Over the course of her eight years as First Lady of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton aroused more controversy than any of her predecessors. While her detractors argued that the First Lady had no business in politics, the former lawyer was appointed by her husband, President Bill Clinton, to oversee a radical reform of the health-care system in the United States. Though she was ultimately unsuccessful in that goal, Hillary Clinton continued to an unprecedented degree to offer her opinions publicly and lobby for legislation in various areas on the part of the administration. The First Lady also found herself the object of a great deal of unwanted attention, in the form of the Whitewater investigation, which focused on her and her husband's past business dealings--and which cast a shadow over much of Bill Clinton's presidency. Although her honesty and legal ethics were put in question by the lengthy probe, Hillary Clinton preserved her public image sufficiently to win election in 2000 as United States senator from New York. Sworn in on January 3, 2001, and thus becoming the only First Lady in U.S. history to hold elective office, she surprised many by not immediately taking on issues of national significance. Instead, she concentrated initially on areas of direct concern to her adopted state. Still, by the end of 2001, she had begun to make bold statements on such subjects as health care, education, and energy, which are of concern to most Americans.
    Clinton was born Hillary Diane Rodham 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, and engaged in competitive sports. 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 Martin Luther King Jr., to whom Jones introduced the group 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, supporting 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 Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, coupled with the violence she 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 the attitudes and future of her graduating class. "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 University professor told her that his school 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, "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 answer to Clinton's question--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 a Senate subcommittee headed by Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota. 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 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. Well matched temperamentally as well as intellectually, they 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. The couple 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. They graduated, in the same class, in 1973.
    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 possible impeachment of President Richard Nixon. One of only three women on the staff of 43 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 and also received 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 U.S. House of Representatives from Arkansas's Third Congressional District, a Republican stronghold. After demonstrating her remarkable organizing skills, Hillary became his unofficial campaign manager. 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. Over the course of the campaign, Hillary had made extensive contacts throughout the state; during this period she also discovered that she enjoyed teaching criminal law, running a legal-services clinic, and doing prison projects and advocacy work in Fayetteville, a 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 Corp., 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, in which he defeated 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 tackled 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 for Joni Mitchell's 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--among them, raising the tax on gasoline and hiking automobile licensing fees in order to finance a highway improvement program--and asking voters to forgive him. They did so, by returning him to office in 1982. After Hillary took her husband's last name, Arkansans also forgave Hillary for her "brash" independence. She changed in other ways, too: as part of a comprehensive image makeover, she traded in her thick glasses for contact lenses, lightened and tamed her hair, lost 15 pounds, and dressed 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--in 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 Governor Clinton himself, 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 49th 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 the dismissal of teachers who 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 years in the governor's mansion, Hillary Clinton exerted considerable influence through positions of public service. She provided disadvantaged families with access to an already existing program called HIPPY, which stood 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 listed among the most influential lawyers in the United States by the National Law Journal, and in 1989 she was ranked 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 1991. He surprised many by taking the lead in some early polls, only to be hit with a barrage of unfavorable publicity stemming from the allegation by Gennifer Flowers, a former lounge singer, that she and Clinton had engaged in a 12-year-long affair. Unspecific reports of the governor's rumored infidelities had been published for years in the Arkansas press, and people in the Clinton camp feared that Flowers's charges might fatally derail his presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton, however, insisted on meeting the issue head-on. At her urging, the Clintons were interviewed by the CBS News correspondent 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 [in discussing an issue of this nature] than anybody we know of, and that's all we're going to say," she declared. 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 quote was widely interpreted as an indication of arrogance. Not long afterward, Clinton made another gaffe while talking to Gail Sheehy, who profiled her for Vanity Fair (May 1992): she complained that the public and the press were following a double standard in not investigating the alleged infidelities of President George Herbert Walker 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." On Election Day 1992 Bill Clinton won the presidency, defeating both Bush and the independent multimillionaire Ross Perot.
    Most of the negative publicity that Hillary Clinton attracted derived from 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 represented 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 34 working groups and 500 employees worked in secrecy from January 25 to May 30, 1993 to come up with a viable way to tame the costs of the nation's $800 billion health-care industry while expanding services and coverage. After Bill Clinton unveiled his health-care package in a well-received speech to Congress, on September 22, 1993, Hillary Clinton, in an unprecedented demonstration of political clout for a First Lady, drummed up support for the legislation in testimony before two House committees. In defending the president's health plan, which he 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 was debated for months after its unveiling, would have provided health insurance to all Americans, including the 37 million who were uninsured and the 22 million who were considered to be "underinsured" at that time. The Clintons 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 represented 14 percent of the United States economy, was superior to alternative proposals. However, the plan attracted strong criticism from several sides, including those who resented the fact that Hillary Clinton, who did not hold public office, was placed in charge of putting forth the package. It also worried many Americans when President Clinton's secretary of health and human services, Donna E. Shalala, testified before the Senate Finance Committee that 40 percent of then-insured Americans would be charged more for their insurance under the plan. Furthermore, small-business organizations objected to the fact that the new legislation would require all employers to pay 80 percent of their employees' health-care premiums. Support for the plan petered out, and many Democrats blamed its lack of success on the methodology the Clintons had used in presenting and advocating the bill. Hillary Clinton eventually placed most of the blame on herself. "I think I was naive and dumb, because my view was results speak for themselves," she told Marian Burros of the New York Times Service, as quoted by the Toronto Globe and Mail (January 11, 1995). "I regret very much that the efforts on health care were badly misunderstood, taken out of context and used politically against the administration. I take responsibility for that, and I'm sorry for that."
    Following the defeat of the Clintons' health-care reform package, Hillary Clinton attempted to withdraw to a degree from media scrutiny. She soon became embroiled, however, in several investigations that would plague the Clintons for the rest of Bill Clinton's tenure in office. The first, comparatively minor scandal was the so-called Travelgate affair, in which seven White House Travel Office employees were fired in May 1993 on the grounds that they had financially mismanaged the office for years. The validity of that charge was later challenged by reports in the media, which speculated that Hillary Clinton had pressured White House lawyers into firing the staff and then had the FBI investigate them so that Clinton associates could take over the positions. In a written response submitted to Congress in March 1996, Hillary Clinton stated, as quoted by a reporter for ABC News.com (June 22, 2000), that she "had no personal knowledge of, or direct involvement with that office," and had only "expressed my concern that if there were real problems in the travel office they should be addressed promptly." In June 2000 Independent Counsel Robert Ray cleared the Clintons of any wrongdoing regarding the incident. Ray noted, however, that while there was no evidence that Hillary Clinton had done anything illegal, it seemed clear that she had played a role in the firings and that she had given testimony that was inaccurate.
    Of much greater consequence was the complex and far-reaching legal case known as Whitewater, so-called because it centered on the commodity and real-estate investments the Clintons had made in the 1970s and 1980s that were related to the Whitewater Development Corp., which the Clintons had formed in 1979 with their friends James and Susan McDougal. The issue first surfaced during the 1992 presidential campaign, when the New York Times published a story suggesting that the McDougals had heavily financed the Clintons in the Whitewater Development Corp.'s investment of river real estate, in what was supposedly a 50-50 partnership. The article also stated that the Clintons had claimed tax deductions for interest payments on Whitewater, when those payments came from the Whitewater Corp. itself. The Clinton campaign responded by producing a report showing that the Clintons had made large investments in Whitewater with their own capital and had lost tens of thousands of dollars as a result. The controversy only continued, however. In 1993, after Bill Clinton had been sworn in as president, the deputy White House counsel and Clinton legal associate Vincent Foster committed suicide, following the eruption of the Travelgate affair; some wondered if he had been murdered (a theory that was later disproved) and whether or not legal documents regarding the Whitewater business had been removed before investigators appeared on the scene. (Foster had recently filed three years of tax returns for the Whitewater investment on the Clintons' behalf.) Reporters also uncovered the fact that Hillary Clinton had made a $1,000 commodities investment in 1978 that had returned an unheard-of $100,000 within 10 months. In the face of growing concern over Whitewater legal matters, Hillary Clinton held a press conference on April 22, 1994, in which she stated that she alone had been responsible for the trades that had earned her $100,000. However, she later admitted that Jim Blair--a friend and the chief attorney for the poultry producer Tyson Foods, which is headquartered in Arkansas--had advised her. She also denied having anything to do with Castle Grande, a fraudulent deal that was made by the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, run by James McDougal, and that ultimately cost the public $4 million. She stated at the time that one of her associates at the Rose legal offices had handled most of the work with Madison. This could not be independently verified, however, as her billing records had mysteriously disappeared.
    As the investigations continued, the Madison savings-and-loan operation was revealed to have been used largely by high-ranking Arkansas politicians for ill-advised and fraudulent loans. The independent counsel assigned to the case by U.S. attorney general Janet Reno, Robert B. Fiske Jr., investigated the possibility that in the mid-1980s Hillary Clinton, acting as a lawyer for Madison, had won approval of an abnormal stock offering to keep the bank afloat. The First Lady continued to deny that she had done any substantial work for the bank or that the work she did for the savings and loan amounted to a conflict of interest (since her husband was governor of Arkansas at the time). It was later revealed, however, that in 1985 and 1986 Hillary Clinton represented the bank before state regulators appointed by Bill Clinton and that one of the regulators later approved the particular stock sale that helped the bank. While a report (costing $4 million) that the Resolution Trust Corp. issued from the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro in 1995 concluded that there were no grounds for suing the Clintons over their Whitewater dealings, several Republicans in Congress alleged that the report was tainted by coverups and obstruction of justice, a claim backed up by testimony from investigators from the firm. In May 1995 the U.S. Senate opened its own investigation of the Whitewater affair.
    In January 1996 Hillary Clinton's legal billing records suddenly surfaced, casting doubt upon her veracity, as they showed that she had put in 60 hours of legal work for Madison over a 15-month period. In June 1996, after 13 months of investigation, the Senate Whitewater panel concluded its probe but issued reports whose contradictions occurred along party lines. The Republicans on the committee accused Hillary Clinton and several high-ranking Clinton administration officials of obstructing justice, declaring their belief that Hillary Clinton was responsible for the withholding of her Whitewater billing records. That report concluded that the First Lady had been aware of the Castle Grande scheme, having held 22 conversations related to Castle Grande during her work with Madison. The report also alleged that she was responsible for the removal of incriminating evidence from Vincent Foster's office and had instructed aides to thwart an official search. The Democrats on the Whitewater panel, however, stated that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of the Clintons and denounced the Republicans' report as the product of a politically inspired witch hunt. In September of that year, a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. inspector general's report concluded that Hillary Clinton had drafted a real-estate document used by Madison to con federal regulators in 1986. The document valued a piece of the Whitewater property at $400,000; six years later the federal government received only $38,000 following the collapse of the Madison bank. It was concluded that Madison had used the document to deceive bank examiners about hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions paid to a prominent Arkansas businessman. But on September 20, 2000 Robert Ray, the third independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation, noted in his final report, as quoted by CNN.com (September 20, 2000, on-line), "This office has determined that the evidence was insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that either President or Mrs. Clinton knowingly participated in any criminal conduct . . . or knew of such conduct."
    Meanwhile, a further source of difficulty for the First Lady was the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was connected tangentially to the Whitewater investigation. The independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who had replaced Fiske on the Whitewater case, decided to investigate the possibility that Bill Clinton had had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, and had later urged her to lie about the affair in her affidavit for the Paula Jones case. (Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, had brought suit against Bill Clinton, whom she accused of sexual harassment.) On January 17, 1998 President Clinton gave his deposition in the Jones case, during which he denied that he had had an affair with Lewinsky. On January 21 the Washington Post, among other publications, broke the story and revealed the existence of secretly recorded audiotapes on which Lewinsky gave details of the alleged affair. While Bill Clinton continued making denials to the media and his Cabinet, Hillary Clinton appeared on several talk shows, declaring that the allegations were the product of a "right-wing conspiracy" to topple the administration. On February 11, 1998, as reported by CNN.com (February 11, 1998, on-line), she predicted that the charge would "slowly dissipate over time under the weight of its own insubstantiality." On August 17, 1998, however, after months of investigation, President Clinton testified before a grand jury that, while he had not engaged in witness tampering, he had been involved in a sexual relationship with Lewinsky; he repeated the admission in a televised address to the nation. On December 19, 1998 Clinton was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice (thus becoming only the second president, after Andrew Johnson in 1868, to be impeached); he was acquitted by the United States Senate the following February. In Talk magazine, according to BBC (August 1, 1999, on-line), Hillary Clinton defended her husband, noting, "Everyone has some dysfunction in their families. You don't walk away if you love someone. You help the person." According to the First Lady, her husband was guilty of a "sin of weakness, not a sin of malice."
    Despite the distraction of the scandals, Hillary Clinton continued to be the most politically active First Lady in the history of the United States. In May 1995 she persuaded President Clinton to appoint an advisory committee on Persian Gulf War-related illnesses; taking her advice, the president extended the investigation after the panel supported the military's controversial findings, which blamed an undiagnosed illness as well as stress for veterans' memory losses, nervous-system disorders, headaches, joint pains, and feelings of chronic fatigue. As quoted on her official U.S. Senate Web site, she said that the experience of trying to reform health care convinced her of the need to work in small steps, noting that "we must continue to make progress. It's still important that we increase access to quality health care for working families." To these ends, in 1997 she played leading roles in two White House conferences on child care. The first, the White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, focused on new scientific findings showing that children's experiences during their first years were of enormous importance to their future health and development. The second, the White House Conference on Child Care, represented an attempt to find ways to provide affordable and reliable child care for working families. Hillary Clinton's most prominent policy effort since 1993, the conference played a major role in the development of the president's Children's Health Insurance Program. The First Lady was also active in other health-related projects, such as helping to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Adoption and Safe Family Act of 1997, which made for easier transitions for foster children moving to permanent homes and increased the number of adoptions.
    Beginning in 1995 Hillary Clinton wrote a weekly syndicated newspaper column, "Talking It Over," in which she shared the observations she had made while meeting people of various nationalities in her capacity as First Lady. The popular column appeared in roughly 100 newspapers nationwide. The year 1996 saw the publication of Clinton's first book, It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us, the proceeds from which went to children's hospitals. A best-seller, It Takes a Village focuses on the role that society can play in raising children. Clinton noted that while parents bear the primary responsibility for their children, support from the larger society is also crucial to young people's well-being.
    The negative publicity Hillary Clinton received during the Whitewater investigation was largely offset by the Lewinsky scandal, by the end of which many Americans had come to view her sympathetically as the wronged wife who had nonetheless stood by her husband. In the summer of 1999, after U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York announced that he would not run for another term, Hillary Clinton began to set in motion her campaign to succeed him. Many observers predicted that she would be unable to rise above her own scandal-tainted past, the fact that she was not from New York State, or the popularity of her likely opponent, New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Indeed, at the beginning of her run, she encountered tough personal questions and made a series of awkward comments in a seeming attempt to please opposing groups of voters simultaneously. Over the course of her campaign, she made some headlines by breaking with the Clinton administration's policy on several issues. While the administration officially stated that the sovereignty of the city of Jerusalem, which is claimed by both Israelis and Arabs, should be determined in peace talks, Hillary Clinton declared in July 1999 that Jerusalem was the "eternal and indivisible capital of Israel" and came out in favor of moving the U.S. embassy to that city from Tel Aviv, Israel, as soon as possible. (Many commentators saw this stance as being intended to make up for a March 1999 speech in which she expressed support for establishing a permanent Palestinian state.) In December 1999 she publicly criticized the administration's "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue" policy, which applied to gays in the military. The First Lady characterized the policy as a political compromise that had proven ineffective, as the number of gays discharged from the service because of their sexual orientation had risen under the new rules. She announced that if elected she would attempt to change the law so that openly gay men and women would be allowed to serve in the military. Meanwhile, she embarked on an extensive tour of New York State, during which she listened to voters' concerns and fielded questions.
    In early January 2000 Hillary Clinton moved into a $1.7 million house in Chappaqua, located in Westchester County, New York, to meet the residency requirements for running for office from New York State. On February 6 she officially announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate, marking the first time a First Lady had run for office. "I'm a new Democrat," she said, as quoted by CNN.com (February 6, 2000, on-line). "I don't believe government is the source of all our problems or the solution to them, but I do believe that when people live up to their responsibilities, we ought to live up to ours." She made education a major issue of her campaign, stating that she supported more accountability in public schools, greater investment in teachers, an increased effort to hire top-notch teachers, school construction and modernization, smaller class sizes, and efforts to increase school safety. She also supported budgetary increases in after-school programs and arts and music education. On a different front, she promised legislation that would help boost the economy in upstate New York. On May 16, 2000 she accepted the nomination of the New York State Democratic Party for United States senator.
    The tone of the campaign shifted drastically only a couple of days later, when Mayor Giuliani dropped out of the race to focus on his treatment for prostate cancer. In his absence, New York congressman Rick Lazio emerged as the Republican Senate nominee. Though Lazio initially lagged far behind Clinton in the polls, he soon gained momentum, and the two ran neck and neck for some time--until Lazio's constant attacks on the First Lady's character began to backfire. On Election Day 2000 Clinton prevailed, with 55 percent of the vote, compared with 43 percent for Lazio. To great fanfare, she was sworn in as senator in early January 2001.
    Many expected Clinton to cause an immediate stir by proposing legislation of national significance. Instead, the former First Lady spent the first few months of her Senate career focusing primarily on New York State issues and deferring to ranking senators on more prominent topics. Nonetheless, she soon found herself in the media spotlight for her $8 million memoir contract with Simon & Schuster and the scandals that plagued the Clintons as they left the White House in early 2001. Among other developments, U.S. attorney Mary Jo White investigated Bill Clinton's full pardon of the fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich during the last hours of his presidency; White then expanded her probe to the granting of clemency to four Hasidic Jews who were convicted of defrauding the government of millions of dollars in 1999--and who lived in a small community that voted unanimously for Hillary Clinton in 2000. As a result of such issues, Hillary Clinton's statewide approval rating dropped from 59 percent to around 38 percent. (As of late September 2002, it hovered at 53 percent.)
    On February 13, 2001 Hillary Clinton made her first address from the floor of the Senate, offering several moderate health-care initiatives. By mid-April she had introduced 10 bills, most of them part of an economic package for upstate New York. Surprising many, she avoided appearing on the Sunday-morning talk shows and rarely gave interviews. In June 2001 she took her first stance on a major issue when she introduced legislation to ban the practice of racial profiling in routine police investigations and to end arrest quotas. "It's a balancing issue," Clinton told Jonathan Alter for Newsweek (June 25, 2001). "There's a nearly unanimous belief that racial profiling is fundamentally wrong. On the other hand, we don't want to do anything to undermine legitimate law enforcement." In September 2001, along with Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Hillary Clinton proposed the Media Marketing Accountability Act, which would make it illegal to market or promote adult-rated rap and rock-and-roll albums to children under 17 and would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to choose which R-rated films could be marketed to minors. In July 2001 Clinton was among the leaders to successfully challenge President George W. Bush's decision to reappoint Mary Gall to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission. By the end of 2001 she had introduced 70 pieces of legislation. Among them were bills to create a nursing corps, reduce arsenic levels in drinking water, and help people injured by landmines. A Congressional Quarterly report ranked her third-most-liberal among U.S. senators.
    After the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Hillary Clinton stated on the Senate floor, as quoted on her official Web page, "We will . . . stand united behind our President as he and his advisors plan the necessary actions to demonstrate America's resolve and commitment. Not only to seek out and exact punishment on the perpetrators, but to make very clear that not only those who harbor terrorists, but those who in any way aid or comfort them whatsoever will now face the wrath of our country." Along with New York's senior senator, Charles E. Schumer, she led the fight for the allocation of millions of dollars in federal disaster aid for New York City. While the state did not receive the amount informally promised by the White House, Clinton and Schumer pushed through Congress a sizable relief package.
    On October 11, 2002 Clinton voted for the Senate resolution that gave President George W. Bush the authority to order U.S. armed forces to attack Iraq when he determined that such action was necessary. Although 22 other Democratic senators also approved the resolution, the vote aroused heated controversy regarding its constitutionality and its affect on international relations. In a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, as transcribed on her official government Web site, Clinton cited the problems of attacking Iraq unilaterally rather than with the approval of the members of the United Nations, which she described as "an organization that is still growing and maturing." "A vote for the resolution best serves the security of our nation," she declared. "If we were to defeat this resolution or pass it with only a few Democrats, I am concerned that those who want to pretend this problem [Iraq's weapons arsenal] will go way with delay will oppose any UN resolution calling for unrestricted inspections. This is a very difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make--any vote that may lead to war should be hard--but I cast it with conviction. My vote is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of preemption, or for unilateralism, or for the arrogance of American power or purpose--all of which carry grave dangers for our nation, for the rule of international law and for the peace and security of people throughout the world."
    Senator Clinton serves on the Senate Budget Committee, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. In addition, she serves on the Subcommittees on Aging; Public Health; Clean Air, Wetlands, Public Property and Nuclear Safety; Fisheries, Wildlife and Water; and Superfund, Waste Control, and Risk Assessment. She has raised substantial sums for other Democratic Party candidates, with the goal, according to some observers, of setting the groundwork for a possible run for the presidency in 2004 or 2008. "I think she is doing everything that someone who wants to be a national candidate has to do," the political strategist Paul Friedman told Raymond Hernandez for the New York Times (January 24, 2002). "She is learning the ropes in the Senate. She is doing her constituency work in New York, and at the same time, she is putting a tremendous amount of work into raising money and contributing it to colleagues who are unlikely to forget the favor."
    In keeping with her longstanding commitment to a healthful lifestyle, the blond, blue-eyed Hillary Rodham Clinton exercised regularly at YMCA facilities before moving to the White House, where she banned smoking. She currently stays in her house near Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., during the week, and usually spends her free time engaging in correspondence and reading reports on current issues and legislation. She spends her weekends at the home she shares with Bill Clinton in Chappaqua, New York. She loves art and sculpture and is a devout Methodist. Her second book, the lavishly illustrated An Invitation to the White House: At Home with History, co-written with Carl Sferrazza Anthony, was published in 2000. The Clintons' daughter, Chelsea, graduated from Stanford University and is currently studying in England, at Oxford University. -- G.O.