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| Early life | |
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Hillary Diane Rodham[nb 1] was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.[1][2] She was raised in a United Methodist family, first in Chicago and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois.[3] Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham (1911–1993), was the son of Welsh and English immigrants;[4] he managed a successful small business in the textile industry.[5] Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell (1919–2011), was a homemaker of English, Scottish, French, French Canadian, and Welsh descent.[4][6] Hillary grew up with two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony.
Mementos of Hillary Rodham's early life are shown at the William J. Clinton Presidential Center.
As a child, Hillary Rodham was a teacher's favorite at her public schools in Park Ridge.[7][8] She participated in swimming, baseball, and other sports.[7][8] She also earned numerous awards as a Brownie and Girl Scout.[8] She attended Maine East High School, where she participated in student council, the school newspaper, and was selected for National Honor Society.[1][9] For her senior year, she was redistricted to Maine South High School, where she was a National Merit Finalist and graduated in the top five percent of her class of 1965.[9][10] Her mother wanted her to have an independent, professional career,[6] and her father, otherwise a traditionalist, was of the opinion that his daughter's abilities and opportunities should not be limited by gender.[11]
Raised in a politically conservative household,[6] at age thirteen Rodham helped canvass South Side Chicago following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she found evidence of electoral fraud against Republican candidate Richard Nixon.[12] She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964.[13] Rodham's early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anticommunist), who introduced her to Goldwater's classic The Conscience of a Conservative,[14] and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw and met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in Chicago in 1962.[15]
Tags:Chicago,Illinois,Methodist,President,United Methodist,Park Ridge, Illinois,Hugh Ellsworth Rodham,Welsh,English,Dorothy Emma Howell,Scottish,French,French Canadian,Hugh,Tony,William J. Clinton Presidential Center,Brownie,Girl Scout,Maine East High School,Student Council,National Honor Society,Maine South High School,National Merit Finalist,Conservative,South Side Chicago,1960 U.s. Presidential Election,Electoral Fraud,Republican,Richard Nixon,Barry Goldwater,U.s. Presidential Election Of 1964,Anticommunist,The Conscience Of A Conservative,Social Justice,Civil Rights,Martin Luther King, Jr.,Life, | |
| Wellesley College years | |
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In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science.[16] During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans;[17][18] with this Rockefeller Republican-oriented group,[19] she supported the elections of John Lindsay and Edward Brooke.[20] She later stepped down from this position, as her views changed regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.[17] In a letter to her youth minister at this time, she described herself as "a mind conservative and a heart liberal."[21] In contrast to the 1960s current that advocated radical actions against the political system, she sought to work for change within it.[22] In her junior year, Rodham became a supporter of the antiwar presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy.[23] Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rodham organized a two-day student strike and worked with Wellesley's black students to recruit more black students and faculty.[23] In early 1968, she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association and served through early 1969;[22][24] she was instrumental in keeping Wellesley from being embroiled in the student disruptions common to other colleges.[22] A number of her fellow students thought she might some day become the first woman President of the United States.[22] So she could better understand her changing political views, Professor Alan Schechter assigned Rodham to intern at the House Republican Conference, and she attended the "Wellesley in Washington" summer program.[23] Rodham was invited by moderate New York Republican Representative Charles Goodell to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s late-entry campaign for the Republican nomination.[23] Rodham attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami. However, she was upset by how Richard Nixon's campaign portrayed Rockefeller and by what she perceived as the convention's "veiled" racist messages, and left the Republican Party for good.[23]
Main article: Hillary Rodham senior thesis
Rodham wrote her senior thesis, a critique of the tactics of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, under Professor Schechter.[25] (Years later, while she was First Lady, access to the thesis was restricted at the request of the White House and it became the subject of some speculation.)[25]
In 1969, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts,[26] with departmental honors in political science.[25] Following pressure from some fellow students,[27] she became the first student in Wellesley College history to deliver its commencement address.[24] Her speech received a standing ovation lasting seven minutes.[22][28][29] She was featured in an article published in Life magazine,[30] due to the response to a part of her speech that criticized Senator Edward Brooke, who had spoken before her at the commencement.[27] She also appeared on Irv Kupcinet's nationally syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New England newspapers.[31] That summer, she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthy conditions).[32]
Tags:United States,Wellesley College,New York,President Of The United States,Presidential Nomination,Political Science,Young Republicans,Rockefeller Republican,John Lindsay,Edward Brooke,American Civil Rights Movement,Vietnam War,Presidential Nomination Campaign,Eugene Mccarthy,Assassination Of Martin Luther King, Jr.,Alan Schechter,House Republican Conference,Charles Goodell,Nelson Rockefeller,1968 Republican National Convention,Hillary Rodham Senior Thesis,Saul Alinsky,Bachelor Of Arts,Irv Kupcinet, | |
| Yale Law School and postgraduate studies | |
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Rodham then entered Yale Law School, where she served on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action.[33] During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center,[34] learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973).[35][36] She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital[35] and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free legal advice for the poor.[34] In the summer of 1970, she was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. There she researched migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education.[37] Edelman later became a significant mentor.[38] Rodham was recruited by political advisor Anne Wexler to work on the 1970 campaign of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Duffey, with Rodham later crediting Wexler with providing her first job in politics.[39]
In the late spring of 1971, she began dating Bill Clinton, also a law student at Yale. That summer, she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.[40] The firm was well known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes (two of its four partners were current or former Communist Party members);[40] Rodham worked on child custody and other cases.[nb 2] Clinton canceled his original summer plans, in order to live with her in California;[41] the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school.[42] The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.[43] She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973,[26] having stayed on an extra year to be with Clinton.[44] Clinton first proposed marriage to her following graduation, but she declined.[44]
Rodham began a year of postgraduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center.[45] Her first scholarly article, "Children Under the Law", was published in the Harvard Educational Review in late 1973.[46] Discussing the new children's rights movement, it stated that "child citizens" were "powerless individuals"[47] and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but that instead courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis.[48] The article became frequently cited in the field.[49]
Tags:Democratic,Bill Clinton,Yale Law School, | |
| From the East Coast to Arkansas | |
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During her postgraduate study, Rodham served as staff attorney for Edelman's newly founded Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts,[50] and as a consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children.[51] In 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal.[52] Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard Nussbaum,[35] Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for impeachment.[52] The committee's work culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974.[52]
By then, Rodham was viewed as someone with a bright political future; Democratic political organizer and consultant Betsey Wright had moved from Texas to Washington the previous year to help guide her career;[53] Wright thought Rodham had the potential to become a future senator or president.[54] Meanwhile, Clinton had repeatedly asked her to marry him, and she continued to demur.[55] However, after failing the District of Columbia bar exam[56] and passing the Arkansas exam, Rodham came to a key decision. As she later wrote, "I chose to follow my heart instead of my head".[57] She thus followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, rather than staying in Washington where career prospects were brighter. He was then teaching law and running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in his home state. In August 1974, Rodham moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and became one of only two female faculty members in the School of Law at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.[58][59] She gave classes in criminal law, where she was considered a rigorous teacher and tough grader, and was the first director of the school's legal aid clinic.[60] She still harbored doubts about marriage, concerned that her separate identity would be lost and that her accomplishments would be viewed in the light of someone else's.[61]
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| Early Arkansas years | |
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Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton lived in this 980 square feet (91 m2) house in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Little Rock from 1977 to 1979 while he was Arkansas Attorney General.[62]
Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton bought a house in Fayetteville in the summer of 1975, and Hillary finally agreed to marry.[63] Their wedding took place on October 11, 1975, in a Methodist ceremony in their living room.[64] She announced she was keeping the name Hillary Rodham,[64] to keep their professional lives separate and avoid apparent conflicts of interest and because "it showed that I was still me,"[65] although her decision upset their mothers.[66] Bill Clinton had lost the congressional race in 1974, but in November 1976 was elected Arkansas Attorney General, and so the couple moved to the state capital of Little Rock.[67] There, in February 1977, Rodham joined the venerable Rose Law Firm, a bastion of Arkansan political and economic influence.[68] She specialized in patent infringement and intellectual property law[33] while also working pro bono in child advocacy;[69] she rarely performed litigation work in court.[70]
Rodham maintained her interest in children's law and family policy, publishing the scholarly articles "Children's Policies: Abandonment and Neglect" in 1977[71] and "Children's Rights: A Legal Perspective" in 1979.[72] The latter continued her argument that children's legal competence depended upon their age and other circumstances and that in serious medical rights cases, judicial intervention was sometimes warranted.[48] An American Bar Association chair later said, "Her articles were important, not because they were radically new but because they helped formulate something that had been inchoate."[48] Historian Garry Wills would later describe her as "one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades",[73] while conservatives said her theories would usurp traditional parental authority,[74] allow children to file frivolous lawsuits against their parents,[48] and argued that her work was legal "crit" theory run amok.[75]
In 1977, Rodham cofounded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a state-level alliance with the Children's Defense Fund.[33][76] Later that year, President Jimmy Carter (for whom Rodham had been the 1976 campaign director of field operations in Indiana)[77] appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation,[78] and she served in that capacity from 1978 until the end of 1981.[79] From mid-1978 to mid-1980,[nb 3] she served as the chair of that board, the first woman to do so.[80] During her time as chair, funding for the Corporation was expanded from $90 million to $300 million; subsequently she successfully fought President Ronald Reagan's attempts to reduce the funding and change the nature of the organization.[69]
Following her husband's November 1978 election as Governor of Arkansas, Rodham became First Lady of Arkansas in January 1979, her title for twelve years (1979–1981, 1983–1992). Clinton appointed her chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee the same year,[81] where she secured federal funds to expand medical facilities in Arkansas's poorest areas without affecting doctors' fees.[82]
In 1979, Rodham became the first woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm.[83] From 1978 until they entered the White House, she had a higher salary than that of her husband.[84] During 1978 and 1979, while looking to supplement their income, Rodham made a spectacular profit from trading cattle futures contracts;[85] an initial $1,000 investment generated nearly $100,000 when she stopped trading after ten months.[86] The couple also began their ill-fated investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation real estate venture with Jim and Susan McDougal at this time.[85]
On February 27, 1980, Rodham gave birth to a daughter, Chelsea, her only child. In November 1980, Bill Clinton was defeated in his bid for reelection.
Tags:Chelsea,Congressional,Arkansas Advocates For Children And Families,Legal Services Corporation,Rose Law Firm,Board Of Directors, | |
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