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Hillary Rodham Clinton

Born 1947
American first lady, attorney, politician, Senator

"I think that you have to keep true to your own beliefs about what is important.... But you always have to be open to new ways of saying it that perhaps are understood better."

Introduction

Hillary Rodham Clinton follows in the tradition of Eleanor Roosevelt as a first lady who uses her position as a platform for social change. Clinton became the 42nd first lady of the United States on January 20, 1993, when her husband, Bill Clinton, a former governor of Arkansas, took the presidential inaugural oath. A nationally known activist on education and children's issues, a mother, and a trusted political adviser to her husband, Hillary Clinton has chaired an Arkansas state commission on education, served on dozens of corporate and civic boards, and made a career as one of America's leading attorneys. She was named one of the nation's top 100 lawyers by the National Law Review in 1988 and 1991.

In 1999, Clinton began an unannounced campaign for U.S. Senate from New York. The candidacy was made official on February 6, 2000. She is the first first lady in the nation's history to run for political office.

Childhood experience

The oldest of three children of Hugh and Dorothy Rodham, Clinton grew up in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Illinois. Her father owned a fabric store and her mother was a homemaker who had dreams for her only daughter. One was that Hillary would one day be the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. As a child Clinton was active in ballet, swimming, tennis, skating, softball, volleyball, and even earned every badge as a Brownie and Girl Scout.

Clinton's advocacy for children's rights had its roots in her religious upbringing. From her parents she learned fairness and from her youth minister, the Reverend Don Jones, she learned about social justice. Her church group would baby-sit migrant children while their parents worked. The group would also visit African Americans living in the inner city of Chicago. To raise funds for poverty-stricken children in urban areas, Clinton staged sporting events and a small circus, experiences from which she learned the value of social responsibility.

College speech

In high school Clinton was class president, a member of the student council, the debating team, National Honor Society, and the winner of Maine South High School's first social science award. After graduation, she attended Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, at a time when American college campuses were actively protesting the Vietnam War. The assassination of clergyman and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Clinton had met when Reverend Jones took her to hear him preach in 1962, further increased her belief in social justice. Graduating from Wellesley with honors, Clinton became the college's first student commencement speaker. As president of the student government, she polled her classmates on what she should say and solicited from them poems and ideas. Her goal was to communicate the turmoil of America at a time of an unpopular war, political assassinations, and rioting in cities. The speech drew a standing ovation and an article appeared in Life, giving Clinton her first national media exposure.

Meets Bill Clinton

Clinton next attended Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, where she wrote her now-famous thesis on the rights of children and worked with impoverished youths at the Yale-New Haven Hospital. At this time she met two of the most influential people in her life: Bill Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman. Edelman was the founder of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), a Washington-based lobbying group, where Clinton later would work as a staff lawyer and board chairperson. Clinton first noticed Bill Clinton when he was trying to convince a group of classmates that they did not need immunization shots to visit Arkansas and boasting that Arkansas had "the biggest watermelons in the world." She met him again while registering for classes and he talked with her for an hour. When they reached the front of the line, the registrar said, "Bill, what are you doing here? You already registered."

After graduation in 1973, Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham went their separate ways. He returned to Arkansas to teach and run for Congress (he lost), and she went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work for the Children's Defense Fund. Soon afterward, she went to Washington, D.C., to work on the impeachment inquiry of President Richard Nixon following his involvement in the Watergate cover-up, the biggest political scandal in U.S. history that included Nixon's involvement in various illegal activities designed for him to win the re-election in 1972. In 1974 Hillary took a teaching job at the University of Arkansas Law School. Keeping her maiden name, she married Bill Clinton in 1975. She continued to teach and headed the legal aid clinic at the school. In 1977 she joined the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, within two years becoming the firm's first woman partner.

Faces surname controversy

In 1978 Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas but lost his bid for re-election two years later. Some voters resented that Hillary Rodham would not take her husband's surname, while others objected to the outsiders Bill Clinton brought into state government. Two years later, when Clinton was re-elected, Hillary Rodham had decided to take her husband's surname. Hillary Clinton became chairperson of the Arkansas Education Standards Committee, an unpaid public position. She traveled the state, held meetings, visited schools, and testified before state legislators. She also oversaw a committee study that led to new standards for public schools, including teacher testing and smaller class sizes. This endeavor called upon the Clintons to combine their political skill and turn their findings into law.

Throughout her husband's 12 years as governor, Clinton continued her efforts to help children. She initiated the Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youth and became a board member of the state's Children's Hospital, where she helped establish Arkansas's first neonatal nursery. She also served on the Southern Governors' Association Task Force on Infant Mortality. In 1980 Hillary Clinton gave birth to a daughter, Chelsea. Determined that Chelsea would have as normal an upbringing as possible, the Clintons have kept their daughter out of the media spotlight.

Supports husband's presidential ambitions

At the onset of the 1992 presidential campaign, many Democratic presidential hopefuls believed President George Bush was unbeatable because of his popularity after the Gulf War. Thinking otherwise, the Clintons mutually decided that Bill Clinton could become the next president. However, the campaign almost immediately turned stormy as critics tried to discredit both of the Clintons. After charges of infidelity were made against her husband, Hillary felt obligated to defend her marriage on the television program 60 Minutes.

Clinton's outspokenness sometimes made her a campaign issue. She was often quoted as saying, "If you vote for him, you get me." When asked by the press if her career as a lawyer conflicted with the responsibilities of first lady, Clinton replied, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do is fulfill my profession. The work that I have done as a professional, a public advocate, has been aimed ... to assure that women can make the choices ... whether it's a full-time career, full-time motherhood, or some combination." The media zeroed in on the "cookie" comment, fueling a new controversy.

The campaign also focused attention on Clinton's legal writings, some of them 20 years old and dating from law school. She had once written that the rights of children are often ignored by courts and that at one time in history women, like slaves, had no rights. As a result her critics accused her of encouraging children to sue their parents over trivial matters and equating marriage with slavery.

Heads task force

Soon after President Clinton's inauguration, everyone wondered what responsibility he would give his wife, and many feared she would have too much political power and influence. The president announced that Hillary Rodham Clinton would take the unpaid position as chair of a task force charged with producing a healthcare reform plan. No first lady had ever been given such an important assignment. The goal of the task force was to produce a health care system that would insure all Americans, but the plan was not accepted by Congress.

In the spring of 1995 Hillary Clinton, accompanied by her daughter, completed a 12-day goodwill tour of southern Asia where they met with heads of state and everyday citizens. Clinton observed such things as health care procedures and banking practices. Clinton renewed her commitment to women's issues on this trip and planned to work toward a declaration of principles on the rights of women at the fourth United Nations international conference on women held in Beijing, China, in September 1995. Clinton is the honorary chairperson of the American delegation.

In November 1996 Bill Clinton was re-elected president of the United States. In that same year Hillary Clinton published her first book, entitled It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us.

The second term

With Bill Clinton's second term in office came a tremendous public scandal in the White House. The publication of the Starr Report decisively exposed the President's affair with Monica Lewinsky and his lies to investigators and the American public. While the President faced impeachment proceedings, speculation arose worldwide about how Hillary would respond. She never faltered in publicly supporting her husband.

Clinton continued to travel the globe, in the process becoming the most traveled first lady in history. According to John M. Broder of the New York Times, she often met with women who ran clinics and small businesses and other common people, delivering the same message everywhere: without schooling, decent health care, and the empowerment of women, societies will remain mired in poverty and paternalism, or male domination. Continuing her focus on women's and children's issues, Clinton in late 1997 chaired a White House conference on the issue of child care, telling Time, "You have to put the issue in front of the American people and get them to look at it honestly."

Running for office

By the spring of 1999 Clinton admitted she was contemplating a run for the U.S. Senate, in all likelihood opposing New York City mayor Rudolph Guiliani. She went on to buy a house in the suburb of Chappaqua, and in early December announced to a cheering crowd at a teachers union meeting that she would announce her candidacy early in the year 2000.

Although her campaign had not yet officially begun, by the end of 1999 Clinton had entered some very rough spots. Two events in particular made waves with potential supporters. When Bill Clinton granted pardon to several Puerto Rican nationalists who had been jailed for their involvement in a violent protest, Hillary Rodham Clinton took a stand in opposition to her husband's, denouncing his pardons. The sizable Puerto Rican population in New York was outraged by her statement. Later, on a mission as First Lady, Clinton embraced the Palestinian First Lady Suha Arafat, which offended many New York supporters of Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish. According to a commentator in Newsweek, these two events "demonstrated that Hillary's natural advantage, her high profile, comes with the corresponding disadvantage of having to balance her roles as candidate and First Lady."

To add to this, in the midst of her political struggles, Hillary's Choice, a book by Gail Sheehy, hit the bookstores, once again focusing on the scandals in the Clinton White House. Sheehy's book, according to San Francisco Chronicle contributor David Kipen, has "taken a speculum to the first couple's private lives" — a very unwelcome focus for a political candidate.

Despite the setbacks and poor showings in the polls, Clinton moved forward, hiring the powerful New York political operative Bill DeBlasio as her campaign chairperson. On February 6, 2000, she made her candidacy official and followed her announcement with a week-long tour through New York. Although her run for Senate is a troubled one even in the eyes of her most avid supporters, Clinton maintains the dignity and determination she has shown throughout her tenure as the nation's First Lady. She views herself as a fighter, as she stated in her announcement speech: "I'm a new Democrat. 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 to help them build better lives. That's the basic bargain we owe one another in America today. To fulfill that basic bargain for New York I'll have to fight. Well, I've had some experience with that, too."

On November 7, 2000, Clinton became the first sitting first lady to win an elected office. She beat Republican Representative Rick Lazio in her New York bid for a seat in the United States Senate.

On January 8, 2001, Clinton received an $8 million advance from Simon & Schuster for her memoirs. A search is underway for a collaborator. In 2000, Clinton published An Invitation to the White House: At Home With History. This book was also put out by Simon & Schuster.

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