)



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Hillary believed that the aggressiveness of the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism” and foreign policy in general had damaged America’s standing internationally, and they were both committed to rebuilding the country’s reputation in terms of promoting cooperation, human rights, and economic development. Still, they would not always see eye to eye on strategy, and the Obama White House would be known to limit the State Department’s agency at times. On February 13, 2009, Hillary delivered her first official speech as secretary of state at the Asia Society in New York City, during which she discussed two of her early initiatives. First, she talked about the goal of her upcoming trip to four Asian countries: “I hope to signal that we need strong partners across the Pacific” (Clinton 2009). As the Atlantic that month noted, “The itinerary for Clinton’s first overseas trip as Secretary of State signals that Asia is the strategic focal point of the new century. . . . Asian economies have been dramatically expanding since the 1970s—no surprise there. But what is less widely recognized is their equally dramatic military expansion” (Kaplan 2009). Indeed, both Hillary and Obama saw new importance in reaching across the Pacific Ocean for allies, the same way the United States had historically reached across the Atlantic. In her speech, Hillary also said that “the U.S. is committed to a new era of diplomacy and development in which we will use ‘smart power’ to work with historic allies and emerging nations to find regional and global solutions” (Clinton 2009). Smart power would become an important buzzword for her approach to foreign policy in the years ahead. As she explains in her memoirs, the concept of smart power was not new to Washington in 2009, but her take on it was slightly different than others’: “for me, smart power meant choosing the right combination of tools—diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal and cultural—for each situation” (Clinton 2014). In other words, under her helm, she wanted the State Department to use every resource available including news media, development aid, and public-private collaboration to protect and advance U.S. interests abroad in ways America’s military power could not. For example, she would promote the development of public-private partnerships in particular to garner progress on the ground for women around the world. Just two days after her Asia Society speech, in which she talked about her desire to listen to allies across the Pacific, Hillary embarked on her first official trip as secretary of state: from February 15 to 22, she would visit Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and China. As CNN noted on Hillary’s first day of travel, the trip represented “a departure from a diplomatic tradition under which the first overseas trip by the secretary of state in a new administration is to Europe” (Dougherty 2009). It was a calculated departure by Hillary, who believed that the United States needed to do more “to help shape the future of Asia” and manage America’s “increasingly complex

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relationship with China.” As she writes in Hard Choices, she saw her task as reasserting American power in the Pacific “without sparking an unnecessary confrontation with China” (Clinton 2014). Japan and South Korea were already strong U.S. allies worthy of a high-profile visit, and she hoped that her stop in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world and the fourth most populous one, plus the home to the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations (ASEAN), would signal U.S. interest in a closer relationship. Finally, strategic engagement with China was in the economic and national security interests of the United States, so Hillary wanted to start a meaningful dialogue with the Chinese government as soon as possible. Though friendly faces and enthusiastic crowds could be expected to greet the new secretary of state in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, Hillary knew that the rounds of welcome visits she was scheduled to make in China would likely offer the first real taste of the challenges awaiting in her new job. According to Hillary, the Asia Society’s China scholar Orville Schell recommended she incorporate an ancient Chinese proverb from The Art of War, largely considered the best single book ever written on the subject, into her first official speech. The proverb roughly translates into English: “When you are in a common boat, cross the river in peace together” (it refers to soldiers from two warring states who find themselves together trying to cross a wide river during a storm). Hillary took his advice and notes that several Chinese officials cited her use of the proverb during her subsequent trip to China (Clinton 2014). In an effort to explore such common cause with her hosts during her visit to China, Hillary toured the Taiyanggong Thermal Power Plant, a clean thermal power plant built with General Electric and Chinese technology. The Taiyanggong plant, according to The Huffington Post, was “a one-year-old gas-fired power plant that produces both electricity and steam with half the emissions and a third the water usage of an equivalent Chinese coal-fired plant” (Pasternack 2009). Hillary’s tour of the plant near the end of her Asia trip allowed her to steer the focus of her visit to climate change, an issue that some China experts believed could “give relations between the countries fresh energy,” according to the New York Times (Landler 2009). Hillary was accompanied by Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern, who pointed out that the United States and China account for 40 percent of the world’s emissions. Of the Taiyanggong plant, Stern said, “This is exactly the kind of thing the U.S. and China should do more together” (Landler 2009). Overall, Hillary’s Asia trip was considered a success; she had signaled the United States’ “pivot” toward an intensified focus on the region and made positive initial contacts with her counterparts in key countries. The Economist in February 2009 described Hillary’s Asia tour as “a well-received first trip abroad as secretary of state, listening not lecturing” (“Hillary Says Hello to Asia” 2009).



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The month after Hillary’s Asia trip, North Korean border guards chased a crew of American journalists along the border between China and North Korea and ultimately arrested two female journalists at gunpoint, while their guide and producer were able to escape. The crew worked for San Francisco–based Current TV, founded by former Vice President Al Gore, and were at the border to document stories of North Korean women sold into human trafficking and the sex trade. The crew and their guide traversed the iced-over Tumen River from China to the North Korean border and back. The North Korean guards then appeared with their guns drawn; they arrested and dragged the two female journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, both in their thirties, back to North Korean soil. In June, the women were sentenced to twelve years of hard labor in a North Korean prison camp. Once the Obama administration learned that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il would only release the prisoners if he received a personal visit and apology from a high-ranking U.S. official, Hillary discussed with the president whom the United States might send: maybe former Vice President Al Gore or former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The New York Times reported that “North Korea signaled its desire to have [former President] Clinton act as a special envoy in conversations with Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee, who relayed the message to their families in the middle of July, according to a senior administration official” (Landler and Baker 2009). The families passed the message to Gore, who notified the administration and called Bill to personally ask him to undertake the trip and negotiate the release of the women. With the blessing of the Obama administration, Bill secretly flew to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang on August 4. Twenty hours later, Bill, Lee, and Ling boarded a private jet headed to Los Angeles. President Obama had contacted the women’s families but withheld any public comment until the released journalists were safely on their way home with Bill. The New York Times quoted a “former official” that when Bill was president, he had sent Kim a letter of condolence on the death of his father, Kim Il-sung, and so for Kim, freeing the women was a “reciprocal humanitarian gesture” (Landler and Baker 2009). The Obama administration made it clear that Bill undertook the trip as a private citizen and thereby did not carry any official message from the president to Kim. Still, the New York Times aptly noted, “The riveting tableau of a former president, jetting into a diplomatic crisis while his wife was embarking on a tour of Africa in her role as the nation’s chief diplomat, underscored the unique and enduring role of the Clintons, even in the Obama era” (Landler and Baker 2009). The story was even more tantalizing in light of the fact that the North Koreans had conducted an underground nuclear test in May; after which Hillary, on behalf of the United States, successfully lobbied the UN Security Council to impose sanctions against North Korea. In response to comments Hillary made about their

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nuclear testing just two weeks before her husband’s secret visit with Kim, the North Korean Foreign Ministry had called Hillary “a funny lady” who was neither intelligent nor a skilled diplomat (Clinton 2014). The U.S. media loved that the backdrop of Bill’s secret trip included North Korea’s insults of his wife. Hillary would have another run-in with the menace of North Korea that would make front-page news at home just one year later. After a South Korean navy ship was hit by a torpedo and sank in the Yellow Sea killing forty-six crewmen in March 2010, a UN investigation found that North Korea was likely to blame. So, in July 2010, Hillary and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates traveled to South Korea to reaffirm U.S. support for its ally against such aggression. While there, they visited the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which had separated North and South Korea since 1953. (The DMZ runs two and half miles wide along the thirty-eighth parallel and is the most heavily fortified border in the world.) Hillary and Gates walked through a small building that straddles the border and is used to host negotiations between the two sides. “As we walked through, a North Korean soldier stood just inches away, on the other side of a window, staring stonily at us,” recalls Hillary. “I stayed focused on our briefer while Bob smiled merrily” (Clinton 2014). A photographer traveling with them captured the surreal image of the soldier peering at the U.S. officials from behind the glass—just inches yet a world away. The photo ran on the front page of the New York Times on July 21, 2010. During her first official visit to China, one of the senior officials with whom Hillary met was Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. Hillary recalls that during their first conversation, he brought up the fact that the Chinese were hosting a grand international exposition, in the tradition of the pre–World War II world’s fairs, and that the United States was one of only two countries not scheduled to participate. The Chinese saw the American absence as a sign of disrespect and of America’s decline; the only other country not participating was Andorra, one of Europe’s smallest states located in the mountains between France and Spain. Hillary pledged to Yang that she would make sure the United States was represented; however, she soon learned that the USA Pavilion lacked funding or motivation—Congress imposes limits on world’s fair spending, and the Bush administration had no interest in private fundraising for the expo (Clinton 2014). In May 2010, when Hillary toured the completed USA Pavilion, the New York Times observed: “By all accounts, the United States would have been a no-show at the Shanghai Expo had Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton not opened her Rolodex and raised about $60 million in private cash to finance a pavilion here” (Landler 2010). Many American critics said the pavilion seemed to be a vehicle for self-promotion by its corporate sponsors; however, as BBC News reported, “…it appears to be a success in China and is one of the most visited at the fair” (Ghattas 2010). While the



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pavilion’s message might have been more about American industry than American ideals, Hillary had kept her promise to Chinese Foreign Minister Yang and could say, “We pulled it off” (Clinton 2014). Meanwhile, throughout 2009 and 2010, “China’s neighbors watched with increasing alarm as Beijing accelerated a naval buildup and asserted its claim to wide swaths of water, islands, and energy reserves,” as Hillary explains (Clinton 2014). Just two months into Obama’s presidency, a U.S. surveillance ship was shadowed and aggressively harassed by five Chinese vessels in international waters of the South China Sea. A pair of the Chinese ships stopped “directly ahead of USNS Impeccable, forcing Impeccable to conduct an emergency ‘all stop’ in order to avoid collision,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “They dropped pieces of wood in the water directly in front of Impeccable’s path” (“U.S. Accuses China of Harassing Naval Vessel” 2009). Similar confrontations would follow between Chinese ships and vessels from Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines. While in Beijing in May 2010 for the joint Chinese-U.S. Strategic Economic Dialogue, Hillary could tell that territorial claims in the South China Sea were a priority of the Chinese government. Something needed to be done to push back against such Chinese aggression. Two months later, Hillary traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam, for the ASEAN regional forum, where she notes that the South China Sea was the topic on everyone’s mind. “Yet China kept insisting this wasn’t an appropriate topic for a regional conference,” she writes in Hard Choices (Clinton 2014). China preferred to deal with its neighbors in one-on-one settings, but at the ASEAN session on July 23, Vietnam brought up the South China Sea, and soon other countries’ ministers took turns adding their concerns. Together, they called for a multilateral approach. Hillary then weighed in, saying that the United States would not take sides in any dispute but supported the proposed multilateral approach. In addition, the United States was prepared to facilitate a process whereby all of the regional players could develop “a code of conduct” that would prevent future conflicts (Clinton 2014). Of course, this dramatic confrontation by China’s neighbors had been choreographed the day before by Hillary and her team. And though the confrontation did not resolve the tensions in the South China Sea, she notes that diplomats in the region would refer to the meeting “as a tipping point, both in terms of American leadership in Asia and in the pushback against Chinese overreach” (Clinton 2014). While tensions brewed in Asia over Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, another international hotspot that demanded the Obama administration’s attention throughout 2009 was Afghanistan. When Obama took office in January, a request for more troops awaited him from U.S. military brass. U.S. troops had been in Afghanistan since shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by the terrorist network known as

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Al-Qaeda, which was given refuge by the Taliban government in Afghanistan. As Obama would recount in a speech at West Point in December 2009, “We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly three thousand people. . . . For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked Article 5—the commitment that says an attack on one member nation is an attack on all,” Obama recalled. “And the United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks” (Obama 2009). In 2009, the question within the Obama administration had become whether to approve the request for more troops, a “surge” of 30,000 American soldiers, to turn the tide in Afghanistan. The biggest internal critics of a surge were Vice President Joe Biden and Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke. By late November, having recently traveled to Afghanistan to visit with President Hamid Karzai (the country’s first democratically elected president in 2001 after the Taliban were pushed out of power), who had just won reelection, Hillary threw her support behind the military surge. On November 23, 2009, Obama listened to final arguments from his top advisers in the White House Situation Room; he then resolved to approve the surge and announce it in a speech planned at West Point. During his West Point speech, Hillary recalls the president reaffirmed “the more focused mission in Afghanistan: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He also surprised her by announcing that “after eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home” (Clinton 2014). Though she agreed with a definitive timeline for the surge, Hillary thought that Obama’s time frame would prove too short. In hindsight, most pundits seem to rate results of the 2010 Afghanistan surge as a mixed bag with definite progress made in disrupting the Taliban in their former southern strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces, but in the east, new influxes of fighters and weapons from Pakistan appeared to worsen the situation on the ground. One week after Obama’s announcement, Richard Holbrooke, who had been key in getting Pakistan to see that it needed to partner with the United States against the Taliban, was in a meeting in Hillary’s State Department office when he suddenly showed signs of physical distress and was rushed to the hospital. Surgeons attempted to repair a tear in his aorta; and the following day, a second surgery was required to stop continued bleeding. Holbrooke died two days later in the hospital surrounded by his family; he was sixty-nine years old. Hillary, Bill, and Obama spoke at his memorial service in January at Washington’s Kennedy Center. Unfortunately, for all of Holbrooke’s work to bring the Karzai government and the Taliban to the negotiating table and to involve Pakistan as a partner in facilitating such peace, by 2013 all inroads to negotiations were closed by the Taliban (Clinton 2014). Of



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course, the U.S. assassination of Osama bin Laden at his compound in Pakistan on May 11, 2011, without prior warning to the Pakistani government, did not help U.S. relations with the Taliban or the Pakistanis. Hillary returned home from the 2010 ASEAN conference in Vietnam shortly before what she calls “one of the most important events in my life” (Clinton 2014): Chelsea’s wedding. On Saturday, July 31, Chelsea married Marc Mezvinsky in front of four hundred friends and family members in an outdoor ceremony at the Astor Courts Estate, a former home of the early twentieth-century New York socialites Jacob and Ava Astor, in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Chelsea wore a strapless gown with silver beading at the waist and a full, gathered skirt, while the groom wore a black suit and thin tie with a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and a yarmulke. Their interfaith ceremony was conducted by a Jewish rabbi and a Methodist reverend. Guests noted afterward that Bill was visibly emotional when walking his daughter down the aisle and again when the two took to the floor for their first dance to Frank Sinatra’s “The Way You Look Tonight” (“Chelsea Clinton’s Wedding: 14 Facts You Have to Know” 2010). Chelsea and her husband first met as teenagers at a Renaissance Weekend on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, which they attended with their parents. Both of Mezvinsky’s parents served as Democrats in Congress, his mother from Pennsylvania and his father from Iowa; his mother also worked as a correspondent for NBC. Chelsea and Mezvinsky both attended Stanford University and then Oxford for their graduate studies, but they did not start dating until they met again in New York City in 2005. After dating for four years, the couple announced their engagement over Thanksgiving in 2009. Hillary notes that not only did the U.S. press want details about Chelsea’s wedding, but she also fielded questions for months before the event from reporters across the globe (Clinton 2014). In March, antigovernment uprisings in Libya against longtime dictator Colonel Muammar Qaddafi became a focus of attention for many Western countries, including the United States, after Qaddafi used extreme force against the demonstrators. A month earlier, a riot in the Libyan coastal city of Benghazi had been triggered by the arrest of a human rights activist. After Gaddafi’s military forces fired live ammunition at demonstrators, the rebels armed themselves and took control of Benghazi. Unlike the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the conflict in Libya very quickly resembled a civil war. The rebels soon received military training and international backing as many countries in the world welcomed a chance to depose Gaddafi, whom former U.S. president Ronald Reagan called “the mad dog of the Middle East” for his sponsorship of terrorism against the West (Memmott 2011). The UN Security Council unanimously approved an arms embargo against Libya, froze the assets of Gaddafi’s family and officers, and referred his government to the International Criminal Court

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Dissent and Democracy Halfway around the World In 2011, dramatic events in Northern Africa and the Middle East rocked a number of authoritarian regimes and had Americans cheering the spread of democracy. These events would become known as the “Arab Spring” and included popular protests demanding the ouster of longtime autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria. In early January, Hillary traveled to Qatar for an annual regional summit. In her speech there, Hillary spoke bluntly to Arab leaders about the challenges facing the region: “People are . . . profoundly concerned about the trends in many parts of the broader Middle East, and what the future holds. . . . In too many places, in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand” (Clinton 2014). She talked about how the youth, who formed an increasing majority of the region’s population, wanted to see an end to corrupt institutions and a stagnant political order. The next generation was demanding reform to make their governments more effective, more responsive, and more open. Just one day after Hillary spoke of the dangers facing those leaders who would refuse to embrace democratic reforms, one of the region’s longest reigning autocrats, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, was forced to flee his country by citizen rebels. Weeks before, a twenty-six-year-old unemployed street vendor, selling produce to support his family of seven, felt humiliated by Tunisian police officers who harassed him and tried to confiscate his cart. After local officials refused to hear his complaint, he marched to the steps of a government building and set himself on fire. News of this desperate act spread, and within days, uprisings grew across the country, with large groups of protesters demanding reforms to address the unemployment, poverty, food inflation, and political repression that plagued the country. Similar uprisings would begin in Egypt and Yemen roughly one week later.

(ICC) in response to his brutal assault on the protesters. By early March, Western countries lined up to recognize the organization of Libya’s rebel forces. Hillary took part in international and White House discussions about whether the world community needed to step in to keep Gaddafi from slaughtering many of his own citizens. President Obama agreed to commit the United States to military operations only if other countries contributed as well. Hillary and America’s UN Ambassador Susan Rice began working with European diplomats in favor of intervention to work out a plan that then passed the UN Security Council. On March 19, NATO and its Qatari partners began airstrikes to destroy Libya’s air defenses and attack a large column of Libyan troops headed toward Benghazi where Gaddafi had said in a televised message, “there will be no mercy” (Clinton 2014). In Hard Choices, Hillary pushes back against critics who said at the time that the



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Obama administration was “leading from behind”; instead, Hillary asserts that “no one else could have played the role we did, both in terms of military capability to land a decisive first blow against Gaddafi’s forces and the diplomatic capacity to build and hold together a broad coalition” (Clinton 2014). Hillary admits that the military campaign in Libya lasted much longer than expected, with the rebel forces slogging it out to gain ground against Gaddafi’s forces. In late August rebel forces captured the capital of Tripoli forcing Gaddafi and his family to flee. On October 18, with a new transition government at the helm and NTC troops closing in on Gaddafi’s hometown and likely refuge of Sirte, Hillary made a surprise visit to Libya to show U.S. support for the new government and its prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril. Two days later, NTC troops captured Sirte and killed Gaddafi and one of his sons. Still, there would not be peace in Libya for years nor in Syria, the most complicated of the conflicts to emerge from the Arab Spring uprisings. Antigovernment protests broke out in Syria against the authoritarian regime of President Bashar Assad after the arrests of youths in Daraa who wrote anti-Assad graffiti on public walls in March 2011. The teens were arrested and tortured for several days. In response, peaceful protests spread to other cities across Syria, attracting more than 100,000 participants. Like in Libya, the Syrian regime responded with brutal force. Over the summer, several rival opposition groups formed, each with its own rebel brigades, and the Islamic Brotherhood in Iraq (later known as ISIS) secretly sent operatives into Libya. As the rebel groups continued to gain momentum, Assad sent the military to stop them, leading to the outbreak of a full-scale civil war. Aleppo, Syria’s largest city with 4.5 million residents, would become the center of a four-year-long, brutal deadlock between Assad’s forces and rebels. In late January 2012, Hillary attended a special session of the UN Security Council to hear a report by the Arab League about Syria and decide how to respond. In March 2012 under pressure from the UN and the Arab League, Assad agreed to a cease-fire with the rebels and then appeared to accept a settlement plan crafted by Kofi Annan, the UN’s Special Envoy to Syria. But per usual, Assad disregarded his pledges and kept up his violent attacks on rebel-controlled parts of the country, which often included the massacre of innocent civilians. Even as he embraced the idea that the United States needed to consider training and arming rebel troops to turn the tide on the ground in Syria, President Obama did not want to commit any American ground forces. After all, he was the candidate who had won the presidency largely due to his opposition to the war in Iraq. By the time Hillary left the State Department, she notes, “tens of thousands of Syrians had been killed. Millions more had fled. International diplomacy had reached a standstill” (Clinton 2014). Repeated efforts by the United Nations, backed by the United States,

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failed to bring an end to the conflict largely due to Russian and Chinese refusals to agree with any effort at regime change. By 2018, Assad and his forces had retaken control of the country, while more than half of all Syrians became refugees abroad or displaced persons at home. In a dramatic late-night broadcast from the White House East Room on May 2, 2011, President Obama announced: “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children” (Obama 2011). As the president explained in his address, after years of work by the U.S. intelligence agents and analysts, about a year and half earlier he had been told of a possible lead to bin Laden hiding in a compound deep inside of Pakistan. In March and April, 2011, CIA Director Leon Panetta had assembled a small group of senior officials, including Hillary, to meet with the president for updates and debates on how best to proceed. Hillary recalls in her memoirs that “the president’s top advisors were split on the wisdom of a raid. . . . These were difficult and emotional discussions” (Clinton 2014). Much of the hesitation about conducting a raid inside Pakistan centered on whether the United States should alert Pakistani intelligence even if the United States was not completely sure all Pakistani officials would keep such plans secret from AlQaeda. Would an unannounced raid hinder future relations with the Pakistani government? On April 28, the president convened his advisors one last time and asked for their final recommendations. “I concluded the chance to get Bin Laden was worth it,” Hillary recalls. “Our relationship with Pakistan was strictly transactional, based on mutual interest, not trust. It would survive. I thought we should go for it” (Clinton 2014). The night before the planned raid, Hillary attended a wedding. Then just after noon on May 1, she headed to the White House to join other members of the national security team in the Situation Room. At 2:30 p.m. in Washington, two Black Hawk helicopters carrying Navy SEALS departed eastern Afghanistan and headed toward Abbattabad, Pakistan. As Hillary and the others watched scratchy images on the Situation Room video monitors, the two helicopters approached the suspected compound—one helicopter accidentally hit its tail on one of the compound walls while the other was forced to land just outside. Still, the Navy SEALS soon disembarked and entered the compound’s main building. Back in Washington, the officials in the Situation Room could not see what was happening inside the compound for about fifteen minutes. Then word came that the SEALS had found bin Laden, a firefight had ensued and he was killed. The SEALS blew up the disabled Black Hawk and then loaded themselves and Bin Laden’s body onto a backup helicopter, which ushered them back to the U.S. base in Afghanistan. In Hard Choices, Hillary describes how the small group



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that had accompanied the president to the East Room to make his public remarks were heading back across the White House property when they saw a huge crowd gathered outside the gates “in a spontaneous celebration, waving American flags, chanting, ‘USA! USA!’ . . . they were expressing the emotional release our entire country felt after so many years waiting for justice” (Clinton 2014). In December 2011 Hillary made a historic trip to Burma, becoming only the second secretary of state to ever visit the country also known as Myanmar. Upon her arrival, Hillary was quoted by BBC News as saying that the purpose of her trip was to “determine for myself and on behalf of our government what is the intention of the current government with respect to continuing reforms, both political and economic” (Clinton 2014). The preface to Hillary’s trip was the announcement of a number of surprising democratic reforms by Burma’s president, Thein Sein. Those reforms included the release of dozens of political prisoners—most notably Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who had been on house arrest—and relaxation of a number of media restrictions. When President Obama announced Hillary’s trip to Burma, he referred to Sein’s reforms as “flickers of progress.” Still some critics worried that the administration was moving too quickly to reward a notoriously repressive regime. Hillary’s schedule included meetings with President Sein and members of the Burmese Parliament, in which she promised to push them on their loathsome human rights record. Still, perhaps most remarkable were her two scheduled visits with Suu Kyi, who had recently announced that she would seek a seat in Parliament in the next election. While in the country, Hillary would also meet with representatives from civil society and ethnic communities and hold a press conference attended by Burmese as well as international reporters. Although much of her focus in Burma was on promoting democracy, Hillary’s trip was also about the U.S. “pivot” toward increasing its influence and building new alliances in Asia to counter China’s influence in the region. In September 2012 Hillary announced: “In recognition of the continued progress toward reform and in response to requests from both the government and the opposition, the United States is taking the next step in normalizing our commercial relationship” with Burma (Clinton 2014). Her comments were reported by the Guardian during a meeting between Hillary and Burmese president Thein Sein on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. (The week before, Suu Kyi had voiced support for the step, saying that her country should not depend on the United States to keep up its momentum for democracy; the change should come from inside.) Hillary also offered President Sein U.S. help in his country’s efforts toward peace with its ethnic minorities and in clearing undetonated mines from its land.

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Some of Hillary’s tensest moments involving diplomacy with China came in April 2012 after Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who is legally blind, escaped house arrest and sought refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Chen, a legal advocate who worked to oppose China’s strict family-planning policies, had been arrested and tried on dubious legal charges by the Chinese government in 2006. After four years in prison, Chen was released only to be basically jailed along with his wife in their farmhouse in China’s rural Shandong Province, complete with internal surveillance cameras, metal sheets over the windows, and armed guards outside. If the Chens were found to be trying to contact the outside world, they would be beaten. So after weeks of planning, on the night of April 22, Chen scaled one of the high walls that the authorities had built around his home, and although he severely injured his foot, he made his way in the dark to a predetermined pickup spot. Once there, he used a smuggled cell phone to call a former English teacher who was part of a network of activists who had been trying to draw attention to Chen’s plight. The teacher collected Chen and at his request, drove him more than three hundred miles to Beijing where they met up with a knot of devoted supporters who helped hide Chen while he recovered from his ordeal. His friends contacted the U.S. Embassy because Chen needed medical attention as well as time to figure out his next moves: he was determined to stay in China and seek a normal life, he did not want to become an exile. Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser who was in China on another matter, determined that Chen’s injury and blindness qualified him for short-term humanitarian assistance in a “good Samaritan way,” a State Department official involved in the internal discussions told the New York Times (Myers and Landler 2012). As Hillary explains in her memoirs, the logistics of helping Chen would be tricky and the diplomacy even trickier. Chinese security forces kept a regular presence around the U.S. Embassy, so Chen could not simply walk in the front door. If they decided to help him, Hillary’s team would need to act quickly; the secretary of state was scheduled to travel to Beijing in just a few days for the annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue along with U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and their Chinese counterparts. On the night of April 25, Hillary led a conference call with her deputies who had been consulting the embassy staff ever since Chen contacted them; they talked through the plan to bring Chen in, and Hillary told her team, “Go get him” (Clinton 2014). While Bob Wang, one of Hillary’s deputies in Beijing, headed out to meet Chen and quietly escort him into the Embassy, another deputy in Washington called the White House to brief Obama’s staff. While there was concern within the administration that the Chinese might be angry enough to cancel the pending summit or worse, Hillary made “a calculated gamble that, as hosts of the upcoming summit, the Chinese had invested at least as much as we had in keeping it



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on track . . . I was willing to bet that Beijing would not blow up the entire relationship over this one incident,” she explains in Hard Choices. “The United States had talked about human rights in China for decades. . . . Now our credibility was on the line. . . . If we didn’t help Chen, it would undermine our position everywhere” (Clinton 2014). As Hillary boarded a plane and flew to Beijing, her staff on the ground opened negotiations with the Chinese government—the good news was that they were willing to talk. But as Hillary recalls, “It was as tense a flight as any I can recall. From the White House the President had sent a clear message: Don’t screw up” (Clinton 2014). By the time Hillary landed in Beijing, a deal had been reached: the Chinese government would bring Chen’s family to be reunited with him, he would be treated at a local hospital for his injuries, and then he would leave the capital to study law at a Chinese university, possibly followed by study in the United States. Once Chen was in the van to transport him to Chaoyang Hospital, Hillary was able to speak to him via cell phone for the first time. That evening, she attended the first official dinner of the Chinese-American summit. Soon, Chen began telling reporters from his hospital bed that he “no longer felt safe” (Myers and Landler 2012). Hillary’s team determined that Chen was getting cold feet about his choice to stay in China, and their Chinese counterparts were becoming enraged. Meanwhile, back at home, Republicans in an election year were criticizing the administration for supposedly forcing Chen to leave the U.S. Embassy, even calling it “a dark day for freedom.” So, while Hillary shuffled between summit meetings and press photo-ops with Geithner and their Chinese counterparts, she and her team reopened talks about Chen’s situation with Chinese officials. Finally, an understanding was reached: “Chen, as a Chinese citizen in good standing, would apply for a visa to the United States, and it would be processed expeditiously by both sides. He could then take his family and begin his studies at New York University” (Clinton 2014). The elephant in the room throughout the summit had now been addressed and its future resolved. On May 19, the Chinese held up their end of the deal: as the New York Times reported, “Chen Guangcheng . . . arrived in the heart of Greenwich Village on Saturday, holding the kind of open-air news conference that he could have never imagined while under virtual house arrest in China.” The Times also noted, “China has a pattern of allowing some especially vocal dissidents to leave the country in order to minimize the impact of their activism at home.” While on the plane to the United States, Chen “looked calm, but his hands shook as he talked about leaving a country he has tried to change from within for years” (Kaplan, Jacobs, and Landler 2012). In July 2012, again as part of the “pivot” toward Asia, Hillary traveled to Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (Clinton 2014). Her visit to Laos,

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though only four hours long, was historic as she became the first secretary of state to visit the communist country since 1955. During her stop in the capital city of Vientiane, Hillary met with the communist government’s prime minister and foreign minister to discuss environmental concerns about a proposed dam project on the Mekong River as well as investment opportunities. She also visited a prosthetics and rehabilitation center supported by USAID, where she spoke with a twenty-year-old man who had lost both of his hands and his eyesight after he picked up a cluster bomb left from the U.S. air raids of Laos during the Vietnam War. Between 1964 and 1975, the U.S. military carried out 580,000 bombing raids over the country as part of a secret operation to cut off supply routes for North Vietnamese forces, making Laos the heaviest bombed place on earth. At the time of Hillary’s visit, approximately 30 percent of the bombs still remained unexploded. Though Congress during the Bush administration had authorized less than $3 million per year toward clearing the unexploded bombs, that authorization tripled to $9 million in 2012 and then grew to $10 million the following year. In 2016, Obama would become the first U.S. president to travel to Laos. During his three-day visit, he would address the people of Laos and pledge that the United States would spend $90 million over three years in a joint effort with the country’s government to clear tens of thousands of unexploded U.S. bombs from the Vietnam War: “From the anguish of war, there came an unlikely bond between our two peoples” (Clinton 2014). The single most contentious event of Hillary’s time as secretary of state, one that would play prominently in the imagination of online conspiracy junkies and Hillary haters for years to come, was the terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic and CIA compounds in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, that resulted in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The loss of Stevens, State Department Information Officer Sean Smith, and CIA officers and former Navy SEALS Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods in the attacks was “a crushing blow” for Hillary. “As Secretary I was the one ultimately responsible for my people’s safety,” she writes in Hard Choices, “and I never felt that responsibility more deeply than I did that day” (Clinton 2014). September 2012 was filled with unrest across the Middle East and Northern Africa as the struggles begun in the Arab Spring were still playing out in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood had risen to power, and in the civil war waging in Syria; plus, Al-Qaeda–linked groups in a number of countries continued to recruit disaffected young Muslim men and threaten U.S. assets in the region. On September 11, arguably one of the most significant days for Americans each year as the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, an angry crowd gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, to protest the internet release a few days earlier of a fourteen-minute video trailer for a movie called Innocence of Muslims



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Benghazi 101 The city of Benghazi lies on the northern coast of Africa, slightly southwest across the Mediterranean Sea from Greece. Founded as early as 631 BCE, Euesperides (as the Greeks called Benghazi) was one of five major centers established in the region by Greek colonists. Over the centuries, the town of Benghazi fell under the control of the Egyptians and then the Romans, the Arabs, and by the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire. Italy seized the three historic regions that today form Libya from the Ottomans in 1912, and Benghazi grew considerably as an Italian colony in the years before World War II. Control of Benghazi changed hands five times between Allied and Axis forces as the North African Campaign of the war raged from 1940 until late 1942. After the Allied forces finally pushed the Italians out of Libya, the country was divided between the French and the British, who controlled Benghazi. In 1951 Libya became an independent state under King Idris al-Sanusi, whose rule ended in 1969 with a bloodless military coup masterminded by twentyseven-year-old Muammar Gaddafi. For more than three decades as dictator of Libya, Colonel Gaddafi had a turbulent relationship with the United States and the United Nations; he only really became a quasi-respectable leader in the eyes of the West during his last seven years or so, after ending his sponsorship of international terrorism and abandoning his efforts to develop nuclear weapons. In early 2011, violent protests against the Gaddafi government—likely inspired by the “Arab Spring” revolts in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia—started in Benghazi and soon spread to other Libyan cities. By the end of the year, rebels killed Gaddafi and key members of his family, which created a power vacuum and launched prolonged civil war and political unrest. Today, Benghazi is Libya’s second largest city and a major seaport.

that demeaned the Islamic prophet Mohammad in many inflammatory ways. Although the U.S. government had nothing to do with the trailer video or the movie, many Muslims obviously blamed the United States for its creation and airing. In the months and years to follow, part of the lingering controversy over what President Obama and Hillary knew about the Benghazi attacks and when would center on early messaging from the administration that the Libyan attacks were the result of an angry protest, purportedly over the same movie trailer, that turned violent, despite claims by several Libyan sources that the attacks were premeditated and no such protest had occurred near the compound. The White House would be slow to label the Benghazi attacks as “terrorism” and to corroborate reports that they were premeditated by a little-known militant group, Ansar al-Sharia, which claimed credit for the attacks even while happening. So what exactly did happen in Benghazi that night?

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Stevens and Smith spent September 11, 2012, at the temporary U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, where Stevens held a series of meetings during the day, including an afternoon meeting with a Turkish diplomat. Stevens had traveled to Benghazi from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli a day earlier with two security officers; so on September 11, there were a total of five Diplomatic Security agents at the compound in addition to Stevens and Smith. Stevens escorted his Turkish visitor to the compound’s front gate once their meeting concluded. Everything seemed calm and normal as Stevens and Smith retired for the night. Then, about forty minutes later, a compound security officer heard loud sounds, gunfire, and explosions in front of the compound. The DS agent in the compound’s tactical operations center immediately activated the alert system within the compound and contacted U.S. security officials at the Tripoli embassy. He also alerted CIA agents stationed nearby at their own, secret compound annex for assistance. Within thirty minutes, the armed attackers gained access to the compound’s main building where DS agent Scott Strickland had moved Stevens and Smith to a fortified safe haven. Once inside, Stevens used a borrowed cell phone to make several calls for local assistance. Meanwhile, the attackers fired into the building and attempted to breach the gate on the safe haven, to no avail. They retreated and set the building on fire while other attackers pinned down the other three DS officers in two separate buildings on the compound. As the main building filled with harsh smoke, Strickland attempted to escape with Stevens and Smith via an emergency exit to the roof; but when he reached the exit, the diplomats were no longer behind him. Strickland reentered the building to search for the men several times; then, nearly overwhelmed by the thick smoke, he made his way to the roof and radioed that Stevens and Smith were missing. The other three DS agents soon were able to get to the main building, where they found Smith dead from apparent smoke inhalation, but there was no sign of Stevens. Meanwhile, the U.S. military worked to position an unarmed drone over Benghazi to provide the CIA team on the ground with real-time intelligence; the drone would take roughly an hour to arrive in position. At about 10:30 p.m., a six-member CIA team arrived from the annex with approximately fifty members of the Libyan 17th of February Brigade, a de facto security force in Benghazi. The team removed Smith’s body and joined the search for Stevens. Within less than an hour, the 17th of February Brigade told the U.S. agents that it could no longer safely hold a perimeter around the compound and withdrew. DS agents made a final search for Stevens and then left with the CIA team for their annex. They encountered heavy gunfire along the streets of Benghazi. About midnight, the CIA annex came under fire in an attack that would last nearly two hours; then the attackers seemed to disperse. A security team from the Embassy



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in Tripoli touched down at the Benghazi airport at 1:30 a.m. and learned that Stevens was still missing. Meanwhile, the Tripoli Embassy received a phone call from an Arabic-speaking source using the same cell phone that Stevens had hours earlier, who said a Westerner had been found in Benghazi and taken to a hospital. Stevens’s body was soon found at Benghazi Hospital, where doctors said he had been brought in by a group of civilians and presumed dead; they had tried to resuscitate him for almost forty minutes. His body was moved to the Benghazi airport to await pickup. Meanwhile, the team from the Tripoli Embassy had finally arranged transportation from the airport into Benghazi under the protection of another local militia, and they headed to the CIA annex. Just after their arrival, the annex sustained three direct hits from mortar fire. The mortar assault lasted only eleven minutes but claimed the lives of CIA agents Doherty and Woods. Once the attack ended, about thirty Americans evacuated the CIA annex grounds and headed for the airport; there they identified the body of Stevens, who presumably, like Smith, died from smoke inhalation. Nearly twelve hours later, a U.S. military aircraft evacuated everyone and the American bodies out of Libya. In the weeks, months, and years after the Benghazi attacks, numerous investigations would be conducted within the U.S. government and by news organizations to determine why the attack had been unanticipated; if security had been too lax; the rescue response too slow; and if the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, or the Department of Defense had been totally forthcoming about what information was known, when it was known, and how the government had responded. Basically, the burning question was twofold: Was the loss of American lives avoidable, and if so, who was to blame? The State Department, as required by law whenever there is a loss of life in the line of duty, appointed an Accountability Review Board to investigate the incident. Eight different Congressional committees also conducted their own investigations into at least some elements of attack and the administration’s response. Hillary herself testified before Congress several times, answering hundreds of questions about the attack and the administration’s culpability, including her testimony before former colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2013 and her eight hours of testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in October 2015. It would not be until June 2016, well into Hillary’s second campaign for president, that the Republican-led House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report on the incident. According to the New York Times, “The 800-page report delivered a broad rebuke of the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department—and the officials who led them—for failing to grasp the acute security risks in Benghazi, and especially for maintaining outposts there that they could not

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protect” (Herszenhorn 2016). It was also highly critical of the State Department–ordered independent investigation as purposely limited and cursory. The Select Committee report did not dispute earlier findings that U.S. military assets in Europe could not have reached the compound in Benghazi in time to prevent the deaths that occurred. And, perhaps most significantly, it did not find evidence of “professional misconduct or dereliction of duty” by any U.S. officials, including Hillary and UN Ambassador Susan Rice, both of whom took a beating from hardline Republicans during Congressional testimonies and in the press for supposedly misleading the American people about the administration’s handling of the attack (Herszenhorn 2016). Many Democrats alleged from the committee’s start that its investigation was specifically intended to damage Hillary’s prospect as the likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. Plus, the length of the investigation, at more than two years—longer than the investigation into the 9/11 attacks, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—and the expense, estimated at more than $7 million in taxpayer funds, fueled stinging criticism from many Americans. And, as the New York Times noted, “The committee made scant mention of procedures put in place since the Benghazi attacks, which fundamentally changed the way American embassies and consulates operate” (Herszenhorn 2016). Those procedures were recommended by her department’s Accountability Review Board in its final report, and as Hillary notes in Hard Choices, “I pledged that I would not leave office until every recommendation was on its way to implementation. By the time I left, we had met that goal” (Clinton 2014). The part of the House Select Committee’s investigation that would most haunt Hillary politically was the finding that she had used a private e-mail service during her time as secretary of state, which would launch a separate investigation not closed until days before the 2016 election. Despite Republican criticism about the Benghazi attack, Hillary could point to the achievement of many of her goals for the State Department as her tenure in office wound down. Abroad, she had worked to broker the marriage of diplomacy and technology by championing efforts for the United States to garner goodwill and progress on the ground for ordinary citizens through support of broadband funding and access projects in developing nations. She also greatly increased the use of social media by State Department employees to further their initiatives and communicate directly with an international audience, in essence bringing the diplomatic core into the modern media age. Hillary successfully led her department to collaborate with nongovernment groups, something of a departure from past practice. She formed joint public-private ventures with countless organizations and funded sixty-seven programs dedicated to the rights of women as a new flank against traditional forms of repression overseas and



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a cost-effective way to promote both security and development. The guiding national security principle of the early Bush administration in 2000– 2001 was that too much international cooperation would weaken the United States, but Hillary’s tactics gained supporters in both parties who agreed that boosting cooperation produces results (Calabresi 2011). Hillary successfully increased the number of State Department political advisers at the Defense Department, from fifteen to one hundred, in an attempt to help steer Pentagon policy to support State Department initiatives. She was helped in this effort by Obama’s initial defense secretary, Republican Robert Gates, who saw potential benefits in building up the State Department’s role in national security. According to Time, “the two found common cause on the size and duration of the Afghanistan surge and on not releasing photos of the dead Osama bin Laden” (Calabresi 2011). Under Hillary, the State Department also worked with the CIA to counter violent extremism throughout the greater Middle East by fighting the internet propaganda and online recruitment efforts of such groups as Al-Qaeda and, later, ISIS. The Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications was created and housed at the State Department to monitor online chat rooms and check anti-American misinformation. Hillary could also count success in the State Department’s “pivot” toward Asia and its “reset” in relations with Russia and its authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin. Under her leadership, the State Department had effectively reached out to aid Haiti and then Japan after each suffered massive damage and losses of life due to earthquakes in 2010 and 2011, respectively. And finally, the United States had increased dialogue with newly emerging regional powers like India, the world’s second most populous country, as well as its neighbor and longtime rival Pakistan, with its strategic location next to Iran and Afghanistan. Hillary had always been very vocal about the fact that she would only serve one four-year term as secretary of state. Once President Obama won reelection in November 2012, Hillary reiterated to him her plan to step down. Though Politico editor Susan Glasser would surmise, “Timing, fate and the White House may have all conspired in it, but the truth is that Hillary Clinton never did find a way to turn Foggy Bottom into her ticket to history,” others familiar with the job give Hillary more credit (Glasser 2013). “She’s been a good Secretary of State,” said Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor under President George H.W. Bush. “She is confident but not arrogant in her confidence, and quite agile” (Calabresi 2011). February 1, 2013, was Hillary’s last day as secretary of state—Obama tapped Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a veteran of the Vietnam War, as her successor. For the first time in twenty years, Hillary was a private citizen.

10 The 2016 Election and Beyond

I did it because when you clear away all the petty and not-so-petty reasons to run—all the headaches, all the obstacles—what was left was something too important to pass up. It was a chance to do the most good I would ever be able to do. —Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, 2017 On April 12, 2015, Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her second campaign for president in a message posted to her website and social media. The two-minute-long video featured a variety of Americans talking about starting new phases in their lives: opening a business, preparing to welcome a baby, moving homes, getting a first job, entering retirement, getting married. Then, a full ninety seconds into the video, Hillary appeared on camera, presumably in front of her white clapboard home, smiling in a red sweater and blue blazer. “I’m getting ready to do something too, I’m running for president. . . . Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion,” she said (Clinton, April 12, 2015). The contrast to her 2008 announcement was stark: this message looked more like a corporate “feel good” commercial than a political speech, and Hillary appeared more engaged and upbeat. In her 2017 memoir, What Happened, Hillary writes that she had been considering a second run for the 163

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presidency, talking the idea over with close friends, her husband, and President Obama. “The most compelling argument is the hardest to say out loud,” she writes. “I was convinced that both Bill and Barack were right when they said I would be a better president than anyone else out there. I also thought I’d win” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). And while she admits that she regrets some things about her 2016 campaign, she says that the decision to run is not one of them. As she had told her Wellesley classmates in her 1969 graduation speech (admittedly paraphrasing the poet T. S. Eliot), “There is only the trying . . . again and again and again; to win again what we’ve lost before” (Clinton 1969). Hillary’s 2016 campaign staff combined veterans of service to her and her husband with some campaign newcomers, and the number of women on her staff was noteworthy for a national campaign. Former chief of staff to President Clinton, John Podesta, left his post in the Obama White House to become Hillary’s campaign chairman, and Hillary’s former deputy chief of staff at the State Department, Huma Abedin, became vice chair. Thirty-fiveyear-old campaign manager Robby Mook came with a reputation for utilizing technology, data, and analytics to great success in campaigns; and Hillary’s announcement video, primed for social media, seemed to signal that she wanted to show younger voters she could be a media-savvy candidate in the footsteps of Obama. Since she left the State Department in early 2013, Hillary had frequently used social media, particularly Twitter, to weigh in on current events without having to directly interact with the press. Hillary admits in What Happened that one of the “two tricky areas” she focused on while building her campaign team was “how to improve my relationship with the press” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). To that end, she hired Jennifer Palmieri, who had worked for both Presidents Obama and Clinton, as communications director. “Over the years, my relationship with the political press had become a vicious cycle,” writes Hillary. “The more they went after me, the more guarded I became, which only made them criticize me more” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). She vented her past frustrations to Palmieri and her deputy earlier on but told them that she was ready to try whatever they suggested to reset the relationship. Hillary entered the race with a strong base of support. According to a CBS News poll conducted in early 2015, 81 percent of Democrats said they would consider voting for her—a level of support that greatly outpaced her potential rivals for the Democratic nomination. Still, Hillary’s aides signaled that she would take nothing for granted during her second run for the presidency. She planned to present herself as a more humble candidate, “as unencumbered by the trappings of power and celebrity as is possible for a universally recognized former first lady, secretary of state and presidential candidate” (Miller 2015). By the July Fourth holiday, four male candidates had entered the race to challenge Hillary for the Democratic nomination: Senator Bernie Sanders



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of Vermont, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee, and former Virginia Senator Jim Webb. Sanders, a self-styled socialist, quickly built up a strong following online among young people as he talked about the need for free college for everyone (which Hillary’s campaign attempted to counter with a plan for debtfree college released in August), challenging the power of the richest 1 percent of Americans, and taking on the Washington establishment. O’Malley presented himself as a progressive alternative to Hillary; on early trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, he touted his accomplishments as governor, including tighter gun laws, implementation of a progressive tax code, and legalization of same-sex marriage. He had championed Obamacare, increased the state’s health-care rolls, and signed a bill raising the minimum wage. Lincoln Chafee had succeeded his father as a Republican senator from Rhode Island upon the senior Chafee’s death in 1999, and then he served as a Democratic governor. He would regularly criticize Hillary on her vote for the war in Iraq as a Senator (he was the lone Republican to vote against it) but had difficulty attracting much popular or press interest. The last candidate to enter the race, Webb had not served in public office since his single term in Congress ended in 2013—at the time, he declined to run for reelection, saying that he hated campaigning and did not like politics. He was formerly a Republican who also served for a short time as secretary of the navy under President Ronald Reagan. Webb embraced a progun rights stance and talked of the need to find “middle ground” in the controversy over displaying Confederate flags—positions notably counter to those of most Democratic Party members. From the beginning, many observers were unclear regarding Chafee’s and Webb’s motivations for running, and both were largely viewed as long shots for the nomination—Sanders and O’Malley were weightier candidates but lacked Hillary’s name recognition, national campaign experience, and fundraising credentials. The first hurdle that Hillary and her campaign had to overcome in fall 2015 was not presented by one of her challengers, it dated back before her campaign had begun: her use of a private e-mail server during her tenure as secretary of state, which had become public knowledge as part of the House Select Committee investigation into the 2012 Benghazi attacks. A month before she announced her candidacy, news broke that Hillary had used a personal e-mail address connected to a privately owned server installed on her New York property rather than government e-mail. Supporters quickly pointed out that several previous secretaries of state, including Colin Powell, had also used private e-mail accounts—but they had not used their own servers. At the time, Hillary admitted that it “clearly wasn’t the best choice” to skip using her government-issued e-mail address, and Hillary’s attorneys had turned over thirty thousand work-related e-mails to the State Depart-

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ment (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Beginning in May, the department had been processing them and, under a judge’s order, releasing batches of the cleared e-mails each month. Then on August 11, her campaign let it be known that Hillary would turn over the actual server to the Justice Department. When she announced her candidacy back in April, Podesta had assured donors that the e-mail issue would go away, and now the campaign hoped to signal that Hillary had nothing to hide—she was fully cooperating with the Justice Department investigation into how classified information was handled. Most of the e-mails released thus far had proved innocuous, and others were partly or fully redacted by the time the State Department cleared them for release. While all government agencies are responsible for determining which of their materials are classified, a team of nearly a dozen interagency officials were reviewing Hillary’s e-mails to make recommendations on what should and should not be classified— and some had been retroactively classified by the State Department as a result. Still, the issue of the e-mails dogged her campaign as her favorable ratings trended downward after the scandal broke; by late August, 44 percent of Americans had a negative view of her. In an interview with ABC News’ David Muir on September 8, Hillary apologized for the private e-mail server: “I should have used two accounts. One for personal, one for work-related e-mails,” Clinton said. “That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility” (Clinton, September 8, 2015). In her defense, government-issued BlackBerry phones at the time of her tenure only allowed one e-mail address. And the law that now requires government officials to transfer e-mails sent to private addresses onto government servers was not enacted until 2014, a year after Hillary had departed the State Department. “It should also be noted that officials in George W. Bush’s White House, including political adviser Karl Rove, used a server controlled by the Republican National Committee for email,” Vox pointed out. “[Hillary] might have violated best practices . . . but she didn’t break the law, or even break new ground, simply by setting up a personal server to handle her email” (Allen 2016). The campaign hoped that her public apology would settle the issue with voters once and for all. Then, on September 25, the Obama administration announced it had uncovered a set of e-mails on Hillary’s private server between David Petraeus and the State Department that had not been previously turned over because they were on a different e-mail account that predated the one discovered by the House investigation. Though there was nothing revolutionary in the new set of messages, once again Republicans cried foul, the press raised questions, and the American people wrangled with whether Hillary was trustworthy. Even with the e-mail controversy tailing her, Hillary enjoyed a sixteenpoint lead over her closest rival, Sanders, in public opinion polls just a



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week before the first Democratic debate. The debate between the five candidates in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 13 was remarkably civil and actually covered a number of policy positions, in contrast to the first two Republican primary debates in August and September with their crowded stages and unruly arguments. While Sanders’ impact on the conversation could be seen in the other candidates’ efforts to attack Wall Street and critique the campaign finance system—early talking points that were gaining Sanders traction on the campaign trail—most observers declared Hillary the “winner” of the debate. That evening, Chuck Todd of NBC News, for example, tweeted, “Clinton was easily the most polished and prepped candidate on stage. Wasn’t even close” (Todd 2015). Meanwhile a CNN poll found that 62 percent of Democrats said that Clinton was the winner. Still, Sanders clearly had the most memorable line of the night: “We’re sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails,” he interjected when the moderator, Anderson Cooper of CNN, asked Hillary about the subject. “Let’s talk about the real issues facing America,” Sanders admonished (Democratic Presidential Debate, October 13, 2015). Within ten days of the first debate, both Webb and Chafee dropped out of the race. The second Democratic debate on November 14 occurred just one day after a series of deadly, coordinated terrorist attacks ravaged Paris over a three-hour period, killing 130 people and wounding 494. In light of the attacks, much of the debate in Des Moines, Iowa, focused on foreign policy, national security, and the threat posed by ISIS, the Islamic militant group responsible for the Paris attacks. Both Sanders and O’Malley made notably harsher attacks on Hillary than in the first debate: on her vote for the war in Iraq, which Sanders identified as opening the floodgates for ISIS; and on her role in creating the Obama administration’s “messes” in the Middle East, as O’Malley characterized Libya, Syria, and Iran (Democratic Presidential Debate, November 14, 2015). In one of the tensest moments of the debate, Sanders questioned Hillary’s cozy relationship with Wall Street and insinuated that the big banks were paying for favors with their large contributions to her campaign. Hillary called the implication an attack on her character and then noted that the majority of her donations were small-dollar amounts made by women, which the live audience applauded. Immediately following the debate, CBS News conducted a poll of Democratic and Independent viewers. Fifty-one percent thought Hillary won the debate, compared with 28 that favored Sanders (O’Malley garnered 7%, and 14% of viewers called it a tie). Still, honesty remained Hillary’s biggest weakness with those polled; though she led Sanders by thirteen points in terms of leadership qualities, she trailed both Sanders and O’Malley on honesty and trustworthiness. On December 2, a heavily armed man and woman entered an employee holiday party at the Inland Regional Center, in San Bernardino, California,

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and began shooting people. Fourteen people were killed and another twenty-two wounded. Before the attackers fled the center, a complex with over 500 workers who provided services for local residents with developmental disabilities, they also planted several explosives. The shooters were identified by witnesses as a worker at the center and his stay-at-home wife. Hours later, authorities spotted the suspects in a vehicle outside their home; a high-speed chase and gun battle ensued, leaving both attackers dead. Massive amounts of ammunition and bomb-making materials were found in the couple’s home along with evidence that they may have been radicalized online by militant Islamic terrorists—the wife had posted a pledge of allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Facebook that day. In response to the shooting, the Republican presidential frontrunner, New York real estate developer and reality TV host Donald Trump, called for a Muslim travel ban into the United States. While many Republicans in Congress criticized Trump’s suggestion, several of his Republican challengers agreed to some degree. “A prohibition of Muslims—an unprecedented proposal by a leading American presidential candidate, and an idea more typically associated with hate groups—reflects a progression of mistrust that is rooted in ideology as much as politics,” wrote Peter Spiro in the New York Times (Spiro 2015). At the third Democratic debate in Manchester, New Hampshire on December 19, Hillary called out Trump’s “bluster” and “bigotry” and ripped into his call for banning Muslim immigration, at one point saying, “He is becoming ISIS’s biggest recruiter” (Democratic Presidential Debate, December 19, 2015). Several days later, in response to questions about proof that ISIS was showing Trump in its recruiting videos, Palmieri had to concede that Hillary “didn’t have a particular video in mind” (Borchers 2015). Still, many pundits agreed with Clinton’s basic point that Trump’s anti-Muslim and anti‑refugee rhetoric helped ISIS by lending proof to its core recruiting message: the West hates Islam. During the debate, both Sanders and O’Malley tried to attack Hillary for her vote on the war in Iraq and her seeming support of “regime change” in the Middle East. She deflected most of their criticism and seemed more focused on juxtaposing her positions with those of Republicans, and specifically Trump, than the other Democrats on the stage. The three candidates also clashed on gun control, the costs of Sanders’ proposals for free college and free health care, and tax increases. In anticipation of the Iowa caucuses, the first contest of the primary season, Hillary had driven to Iowa in April 2015 for a “no-frills” visit, akin to the listening tour she undertook after announcing her Senate run in New York. In 2008 Hillary had placed a disappointing third in Iowa, and now she was determined to learn from residents about their hopes and anxieties. Plus, Iowans notoriously favor meeting candidates in small settings rather than listening to speeches at large rallies. According to



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Politico, many of her staffers noticed that in 2016 Hillary was much more personally engaged in the details of the campaign in Iowa than she had been in 2008 as her campaign built a formidable field operation in all of the state’s ninety-nine counties. To many, Hillary seemed determined to learn the lessons of her previous loss; for example, she now read aloud the names of local volunteers at every rally, a well-received practice of Obama in 2008 (Thrush and Karni 2016). When Iowa Caucus Day came on February 1, 2016, Hillary and her team must have been frustrated by the results; for although she won, it was not by the double-digit spread they had originally predicted—instead, she won by a razor-thin margin against a seventy-four-year-old socialist with little national name recognition before entering the race. But Sanders was preaching a populist message with his focus on income inequality and the grip that the moneyed interests held on American politics, and Iowans seemed more attracted to his message than to Hillary’s experience. Indeed, in the fourth Democratic debate on January 17, Sanders had landed memorable jabs at Hillary for her ties to Wall Street: “The first difference is I don’t take money from big banks,” and “I don’t get speaking fees from Goldman Sachs” (Thrush and Karni 2016). The day after the caucuses, Politico quoted Mo Elleithee, a communications adviser to Hillary’s 2008 campaign: “You’re going to see a bounce in Bernie’s step tomorrow, the first evidence that their message may have taken hold.” She continued, “There’s going to be a new sense of urgency [in the primary]—there is nothing more dangerous than Hillary Clinton as a candidate with her back against the wall. You’re going to see two energized campaigns” (Thrush and Karni 2016). (O’Malley exited the race the night of the Iowa caucuses after having only garnered one percent of the vote.) Polls the week after Iowa showed that Hillary’s early thirty-one-point lead over Sanders had vanished. Then, on February 9, Sanders delivered a blow to Clinton’s campaign with a landslide finish in New Hampshire. Sanders won the primary with over 60 percent of the vote compared to Hillary’s 38 percent. Results from the NBC News polling in New Hampshire showed some of Hillary’s vulnerabilities. Even though she was uniformly considered the first woman with a serious chance at securing a major party’s nomination for president, Hillary lost to Sanders among female voters, 44 percent to 55 percent. The only age category that Hillary won was sixtyfive and over, and even then only by 10 percent; whereas Sanders won among young voters by a whopping 83 percent to Hillary’s 16 percent. And even among Democrats who considered themselves “somewhat liberal” or “moderate,” which combined made up a majority of voters, Sanders beat Hillary by 14 and 20 percent spreads. The pressure was on for Hillary and her campaign to win, and win big, on Super Tuesday in less than a month. Super Tuesday, the day of a dozen state nominating contests (plus one territory, American Samoa) was March 1, 2016. As predicted, Hillary won

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big in seven states, largely due to support among African American voters. She also eked out a more surprising win in Massachusetts, a liberal state next door to Sander’s home turf. Though Sanders expected a tough day, he still won in Colorado, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and his home state of Vermont, which was enough for him to justify staying in the race. As Sanders told supporters in Vermont that night, there were still thirty-five states left to vote. “Let me assure you that we are going to take our fight for economic justice, for social justice, for environmental sanity, for a world of peace to every one of those states” (Cheney 2016). Hillary gave her victory speech that evening in Miami, Florida where she “exuded confidence,” according to Politico (Cheney 2016). The surprise of the night was the success of Trump, who steamrolled his competitors by winning seven of the eleven Republican state contests. Many leaders in his own party were shocked— and uneasy—about Trump’s success in the primaries. “Even two longtime Clinton confidants, pollster Stan Greenberg and strategist James Carville, felt compelled to try to understand what was fueling Trump’s rise in the wake of Super Tuesday” (Cheney 2016). They conducted their own polling, which suggested the Republican electorate had unprecedented anger toward the Democratic Party; nearly 90 percent of Republicans thought its policies were so misguided they threatened the nation’s well-being. Though more Americans were registered as Democrats than any other party, the ability to attract some voters who identified as Republican or independent would be vital for the Democratic candidate come November. By 2016, no one in U.S. politics could ignore that the electoral college, regardless of the popular vote, determines the next president; so winning the general election as the Democratic nominee would come down to certain “swing” states where the candidate would need to attract at least some voters outside of the Democratic ranks. (Election analytics website FiveThirtyEight identifies the states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin as swing states, meaning they have regularly seen close contests over the last few presidential campaigns.) On March 8, although polls going into the Michigan primary gave Hillary a double-digit lead, she lost to Sanders in the state. The previous Sunday, the candidates had debated one another in Flint, Michigan, where Sanders repeatedly attacked Hillary on free trade agreements, such as the National American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed by Bill while president, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which Hillary promoted while secretary of state and President Obama signed in 2016. Still, even with their disagreements and reliance on sarcasm, the debate was largely friendly compared with the two most recent Republican debates, a fact that both Hillary and Sanders mentioned toward the end. The caustic and even at times stunning exchanges between the Republican candidates



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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton campaigns at Carpenters Training Center in St. Louis on March 12, 2016. (R. Gino Santa Maria/Shutterfree, LLC/ Dreamstime.com)

forewarned of a very contentious general election. Sanders continued to pick up small numbers of additional delegates with wins in the Alaska and Washington caucuses in late March and the Wyoming primary on April 9. Hillary, still the Democratic frontrunner, needed to shift the momentum her way. She had not expected a redo of the tight primary race with the then-upstart Obama in 2008; her team wanted to be able to fully focus their money and manpower on the general election race as soon as possible (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). “More than 20,000 first-time voters have registered with New York state in what state officials are calling an ‘unprecedented surge’ of voter interest ahead of the state’s April 19 presidential primary,” the Associated Press reported in late March (Associated Press 2016). With 320 delegates up for grabs in New York, Hillary was counting on a win in her adopted home state. Hillary and Sanders debated each other for the first time in over a month in Brooklyn, New York, on April 14 in what quickly became their fieriest meeting yet. Though many observers said that Sanders delivered his strongest debate performance and clearly “won,” that did not change the expected outcome of the primary vote the following week (Nelson, April 1, 2016). Hillary won decisively in the New York primary, by nearly 15 percentage points over Sanders, giving her a 260 pledged delegate lead. And the female vote was critical to Hillary’s win: 59 percent of all voters

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were women, and of those voters, 63 percent supported Hillary, compared with 37 percent for Sanders. Furthermore, Black women, one of Hillary’s most reliable voting blocs in previous elections, stuck with her: nearly 80 percent voted for her, according to Vox (Nelson, April 1, 2016). Hillary’s win in New York made her eventual success in winning enough delegates to secure the nomination seem all but inevitable. “Put simply, Sanders can’t win the Democratic nomination without a minor miracle,” opined the website FiveThirtyEight. “That doesn’t mean Sanders won’t continue to campaign, and minor miracles do sometimes happen. But the media shouldn’t sugarcoat this” (“What Went Down in the New York Primaries” 2016). Of course, the press loved the fact that the Democratic race was so contested; the drama of Hillary possibly losing the nomination again made for good copy, and combined with the craziness that was the Republican primary race, readership and viewership were up for numerous media outlets. For all the public interest in both races, it is important to note that both frontrunners, Hillary on the Democratic side and Trump among the Republicans, had very negative polling numbers. “This is unprecedented,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman told the Washington Post after Hillary and Trump won their respective contests in New York (Marcus 2016). “It will be the first time in the history of polling that we’ll have both major party candidates disliked by a majority of the American people going into the election” (Marcus 2016). And the New York primary highlighted the internal party challenges for both frontrunners: how unpopular they were with a certain opposite segment within their parties. For Hillary that opposition came from the “Bernie Bros.” As Vox explained, “The Bernie Bros—if you define ‘bro’ very, very loosely—do seem to be a real phenomenon. Sanders won sixty-four percent of unmarried men, while [Hillary] won married men as well as unmarried and married women, according to exit polls” (Nelson, April 20, 2016). For Trump, he faced Republican opposition from the #NeverTrump movement. In New York exit polls, one quarter of Republicans said they would not vote for Trump if he became the nominee, and 36 percent said they would be “concerned or scared” if he was elected president—and New York was Trump’s home state (Nelson, April 20, 2016). On May 17, after a string of Sanders victories in Indiana, West Virginia, and Oregon that day, Hillary declared victory in the Kentucky primary when the polls closed. Including the fifty-five delegates up for grabs in Kentucky, Hillary was just ninety-four away from clinching the nomination, with the superdelegates—the party elites who could vote how they wanted and were mostly backing her—included. Due to the small margin of victory, Sanders’ campaign requested a recanvass of the votes in Kentucky’s Democratic presidential primary, which was then conducted on March 24. That afternoon, the Kentucky secretary of state announced that



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the recanvass had resulted in no change in the election outcome. In Hillary, the documentary released by Hulu in 2020, Hillary remarks at one point, “Bernie just drove me—crazy. It was all just bologna and people got sucked into it” (Burstein 2020). In an unprecedented move, on May 23, Democratic Party officials granted Sanders nearly equal say over the party platform in a move they hoped would soothe a bitter split with backers of the challenger, aka the Bernie Bros. “The senator from Vermont was allowed to choose nearly as many members of the Democratic Party platform-writing body as [Hillary], who is expected to clinch the nomination next month,” explained the Washington Post (Gearan 2016). Indeed, as May turned into June, even groups outside the Democratic Party began to prepare for a general election between Hillary and Trump as her Republican rival. On June 6, Hillary clinched enough pledged superdelegates to secure the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention come summer, but the primary season was not over yet. June 7 was a good day for Hillary’s campaign: of the six Democratic state primaries, Hillary won half including big wins in New Jersey and California, which garnered her 269 delegates. She had clinched the Democratic nomination for president. That evening, she addressed a crowd of enthusiastic, flag-waving supporters in Brooklyn, New York, pointing out that they were all currently standing under a glass ceiling. Wearing a white jacket, the same color donned by suffragettes in the early twentieth century, she paid homage to those that began the push for women’s equality and the right to vote at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, in nearby upstate New York. Then she told the crowd, “Tonight belongs to all of you. Now you are writing a new chapter to that story, this campaign is about making sure there are no ceilings, no limits on any of us, and this is our moment to come together” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Meanwhile, Sanders signaled that he was not ready to give up the fight; in front of a crowd of supporters in California, Sanders promised to “take our fight for social, economic, racial and environmental justice to Philadelphia,” the site of the Democratic Convention (Sanders 2016). In her victory speech, Hillary also noted that her mother was born on the same day in 1919 that Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. She said that she wished her mother were still alive to see the wonderful mother that Chelsea had become and to meet Chelsea’s daughter, Charlotte. Throughout her 2016 campaign, in contrast to that of 2008, Hillary seemed to bask in being a mother and a grandmother; she focused much more on women’s issues and made time to regularly meet with small groups of women before their states’ primaries. In turn, by June 2016 her campaign became the first presidential campaign to be “fueled by

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May I See Your Woman Card, Please? During a press conference on April 26, 2016, after he swept five Republican primaries, Donald Trump said of Hillary, “The only card she has is the woman’s card. She’s got nothing else to offer.” He continued, “And frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote” (Schwartz 2016). The comment immediately went viral on social media, and many Americans condemned the remarks as sexist. For her part, Hillary was quick to respond, turning the card into a fundraising tool. In what became a rallying cry for many supporters, Hillary said, “If fighting for women’s healthcare and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in” (Chozick, May 2, 2016). Just days after Trump’s comments, Hillary’s campaign issued a fundraising e-mail: “We’ve been hearing from supporters all over the country that they’d like a ‘woman card’ of their very own—to display proudly on a fridge or pull out of their wallet every time they run into someone who says women who support Hillary must not be using our brains” (Chozick, May 2, 2016). Supporters who donated at least one dollar could receive a hot pink Official Hillary for America Woman Card with a line at the bottom that read, “Congratulations! You’re in the majority.” In just three days, the campaign raised $2.4 million in donations and merchandise sales (“Deal Me In” T-shirts, etc.) and attracted a record number of first-time donors—40 percent of the nearly one hundred and twenty thousand donors had never previously given to the campaign (Chozick, May 2, 2016).

unprecedented support from female donors,” as Mother Jones noted (Chomas 2016). Women accounted for a little more than 60 percent of the identifiable contributions to Hillary’s campaign and outside groups supporting her through the end of June, according to Federal Election Commission data. By contrast, nearly 31 percent of the donations to help Republican Donald Trump came from female donors. If this trend in donating could be solidified into voting come November, Hillary could expect a nice bump from the female vote. As USA Today noted in early July: “A slew of recent polls point to female voters overwhelmingly backing Clinton over Trump, a threat to his White House ambitions. Nearly ten million more women than men cast ballots in 2012” (Page, July 10, 2016). In her 2003 memoir Living History, Hillary writes that she believes she suffered attacks during Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign because she was an outspoken, professional woman. “Some of the attacks, whether demonizing me as a woman, mother and wife or distorting my words and positions on issues were politically motivated. . . . Others may have reflected the extent to which our society was still adjusting to the changing roles of women” (Clinton 2003). She contends that she “had been turned into a



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“The Hair Is Real, The Color Isn’t” Hillary, like many women, changed her hairstyle numerous times over her life; however, the attention that her hair garnered as first lady and then as a politician in her own right is unprecedented. During Bill’s first presidential campaign in 1992, the press questioned Hillary’s love of headbands. Two years later, one newspaper commented that Hillary’s changing hairstyles might cast the first lady as inauthentic, someone not to be trusted (Cannon 1994). Hillary writes in her 2017 memoir What Happened that she is rarely jealous of her male colleagues, except when it comes to getting ready. She estimates that during the 2016 campaign, she spent twenty-five days having her hair and makeup done by her “glam squad.” She laments the fact that women in the public eye are regularly held to a different standard when it comes to their appearance (Clinton 2017). Indeed, journalist Kristen Bellstrom noted in Fortune that Americans are unable to separate women from the way they look (Bellstrom 2016). During Hillary’s first Senate campaign, New York journalists complimented her new, understated style because now people might actually listen to her words; however, any distraction avoided by her subdued style soon reappeared. Critiques of Hillary’s hair reached a level of ridiculousness when Donald Trump accused her of wearing a wig in 2015. Conservative pundits adopted the accusation, and the rumor flashed across social media. People called one of Hillary’s hairdressers, who emphatically denied the rumor (Herbst and McAfee 2015). At a Democratic fundraiser that August, Hillary herself weighed in, joking that while her hair was real, its blond color was not.

symbol for women of my generation,” and that is why the press and public seemed to care as much about what she wore and how she acted as they did about her political views. She admits that for most of her life, she had paid little attention to her hair or clothes. One of her classmates from Yale, Nancy Gertner, remarks in the 2020 documentary, Hillary, that among the young, female students at the time, it was “a race to grubbiness . . . how many social conventions could we ignore, not shaving our legs, not wearing makeup”; and in her estimation, Hillary was more actually traditional than many of her peers (Burstein 2020). As soon as Hillary became first lady of Arkansas, Gertner remembers her friend “battling every attack we heard about at Yale, for real”—attacks for not having kids, not taking her husband’s name, pursuing her own profession (Burstein 2020). In What Happened, her memoir largely about the 2016 election, Hillary writes: “It’s not easy to be a woman in politics. That’s an understatement. It can be excruciating, humiliating. The moment a woman steps forward and says, ‘I’m running for office,’ it begins: the analysis of her face, her body, her voice, her demeanor” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Hillary notes in the

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Hulu documentary that for six hundred days, give or take, of the campaign, she spent an hour on her hair and makeup—and “the men I was running against didn’t have to do any of this” (Burstein 2020). In What Happened, she posits that the public and media scrutiny becomes even more harsh the higher a woman rises in politics. “If we’re being too tough, we’re unlikeable. If we’re too soft, we’re not cut out for the big leagues” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). At one point in the Hulu documentary, Hillary equates the balancing act for female politicians to the story of Goldilocks and three bears: “Be assertive, but not too assertive” (Burstein 2020). The discussion that Hillary broaches of how women in politics are perceived and covered by the media is weightier than a simple complaint about fairness or outdated views on the proper roles of the sexes. “For women candidates, likability is linked to electability, and that’s not the case for men,” says Adrienne Kimmell, executive director of the nonpartisan Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which during the spring of 2016 conducted research that found voters are willing to support a male candidate they don’t like, if they think he is qualified. But they are less likely to support a female candidate they think is qualified unless they also like her (Page, June 5, 2016). So, Trump could count on at least some Americans who did not like him to still possibly vote for him, whereas Hillary had to make people like her in order to have a chance at their vote. And as Debbie Walsh, director for the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, explained to USA Today in early June 2016, commentary on Hillary’s demeanor on cable news shows and Twitter during the campaign proved the persistence of bias. “I mean, the conversation about . . . ‘why don’t you smile’ and ‘why are you yelling at me?’” Walsh points out. “The campaign is filled on both sides with men doing a lot of yelling, and that doesn’t seem to get called out in the same way” (Page, June 5, 2016). Political science professor Julie Dolan, the lead author of the 2016 edition of Women and Politics: Paths to Power and Political Influence, was also quoted by USA Today: “Although Ted Cruz [a senator from Texas and contender for the Republican nomination in 2016] was often tagged for being not very likable, it didn’t seem to be as much as a detriment to him as it was for Hillary Clinton” (Page, June 5, 2016). She explained, “Clinton received more personal coverage than did Cruz, despite already being a much better known political figure, and her coverage was much more negative than his” (Page, June 5, 2016). In 2016 Hillary’s campaign took steps to address the likability issue, including assigning a video crew to follow her around full time to capture her spontaneous interactions with voters. Hillary notes in her memoirs that she enlisted the help of a linguistic expert to help make her voice seem strong while not “yelling” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). And she consulted other women in positions of power in U.S. society. In What



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Happened, she talks about advice she received from Sheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Facebook, and took to heart: “that women are seen favorably when they advocate for others, but unfavorably when they advocate for themselves” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Hillary had seen this in her own likability ratings: “people like me when I’m in a supporting role,” when she stood behind her husband as a loving wife, when she agreed to serve in Obama’s cabinet after losing the nomination to him, when she fought for New York’s first responders in the Senate (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Two examples from Carl Bernstein’s biography bear mentioning here. First, he points out that the week that Hillary testified in front of Congress about her health-care initiative “may have been the pinnacle of her career as first lady” because of the high praise she received from politicians and the public alike. “I’m here as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman,” Hillary told the House Ways and Means Committee before she answered more than 150 questions in a calm, respectful, and even, at times, humorous manner (Bernstein 2007). Second, Bernstein aptly points out, “By the time her husband went to trial in the Senate, every opinion poll indicated that she had become widely admired in a way that Bill wasn’t, by both women and men—as a result of her conduct” (Bernstein 2007). Unfortunately for Hillary, those same likability ratings never were as high when she ran for office. “Elections are about people, they are not about policy,” according to Mo Elleithee, who worked on Hillary’s 2008 campaign. “The biggest problem Hillary Clinton faces is, she’s the most famous person in the world who no one really knows” (Page, June 5, 2016). Hillary acknowledges in her memoirs that many voters have said she appears guarded or too calculating in what she says and does. Hillary chalks it up to her composure as it has developed over the years; she claims that she has always been a private person, but a “life spent in the public eye” has given her lots of practice at pushing down her emotions, holding her tongue, and presenting herself as steady, unruffled by difficult situations or negative comments. “I wear my composure like a suit of armor, for better or worse,” she writes in What Happened (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). She professes in her memoirs to be puzzled why people say they feel like they don’t really know her. She points out that for years the press has covered everything about her life, and many Americans even read hundreds of her e-mails. She suggests that many Americans actually know more about her than they do about their good friends. Yet for some reason, many people think there must be another Hillary, one that stays hidden—that she keeps hidden—from the public eye, and that makes her untrustworthy. That belief, that she is always hiding something, hurt her during both of her campaigns for president. “She’s not your typical woman candidate in the sense that the Number One thing most women have to do running for executive office is prove

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that they’re qualified, prove that they’re competent, and that is not something that Hillary Clinton has had to do,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who studies gender politics, told USA Today in June 2016. “Voters from the get-go have thought that she is extremely qualified” (Page, June 5, 2016). They just did not trust her, and Trump would play on that during the general election with his jabs at her as “Crooked Hillary.” Nevertheless, it must have come as a huge relief to Hillary’s campaign when, on July 5, just days after she sat through three and a half hours of grilling by the FBI, the agency’s director, James Comey, announced that he would not recommend any charges against Hillary for her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state—although he did say that she acted “carelessly” with classified information. John Podesta, who had promised Hillary’s donors that the issue would go away, was finally vindicated. Bernie Sanders formally endorsed Hillary in a joint appearance in New Hampshire on July 12, with a large banner declaring “Stronger Together” in full view of the media cameras. “I have come here to make it as clear as possible as to why I am endorsing Hillary Clinton and why she must become our next president,” said Sanders, whose endorsement of Clinton upset a number of his devoted supporters (Lee, Merica, and Zeleny 2016). “Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that,” he added (Lee, Merica, and Seleny 2016). Some of the Bernie Bros were not happy. As Hillary notes in What Happened, because she and Sanders shared the same views on many policy issues, it was difficult as the campaign went on for him to attack her on her positions, so he instead went after her character through his insinuations about her coziness with Wall Street. She writes, “Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). She contends that mistrust of her sowed by Sanders during the primaries made “it harder to unify progressives in the general election” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). It surely did not help to bring Sanders supporters onboard for Hillary when Wikileaks made public a trove of private e-mails, allegedly obtained by Russia hackers from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), that revealed DNC leaders had aimed to defeat Sanders in the primaries. In the fallout over the revelations, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz would be forced to resign just as the Democratic National Convention was set to begin. As the Republican National Convention wrapped up its three-day event nominating Trump, with ultraconservative Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running mate, Hillary hoped to refocus the media spotlight on her campaign with a text message to her supporters that she had chosen Virginia senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. As Vanity Fair noted on July 23, “Kaine addresses a number of weaknesses within the [Hillary]



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campaign. [Hillary] has struggled to secure support among white men. With Kaine on her ticket, [she] will likely be able to stem the flow of white, working-class males who backed Bernie Sanders in the primary to the Trump camp” (Tracy 2016). In his acceptance speech on the last night of the Republican Convention in Ohio, Trump had presented a very bleak view of the state of America and presented himself as the one person who could reverse its course of economic and military decline. The Democratic National Convention was planned to entertain with the star power of popular actors, musicians, and professional athletes and to celebrate the historic significance of the first female nominee for president by a major political party. Its location in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, seemed fitting. Bernie Sanders was one of the speakers on the first day of the Democratic Convention, and he asked his supporters to unite behind Hillary, saying that no one knew better than he how disappointing a loss could be. On the second day, Sanders played a similar role as Hillary at the 2008 convention in that he was present on the floor with the New Hampshire delegates to pledge them to Hillary and then end the roll call with his declaration that the convention should nominate Hillary by acclaim. The crowd enthusiastically accepted his proposal—some likely with relief to put the party divide behind them. Bill Clinton was the keynote speaker the first night, and he brought the crowd filling the Wells Fargo Center to their feet. On the second evening, Tim Kaine spoke before President Obama took the stage for his prime-time address. “I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman, not me, not Bill, more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America,” President Barack Obama said of his former secretary of state. “I hope you don’t mind, Bill, but I was just telling the truth, man” (Obama 2016). At the conclusion of Obama’s powerful endorsement of Hillary, she surprised the hall by joining him on stage. As the two greeted each other in center stage, they both smiled and pointed at one another; then, as they leaned in, Hillary appeared to whisper words of gratitude to her former boss. Obama, easily six inches taller than Hillary, enveloped her in a full bear hug, which she comfortably returned, resting her head on his chest as they faced the crowd. “The Hug, that was something else,” the Los Angeles Times wrote the next day. “A physical exclamation point to the convention’s theme of unity, yes. But the embrace was so obviously an act of mutual admiration, fueled by encouragement on his part, gratitude on hers, that for just a few minutes, politics did not go on as usual. It paused and considered the complexities of professional friendship” (McNamara 2016). Just eight years ago, Obama had dismissed Hillary in a debate as being “likable enough”; but now, social media could not get enough of his obvious warmth for her and approval of her as his successor.

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The convention’s other truly powerful moment in the lead-up to Hillary’s acceptance speech came not from a political celebrity or Hollywood star but from Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim American soldier who died in combat. Speaking before the hushed convention crowd, Khan asked a question of Trump, “Have you even read the United States Constitution?” A roar then erupted from the crowd when Khan pulled out his own copy and offered to lend it to the Republican nominee. Hillary was introduced as the convention’s final speaker by Chelsea, now thirty-six and the mother of two. She shared a unique perspective of Hillary as a loving mom filled with compassion for the needy. Chelsea told the crowd, “She never, ever, forgets who she’s fighting for” (Clinton, July 28, 2016). After a video montage of her life, Hillary took the stage in a white pantsuit to deliver her prime-time acceptance speech. “We will not build a wall,” she said in rebuke of Trump’s goal to build a massive wall along the U.S. southern border with Mexico. “Instead, we will build an economy where everyone who wants a good-paying job can get one” (Clinton, July 28, 2016). In contrast to Trump’s speech in Ohio, Hillary went on to offer an uplifting, favorable view of America and the potential of its citizens. She told the crowd, “And yes, love trumps hate. That’s the country we’re fighting for. That’s the future we’re working toward. And so it is with humility . . . determination . . . and boundless confidence in America’s promise . . . that I accept your nomination for President of the United States” (Clinton, July 28, 2016). She concluded: Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come. Happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between. Happy for boys and men, too—because when any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone. When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit. (Clinton, July 28, 2016)

On the same day that Hillary addressed the Democratic Convention, Trump tried to draw his own media attention by mocking the Democrats for claiming Russia hacked the DNC in an effort to aid his candidacy and claiming that he knew nothing about the Wikileaks release of the e-mails. He then effectively requested that the Russians hack Hillary’s e-mail server, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing,” in a reference to the e-mails Hillary and her staff had deemed personal and therefore deleted from her private server before handing it over to the Justice Department back in 2015 (Crowley and Page 2016). Democrats at the convention in Philadelphia told USA Today, “Trump has business interests with the Russians,” and that was one of the reasons why they were demanding he releases his tax returns (Crowley and Page 2016). At his news conference, Trump claimed that he has no business dealings with Russia or with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, despite



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Putin’s regular praise of the Republican nominee. As he had throughout the campaign, Trump refused to release his tax returns, saying that he was under a routine federal audit and had to wait until it was completed. (As of this writing in mid-2020, President Trump still has yet to release any of his tax returns.) Unfortunately for her campaign, the public would soon get a glimpse into Hillary’s frustration with the fact that Trump could say things that were shocking—and showed a total lack of decorum for a presidential race—and yet still have traction with voters. On September 10, a recording of some remarks Hillary made at a private New York fundraiser was leaked to the media: “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call ‘the basket of deplorables,’ right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it. And, unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up.” Trump immediately called on her to apologize for the “insulting” comments (Riley 2016). By September 18, less than one week before her first debate against Trump, Hillary’s lead in the polls had vanished according to Real Clear

Are There Two Hillary Rodham Clintons? On September 11, 2016, Hillary attended a memorial ceremony in New York City to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The sixty-eight-year-old presidential candidate was standing among other invited dignitaries while the victims’ names were read aloud. Then she suddenly left the ceremony. One bystander caught video footage of Hillary: she appeared unsteady on her feet as Secret Service agents conferred with her. A black van pulled up nearby and Hillary seemed to lose her footing as the agents assisted her into the waiting vehicle. The van drove Hillary to her daughter’s apartment in the city. About ninety minutes later, with news cameras gathered around, Hillary walked out of the building, smiling and waving to onlookers and the cameras. She paused to pose for a photo with a child on the sidewalk and then walked unassisted to the same awaiting van. Her personal physician told the media that Hillary had been fighting a prolonged cough that was diagnosed as pneumonia just two days before the September 11 observance. Hillary was on antibiotics at the time and became overheated at the ceremony, which in turn caused her fainting spell, according to her doctor. For some people on the internet that explanation was not satisfactory. Instead, some critics began to theorize that Hillary must have a body double. They posted photo comparisons of Hillary the morning before her collapse and Hillary when she left her daughter’s apartment building as proof that the second might be a doppelganger sent out briefly in the public eye to cover up the state of Hillary’s poor health. Though such theories continued to appear on the internet throughout the campaign, no mainstream media outlets ever found them credible, and the actual existence of a body double was never proven.

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Politics. When the two candidates faced off on September 26 at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York, the debate was viewed by more than eighty-four million people, making it the most watched debate in U.S. history. Most observers agreed that Hillary won the debate; for example, NBC News that night said, “Hillary Clinton seemed to overpower Donald Trump in their first presidential debate Monday night” (2016 Presidential Debate 2016). Trump frequently stumbled over his own answers and was defensive much of the night. “I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate,” Hillary said at one point. “And yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for is I prepared to be president” (2016 Presidential Debate 2016). The moderator, Lester Holt of NBC News, asked Trump why, after his five-year crusade to raise questions about Barack Obama’s place of birth (and thereby his U.S. citizenship and eligibility to serve as president), he had suddenly, one week prior, admitted that Obama was born in the United States? Trump expressed no contrition for hounding the president to produce his birth certificate, and he gave no explanation for why he finally changed his mind; instead, Trump tried to blame Hillary for starting the rumor about Obama’s birthplace (fact checkers said the claim was untrue, according to NBC) and praised himself for forcing Obama to show his birth certificate. Toward the end of the debate, Holt asked Trump to turn to Hillary and tell her what he meant when he said she did not have a “presidential look” (2016 Presidential Debate 2016). Trump responded that “she doesn’t have the stamina” necessary to be president—likely in an effort to throw doubt on her campaign’s explanation of Hillary’s apparent fainting spell while attending a remembrance event in New York City on September 11 (2016 Presidential Debate 2016). After listing some of her accomplishments as secretary of state, Hillary retorted, “He tried to change from looks to stamina, but this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs, and dogs” (2016 Presidential Debate 2016). Hillary attempted to use the debate stage to counter her negative ratings on trustworthiness. At one point she hit Trump over his tax returns, saying she wondered if there was “something he’s hiding,” before addressing her own use of a private e-mail as secretary of state. “I made a mistake using a private e-mail,” she said (2016 Presidential Debate 2016). Still, on October 4, a Washington Post poll found that 62 percent of people believed Hillary to be dishonest, despite her strong debate performance—and the election was just a month away. On October 7, 2016, the Washington Post released a video from 2005 in which Trump bragged to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about his freedom to grab women’s genitals, to do “anything” he wants to women, because he’s “a star” (Fahrenthold 2016). The story spread like wildfire on social media and news websites. Some pundits said that Trump would have to drop out of the presidential race. About 3:30 p.m. that same day,



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the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence issued a public warning about Russian efforts to interfere with the election, including compromising e-mail accounts belonging to Americans. However, the warning was largely overshadowed in the news and on social media by the Access Hollywood video. Around midnight, Trump released an apology video on his Facebook account, addressing his comments in the 2005 video but also alleging that Bill Clinton had done worse things to women (Fahrenthold 2016). At the second debate between the candidates on October 9, Trump was asked about the video. Trump responded that he had apologized to his family and the American people, but he disputed that the recording amounted to bragging about sexual assault, saying his comments were “locker room talk” (“Second Presidential Debate: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Full Debate” 2016). He denied ever having acted in the way he described on the tape; however, in the following days, a number of women came forward to accuse him of doing precisely the kinds of things he described on the tape—some citing Trump’s on-air denial as their motivation for coming forward. The women’s claims would barely garner the news coverage one might expect largely because, on the same day as the debate, Wikileaks started dumping e-mails from Hillary’s campaign—e-mails that special counsel Robert Mueller would later determine were stolen by the Russians. Exit polls on election day would show that 70 percent of voters found Trump’s treatment of women troubling, but 29 percent of them voted for him anyway, according to the Washington Post on November 9, 2016. Over the next two weeks, Julian Assange’s whistleblower platform, Wikileaks, delivered on an earlier promise to divulge secrets within the Hillary campaign by releasing about 20,000 pages of e-mails illegally stolen from campaign chair John Podesta. Though none the e-mails raised any new controversies for Hillary’s campaign, they did give readers more details on some of the biggest questions about her candidacy: Were there conflicts of interests with the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state; what were her money connections to Wall Street; and how did the candidate come to her policy positions, political expediency, or true conviction? Some of the e-mail exchanges revealed that Hillary’s private positions did not match what she stated in public, for example, on the minimum wage, gay marriage, and big banks. So although no content in the e-mails was explosive, they were not going to help her win over any undecided voters who had hesitations about whether she was honest or if she was powerhungry. At the final debate on October 19 in Las Vegas, Trump tried to use the content of the e-mail leaks to his advantage. He accused Hillary of illegalities at the Clinton Foundation, asking her to return donations from countries with a record of human rights abuses. Hillary responded that she would be “happy to compare what we do with the Trump Foundation” and

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then mentioned how the Trump Foundation was known to have used funds to purchase a large portrait of Trump (Blake 2016). He repeatedly tried to paint Hillary as a political insider who owed her campaign to large Wall Street donations. The most remarkable moment in the debate came when the Republican nominee said he could not commit to accept the results of the election if he loses. “I will look at it at the time,” said Trump, before he suggested without evidence that wide-scale voter fraud and a media conspiracy could affect the voting outcome (Blake 2016). Hillary called his remarks “horrifying,” and even the moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News, felt he needed to remind Trump that peaceful elections, in which the candidates accepted the will of the people, were a vital part of the American democratic tradition (Blake 2016). By mid-October, Hillary’s lead in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls had jumped to seven points—the same as Obama’s winning margin against John McCain in 2008. Polls in a number of swing states were encouraging as well; for example, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll of Pennsylvania showed Hillary ahead of Trump by double digits. Then on October 28, FBI Director James Comey, in a letter to Congress, revealed that the bureau had learned of e-mails, discovered in an unrelated case, that “appear to be pertinent to the investigation” of Hillary’s private e-mail server (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Media outlets reported later that day that the newly discovered e-mails came from a separate federal investigation of former New York Representative Anthony Weiner for his alleged sexually explicit messaging with an underage girl. The new e-mails in question were found on a laptop that Weiner had shared with his recently separated wife, Huma Abedin, vice chair of Hillary’s campaign. Many observers noted at the time that Comey’s announcement was strikingly vague: “Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony,” Comey wrote in his letter (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). With less than two weeks left until election day, the case surrounding Hillary’s use of a private server that had been closed since July now appeared to be reopened. Nine days later—and just thirty-six hours before election day— Comey sent a second letter to Congress that said the new batch of e-mails was not really new and contained no material to cause the bureau to seek any charges against Hillary; and once again, the case was closed. But as Hillary points out in What Happened, in those nine days of swirling speculation, “millions of Americans went to the polls to vote early” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). And, as NBC News would note in hindsight, “nearly half of the lead stories on the three broadcast network’s evening newscasts from October 28 to November 7 were about [Hillary]’s emails.”



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As Hillary writes in What Happened, “Coverage of my emails crowded out virtually everything else my campaign said or did.” Election day was November 8, 2016 (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Hillary and Bill did not return home to Chappaqua from their whirlwind last round of campaign stops until nearly 4:00 a.m. on election day. After a quick stop at home to clean up, they went to cast their votes at a local elementary school. Then they headed into New York City to wait for the election results with her campaign staff, friends, and family at the Peninsula Hotel. She heard wonderful things about the set her advance staff had created at the Javits Center in midtown Manhattan, where she planned to greet supporters that night—a stage shaped like the United States with an actual glass ceiling above. Hillary spent much of the day working on her speech for that night with her speechwriters and communications director. By the time she finished the speech, voting stations were closing on the East Coast. The first warning signs that all of the polls predicting she would win might be wrong came with the results in North Carolina, and then Florida, and then Ohio. Hillary excused herself from the tense room with everyone watching the returns to take a nap. She was so exhausted from the campaign. Once she awoke again, she found that “as the hours slipped by, the numbers got worse.” Hillary writes in What Happened, “I felt shell-shocked. I hadn’t prepared mentally for this at all” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Shortly after midnight, some good news came from Nevada, and some promise was still alive in other swing states where votes were still being counted. “The experts were telling us that it might be so close we’d need a recount or at least another day to sort everything out” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Once 1:00 a.m. passed, Hillary says she asked Podesta to go to the Javits Center and ask the supporters there to go home; she would speak to them on Wednesday morning, whatever the election status. Once Trump won Pennsylvania in the wee hours, she knew she needed to call and concede the race. She writes that her call to him “was all perfectly nice and weirdly ordinary, like calling a neighbor to say you can’t make it to his barbecue” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). In the morning, she says, it was all real. Wearing a purple pantsuit, accompanied by Bill in a suit and purple tie, as well as Chelsea and Marc, Hillary addressed her shocked, saddened supporters. “My job was to get through this morning, smile, be strong for everyone, and show America that life went on and our republic would endure,” she writes (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Then she and Bill headed home to Chappaqua, where she would mourn the loss, practice yoga, talk to friends, answer letters and e-mails, walk her dogs, and try to lose herself in books. In What Happened, she writes: “I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want—but I was the candidate. It was my

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campaign. Those were my decisions” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). Hillary won the popular vote in the 2016 election by 2.8 million votes but lost the electoral college—she won 232 electoral votes to Trump’s 302. (A candidate must win 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.) Nine months after the election, top officials who worked for both the Clinton and Trump campaigns said that they believe Comey’s intervention—and its aftermath—affected the race. One of the country’s most accurate election analysts, Nate Silver of the website FiveThirtyEight, agrees: “At a maximum, [Comey’s first letter] might have shifted the race by three or four percentage points toward Donald Trump, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida to him,” Silver wrote in May 2017. “At a minimum, its impact might have been only a percentage point or so. Still, because Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than one point, the letter was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College” (Silver 2017). On May 3, 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on Comey’s actions just before election day. During the hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California asked Comey why he made the October 28 announcement in the first place, especially given existing Justice Department guidelines against interfering in upcoming elections. Comey replied that he faced two options: one, speak about the newly found e-mails, or two, conceal them. “Speak would be really bad. There’s an election in eleven days. Lordy, that would be really bad,” Comey said. “Concealing in my view would be catastrophic, not just to the FBI, but well beyond. And honestly, as between really bad and catastrophic, I said to my team we’ve got to walk into the world of really bad. I’ve got to tell Congress that we’re restarting this.” He added, “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election. But honestly, it wouldn’t change the decision” (New York Times, June 8, 2017). Comey was fired six days after that testimony. As for Hillary, she admits that she will likely keep replaying in her head what went wrong. “But I’m not going to sulk or disappear. I’m going to do everything I can to support strong Democratic candidates everywhere” (Clinton, What Happened, 2017). In September 2017, about ten months after the election, Hillary granted an interview with People magazine in which she called her life as a private citizen “liberating” and talked about how her husband was a beacon of reassurance in the days and months since her loss. “Bill is my partner in life,” she said. “Over this last year, we’ve spent long hours walking the trails behind our house, talking about things I wished I’d done differently in the election. He’s listened to me vent. We’ve shared a lot of quiet moments too” (Westfall 2017). Also in September 2017, Hillary released her third memoir, What Happened, which was described thus by one reviewer for NPR: “There’s a sense in this book that, after two years of stoic composure,



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Like Daughter, Like Mother Her memoir, What Happened, was not the only book Hillary Rodham Clinton released in 2017. That fall, Hillary published her first children’s book, It Takes a Village, an adaptation of her 1996 best-selling work with the same title. In an interview with Parents magazine, Hillary explained that her original book was about her belief that practically everything in life worth doing is best done together with others. Whether raising a family, improving a community, or starting a business, people thrive when they look out for and help one another. “I believe more fiercely than ever in that message,” explained the grandmother of two young children (Cicero 2017). In her foray into children’s literature, Hillary actually followed the footsteps of her daughter, Chelsea. Chelsea first published It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going! in 2015, which aimed to educate teens about such social problems as homelessness, disease, pollution, and gender discrimination and to arm them with the know-how to make a difference in their communities. Next, in 2017 Chelsea authored She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World, followed by Don’t Let Them Disappear: 12 Endangered Species across the Globe in 2019. Hillary and Chelsea partnered to publish The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience in October 2019. Though this book is aimed at an adult audience, it includes profiles of many of Hillary’s childhood heroes, including Amelia Earhart and Maria Von Trapp (the real woman portrayed by Julie Andrews in the 1965 award-winning movie The Sound of Music), as well as modern-day female heroes such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, gay rights activist and actor Ellen DeGeneres, Congresswoman and gun control advocate Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords, and tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.

Clinton simply needed to get it all out . . . her book is a howl from the gut of Hermione Granger (of the Harry Potter series)—the embattled cry of the hyper-competent woman who desperately wishes the world were a meritocracy” (Kurtzleben 2017). On the publicity tour for the book, Hillary stepped out of her normal comfort zone to grant interviews to the likes of Howard Stern, the former shock jock from New York, and a lengthy interview along with Chelsea on Conan O’Brien’s audio show. Surprisingly, Hillary so enjoyed the longer interview format that she is working on a new podcast of her own that will feature her in conversation with a brandname guest, who might be drawn from world leaders and politicians, but also celebrities, authors, and perhaps even famous chefs or designers. Early in March 2019, Hillary confirmed that she would not be a candidate for president in 2020, but she noted, “I’m not going anywhere” (Goldmacher 2019). Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Hillary continued to

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Will the Real Secretary of State Please Step Forward In October 2018, for fans of the CBS drama series Madam Secretary, reality became fiction—or was it that fiction became reality? The television series starred Tea Leoni as fictional U.S. Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord and Tim Daly as her theology professor husband; both characters previously worked for the CIA under the show’s fictional president, Conrad Dalton, played by Keith Carradine. In the premiere episode of its fifth season, Madam Secretary played host to three real-life former U.S. secretaries of state: Madeleine Albright, the first female to hold the position from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton; Colin Powell, who served under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who served under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. Leoni’s character called on the three former secretaries of state, who played themselves, for advice on a delicate international matter (Porter 2018). In another storyline that blurred fiction and reality, the final season of the show featured Leoni’s character campaigning for and winning the presidency, to succeed her former mentor and boss, President Dalton. On Madam Secretary in 2019, Elizabeth McCord became the first female president of the United States.

criticize her rival and to voice her thoughts about national issues on Twitter and in op-eds and articles penned for the Atlantic, among other platforms. (For his part, President Trump consistently mentioned Hillary, her e-mails, and his victory over her at his rallies and on social media.) On April 28, 2020, Hillary endorsed Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president versus the incumbent Trump. Throughout the 2020 election cycle, Hillary promoted Biden’s policy positions via social media and held virtual (due to the COVID-19 pandemic) fundraisers for Biden. On November 7, the morning after the election, Hillary congratulated Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, the first female to become vice president, on Twitter: “The voters have spoken, and they have chosen @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris to be our next president and vice president. It’s a history-making ticket, a repudiation of Trump, and a new page for America” (Clinton, November 7, 2020).

Timeline

October 26, 1947  Hillary Diane Rodham is born in Chicago, Illinois. Shortly thereafter, the Rodham family will move to the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, where Hillary and her two younger brothers will be raised. November 22, 1963 Hillary Rodham is in high school when President John F. Kennedy is assassinated while visiting Dallas, Texas. Vice President Lyndon Johnson is sworn in as president. 1964  Hillary Rodham volunteers on the presidential campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater even though she is too young to vote. September 1965  Hillary Rodham enters her freshman year at Wellesley, a private women’s college in Massachusetts. As a freshman, she becomes president of the Young Republicans on campus. Summer 1966  Hillary Rodham works as a babysitter and researcher for an ex-Wellesley professor who is working on a book critical of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. April 4, 1968 Hillary Rodham is shocked and angered to hear of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom she had heard speak years before in Chicago. The next day, she attends a march in Boston and returns to Wellesley College, determined to motivate the school toward greatly racial diversity. Summer 1968 Hillary Rodham interns for the House Republican Committee in Washington, and then attends the 189

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Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida to work for New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in his attempt to deny Vice President Richard Nixon the party’s nomination for president. August 1968 Back home in Park Ridge for the last weeks of summer, Hillary and one of her childhood friends drive into Chicago to witness the chaos between antiwar protests and city police outside the Democratic National Convention taking place downtown. Fall 1968 Hillary Rodham campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy after switching her party affiliation, largely due to her growing anti-Vietnam War stance. May 31, 1969 Hillary Rodham graduates with a bachelor of arts degree from Wellesley College. She is the first student in Wellesley history to deliver an address at her commencement ceremony. Summer 1970 Hillary Rodham works as an intern for civil rights attorney Marian Wright Edelman in Washington, D.C. September 1970 Hillary Rodham attends Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. 1971 Hillary Rodham meets Bill Clinton, a fellow law student at Yale, upon his return from studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in England. 1973 first Hillary Rodham graduates with a juris doctorate degree from Yale University Law School. 1973–1974 Hillary Rodham works as an attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. January 1974 Hillary Rodham works for special counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on inquiry into possible impeachment of President Richard Nixon. On August 9, Nixon will become the first president in U.S. history to resign from office. August 1974 Hillary Rodham moves to Arkansas to be closer to Bill Clinton and to teach law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. 1974–1977 Hillary Rodham serves as director of the Legal Aid Clinic and an assistant professor at the UA School of Law.

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October 11, 1975 Hillary Rodham marries William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton in Fayetteville, Arkansas. November 2, 1976 Bill Clinton wins election as Arkansas attorney general. 1976–1992 Hillary Rodham Clinton is recruited as an attorney and then becomes a partner (as of 1979) at Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. 1978 Hillary Rodham Clinton is appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corp., an organization that provides federal funds to legal aid bureaus (like the UA Legal Aid Clinic that Rodham helped organize years earlier) throughout the country. November 7, 1978 Bill Clinton is elected governor of Arkansas. Hillary becomes the First Lady of Arkansas to continue her career (as an attorney with Rose Law Firm) while living in the governor’s mansion. 1979 Governor Bill Clinton appoints Hillary Rodham Clinton as chairperson of the Rural Health Advisory Committee, charged with addressing the issue of providing health care in isolated areas. 1979 The Clintons, along with James and Susan McDougal, form the Whitewater Development Corp. February 27, 1980 Hillary Rodham Clinton gives birth to a daughter, Chelsea Victoria. November 1980  Governor Bill Clinton loses his reelection bid. However, he returns to office in 1982 and is reelected in 1984, 1986, and 1990. 1983 Governor Bill Clinton appoints Hillary Rodham Clinton to head the Arkansas Education Standards Committee. 1988 Hillary Rodham Clinton is named one of the one hundred most influential lawyers in the United States by the National Law Journal. (She will be named to the list again in 1991.) November 3, 1992 Bill Clinton is elected president over his Republican opponent, incumbent president George H. W. Bush. January 1993 President Bill Clinton appoints Hillary Rodham Clinton to lead the Task Force on National Health Care Reform.

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July 20, 1993 White House attorney and longtime Clinton friend Vince Foster is found dead in his car in Washington, D.C. His death is later ruled a suicide. September 1993 Hillary Rodham Clinton testifies before the House Ways and Means Committee to support President Bill Clinton’s health-care reform package. January 1994  U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno appoints an independent counsel to investigate the Clintons’ real estate investments in the Whitewater Development Corp. September 1994 Congress defeats President Bill Clinton’s healthcare reform bill. 1994 Hillary Rodham Clinton champions the Violence Against Women Act through Congress to help states develop programs that stop sexual assault, stalking, and domestic abuse. September 5, 1995 First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton addresses the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, China January 14, 1996 Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first book, It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us, is published by Simon & Schuster. November 5, 1996 Bill Clinton wins reelection as president. January 1998  The Independent counsel, now Kenneth Starr, requests permission from Attorney General Reno to expand his investigation to include President Bill Clinton’s alleged affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky; President Clinton publicly denies sexual relationship with Lewinsky. August 17, 1998 Bill Clinton testifies before Whitewater investigation grand jury in his own defense, a first for any sitting U.S. president. September 11, 1998 Independent counsel Kenneth Starr announces that evidence in the Whitewater case is insufficient to implicate the Clintons in any criminal conduct. December 16, 1998 President Bill Clinton is impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstruction of justice relating to his affair with Monica Lewinsky; however, two months later, the Senate will find Clinton not guilty of the House’s impeachment charges.

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September 1999 The Clintons purchase a home in Chappaqua, New York. February 6, 2000 Hillary Rodham Clinton announces that she will run for the U.S. Senate from New York State. May 2000 The New York State Democratic Party nominates Hillary Rodham Clinton for U.S. Senate. November 7, 2000 Hillary Rodham Clinton wins her Senate bid with 56 percent of the popular vote. November 14, 2000 Simon & Schuster publishes the coffee table book An Invitation to the White House: At Home with History, by Hillary Rodham Clinton. September 11, 2001 Nineteen al-Qaeda linked terrorists attack the World Trade Center in New York City; Senator Clinton and fellow New York Senator Charles Schumer will coauthor bills to provide federal funds for the city to rebuild and to provide medical care for emergency responders at the scene that day and in the months after. June 9, 2003 Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first memoir, Living History, sells more than two hundred thousand copies in its first week. November 7, 2006 Hillary Rodham Clinton wins reelection to the U.S. Senate from New York. January 22, 2007 Hillary Rodham Clinton announces her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. January 8, 2008 Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary, the first primary of the election season. June 8, 2008 Hillary Rodham Clinton suspends her presidential campaign and endorses rival Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for president. August 28, 2008 At the Democratic National Convention, Hillary interrupts the nomination roll call to ask that her rival Barack Obama be nominated. November 4, 2008 Democratic candidate Barack Obama wins election as president over his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona. January 21, 2009 The Senate confirms Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. She becomes only the third woman to hold the position.

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February 2009 Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton breaks tradition with a first official trip to four Asian countries, rather than visiting Europe. November 2009 Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton supports President Obama’s authorization for a surge of U.S. military troops in Afghanistan. July 31, 2010 Chelsea Clinton weds Marc Mezvinsky in a private ceremony before four hundred friends and family members in Rhinebeck, New York. March 2011 Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton helps gain UN support for coalition airstrikes against troops loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad due to international fears that he is using chemical weapons against rebels and civilians in his country. 2011 As secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton is an early, vocal proponent within the White House for a top-secret raid to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the United States. July 11, 2011 Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Laos in fifty-seven years. April 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and members of her diplomatic corps secure the safety of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng after he escapes house arrest and seeks U.S. aid. September Terrorists attack a U.S. diplomatic compound in 11–12, 2012 Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens. February 1, 2013 Hillary Rodham Clinton resigns as secretary of state. June 10, 2014 Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoir Hard Choices of her time as U.S. secretary of state is published. April 12, 2015 Hillary Rodham Clinton announces a second run for the presidency via a video posted on YouTube. August 2015 Hillary Rodham Clinton states that she will turn over her private e-mail server to the Justice Department five months after the New York Times first reports that she used a personal e-mail account fed through its own server while secretary of state, rather than using the state department’s system.

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July 18, 2016 FBI Director James Comey states that he would not recommend charges against Hillary Rodham Clinton for use of private e-mail server; the next day U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch states that Clinton will not be charged for her use of a private server while secretary of state. July 22, 2016  Hillary Rodham Clinton officially becomes the Democratic Party nominee for president with U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia as her running mate. November 8, 2016 Although she wins the popular election by approximately 3 million votes, Hillary Rodham Clinton loses her bid for president to Republican nominee Donald Trump. September 17, 2017  Hillary Rodham Clinton publishes her seventh book, What Happened. October 1, 2019 Hillary Rodham Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, publish The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience. April 28, 2020  Hillary Rodham Clinton endorses former vice president Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president. Throughout the remainder of the 2020 election cycle, she supports Biden’s campaign through social media and online (due to the COVID-19 pandemic) fundraisers. January 20, 2021 Hillary Rodham Clinton joins her husband at the inauguration of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States.

PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENTS Hillary Clinton, Remarks for the UN Fourth World Conference on Women (1995)

Coming on the heels of Hillary’s failure to deliver a reform bill through Congress to grant all Americans universal health care, her staff was at odds about her plans to travel to China to deliver a speech on women’s rights with White House aides who did not think the first lady should dive into international issues, particularly dealing with China. At age forty-seven, Hillary had already spent years as an attorney advocating for women and children, and this speech was an opportunity for her to share her expertise with the world in a way that could create for her an identity separate from her husband’s. On the outskirts of Beijing, Hillary delivered the speech in a large conference hall that at times filled with the sound of stomping feet as the audience made clear their agreement with her observations. Hillary would often recall at least one theme of this 1995 speech during her campaign for the presidency in 2016: that human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights. Beijing, China September 5, 1995 Mrs. Mongella, Distinguished delegates and guests, I would like to thank the Secretary General of the United Nations for inviting me to be part of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. This is truly a celebration—a celebration of the contributions women make in every aspect of life: in the home, on the job, in their communities, as mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, learners, workers, citizens and leaders. It is also a coming together, much the way women come together every day in every country. We come together in fields and in factories. In village markets and supermarkets. In living rooms and board rooms. Whether it is while playing with our children in the park or washing clothes in a river, or taking a break at the office water cooler, we come together and talk about our aspirations and concerns. And time and again, our talk turns to our children and our families. However different we may be, there is far more that unites us than divides us. We share a common future. And we are here to find common ground so that we may help bring new dignity and respect to women and 197

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girls all over the world—and in so doing, bring new strength and stability to families as well. By gathering in Beijing, we are focusing world attention on issues that matter most in the lives of women and their families: access to education, health care, jobs, and credit, the chance to enjoy basic legal and human rights and participate fully in the political life of their countries. There are some who question the reason for this conference. Let them listen to the voices of women in their homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces. There are some who wonder whether the lives of women and girls matter to economic and political progress around the globe. . . . Let them look at the women gathered here and at Huairou . . .the homemakers, nurses, teachers, lawyers, policymakers, and women who run their own businesses. It is conferences like this that compel governments and peoples everywhere to listen, look and face the world’s most pressing problems. Wasn’t it after the women’s conference in Nairobi ten years ago that the world focused for the first time on the crisis of domestic violence? Earlier today, I participated in a World Health Organization forum, where government officials, NGOs, and individual citizens are working on ways to address the health problems of women and girls. Tomorrow, I will attend a gathering of the United Nations Development Fund for Women. There, the discussion will focus on local—and highly successful—programs that give hard-working women access to credit so they can improve their own lives and the lives of their families. What we are learning around the world is that, if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish. If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations will flourish. That is why every woman, every man, every child, every family, and every nation on our planet has a stake in the discussion that takes place here. Over the past 25 years, I have worked persistently on issues relating to women, children and families. Over the past two-and-a-half years, I have had the opportunity to learn more about the challenges facing women in my own country and around the world. I have met new mothers in Jojakarta, Indonesia, who come together regularly in their village to discuss nutrition, family planning, and baby care. I have met working parents in Denmark who talk about the comfort they feel in knowing that their children can be cared for in creative, safe, and nurturing after-school centers. I have met women in South Africa who helped lead the struggle to end apartheid and are now helping build a new democracy.



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I have met with the leading women of the Western Hemisphere who are working every day to promote literacy and better health care for the children of their countries. I have met women in India and Bangladesh who are taking out small loans to buy milk cows, rickshaws, thread and other materials to create a livelihood for themselves and their families. I have met doctors and nurses in Belarus and Ukraine who are trying to keep children alive in the aftermath of Chernobyl. The great challenge of this conference is to give voice to women everywhere whose experiences go unnoticed, whose words go unheard. Women comprise more than half the world’s population. Women are 70 percent of the world’s poor, and two-thirds of those who are not taught to read and write. Women are the primary caretakers for most of the world’s children and elderly. Yet much of the work we do is not valued—not by economists, not by historians, not by popular culture, not by government leaders. At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth, raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries. Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or treated; they are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by poverty and economic deprivation; they are being denied the right to go to school by their own fathers and brothers; they are being forced into prostitution, and they are being barred from the ballot box and the bank lending office. Those of us who have the opportunity to be here have the responsibility to speak for those who could not. As an American, I want to speak up for women in my own country— women who are raising children on the minimum wage, women who can’t afford health care or child care, women whose lives are threatened by violence, including violence in their own homes. I want to speak up for mothers who are fighting for good schools, safe neighborhoods, clean air and clean airwaves . . . for older women, some of them widows, who have raised their families and now find that their skills and life experiences are not valued in the workplace . . . for women who are working all night as nurses, hotel clerks, and fast food chefs so that they can be at home during the day with their kids . . . and for women everywhere who simply don’t have time to do everything they are called upon to do each day. Speaking to you today, I speak for them, just as each of us speaks for women around the world who are denied the chance to go to school, or see a doctor, or own property, or have a say about the direction of their lives, simply because they are women.

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The truth is that most women around the world work both inside and outside the home, usually by necessity. We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential. We also must recognize that women will never gain full dignity until their human rights are respected and protected. Our goals for this conference, to strengthen families and societies by empowering women to take greater control over their own destinies, cannot be fully achieved unless all governments—here and around the world— accept their responsibility to protect and promote internationally recognized human rights. The international community has long acknowledged—and recently affirmed at Vienna—that both women and men are entitled to a range of protections and personal freedoms, from the right of personal security to the right to determine freely the number and spacing of the children they bear. No one should be forced to remain silent for fear of religious or political persecution, arrest, abuse or torture. Tragically, women are most often the ones whose human rights are violated. Even in the late 20th century, the rape of women continues to be used as an instrument of armed conflict. Women and children make up a large majority of the world’s refugees. And when women are excluded from the political process, they become even more vulnerable to abuse. I believe that, on the eve of a new millennium, it is time to break our silence. It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights. These abuses have continued because, for too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words. The voices of this conference and of the women at Huairou must be heard loud and clear: It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.



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It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will. If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women’s rights. . . . And women’s rights are human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely. And the right to be heard. Women must enjoy the right to participate fully in the social and political lives of their countries if we want freedom and democracy to thrive and endure. It is indefensible that many women in non-governmental organizations who wished to participate in this conference have not been able to attend— or have been prohibited from fully taking part. Let me be clear. Freedom means the right of people to assemble, organize, and debate openly. It means respecting the views of those who may disagree with the views of their governments. It means not taking citizens away from their loved ones and jailing them, mistreating them, or denying them their freedom or dignity because of the peaceful expression of their ideas and opinions. In my country, we recently celebrated the 75th anniversary of women’s suffrage. It took 150 years after the signing of our Declaration of Independence for women to win the right to vote. It took 72 years of organized struggle on the part of many courageous women and men. It was one of America’s most divisive philosophical wars. But it was also a bloodless war. Suffrage was achieved without a shot fired. We have also been reminded, in V-J Day observances last weekend, of the good that comes when men and women join together to combat the forces of tyranny and build a better world. We have seen peace prevail in most places for a half century. We have avoided another world war. But we have not solved older, deeply-rooted problems that continue to diminish the potential of half the world’s population. Now it is time to act on behalf of women everywhere.

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If we take bold steps to better the lives of women, we will be taking bold steps to better the lives of children and families too. Families rely on mothers and wives for emotional support and care; families rely on women for labor in the home; and increasingly, families rely on women for income needed to raise healthy children and care for other relatives. As long as discrimination and inequities remain so commonplace around the world—as long as girls and women are valued less, fed less, fed last, overworked, underpaid, not schooled and subjected to violence in and out of their homes—the potential of the human family to create a peaceful, prosperous world will not be realized. Let this conference be our—and the world’s—call to action. And let us heed the call so that we can create a world in which every woman is treated with respect and dignity, every boy and girl is loved and cared for equally, and every family has the hope of a strong and stable future. Thank you very much. God’s blessings on you, your work and all who will benefit from it. Source: Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Remarks for the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women.” Fourth World Conference on Women by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in collaboration with the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Secretariat, September 5, 1995. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum. https://www .un.org/esa/gopher-data/conf/fwcw/conf/gov/950905175653.txt.

Hillary Clinton, Address to the Democratic National Convention (2016)

Hillary Rodham Clinton made history in 2016 when she became the first woman to be nominated by a major U.S. political party as their standard-bearer for president. On the final day of the Democratic National Convention held in Philadelphia in July 2016, Hillary addressed the crowded convention hall wearing an all-white suit—a nod to the legacy of suffragettes who marched and protested in the early 1900s to finally secure American women the right to vote in 1921. Philadelphia July 28, 2016 Thank you! Thank you for that amazing welcome. . . . My friends, we’ve come to Philadelphia—the birthplace of our nation— because what happened in this city 240 years ago still has something to teach us today.



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We all know the story. But we usually focus on how it turned out—and not enough on how close that story came to never being written at all. When representatives from 13 unruly colonies met just down the road from here, some wanted to stick with the King. Some wanted to stick it to the king, and go their own way. The revolution hung in the balance. Then somehow they began listening to each other . . . compromising . . . finding common purpose. And by the time they left Philadelphia, they had begun to see themselves as one nation. That’s what made it possible to stand up to a King. That took courage. They had courage. Our Founders embraced the enduring truth that we are stronger together. America is once again at a moment of reckoning. Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart. Bonds of trust and respect are fraying. And just as with our founders, there are no guarantees. It truly is up to us. We have to decide whether we all will work together so we all can rise together. Our country’s motto is e pluribus unum: out of many, we are one. Will we stay true to that motto? Well, we heard Donald Trump’s answer last week at his convention. He wants to divide us—from the rest of the world, and from each other. He’s betting that the perils of today’s world will blind us to its unlimited promise. He’s taken the Republican Party a long way . . . from “Morning in America” to “Midnight in America.” He wants us to fear the future and fear each other. Well, a great Democratic President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than eighty years ago, during a much more perilous time. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Now we are clear-eyed about what our country is up against. But we are not afraid. We will rise to the challenge, just as we always have. We will not build a wall. Instead, we will build an economy where everyone who wants a good paying job can get one.

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And we’ll build a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants who are already contributing to our economy! We will not ban a religion. We will work with all Americans and our allies to fight terrorism. There’s a lot of work to do. Too many people haven’t had a pay raise since the crash. There’s too much inequality. Too little social mobility. Too much paralysis in Washington. Too many threats at home and abroad. But just look at the strengths we bring to meet these challenges. We have the most dynamic and diverse people in the world. We have the most tolerant and generous young people we’ve ever had. We have the most powerful military. The most innovative entrepreneurs. The most enduring values. Freedom and equality, justice and opportunity. We should be so proud that these words are associated with us. That when people hear them—they hear . . . America. So don’t let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We’re not. Don’t let anyone tell you we don’t have what it takes. We do. And most of all, don’t believe anyone who says: “I alone can fix it.” Those were actually Donald Trump’s words in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us. Really? I alone can fix it? Isn’t he forgetting? Troops on the front lines. Police officers and firefighters who run toward danger. Doctors and nurses who care for us. Teachers who change lives. Entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem. Mothers who lost children to violence and are building a movement to keep other kids safe. He’s forgetting every last one of us. Americans don’t say: “I alone can fix it.” We say: “We’ll fix it together.” Remember: Our Founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power. Two hundred and forty years later, we still put our faith in each other. Look at what happened in Dallas after the assassinations of five brave police officers. Chief David Brown asked the community to support his force, maybe even join them.



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And you know how the community responded? Nearly 500 people applied in just 12 days. That’s how Americans answer when the call for help goes out. 20 years ago I wrote a book called It Takes a Village. A lot of people looked at the title and asked, what the heck do you mean by that? This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone. America needs every one of us to lend our energy, our talents, our ambition to making our nation better and stronger. I believe that with all my heart. That’s why “Stronger Together” is not just a lesson from our history. It’s not just a slogan for our campaign. It’s a guiding principle for the country we’ve always been and the future we’re going to build. A country where the economy works for everyone, not just those at the top. Where you can get a good job and send your kids to a good school, no matter what ZIP code you live in. A country where all our children can dream, and those dreams are within reach. Where families are strong . . . communities are safe. And yes, love trumps hate. That’s the country we’re fighting for. That’s the future we’re working toward. And so it is with humility . . . determination . . . and boundless confidence in America’s promise . . . that I accept your nomination for President of the United States! Now, sometimes the people at this podium are new to the national stage. As you know, I’m not one of those people. I’ve been your first lady. Served 8 years as a Senator from the great state of New York. I ran for President and lost. Then I represented all of you as Secretary of State. But my job titles only tell you what I’ve done. They don’t tell you why. The truth is, through all these years of public service, the “service” part has always come easier to me than the “public” part. I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me. So let me tell you. The family I’m from . . . well, no one had their name on big buildings. My family were builders of a different kind. Builders in the way most American families are. They used whatever tools they had—whatever God gave them—and whatever life in America provided—and built better lives and better futures for their kids.

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My grandfather worked in the same Scranton lace mill for 50 years. Because he believed that if he gave everything he had, his children would have a better life than he did. And he was right. My dad, Hugh, made it to college. He played football at Penn State and enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor. When the war was over he started his own small business, printing fabric for draperies. I remember watching him stand for hours over silk screens. He wanted to give my brothers and me opportunities he never had. And he did. My mother, Dorothy, was abandoned by her parents as a young girl. She ended up on her own at 14, working as a house maid. She was saved by the kindness of others. Her first grade teacher saw she had nothing to eat at lunch, and brought extra food to share. The lesson she passed on to me years later stuck with me: No one gets through life alone. We have to look out for each other and lift each other up. She made sure I learned the words of our Methodist faith: “Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.” I went to work for the Children’s Defense Fund, going door-to-door in New Bedford, Massachusetts on behalf of children with disabilities who were denied the chance to go to school. I remember meeting a young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school—it just didn’t seem possible. And I couldn’t stop thinking of my mother and what she went through as a child. It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough. To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws. You need both understanding and action. So we gathered facts. We built a coalition. And our work helped convince Congress to ensure access to education for all students with disabilities. It’s a big idea, isn’t it? Every kid with a disability has the right to go to school. But how do you make an idea like that real? You do it step-by-step, yearby-year . . . sometimes even door-by-door. And my heart just swelled when I saw Anastasia Somoza on this stage, representing millions of young people who—because of those changes to our laws—are able to get an education.



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It’s true . . . I sweat the details of policy—whether we’re talking about the exact level of lead in the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, the number of mental health facilities in Iowa, or the cost of your prescription drugs. Because it’s not just a detail if it’s your kid—if it’s your family. It’s a big deal. And it should be a big deal to your president. Over the last three days, you’ve seen some of the people who’ve inspired me. People who let me into their lives, and became a part of mine. People like Ryan Moore and Lauren Manning. They told their stories Tuesday night. I first met Ryan as a seven-year old. He was wearing a full body brace that must have weighed forty pounds. Children like Ryan kept me going when our plan for universal health care failed . . . and kept me working with leaders of both parties to help create the Children’s Health Insurance Program that covers 8 million kids every year. Lauren was gravely injured on 9/11. It was the thought of her, and Debbie St. John, and John Dolan and Joe Sweeney, and all the victims and survivors, that kept me working as hard as I could in the Senate on behalf of 9/11 families, and our first responders who got sick from their time at Ground Zero. I was still thinking of Lauren, Debbie and all the others ten years later in the White House Situation Room when President Obama made the courageous decision that finally brought Osama bin Laden to justice. In this campaign, I’ve met so many people who motivate me to keep fighting for change. And, with your help, I will carry all of your voices and stories with me to the White House. I will be a President for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. For the struggling, the striving and the successful. For those who vote for me and those who don’t. For all Americans. Tonight, we’ve reached a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for President. Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come. Happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between. Happy for boys and men, too—because when any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone. When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.

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So let’s keep going, until every one of the 161 million women and girls across America has the opportunity she deserves. Because even more important than the history we make tonight, is the history we will write together in the years ahead. Let’s begin with what we’re going to do to help working people in our country get ahead and stay ahead. Now, I don’t think President Obama and Vice President Biden get the credit they deserve for saving us from the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes. Our economy is so much stronger than when they took office. Nearly 15 million new private-sector jobs. Twenty million more Americans with health insurance. And an auto industry that just had its best year ever. That’s real progress. But none of us can be satisfied with the status quo. Not by a long shot. We’re still facing deep-seated problems that developed long before the recession and have stayed with us through the recovery. I’ve gone around our country talking to working families. And I’ve heard from so many of you who feel like the economy just isn’t working. Some of you are frustrated — even furious. And you know what? You’re right. It’s not yet working the way it should. Americans are willing to work — and work hard. But right now, an awful lot of people feel there is less and less respect for the work they do. And less respect for them, period. Democrats are the party of working people. But we haven’t done a good enough job showing that we get what you’re going through, and that we’re going to do something about it. So I want to tell you tonight how we will empower Americans to live better lives. My primary mission as President will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States. From my first day in office to my last! Especially in places that for too long have been left out and left behind. From our inner cities to our small towns, from Indian Country to Coal Country. From communities ravaged by addiction to regions hollowed out by plant closures. And here’s what I believe. I believe America thrives when the middle class thrives. I believe that our economy isn’t working the way it should because our democracy isn’t working the way it should.



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That’s why we need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights, not restrict them. And we’ll pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United! I believe American corporations that have gotten so much from our country should be just as patriotic in return. Many of them are. But too many aren’t. It’s wrong to take tax breaks with one hand and give out pink slips with the other. And I believe Wall Street can never, ever be allowed to wreck Main Street again. I believe in science. I believe that climate change is real and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying clean energy jobs. I believe that when we have millions of hardworking immigrants contributing to our economy, it would be self-defeating and inhumane to kick them out. Comprehensive immigration reform will grow our economy and keep families together — and it’s the right thing to do. Whatever party you belong to, or if you belong to no party at all, if you share these beliefs, this is your campaign. If you believe that companies should share profits with their workers, not pad executive bonuses, join us. If you believe the minimum wage should be a living wage . . . and no one working full time should have to raise their children in poverty . . . join us. If you believe that every man, woman, and child in America has the right to affordable health care . . . join us. If you believe that we should say “no” to unfair trade deals . . . that we should stand up to China . . . that we should support our steelworkers and auto workers and homegrown manufacturers . . . join us. If you believe we should expand Social Security and protect a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions . . . join us. And yes, if you believe that your working mother, wife, sister, or daughter deserves equal pay . . . join us. Let’s make sure this economy works for everyone, not just those at the top. Now, you didn’t hear any of this from Donald Trump at his convention. He spoke for 70-odd minutes—and I do mean odd. And he offered zero solutions. But we already know he doesn’t believe these things. No wonder he doesn’t like talking about his plans. You might have noticed, I love talking about mine.

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In my first 100 days, we will work with both parties to pass the biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II. Jobs in manufacturing, clean energy, technology and innovation, small business, and infrastructure. If we invest in infrastructure now, we’ll not only create jobs today, but lay the foundation for the jobs of the future. And we will transform the way we prepare our young people for those jobs. Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt-free for all! We will also liberate millions of people who already have student debt. It’s just not right that Donald Trump can ignore his debts, but students and families can’t refinance theirs. And here’s something we don’t say often enough: College is crucial, but a four-year degree should not be the only path to a good job. We’re going to help more people learn a skill or practice a trade and make a good living doing it. We’re going to give small businesses a boost. Make it easier to get credit. Way too many dreams die in the parking lots of banks. In America, if you can dream it, you should be able to build it. We’re going to help you balance family and work. And you know what, if fighting for affordable child care and paid family leave is playing the “woman card,” then Deal Me In! (Oh, you’ve heard that one?) Now, here’s the thing, we’re not only going to make all these investments, we’re going to pay for every single one of them. And here’s how: Wall Street, corporations, and the super rich are going to start paying their fair share of taxes. Not because we resent success. Because when more than 90 percent of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, that’s where the money is. And if companies take tax breaks and then ship jobs overseas, we’ll make them pay us back. And we’ll put that money to work where it belongs . . . creating jobs here at home! Now I know some of you are sitting at home thinking, well that all sounds pretty good. But how are you going to get it done? How are you going to break through the gridlock in Washington? Look at my record. I’ve worked across the aisle to pass laws and treaties and to launch new programs that help millions of people. And if you give me the chance, that’s what I’ll do as President. But Trump, he’s a businessman. He must know something about the economy.



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Well, let’s take a closer look. In Atlantic City, 60 miles from here, you’ll find contractors and small businesses who lost everything because Donald Trump refused to pay his bills. People who did the work and needed the money, and didn’t get it—not because he couldn’t pay them, but because he wouldn’t pay them. That sales pitch he’s making to be your president? Put your faith in him—and you’ll win big? That’s the same sales pitch he made to all those small businesses. Then Trump walked away, and left working people holding the bag. He also talks a big game about putting America First. Please explain to me what part of America First leads him to make Trump ties in China, not Colorado. Trump suits in Mexico, not Michigan. Trump furniture in Turkey, not Ohio. Trump picture frames in India, not Wisconsin. Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again—well, he could start by actually making things in America again. The choice we face is just as stark when it comes to our national security. Anyone reading the news can see the threats and turbulence we face. From Baghdad and Kabul, to Nice and Paris and Brussels, to San Bernardino and Orlando, we’re dealing with determined enemies that must be defeated. No wonder people are anxious and looking for reassurance. Looking for steady leadership. You want a leader who understands we are stronger when we work with our allies around the world and care for our veterans here at home. Keeping our nation safe and honoring the people who do it will be my highest priority. I’m proud that we put a lid on Iran’s nuclear program without firing a single shot—now we have to enforce it, and keep supporting Israel’s security. I’m proud that we shaped a global climate agreement—now we have to hold every country accountable to their commitments, including ourselves. I’m proud to stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia. I’ve laid out my strategy for defeating ISIS. We will strike their sanctuaries from the air, and support local forces taking them out on the ground. We will surge our intelligence so that we detect and prevent attacks before they happen. We will disrupt their efforts online to reach and radicalize young people in our country.

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It won’t be easy or quick, but make no mistake—we will prevail. Now Donald Trump says, and this is a quote, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do.” No, Donald, you don’t. He thinks that he knows more than our military because he claimed our armed forces are “a disaster.” Well, I’ve had the privilege to work closely with our troops and our veterans for many years, including as a senator on the Armed Services Committee. I know how wrong he is. Our military is a national treasure. We entrust our commander-in-chief to make the hardest decisions our nation faces. Decisions about war and peace. Life and death. A president should respect the men and women who risk their lives to serve our country—including the sons of Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, both Marines. Ask yourself: Does Donald Trump have the temperament to be Commander-in-Chief? Donald Trump can’t even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign. He loses his cool at the slightest provocation. When he’s gotten a tough question from a reporter. When he’s challenged in a debate. When he sees a protester at a rally. Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons. I can’t put it any better than Jackie Kennedy did after the Cuban Missile Crisis. She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started—not by big men with selfcontrol and restraint, but by little men—the ones moved by fear and pride. America’s strength doesn’t come from lashing out. Strength relies on smarts, judgment, cool resolve, and the precise and strategic application of power. That’s the kind of Commander-in-Chief I pledge to be. And if we’re serious about keeping our country safe, we also can’t afford to have a President who’s in the pocket of the gun lobby. I’m not here to repeal the Second Amendment. I’m not here to take away your guns. I just don’t want you to be shot by someone who shouldn’t have a gun in the first place. We should be working with responsible gun owners to pass commonsense reforms and keep guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists and all others who would do us harm.



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For decades, people have said this issue was too hard to solve and the politics were too hot to touch. But I ask you: How can we just stand by and do nothing? You heard, you saw, family members of people killed by gun violence. You heard, you saw, family members of police officers killed in the line of duty because they were outgunned by criminals. I refuse to believe we can’t find common ground here. We have to heal the divides in our country. Not just on guns. But on race. Immigration. And more. That starts with listening to each other. Hearing each other. Trying, as best we can, to walk in each other’s shoes. So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism, and are made to feel like their lives are disposable. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of police officers, kissing their kids and spouses goodbye every day and heading off to do a dangerous and necessary job. We will reform our criminal justice system from end-to-end, and rebuild trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve. We will defend all our rights—civil rights, human rights and voting rights . . . women’s rights and workers’ rights . . . LGBT rights and the rights of people with disabilities! And we will stand up against mean and divisive rhetoric wherever it comes from. For the past year, many people made the mistake of laughing off Donald Trump’s comments—excusing him as an entertainer just putting on a show. They think he couldn’t possibly mean all the horrible things he says— like when he called women “pigs.” Or said that an American judge couldn’t be fair because of his Mexican heritage. Or when he mocks and mimics a reporter with a disability. Or insults prisoners of war like John McCain—a true hero and patriot who deserves our respect. At first, I admit, I couldn’t believe he meant it either. It was just too hard to fathom—that someone who wants to lead our nation could say those things. Could be like that. But here’s the sad truth: There is no other Donald Trump. . . . This is it. And in the end, it comes down to what Donald Trump doesn’t get: that America is great—because America is good. So enough with the bigotry and bombast. Donald Trump’s not offering real change. He’s offering empty promises. What are we offering? A bold agenda to improve the lives of people across our country—to keep you safe, to get you good jobs, and to give your kids the opportunities they deserve.

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The choice is clear. Every generation of Americans has come together to make our country freer, fairer, and stronger. None of us can do it alone. I know that at a time when so much seems to be pulling us apart, it can be hard to imagine how we’ll ever pull together again. But I’m here to tell you tonight—progress is possible. I know because I’ve seen it in the lives of people across America who get knocked down and get right back up. And I know it from my own life. More than a few times, I’ve had to pick myself up and get back in the game. Like so much else, I got this from my mother. She never let me back down from any challenge. When I tried to hide from a neighborhood bully, she literally blocked the door. “Go back out there,” she said. And she was right. You have to stand up to bullies. You have to keep working to make things better, even when the odds are long and the opposition is fierce. We lost my mother a few years ago. I miss her every day. And I still hear her voice urging me to keep working, keep fighting for right, no matter what. That’s what we need to do together as a nation. Though “we may not live to see the glory,” as the song from the musical Hamilton goes, “let us gladly join the fight.” Let our legacy be about “planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” That’s why we’re here . . . not just in this hall, but on this Earth. The Founders showed us that. And so have many others since. They were drawn together by love of country, and the selfless passion to build something better for all who follow. That is the story of America. And we begin a new chapter tonight. Yes, the world is watching what we do. Yes, America’s destiny is ours to choose. So let’s be stronger together. Looking to the future with courage and confidence. Building a better tomorrow for our beloved children and our beloved country. When we do, America will be greater than ever. Thank you and may God bless the United States of America! Source: “Transcript: Hillary Clinton’s Speech at the Democratic National Convention.” New York Times, July 28, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com /2016/07/29/us/politics/hillary-clinton-dnc-transcript.html.

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Index

Abedin, Huma, 164, 184 Address to the Democratic National Convention (2016), 202–214 Adoption and Safe Families Act (1997), 109 Albright, Madeleine, 107, 145, 188 Alinsky, Saul, 17 Arab Spring, 150 Arkansas Education Standards Committee, 63–65, 191 Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, 54–55 ASEAN (Association of Southeastern Asia Nations), 144, 147 Asia Society, 143 “Basket of Deplorables,” 181 Benghazi, Libya Terrorist Attacks, 149, 150, 156, 165, 194 Bernie Bros., 172, 173, 178 Biden, Joe, xvi, xxii, 109, 135, 188, 195, 208 Black Panther Party, 23, 24 Blair, Diane (Kincaid), 43, 72, 97, 102, 122 Blair, Jim, 97 Bone, Robert L. (Red), 97 The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience, 187, 195 Breast cancer, 91, 110, 126

Burstein, Mal, 31 Bush, George H. W., 68, 75, 85, 87, 96 Bush, George W., 76, 113, 126, 128, 130, 133, 135, 138, 146, 188 Campaigning as a female candidate, xvi, xix, xxii Carter, Jimmy, xiv, 47–48, 51–52, 55, 58–59, 66, 90, 191 CDF (Children’s Defense Fund), 35–36, 50, 54, 55, 76, 190, 206. See also Edelman, Marian Wright Chappaqua, NY, house, 123–124, 185, 193 Chen Guangcheng (Chinese dissident), 154–155 Children’s Rights (as distinct area of law), 27–28 CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), 109–110, 207 Clinton, Bill (William Jefferson Blythe): arrival at Yale, 29; campaign for president, 70–78, 192; campaign for state attorney general, 47–48, 191; campaigns for governor, 53, 57–59, 61–63, 191; Democratic National Convention Speech (2016), 29, 179; first inauguration, 80, 82; impeachment, 119, 121; meeting Hillary, 29, 190; Monica Lewinsky 225

226 Index

Clinton, Bill (Continued) scandal, 116–120, 192; North Korea trip, 145; Paula Jones lawsuit, 113, 116; 2016 campaign, 138 Clinton, Chelsea: author, 187, 195; birth, 56–57, 191; Democratic National Convention speech, 180; Hillary’s first presidential campaign, 138; Hillary’s senatorial campaign, 123, 127; South Asia trip, 102; at Stanford University, 115; wedding, 149, 194 Clinton, Hillary Rodham: in Cambridge, MA, 35–36; childhood in Park Ridge, 5, 189; decision to take Clinton name, 47, 54, 61, 76; eyeglasses, 6, 24, 55; fundraising (for healthcare initiative messaging and Democrats), 98, 132, 136; identity separate from Bill, 76, 123, 140; and image, 77, 82, 132, 175–176; and Iraq War, 133–134, 135, 165, 167, 168; K-12 education, 6–7, 189; marriage to Bill, 42, 46, 47, 70–71, 72, 79, 84, 92, 103, 115, 118–119, 122, 124, 140, 186, 191; and 9/11 terrorist attacks, 129–130, 160, 181; and press, 85, 90, 97, 103, 113, 132, 149, 164, 172, 176–177, 185; private e-mail server, 160, 165, 167, 168, 178, 180, 182, 184–185, 188, 194, 195; and public favorability, xvi, 106, 114, 119, 125, 132–133, 166, 167, 172, 177, 181, 182; relationship with Senate colleagues, 129, 134; and role of First Lady, xv, 79, 82–83, 102, 106, 115, 127, 128; secretary of state offer and confirmation, 138, 142; senatorial campaign, 119–127; senatorial campaign debate (2000), 125; summer in Berkeley, CA, 31; at UA Law School, 41–43, 49; work for Watergate special counsel, 38–41. See also The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience; Hard Choices; It Takes a

Village; Living History; Presidential Campaign (2008); Presidential Campaign (2016); Travel as First Lady; Travel as Secretary of State; What Happened Clinton, Roger, Jr., 36, 43, 66–67 Clinton, Roger, Sr., 36, 66–67 Comey, James, xviii, 184, 186, 195 Conscience of a Conservative, 7, 8; See also Goldwater, Barry Co-presidency (“vote for one, get one for free”), 71, 82 Daley, Richard M., 7, 15 Democratic National Convention 1968, 15, 190 Doar, John, 38–40 Dwire, Jeff, 36–37, 43 Ebling, Betsy, 16 Edelman, Marian Wright, 25, 26, 32, 35, 38, 190. See also CDF (Children’s Defense Fund) Edelman, Peter, 26 Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), 36, 206 Ehrman, Sara, 33, 38, 41–42, 122 Equal Rights Amendment, 43 Family Circle Presidential Cookie Bake-off, 76 Family and Medical Leave Act (1993), 108–109 Fayetteville, AK, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 51, 190 Federal Advisory Committee Act, 88 “Filegate,” 115–116 Fiske, Robert, 95, 96, 115 Foster Care Independence Act (1999), 109 Foster, Vince, 47, 49, 62, 72, 89, 92, 93–95, 97, 112, 115, 192 Gates, Robert (Bob), xvi, 146, 161 Gergen, David, 81, 90, 103 Glass ceiling, xiii, 138, 173, 180, 185, 207

Index 227

Goldwater, Barry, xxi, 7, 8, 189; See also Conscience of a Conservative Gore, Al, 77–78, 114, 128, 145 Gore, Tipper, 77–78, 114 Guernica, 8, 48 Hammerschmidt, John Paul, 37, 44 Hard Choices, xii, 138, 139, 144, 147, 150, 152, 155, 156, 160, 194 Hart, Gary, 33, 68 Henry, Ann, 43 “Hillaryland,” 82 Hot Springs, AK, 32, 36, 43, 44, 46 House Judiciary Committee, Watergate, 38, 40 Hubbell, Webster, 50, 51, 62, 72, 89, 92, 94, 98 Humphrey, Hubert, 15 Impeachment: Clinton, Bill, 119–120, 121, 135, 192; Hillary’s work on Nixon impeachment, 39, 190; Johnson, Andrew, 39 An Invitation to the White House: At Home with History, 193 It Takes a Village, 1, 28, 104–105, 112, 187, 192, 205 Johnson, Lyndon, 9, 13, 14, 189 Jones, Don, 8, 48, 118 Kaine, Tim, 178–179, 195 Kelley, Virginia (Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire), 36–37, 43, 46–47, 91, 96, 111 Kennedy, John F., 8, 13, 26, 69, 160, 189, 212 Kent State University, 24–25, 28 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 8, 15, 17, 25, 26, 189 Lake Winola, PA, 2, 12 Lazio, Rick, 111, 125–126 League of Women’s Voters, 25, 26 Legal Services Corp., 50, 52, 191. See also UA Legal Aid Clinic

Little Rock, AK, 37, 49, 51 Living History, 135, 193 Liz Carpenter Lecture Series (at University of Texas), 92 Magaziner, Ira, 20, 81, 85, 87, 92 McCarthy, Eugene, 15, 190 McDougal, Jim, 74, 95, 96, 97, 112 McDougal, Susan, 74, 95, 112 McGovern, George, xxii, 30, 32, 33, 40, 42 McLarty, Mack, 47, 80, 94 Methodist Church, 2–3, 62, 118 Mezvinsky, Marc, 149, 185, 194 Moore, Rudy, 53, 60 Morris, Dick, 53, 59, 60, 62, 102–103, 113, 114 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124 9/11 Terrorist Attacks, 129–130, 160, 181, 193, 194, 207 Nineteenth Amendment, 21, 173 Nixon, Richard: 1968 campaign, 15, 67; Vietnam War expansion, 24; Watergate, 37 Nussbaum, Bernard, 39, 89 Obama, Barack: Benghazi attack, 157; Democratic National Convention speech, 179; first presidential campaign, 135–138, 169, 171, 184, 193; killing of Osama bin Laden, 149, 152, 194, 207; relationship with Hillary, xvi, xvii, 141, 142–143, 179, Syrian civil war, 151, 194; war “surge” in Afghanistan, 147–148, 194 Osenbaugh, Elizabeth (Bess), 43 Park Ridge, IL, 1, 5, 7–8, 12, 132 Piercy, Jan, xix, 18, 19 Podesta, John, 164, 166, 183, 185 Powell, Colin, 165, 168, 188 Presidential Campaign (2008), 136–138, 193, 205

228 Index

Presidential Campaign (2016): campaign announcement, 164, 194; cinching the nomination, 173; concession, xiv, xxi, 185; debating Trump, xxiii, 182, 184; decision to run, 163–164; Iowa caucus, 168–169; Las Vegas debate, 167–168, 170, 171; Super Tuesday, 169. See also Clinton, Hillary Rodham and public favorability; Clinton, Hillary Rodham and image; Clinton, Hillary Rodham and private e-mail server President’s Task Force on National Healthcare Reform, 85–89, 92, 98–99, 191 Reagan, Ronald, xxii, 7, 52, 67, 81, 87, 96, 149, 165 Reich, Robert, 29, 30 Renaissance Weekend, 81, 149 Rice, Condoleezza, 142 Rice, Susan, 150, 160 Ripon Society, 13 Rockefeller, Nelson, 13, 15, 190 Rodham, Dorothy (Howell), xx, 3–5, 12, 127, 173, 206, 214 Rodham, Hannah (Jones), 2 Rodham, Hugh, Jr., 1, 19, 33, 44, 91, 206 Rodham, Hugh, Sr., 1, 206 Rodham, Russell, 2 Rodham, William, 2 Roosevelt, Eleanor, xiv, 85, 103 Rose Law Firm, 49, 50, 54, 55, 60, 68, 74, 76, 94, 95, 112, 190 Sanders, Bernie, xvii, 165, 166, 169, 172, 173, 178 Schumer, Chuck, 130, 132–133, 193 Scranton, PA, 1–2, 206 Seneca Falls, 117, 173 Sexism: in American culture, xvii, xx, xxiii, xxiv; in American in politics, 174, 177, 178; in Fayetteville, AK, 45; in Little Rock, AK, 51, 61; LSAT, 18, 22; in 1990s America, 83; in Park Ridge, IL, 7;

Trump, 182, 213; in Washington, D.C., 117 Shanghai Expo (USA Pavilion), 145–147 Shields, Geoffrey, 13 Starr, Kenneth, 94, 95, 96, 98, 112–113, 115, 116, 119, 192 Suffrage/Suffragettes, 117, 173, 202, 201 Swing states, 170 Thomason, Harry, 72, 77, 91, 93 Thomason, Linda Bloodworth, 77 Travel as First Lady: Bosnia, 114; China, 107; Ireland, 104; respect overseas, 106; South Asia, 102 Travel as Secretary of State: Africa, 145; Asia, 143–144, 194; Burma, 153; China, 155; Laos, 155–156; Libya, 151; Quatar, 150; South Korea, 146; Vietnam, 147 “Travelgate,” 93–95 Treuhaft, Walker & Burnstein, 31 Trump, Donald: Access Hollywood tape, 182–183; attacks on Hillary, 174, 178; Muslim ban, 168; nomination speech, 180, 203–204, 209; as Republican nominee, 173; and Russia, 180 Twenty-sixth Amendment, 33 UA (University of Arkansas) Legal Aid Clinic, 42, 49, 190 UN (United Nations) Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 38 UN (United Nations) Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 107–108, 192, 197–202 Vietnam War: antiwar protests on college campuses, xiii, 22; in Cambodia, 25; Nixon’s expansion, 24; Tet Offensive, 14; at Wellesley College, 14, 16, 17, 189 Violence Against Women Act (1994), 109, 192

Index 229

Walmart, 68, 76 Watergate, xiv, 37, 40, 41, 44, 48, 93, 112 Wellesley College, 11, 12, 16, 18–19, 164 Wellesley commencement speech of 1969, xviii–xix, 11, 18–20, 164; of 2017, xxiv What Happened, xxiii, 186, 195 Whillock, Margaret, 43 White, Frank, 57, 62–63 White House Press Corps, 90, 93 White House Travel Office, 92–94 Whitehaven Street Home, Washington, D.C., 131

Whitewater, 94, 95–98, 103, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120, 192 Wikileaks, 178, 180, 183 Williams, Maggie, 81 “Woman Card,” xxiv, 174 Wright, Betsy, 33, 61, 67, 69 Wynette, Tammy, 73, 75 Yale Barristers’ Union Prize Trial, 32, 38 Yale Child Study Center, 28, 34 Yale Law School, 18, 21, 22, 190 Yale Review of Law and Social Action, 24

About the Author Kathleen Gronnerud is an adjunct professor in history at Saddleback College and author specializing in American political history. She is the coeditor of Modern American Political Dynasties: A Study of Power, Family, and Political Influence (Praeger, 2018). Kathleen is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley; Northwestern University; and California State University, Fullerton. She holds two Master’s degrees in journalism and history with early training as a television and radio reporter in Washington, D.C. She is a contributing writer to a number of collections including: 50 Events that Shaped African American History: An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic (J. Wilson, ed., Greenwood, 2019); Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (P. Lamphier and R. Welch, eds., ABC-CLIO, 2017); and The World of the Civil War: A Daily Life Encyclopedia (L.T. Frank, ed., Greenwood, 2015). Her work has also been published by the Center for Presidential Studies at Southern Methodist University and the History News Service. Kathleen, her husband and their three children are long-time residents of Southern California.