Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born October 26, 1947)
is the junior United States Senator from
New York, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election. She is married to Bill Clinton—the 42nd President of the United
States—and was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to
2001.
A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham attracted national attention in 1969 when she delivered
a controversial address as the first student to speak at commencement exercises for Wellesley
College. She began her career as a lawyer after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, moving to Arkansas and marrying Bill Clinton
in 1975, following her career as a Congressional legal counsel; she was named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979 and was listed as one of the one hundred most influential lawyers in America in 1988
and 1991. She served as the First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992, was active in a number of organizations concerned with the welfare
of children, and was on the Wal-Mart and several other corporate boards.
As First Lady of the United States, she took a more prominent position in policy matters than almost any before her. Her major
initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval by the
U.S. Congress in 1994, but in 1997 she helped establish the State Children's Health Insurance Program and the Adoption and Safe Families Act. She became the first First Lady to be subpoenaed, testifying before a Federal grand jury as a consequence of the
Whitewater scandal in 1996. She was never charged with any wrongdoing in this
or several other investigations during her husband's administration. The
state of her marriage to Bill Clinton was the subject of considerable public discussion following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998.
Moving to New York, Clinton was elected to the United States
Senate in 2000, the first time a First Lady was elected to public office and the first female Senator from that state.
There she initially supported the George W. Bush administration on some
foreign policy issues, which included voting for the Iraq War Resolution, but opposed
the administration on the Iraq War and on most domestic issues. She was
re-elected by a wide margin in 2006. Long described as a
polarizing figure in American politics, during 2007 she has consistently been
the front-runner in polls
for the 2008 Democratic nomination for President.
Early life and education
Early life
Hillary[1] Diane Rodham was born at Edgewater Hospital
in Chicago, Illinois,[2] and was raised in a United
Methodist family,[3] first in Chicago, and then,
from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois.[4] Her father, Hugh Ellsworth
Rodham, was a son of Welsh and English immigrants[5] and operated a small but successful business in the
textile industry.[6] Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham, of
English, Scottish, French Canadian, Welsh, and
possibly Native American descent,[7] was a homemaker.[4] She has two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony.
As a child, Hillary Rodham was involved in many activities at church and at her public school in Park Ridge. She participated
in tennis and other sports and earned awards as a Brownie and Girl Scout.[8] She attended Maine East High
School, where she participated in student council, the debating team and the
National Honor Society. For her senior year she was redistricted to
Maine South High School,[9] where she was a National Merit
Finalist and graduated in 1965.[9]
Her parents encouraged her to pursue the career of her choice.[10]
Raised in a politically conservative household,[11] at age thirteen she help canvass
South Side Chicago following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, finding evidence of vote fraud against Republican candidate
Richard Nixon,[12] and volunteered for Republican candidate Barry
Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of
1964.[13] Her early political development was shaped
most strongly by her energizing high school history teacher, like her father a fervent anti-communist, and by her Methodist youth
minister, like her mother concerned with issues of social justice; with the
minister she saw and met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in Chicago in 1962.[14][11]
College
In 1965, Rodham enrolled in Wellesley College, where she majored in
political science.[15] She served as president of the Wellesley Young
Republicans organization during her freshman year.[16][17] However, due to her
evolving views regarding the American Civil Rights
Movement and the Vietnam War, she stepped down from that position;[16] she characterized her own nature as that of "a
mind conservative and a heart liberal."[18] In her junior
year, Rodham was affected by the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.,[8] and became a supporter of the anti-war presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy.[19] Rodham
organized a two-day student strike and worked with Wellesley's black students for
moderate changes, such as recruiting more black students and faculty.[20] In that same year she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government
Association.[21][22] She attended the "Wellesley in Washington" summer program at the urging of
Professor Alan Schechter, who assigned Rodham to intern
at the House Republican Conference
so she could better understand her changing political views.[20] Rodham was invited by Representative Charles
Goodell, a moderate New York Republican, to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s
late-entry campaign for the Republican nomination.[20] Rodham attended the 1968 Republican
National Convention in Miami, where she decided to leave the Republican Party for
good; she was upset over how Richard Nixon's campaign had portrayed Rockefeller and what
Rodham perceived as the "veiled" racist messages of the convention.[20]
Rodham returned to Wellesley, and wrote her senior thesis about the tactics of radical
community organizer Saul Alinsky under
Professor Schechter (which, years later while she was First Lady, was suppressed
at the request of the White House and became the subject of speculation as to its contents).[23] In 1969, Rodham graduated with departmental honors in political science.
Stemming from the demands of some students,[24] she
became the first student in Wellesley College history to deliver their commencement
address.[22] According to reports by the
Associated Press, her speech received a standing
ovation lasting seven minutes.[25][26] She was featured in an article published in
Life magazine, due to the response to a part of her speech that criticized
Senator Edward Brooke, who had spoken before her at the commencement;[8] she also appeared on
Irv Kupcinet's nationally-syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New
England newspapers.[27] 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).[28][29]
Law school
Rodham then entered Yale Law School, where she served on the Board of Editors of the
Yale Review of Law and Social Action.[30] During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center,[31] 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).[32][33] She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital,[32] and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free advice for the poor.[31] 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, researching
migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education;[34][35] Edelman would become a significant mentor to her.[35]
In the late spring of 1971, she began dating Bill Clinton, who was also a law student at Yale. That summer, she interned on
child custody cases[36] at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and
Burnstein,[37][38] which was well-known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and
radical causes;[38] two of its four partners were communists.[38][39] The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential
candidate George McGovern.[40][41] She received a
Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973,[8] having spent an extra year there in order to be with
Clinton.[42] Clinton first proposed
marriage to her following graduation, but she declined at the time.[42] She began a year of post-graduate study
on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center.[43] Her first scholarly paper, "Children Under the Law", was published in the Harvard Educational Review in late 1973[44] and became frequently cited in the field.
Marriage and family, law career and First Lady of Arkansas
Key decision
During her post-graduate study, Rodham served as staff attorney for Edelman's newly-founded Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge,
Massachusetts,[45] and as a consultant to the
Carnegie Council on Children.[46] During 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.[47][48]
Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard Nussbaum,[32] Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards
for impeachment.[48] The
committee's work culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974.[48]
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;[49] Wright thought Rodham had the potential to
one day become a Senator or President.[50] Meanwhile,
Clinton had repeatedly asked her to marry him, and she had continued to defer.[51] However, helped by her having passed the Arkansas but not the District of Columbia bar exam on her first attempt,[52] Rodham came to a key decision. As she later wrote, "I chose
to follow my heart instead of my head."[53] She thus
followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, rather than staying in Washington where career prospects were best. Clinton was at the time
teaching law and running for a seat in the U.S. House of
Representatives in his home state. In August 1974, she moved to Fayetteville,
Arkansas, and became one of two female faculty members at the University of
Arkansas, Fayetteville School of Law,[54] where
Bill Clinton also taught. Even then, she still harbored doubts about marriage, concerned that her separate identity would be lost
and her accomplishments would be viewed in the light of someone else's accomplishments.[55]
Early Arkansas years
The couple bought a house in Fayetteville in the summer of 1975, and she finally agreed to marry him.[56] Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton were married on October 11, 1975, in a Methodist ceremony in their living room.[57] She kept her name as Hillary Rodham, later writing that she
had done so to keep their professional lives separate and avoid seeming conflicts of interest, although it upset both their
mothers.[58] Bill Clinton had lost the Congressional race
in 1974, but in November 1976 was elected Attorney General of Arkansas. This required
the couple to move to the state capital of Little Rock.[59] Rodham joined the venerable Rose Law
Firm, a bastion of Arkansan political and economic influence,[60] in February 1977,[61] specializing in patent infringement and
intellectual property law,[30] while also working pro bono in child
advocacy;[62] she rarely
performed litigation work in court.[63]
Rodham co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and
Families, a state-level alliance with the Children's Defense Fund, in 1977.[30][64]
In late 1977, President Jimmy Carter (for whom Rodham had done 1976 campaign coordination
work in Indiana)[65]
appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services
Corporation,[66] and she served in that capacity
from 1978 through the end of 1981.[67] For much of that
time[68] she served as the chair of that board, the first
woman to do so.[69] During her time as chair, funding for
the Corporation was expanded from $90 million to $300 million,[62] and she successfully battled against President Ronald Reagan's initial attempts to reduce the funding and change the nature of the organization.[62]
Following the November 1978 election of her husband as Governor of
Arkansas, Rodham became First Lady of Arkansas in January 1979, her title for a total of twelve years (1979–1981,
1983–1992). Clinton appointed her chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee the same year,[70] where she successfully obtained federal funds to expand medical facilities in
Arkansas' poorest areas without affecting doctors' fees.[71]
In 1979,[72] she became the first
woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm.[73]
From 1978 until they entered the White House, she had a higher salary than her husband.[61] During 1978 and 1979, while looking to supplement their income,
Rodham made a spectacular profit from trading cattle futures
contracts.[74] The couple also began
their ill-fated investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation
real estate venture with Jim and Susan McDougal at
this time.[74]
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
re-election.
Later Arkansas years
Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1992
Bill Clinton returned to the Governor's office two years later by winning the election of 1982. During her husband's campaign,
Rodham began to use the name Hillary Clinton, or sometimes "Mrs. Bill Clinton", in order to have greater appeal to Arkansas
voters;[75] she also took a
leave of absence from Rose Law in order to campaign for him full-time.[76] As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton chaired the
Arkansas Educational Standards Committee from 1982 to 1992,[77] where she sought to bring about reform in the state's court-sanctioned public education
system.[78][79] One of the most important initiatives of the entire Clinton
governorship,[78] she fought a
prolonged but ultimately successful battle against the Arkansas Education
Association[78] to put
mandatory teacher testing as well as state standards for curriculum and classroom size in place.[78] She introduced Arkansas' Home Instruction Program for
Preschool Youth in 1985, a program that helps parents work with their children in preschool preparedness and literacy.[80] She was named Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983 and Arkansas Mother of the
Year in 1984.[81]
Clinton continued to practice law with the Rose Law Firm while she was First Lady of Arkansas. She earned less than all the
other partners, due to fewer hours being billed,[82] but
still made over $200,000 in her final year there.[72] She continued to rarely do trial work,[72] but was considered a "rainmaker" at the firm for bringing in clients,
partly due to the prestige she lent the firm and to her corporate board connections.[72] She was also very influential in the appointment of state
judges.[72] Bill Clinton's Republican
opponent in his 1986 gubernatorial re-election campaign accused the Clintons of conflict of interest, because Rose Law did state
business; the Clintons deflected the charge by saying that state fees were walled off by the firm before her profits were
calculated.[83] From 1987 to 1991 she chaired the
American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession,[84][85] which addressed gender bias in the law profession and induced the
association to adopt measures to combat it.[84]
She was twice named by the National Law Journal as one of the
100 most influential lawyers in America, in 1988 and in 1991.[86] When Bill Clinton thought about not running again for governor in 1990, Hillary Clinton considered
running herself, but private polls were unfavorable and in the end he ran and was re-elected for the final time.[87][88]
Clinton served on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital Legal
Services (1988–1992)[89] and the
Children's Defense Fund (as chair, 1986–1992).[90][10] In addition to her positions with non-profit organizations, she also held positions on
the corporate board of directors of TCBY (1985–1992),[91] Wal-Mart Stores (1986–1992)[92] and Lafarge
(1990–1992).[93] TCBY and Wal-Mart were Arkansas-based
companies that were also clients of Rose Law.[72][94]
Clinton was the first female member on Wal-Mart's board, added when chairman Sam Walton was
pressured to name one;[94] once there,
she pushed successfully for the chain to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices,[94] pushed largely unsuccessfully for more women to be added to the
company's management,[94] and was silent
about the company's famously anti-labor union practices.[94][92]
First Lady of the United States
A new kind of First Lady
After her husband became a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1992, Hillary
Clinton received popular national attention for the first time. Before the New Hampshire
primary, tabloid publications printed claims that Bill Clinton had had an extramarital
affair with Gennifer Flowers, an Arkansas lounge singer.[95] In response, the Clintons appeared together on 60 Minutes, during which Bill Clinton denied the affair but acknowledged he had caused "pain" in their
marriage.[96] (Years later, he would admit that the
Flowers affair had happened.)[97] Hillary Clinton made
culturally dismissive remarks about Tammy Wynette[98] and baking cookies[99] during the campaign that were ill-considered by her own admission. Bill Clinton said that electing
him would get "two for the price of one", referring to the prominent role his wife would assume.[100]
When Bill Clinton took office as president in January 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the First Lady of the United States,
and announced that she would be using that form of her name.[101] She was the first First Lady to hold a post-graduate
degree[102] and to have her own professional
career up to the time of entering the White House.[103] She was also the first First Lady to take up an office in the West Wing of the White House,[43] First Ladies usually staying in the East Wing. She is regarded
as the most openly empowered presidential wife in American history, save for Eleanor
Roosevelt.[104]
Some critics called it inappropriate for the First Lady to play a central role in matters of public policy. Supporters pointed
out that Clinton's role in policy was no different from that of other White House advisors and that voters were well aware that
she would play an active role in her husband's Presidency.[105] Bill Clinton's campaign promise of "two for the price of one" led opponents to refer derisively to
the Clintons as "co-presidents",[106] or sometimes
"Billary".[107] The pressures of conflicting ideas about
the role of a First Lady were enough to send Clinton into "imaginary discussions" with the also-politically-active Eleanor
Roosevelt;[108] from the time she came to Washington, she
also found refuge in a prayer group of The Fellowship that featured many wives of conservative Washington
figures.[109][110] Triggered in part by the death of her father in April 1993, she publicly
sought to find a synthesis of Methodist teachings, liberal religious political philosophy, and Tikkun editor Michael Lerner's "politics of
meaning" to overcome what she saw as America's "sleeping sickness of the soul" and that would lead to a willingness "to remold
society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium."[111][112] Other segments of the public focused on her appearance, which had evolved over time from
inattention to fashion during her days in Arkansas,[113]
to a popular site in the early days of the World Wide Web devoted to showing her many
different, and much analyzed, hairstyles as First Lady,[114][115] to an appearance on
the cover of Vogue magazine in 1998.[116]
Health care and other policy initiatives
In 1993, the president appointed his wife to head and be the chairwoman of the Task
Force on National Health Care Reform, hoping to replicate the success she had in leading the effort for Arkansas education
reform.[78] The recommendation of
the task force became known as the Clinton health care plan, a complex
proposal that would mandate employers to provide health coverage to their employees through individual health maintenance
organizations. The plan was quickly derided as "Hillarycare" by its opponents; some protesters against it became vitriolic, and
during a July 1994 bus tour to rally support for the plan, she was forced to wear a bulletproof
vest at times.[117][118] The plan
did not receive enough support for a floor vote in either the House or the Senate, although both chambers were controlled by
Democrats, and proposal was abandoned in September of 1994.[117] Clinton later acknowledged in her book, Living
History, that her political inexperience partly contributed to the defeat, but mentioned that many other factors were
also responsible. The First Lady's approval ratings, which had generally been in the high-50s percent range during her first
year, fell to 44 percent in April 1994 and 35 percent by September 1994.[119] Republicans made the Clinton health care plan a major campaign issue of the 1994 midterm
elections,[120] which saw a net Republican gain of
fifty-three seats in the House election and seven
in the Senate election, winning control of both; many analysts and
pollsters found the plan to be a major factor in the Democrats' defeat, especially among independent voters.[121]
Opponents of universal health care would continue to use "Hillarycare" as a
pejorative label for similar plans by others.[122]
Clinton reads to a child during a school visit
Along with Senator Ted Kennedy, she was the major force behind the State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997, a federal effort that
provided state support for children whose parents were unable to provide them with health coverage.[123] She promoted nationwide immunization
against childhood illnesses and encouraged older women to seek a mammogram to detect
breast cancer, with coverage provided by Medicare.[124] She
successfully sought to increase research funding for prostate cancer and childhood
asthma at the National Institutes of
Health.[43] The First Lady worked to
investigate reports of an illness that affected veterans of the Gulf War, which became known as
the Gulf War syndrome.[43] Together with Attorney General
Janet Reno, Clinton helped create the Office on Violence Against Women at the Department of Justice.[43] In 1997, she initiated and shepherded the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which she regarded as her greatest accomplishment as
First Lady.[43] As First Lady, Clinton hosted
numerous White House Conferences, including ones on Child Care (1997),[125] Early Childhood Development and Learning (1997),[126] and Children and Adolescents (2000),[127] and the first-ever White House Conferences on Teenagers (2000)[128] and Philanthropy (1999).[129]
Hillary Clinton travelled to over eighty countries during this time,[130] breaking the mark for most-travelled First Lady held by Pat
Nixon.[131] In a September 1995 speech before the
Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Clinton argued very forcefully against practices that abused women around the world and in
China itself.[132] She was
one of the most prominent international figures at the time to speak out against the treatment of Afghan women by the Islamist fundamentalist
Taliban that had seized control of Afghanistan.[133][134] She helped create Vital Voices, an international initiative sponsored by the United States to
promote the participation of women in the political processes of their countries.[135]
Whitewater and other investigations
The Whitewater controversy was the focus of media attention from the
publication of a New York Times report during the 1992 presidential
campaign,[136] and throughout her time as
First Lady. The Clintons had lost their late-1970s investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation;[137] at the same time, their partners in that investment, Jim and Susan McDougal, operated Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan institution
that retained the legal services of Rose Law Firm[137] and may have been improperly subsidizing Whitewater losses.[136] Madison Guaranty later failed, and
Clinton's work at Rose was scrutinized for a possible conflict of interest in representing the bank before state regulators that
her husband had appointed;[136] she
claimed she had done minimal work for the bank.[138] Independent
counsels Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr
subpoenaed Clinton's legal billing records;[139]
she claimed to be unable to produce these records.[139] The records were found in the First Lady's White House book room after a two-year search, and
delivered to investigators in early 1996.[140] The delayed appearance of the records sparked intense interest and another investigation
about how they surfaced and where they had been;[140] Clinton attributed the problem to disorganization that resulted from their move from the
Arkansas Governor's Mansion and the effects of a White House renovation.[141] After the discovery of the records, on January 26,
1996, Clinton made history by becoming the first First Lady to be subpoenaed to testify before a Federal
