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As the only first lady in the history of the republic
to have had a high-powered career as well-established--and in the same field to boot--as
her husband's prior to his being elected president of the United States, Hillary Rodham
Clinton has engendered more controversy and raised more people's expectations than any of
her predecessors. A lawyer, a professor, and an advocate of educational reform and
children's rights, she was appointed the leader of President Bill Clinton's task force on
health care reform in 1993. In that capacity she held unprecedented meetings with senators
and policy experts before addressing the subject in congressional testimony, for which she
was widely, and literally, applauded--a rare event on Capitol Hill. She has been called
"the most important White House adviser on domestic issues" and "the most
openly empowered presidential wife in American history." Over the course of her
husband's presidency, Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure is expected to transform irrevocably
the role of first lady from that of trend-setting international hostess to one in which
policy-making and advising the president openly, without apology, is no longer taboo, if
not yet entirely accepted.Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton was born on October 26, 1947 in
Chicago, Illinois, the oldest child and only daughter of Hugh E. Rodham, who owned a
drapery-making business, and Dorothy Howell Rodham, a full-time homemaker. Hillary and her
brothers, Hugh and Tony, grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois, a middle-class suburb of Chicago
to which the Rodhams moved when Hillary was four years old. As the new kid on the block,
Hillary was often attacked by a girl named Suzy, the neighborhood bully. After running
home in tears one time too often for her mother to countenance, Hillary was told to fight
back the next time she was hit. She did, and from then on her natural leadership abilities
attracted lots of friends--both boys and girls--at Eugene Field Elementary School, Emerson
Junior High, Maine East High School, and the newly built Maine South High School, to which
she was transferred in her senior year as a result of redistricting.
An outstanding student, Clinton excelled in nearly every endeavor she undertook. She
maintained good grades, earned Girl Scout merit badges and DAR (Daughters of the American
Revolution) community-service awards, played the piano, took ballet lessons, engaged in
competitive sports, and performed household chores for an extra potato with dinner rather
than for an allowance. A highly skilled member of the debating team and a participant in
the student government in high school, she was a National Merit Scholarship finalist and a
member of the National Honor Society. During the summers she worked as a lifeguard at a
municipal swimming pool. Even as a teenager, she displayed a predilection for social
activism. Spurred by the Reverend Don Jones, her youth minister at the First United
Methodist Church, she organized baby-sitting services for local migrant workers. Taking
his white, middle-class charges into Chicago's inner-city neighborhoods, Jones introduced
them to black and Hispanic youths in an effort to eradicate prejudice among his pupils. On
one occasion, the two groups of young people discussed the relevance of Picasso's painting
Guernica to their own lives; on another day, in 1962, Jones took the teenagers to listen
to a speech by the civil rights leader the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to whom
Jones introduced the teenagers backstage. Sensing Clinton's insatiable intellectual
curiosity, Jones lent her books by the theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr,
and Paul Tillich as well as J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye.
Despite her association with children from less-privileged backgrounds and her exposure to
a variety of philosophies, Clinton remained, like her parents, staunchly Republican,
campaigning enthusiastically for Barry Goldwater in the presidential campaign of 1964.
After graduating in 1965 from Maine South High School in the top 5 percent of her class,
which voted her the student most likely to succeed, Clinton enrolled at the all-female
Wellesley College, near Boston, Massachusetts, where she promptly became head of the local
chapter of the Young Republicans. It was not long, however, before the turbulence of the
late 1960s reinforced the teachings of her youth minister and led her slowly leftward in
her politics. The assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, coupled with the violence Clinton witnessed at the
Democratic National Convention in Chicago in the summer of 1968, dovetailed with her keen
sense of social justice to convert her wholeheartedly to the Democratic party. She
campaigned for Eugene McCarthy for president in 1968, worked to enroll more black students
at Wellesley, organized the school's first teach-ins on the Vietnam War (which turned into
antiwar protests), and wrote her senior thesis on poverty and community development.
In 1969 Clinton graduated from Wellesley with a bachelor's degree in political science. As
president of the student government, she was selected by her classmates to deliver the
school's first student commencement address, immediately following a speech by Senator
Edward W. Brooke, a liberal Republican from Massachusetts. After shocking her audience by
castigating Brooke for the irrelevance of his remarks, she spoke about her classmates'
college experience in terms of what it had meant to them personally. "We are, all of
us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that
uncertainty," she told her fellow graduating seniors. "But there are some things
we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life,
including, tragically, the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching
for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living." Clinton's words and
her photograph were published in Life magazine. The national publicity she received
through the article and through her victories as a contestant on the television quiz show
College Bowl enhanced her already impressive resume and helped to ensure that she would
have her pick of the best law schools.
Clinton enrolled at Yale Law School, in New Haven, Connecticut, after a Harvard professor
told her that his university did not need any more female students. At Yale she served on
the editorial board of the now-defunct Yale Review of Law and Social Action and presided
over a mass meeting that was called in the spring of 1970 to formulate a response to the
trials of the Black Panthers Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale, which were then underway at a
courthouse near the university. Recalling the campus atmosphere at the time in a speech to
other Yale alumni in October 1992, she said that "there was a great amount of ferment
and confusion about what was and wasn't the proper role of law school education. We would
have great arguments about whether we were selling out because we were getting a law
degree, whether in fact we should be doing something else, not often defined clearly but
certainly passionately argued. That we should somehow be 'out there,' wherever 'there'
was, trying to help solve the problems that took up so much of our time in argument and
discussion."
The solution to Clinton's dilemma--how to combine social activism and a legal
career--presented itself in the figure of the civil rights lawyer and Yale alumna Marian
Wright Edelman, the first black woman to pass the bar exam in Mississippi. After Edelman
gave a speech at Yale in the spring of 1970 about her work in behalf of the poor and
children's rights, Clinton volunteered to work for Edelman's Washington Research Project,
the congressional lobbying and advocacy group that later became the Children's Defense
Fund. Edelman could not afford to pay her for her services, so Clinton applied for a Law
Student Civil Rights Research Council grant, obtained a stipend, and spent the summer of
1970 in Washington, D.C., interviewing the families of migrant laborers and reporting her
findings to Senator Walter F. Mondale's subcommittee. Back at Yale, she augmented her
knowledge of the nascent children's rights field with classes on child psychology and
family law. Scheduled to graduate in 1972, she prolonged her education for a year in order
to work at Yale's Child Study Center, where she helped research a book by Anna Freud,
Joseph Goldstein, and Albert Solnit entitled Beyond the Best Interests of the Child
(1973). During her final year at Yale, Clinton also performed legal research for the
Carnegie Council on Children, specializing in the rights of children to education and
medical care.
Meanwhile, in her second year at Yale Hillary Clinton had met her future husband, Bill
Clinton, at the law library. According to the often-repeated story of their first meeting,
the two of them stared at each other from opposite ends of a long corridor in the library
until Hillary approached Bill and said, "Look, if you're going to keep staring at me,
and I'm going to keep staring back, I think we should at least know each other. I'm
Hillary Rodham. What's your name?" From then on, Hillary and Bill were inseparable.
As well matched temperamentally as they were intellectually, both were equally dedicated
to public service. Having spent the previous year in Oxford, England on a Rhodes
scholarship, Bill Clinton was then in his first year of law school. Before graduating in
the same class in 1973, the couple had spent the summer of 1972 in San Antonio, Texas,
where Bill had run George S. McGovern's presidential campaign and Hillary had registered
Hispanic voters.
For several months after her graduation, Hillary worked as a staff attorney for the
Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts while Bill taught at the University of
Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville. They kept in touch by telephone and occasional
visits. In January 1974 Hillary Clinton moved to Washington, D.C., at the behest of John
Doar, the special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, who was in charge of the
committee's inquiry into the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. One of only three
women on the staff of forty-three lawyers, Clinton was put in charge of legal procedures.
She impressed her peers with her objectivity and her ability to distinguish advocacy from
judicial guidance. Her colleagues found her to be energetic, emotionally supportive, and
cooperative. When the impeachment staff was disbanded following Nixon's resignation, on
August 8, 1974, Clinton was deluged with offers of high-paying jobs at prestigious law
firms on the East Coast in addition to an invitation to return to her post at the
Children's Defense Fund. To the dismay of her friends and family, she instead joined Bill
Clinton on the faculty of the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville in
September 1974.
In the summer of 1974 Bill Clinton had launched a bid for a seat in the House of
Representatives from Arkansas's Third Congressional District, a Republican stronghold.
Hillary became his unofficial campaign manager when she demonstrated her remarkable
organizing skills. Although Bill Clinton lost the election to the Republican incumbent,
John Paul Hammerschmidt, by four percentage points, he came closer to defeating
Hammerschmidt than any Democrat before or since. During the campaign, Hillary had made
extensive contacts throughout the state and discovered that she enjoyed teaching criminal
law, running a legal-services clinic, and doing prison projects and advocacy work in the
quiet college town in the Ozark Mountains. Visits to friends and family in Illinois and to
the East Coast in the summer of 1975 confirmed for Hillary that she was not missing
anything by remaining in Arkansas. Upon her return to Fayetteville in August, Bill
surprised her with a house and a proposal of marriage. When they were wed, on October 11,
1975, Hillary retained her maiden name, a decision that would surface as a controversial
issue in her husband's subsequent political campaigns.
After Bill Clinton was elected state attorney general in 1976, he and Hillary moved to
Little Rock, where she taught law as an adjunct professor at the University of Arkansas
and directed the school's legal-aid clinic. Earlier that year she had impressed Jimmy
Carter with her work on his presidential campaign, which Bill had directed in Arkansas. In
1977 President Carter appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services
Corporation, a Washington-based organization that provides federal funds to legal-aid
bureaus throughout the United States. In the same year she founded and presided over the
Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a nonprofit legal advocacy group whose
mandate was to identify the problems facing low-income children, and she was among the
first female associates hired by Rose Law Firm, where her salary enabled her and Bill to
buy a house in the upper-middle-class suburb of Hillcrest.
In 1978 Hillary campaigned for Bill in his first run for governor, which he won by
defeating his Republican opponent, A. Lynn Lowe, by a margin of almost two to one.
Hillary, who had recently been named to the board of directors of the Children's Defense
Fund, continued to work at Rose Law Firm after the election, giving Arkansas something it
had never had: a working first lady. After moving into the governor's mansion, Bill
appointed Hillary chairperson of the Rural Health Advisory Committee, whose members dealt
with the problems involved with providing health care in isolated areas. Neither Hillary's
retention of her last name nor her assumption of official duties engendered much
controversy at that time. In early 1980 she was made a partner at Rose Law Firm and gave
birth to Chelsea Victoria Clinton, who was named after the song "Chelsea
Morning."
In announcing the birth of a daughter to Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, the governor
offended some of his more traditional constituents, who began to carp that something must
be wrong with his marriage if his wife would not take his name. Compounding his problems
in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan would sweep Republicans into office in a nationwide
landslide, was President Carter's decision to intern 18,000 Cuban refugees at Fort
Chaffee, Arkansas. After some of them rioted that summer, Bill Clinton's Republican
opponent, Frank White, played on racist sentiments in his campaign and unseated Clinton,
who fell into a period of despair. He traveled the state apologizing for his mistakes and
asking voters to forgive him, which they did by returning him to office in 1982. Arkansans
also forgave Hillary for her "brash" independence after she took her husband's
last name and underwent a comprehensive image makeover, which included trading in her
thick glasses for contact lenses, lightening and taming her hair, losing fifteen pounds,
and dressing more fashionably.
Over the following decade Hillary Clinton honed her campaigning skills as her husband was
reelected governor in 1984, 1986, 1988, and 1990. She learned many valuable lessons--about
dealing with the press, gaining popularity, and fending off attacks on her husband's
character and the quality of their marriage--that would serve her well in 1992. In the
meantime, she pursued a fulfilling career with the imprimatur of voters, legislators, and
the governor, who, early in his career, signaled the depth of his confidence in her
abilities by appointing her to top-priority posts. In 1983, as head of the Arkansas
Education Standards Committee, Hillary Clinton set out to improve the quality of public
education, in which Arkansas ranked forty-ninth in the nation in per pupil expenditures.
Her most controversial recommendation was the establishment of teacher competency testing.
She ultimately prevailed, and the state passed a law, instituted in 1985, allowing
teachers to be dismissed if they failed to demonstrate adequate reading, writing, and math
skills. For her educational reforms, Hillary Clinton received the Arkansas Press
Association's first headliner-of-the-year award in 1984.
Throughout her ten years in the governor's mansion, Hillary Clinton demonstrated her
influence in positions of public service. She provided disadvantaged families with access
to an already existing program called HIPPY, for Home Instruction Program for Preschool
Youngsters; served on the board of directors of the Arkansas Children's Hospital; worked
for the Southern Governors' Association Task Force on Infant Mortality; organized the
state's first neonatal care unit and a helicopter service, called Angel One, that would
bring emergency care to people living in outlying rural areas; and served on the American
Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession. She served on the boards of
directors of the retail giant Wal-Mart, TCBY (a yogurt company), and LaFarge, resigning
from them all in May 1992. In 1988 and 1991 she was named among the most influential
lawyers in the United States by the National Law Journal, and in 1989 she was named among
the best business-litigation attorneys in Arkansas.
Bill Clinton had been expected to run for president of the United States long before he
actually threw his hat into the ring in 1992. Five years earlier he had called a press
conference at which all those assembled expected him to declare his intention to run;
instead, he had shocked everyone by declining and explaining that his then seven-year-old
daughter was too young to be subjected to the ruthless inquiries of the press, which had
for years been publishing allegations of the governor's rumored infidelity. That issue
resurfaced with particular virulence early in the 1992 campaign, when a lounge singer
named Gennifer Flowers claimed to have had a twelve-year affair with Bill Clinton.
Because of the unfavorable publicity generated by Flowers's allegation, many in the
Clinton camp thought their candidate was dead in the water, but Hillary Clinton insisted
on meeting the issue head-on. At her urging, the Clintons were interviewed by Steve Kroft
on the television news magazine 60 Minutes on Super Bowl Sunday in January 1992. That
extraordinary event constituted most Americans' introduction to Hillary Clinton. Grilled
about whether he had betrayed his wife, Bill admitted that he had caused pain in their
marriage but refused to be more specific. Hillary put an end to that line of questioning
when she said that the public should respect the "zone of privacy" that
surrounds the way any two people deal with their marital problems. "We've gone
further than anybody we know of, and that's all we're going to say," she declared in
what was almost universally considered to be a bravura performance. When it was reported
that Flowers had been paid for her story, the Clintons went on the offensive, transforming
the issue from a near-certain liability into an attack on the failure of the press to
enforce the standards of responsible journalism.
Subjected to more intense scrutiny than any previous presidential candidate's wife,
Hillary Clinton learned the danger of providing the media with sound bites that could
easily be taken out of context. When Jerry Brown, who was seeking the Democratic
nomination, attacked her professional record, she said, "Well, I suppose I could have
stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was pursue my
profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life." Although she went
on to praise all the choices available to women, including staying home, the unfortunate
remark was widely interpreted as an indication of arrogance. Not long afterward, Clinton
made another gaffe while talking to Gail Sheehy, who profiled her in Vanity Fair (May
1992), when she complained that the public and the press were following a double standard
in not investigating the alleged infidelities of President George Bush, who would be
Clinton's Republican opponent in the 1992 presidential election. In both instances,
Hillary rescued her image and the candidacy of her husband by apologizing for her
mistakes, which had made headlines that referred to the "Hillary Problem" and
the "Hillary Factor."
Most of the negative publicity that Hillary Clinton seemed to attract derived from the
public's anxiety about how much power she would wield if her husband were elected
president of the United States and how she would transform the role of first lady. Early
in the campaign, Bill Clinton had boasted that he and his wife were a "buy one, get
one free" package deal. Shortly after he became president, he named her to the
unofficial post of leader of his Task Force on National Health Care Reform, whose
thirty-four working groups and 500 employees worked in secrecy from January 25 to May 30
to come up with a viable solution to tame the costs of the nation's $800 billion
health-care industry while expanding services and coverage. Hillary Clinton broke
precedent on February 4, 1993, when she held the first in a series of meetings with
congressional leaders. On June 22, 1993 the United States Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia ruled that she was a de facto government official when it sanctioned
the secrecy in which the task force had conducted its business, and a Newsweek poll taken
in September 1993 indicated that 56 percent of Americans approved of her leadership of the
task force.
After Bill Clinton unveiled his health-care package in a well-received speech to Congress,
on September 22, 1993, Hillary Clinton drummed up support for the legislation in testimony
before two House committees in an unprecedented demonstration of political clout for a
first lady. In defending the president's health plan, which he has made the cornerstone of
his domestic policy, she thoroughly impressed members of both parties with her command of
detail, her poise, and, by combining flattery with persuasion at every turn, her
public-relations expertise. The Clintons' bold reform plan, which will be debated and
modified for months to come, would provide health insurance to all Americans, including
the thirty-seven million who are currently uninsured and the twenty-two million who are
considered to be "underinsured." The Clintons have argued that by cutting
wasteful spending through government regulation, raising taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and
injecting "managed competition" into the health-insurance market, their plan to
overhaul the nation's health-care system, which represents 14 percent of the United States
economy, is superior to alternative proposals.
In keeping with her longstanding commitment to a healthful lifestyle, the blond, blue-eyed
Hillary Rodham Clinton, who once joked that all she had to do to make the front page of
the nation's newspapers was to change her hairstyle, exercised regularly at the YMCA
before moving to the White House, where she has banned smoking. Unlike her predecessors,
who made news primarily by redecorating or ordering a new set of china, Clinton has taken
little interest in home decorating other than to add comfort and familiarity to her
surroundings, replace fat-laden French food with more healthful meals, and hold more open
houses for the public. In yet another break with the past, she has set up an office not in
the East Wing of the executive mansion but in the West Wing, closer to her husband's Oval
Office. In her increasingly meager allotments of spare time, she enjoys reading, playing
the piano, watching movies, and playing Game Boy, the popular computerized video game.
Works about subject
- Selected Biographical References: Guernsey, JoAnn Bren. Hillary Rodham Clinton: A New
Kind of First Lady (1993); King, Norman. Hillary: Her True Story (1993); Radcliffe,
Donnie. Hillary Rodham Clinton: A First Lady for Our Time (1993); Sherrow, Victoria.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (1993); Warner, Judith. Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story (1993)
Additional citations
- Alter, Jonathan. Why Hillary still holds on; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v132 no9 38-43
Ag 31 '98
Walsh, Kenneth T. Portrait of a marriage; U.S. News & World Report (ISSN: 0041-5537)
v125 no8 27-8+ Ag 31 '98
Breslau, Karen. Hillary's next life; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v132 no3 22-3 Jl 20 '98
Fineman, Howard. Hillary's tailored universe; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v131 no19 32-4 My
11 '98
Walsh, Kenneth T. The survivalist; U.S. News & World Report (ISSN: 0041-5537) v124
no18 18-20 My 11 '98
Schindehette, Susan. Tempered by fire; People Weekly (ISSN: 0093-7673) v49 46-7 F 9 '98
Klein, Joe. An American marriage; The New Yorker (ISSN: 0028-792X) v73 34-7 F 9 '98
Cooper, Matthew. For better and for worse; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v131 40-1 F 9 '98
Cooper, Matthew. Hillary Clinton goes to war; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v131 24-5 F 2 '98
Adams, James Ring. Webb's dirty lingerie; The American Spectator (ISSN: 0148-8414) v31
28-33+ F '98
Breslau, Karen. Destination unknown; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v130 45-6 N 24 '97
Hubbard, Kim. Happy return; People Weekly (ISSN: 0093-7673) v48 60-1 N 10 '97
Cooper, Matthew. Hillary's turning point; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v130 30 O 20 '97
Tumulty, Karen. Turning fifty; Time (ISSN: 0040-781X) v150 32-8+ O 20 '97
Walsh, Kenneth T. Hillary's resurrection; U.S. News & World Report (ISSN: 0041-5537)
v123 26-9 O 20 '97
Broder, John M. For Hillary Clinton at 50, yet another beginning; The New York Times
Biographical Service (ISSN: 0161-2433) v28 1654-5 O '97
Amiel, Barbara. Commentary; Vogue (ISSN: 0042-8000) v187 504+ S '97
Clinton, Hillary Rodham. African odyssey; Vogue (ISSN: 0042-8000) v187 186-99+ Je '97
Cooper, Matthew. Hillary power; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v129 58-60 Ap 7 '97
Cooper, Matthew. With friends like these . . .; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v129 20-3 Mr 17
'97
Weisberg, Jacob. Act II: ghosts in the administration; Vanity Fair (ISSN: 0733-8899)
vno438 88-91+ F '97
Thomas, Evan. Friends for now; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v129 40-1 Ja 27 '97
Pooley, Eric. Reinventing Hillary; Time (ISSN: 0040-781X) v148 37-8 D 2 '96
Jong, Erica. Hillary's husband re-elected!; The Nation (ISSN: 0027-8378) v263 11-15 N 25
'96
Breslau, Karen. Hillary's second term; Newsweek (ISSN: 0028-9604) v128 21 N 18 '96
Descriptors
- Lawyers ; Professors ; Presidential Advisers; First Ladies; Children's Rights Advocates;
ACTIVISTS ; HUMAN RIGHTS
ACTIVISTS; GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS; RELATIVES OF PRESIDENTS; PRESIDENTIAL
AIDES; FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS; EDUCATORS ; TEACHERS ; CLINTON HILLARY RODHAM
Primary Image Indicator
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Secondary Link Indicator
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