A Woman in Charge (9 page)

In the days following the assassination, many Wellesley students threatened to go on a hunger strike if the college did not give in to their demands to recruit more black faculty members and students, and use its influence with the town of Wellesley, Massachusetts, to demand immediate improvement of conditions in which black residents lived and worked. Hunger strikes were serious business, not to be taken lightly by institutional leaders. Some students wanted to close down the school by refusing to attend classes. This was by far the most heated campus protest of Hillary's time at Wellesley, the only one that threatened seriously to escape the control of the college administration. She proposed a solution that, in the end, avoided a dangerous clash: in her official position, she would work as a go-between with students, faculty, and the college administration to find a compromise. And indeed, the college gradually began to recruit minority faculty and students, and, as the most important institution in the town, exert pressure on local leaders to improve housing and job opportunities for blacks. Hillary's response had been totally in character. “Hillary would step in and organize an outlet that would be acceptable on the Wellesley campus. She co-opted the real protest by creating the academic one, which, looking back on it, I think was a mature thing to do,” recalled a classmate.

That spring, she had begun volunteer work in support of Eugene McCarthy's candidacy. Weekends, she and a cadre of Wellesley women drove to New Hampshire to stuff envelopes and campaign for him in the state's primary, the first in the nation. His 42 percent of the vote (to Johnson's 49 percent) in the March primary was one of the factors leading the president to abdicate, and her fervor was further stoked when McCarthy came to thank student volunteers at his headquarters and she met him.

Ironically, Hillary had been one of thirteen students accepted the previous year to participate in Wellesley's Washington Internship Program for the summer of 1968—as a Republican, assigned to the party's apparatus on Capitol Hill. By the time she arrived in D.C. in June, she was anything but enthusiastic about her earlier choice of party affiliation. The capital seemed desperate and desolate; mourning another assassinated Kennedy and coping with the after-effects of its burning after King's assassination—on a scale unseen since the British burned the city in 1812. She spent nine weeks interning at the House Republican Conference, mostly answering telephones and delivering messages, and keeping her own counsel about her ties to the Democrats. Despite her misgivings, she found her situation manageable: she was one of thirty interns working in the office of the conference chairman, Melvin Laird, then a congressman from Wisconsin and subsequently secretary of defense under President Nixon. She made a lasting impression on Laird. “She presented her viewpoints very forcibly, always had ideas, always defended what she had in mind,” he said. She worked on two projects for him, one a white paper called “Fight Now, Pay Later” that criticized Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War without regard for the costs. She made clear to Laird that her opposition to the war was based more on the human costs than budgetary considerations. She also wrote a paper for the conference on revenue-sharing. She was for it. “Instead of the categorical fixed grants being dictated [from Washington] on how you spent every dollar, she felt it was better to return funds to the states and local communities where the decision could best be made,” said Laird. Meanwhile, she got a field-level introduction to the ways of Washington during a particularly divisive and violent time in the country's history.

For Hillary, the ugliness of the political atmosphere in Washington and the harsh divisions of the country were relieved somewhat by the excitement of her relationship with David Rupert, who was also interning at the GOP conference that summer. They had met on Capitol Hill at a mixer (the term was ubiquitous in certain academic and political milieux in the mid-1960s) for Republican interns. Later that evening, they headed for Georgetown for a drink and conversation. Many years later, Rupert said that he recognized almost immediately that Hillary's Republican credentials were thin, as his own increasingly came to be. She told him that she was president of the Young Republicans club at Wellesley, but she did not hide from Rupert her alienation from party orthodoxy. He, too, opposed the war, as did the congressman he worked for that summer, Charles Goodell of New York.

Near the end of her internship, Hillary attended the Republican convention in Miami as a volunteer in the effort to draft Nelson Rockefeller and derail Richard Nixon's nomination for president. She knew before she got there that Rockefeller's quest to be the nominee was hopeless, but she wanted to work against Nixon and participate in the excitement of a party convention. She shared a room with four other young women volunteers for Rockefeller at the opulent Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, where she placed her first-ever room service order (cereal and a fresh peach), shook hands with Frank Sinatra, and rode in an elevator with John Wayne. She had spent her summer in Republican politics while being a Eugene McCarthy Democrat, the kind of fence-straddling she accomplished in high school as well, when she was a member of Don Jones's youth group and her history teacher's anti-communist society simultaneously. It was a noteworthy pattern.

The Democratic convention, scheduled for August in Chicago, was certain to be far uglier than the GOP's meeting in Miami. With Robert Kennedy's death, McCarthy's candidacy was the only alternative to Hubert Humphrey's nomination. Humphrey was almost certain to win, but tens of thousands of antiwar demonstrators were heading to the convention, including followers of the band of neo-anarchists led by Abbie Hoffman and others who called themselves Yippies and were promising to disrupt the convention proceedings. Antiwar demonstrations had already turned unprecedentedly violent and virulent that spring. Police and military personnel in uniform were routinely subjected to hateful scorn. Many campuses remained shut down. In this atmosphere, Hillary returned to Chicago to stay with her family for the few weeks remaining before she was due back at Wellesley for her senior year.

With war in the streets between demonstrators and police erupting even before the convention was called to order, the nation's attention became fixed on Chicago. Hillary and Betsy Ebeling were adamant that they see for themselves what was happening downtown. On the first night of the convention, Betsy took her parents' car and the two of them, unbeknownst to Hugh and Dorothy, drove from Park Ridge to the barricades on the edge of Grant Park, where the carnage, tear gas, and fighting were the heaviest. As they drew nearer on foot, working their way through police lines and past emergency first-aid stations, they were struck incredulous at what they were seeing: Chicago's police, given full authority by Mayor Richard Daley to assault and arrest indiscriminately, were out of control, their fury as demonstrable as the demonstrators'. “It was kids our age with their heads being split open,” said Ebeling. To Hillary and Betsy, the scene seemed horribly reminiscent of television pictures of the war in Vietnam itself—a battlefield, with blood, bandages, fires burning, and tear gas. Except in Chicago, people were throwing toilets out of the Hilton, and the police seemed to harbor special rage for young women in the crowd who taunted them.

The two young women returned to Grant Park the second and third nights of the convention as the battles grew more intense. As opposed to the war as they both had been, and as often as they had watched filmed scenes on television from Vietnam, the violence in Chicago somehow underscored the horror and reality of young Americans their own age dying in Southeast Asia; some were classmates from Maine South. (A friend from Park Ridge, Jeannie Snodgrass, was nursing the wounded in Grant Park.) The lesson Hillary and Betsy drew from what they had seen was recognition “that our government would do this to our own people”—both in Chicago and Southeast Asia, said Ebeling.

Though Hillary had turned twenty-one on October 26, she was ineligible to vote in the presidential election because of a thirty-day registration cut-off requirement in Illinois. Later she said she would have voted for Humphrey.

Hillary returned to Wellesley for her senior year determined to bring the campus more actively into the antiwar movement. As president of the student body, she did not want to see her college and classmates passively ignore the struggles—becoming more inflamed each month after Nixon's election—that would define so much of her generation and the future of the country. Yet she followed a cautious path, taking care to edge the campus and its women toward meaningful action without causing, literally, a riot. Instead of public demonstrations that would have brought police to the campus, she organized university-sanctioned “teach-ins” to protest the war. She was never in the leadership of any antiwar protests off-campus, nor did she choose to identify with the few women at Wellesley considered to be genuinely radical in their beliefs and actions. “She kept the student body focused on learning about the war, the pros and cons, being able to discuss it,” said Professor Alan Schechter, who was her faculty adviser. Still, she found the substance of the teach-ins hollow, and their effectiveness disappointing.

That fall, Hillary began research on her senior thesis about a true American radical, Saul Alinsky, whose work Don Jones had lauded. What she found in the library stacks on Alinsky seemed to her insufficient and truncated. His philosophy was perhaps best summarized two years after she had completed her thesis, when Alinsky published his
Rules for Radicals,
a volume intended for Hillary's generation of student activists. In it, he enumerated a set of rules governing what he called “the science of revolution,” based on an analysis of ends and means:

Power is the very essence, the dynamo of life…. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies are always immoral; a world where “reconciliation” means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation.

In pursuing “revolution,” Alinsky continued, the advocate “asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means only whether they will work.” Hillary's research on Alinsky was largely based on her own academic visits to impoverished areas of Chicago, where she examined local community action programs in which poor people themselves set out the goals, developed the mechanisms of implementation, and controlled the purse strings. The concept “maximum feasible participation” was at the heart of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society anti-poverty programs and had been endorsed by, among others, Robert Kennedy. Hillary “started out thinking community action programs would make a big difference,” Schechter said. Her on-site observations and extensive interviews (with Alinsky, among others) led her to conclude she had been too idealistic and simplistic in her expectations, and that the programs “might make a marginal but not a lasting difference” unless large infusions of outside funding and expertise, particularly by the federal government, were utilized.

When she and her husband settled into the White House, and Hillary was attempting to burnish a more conservative image, she said, somewhat disingenuously, “I basically argued that [Alinsky] was right. Even at that early stage I was against all these people who came up with these big government programs that were more supportive of bureaucracies than actually helpful to people. You know, I've been on this kick for twenty-five years.”

 

T
HERE HAD BEEN
no tradition of a student commencement speaker at Wellesley. But throughout the country in 1969, student protesters were demanding to be heard at their graduations or threatening to boycott them if they weren't. As president of the Wellesley student body, Hillary and a number of highly regarded classmates agreed they would urge Wellesley's president to have both a student speaker and, as was customary, a prominent leader from outside the college community.

Sensing the overwhelming will of the students, President Ruth Adams put aside her misgivings, particularly because it was clear who the student speaker would be. “There was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be—Miss Hillary Rodham. She is cheerful, good humored, good company, and a good friend to all of us,” Adams said in her introduction. It followed the address of Republican senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, at the time the highest-ranking black politician in American history and the only nonwhite member of the Senate. As president of the Wellesley Young Republicans in her freshman year, Hillary had campaigned hard for his election.

She had sought ideas from her fellow students about what she should say in her commencement address. But instead of delivering the speech she had drafted, she improvised a totally unscripted reproof to Brooke's rather bland and dispassionate remarks, in which he had professed “empathy” with some of the goals of antiwar demonstrators and civil rights workers, while implying disapproval of their tactics, which he described as “coercive protest.” He seemed to defend the war itself, or at least Richard Nixon's approach to prosecuting it, and said nothing about the grievances that inspired the civil rights revolution—nor did he mention the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy, two of the defining events of the graduates' time at Wellesley.

“I find myself in a familiar position,” Hillary began, “that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive…protest, and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. Part of the problem with empathy, with professed goals, is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.” The most important part of that task, she then asserted, was to end the war.