Hillary Clinton early life and career

Hillary Diane Rodham was born October 26, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois to Hugh Rodham and Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham. Hugh was from a Pennsylvania family of coal miners, but decided on higher education and graduated from Penn State University before moving to Chicago and becoming prosperous as a merchant. He also voted Republican and was known as a martinet. Hillary grew up in the upscale Chicago suburb of Park Ridge with two younger brothers, Hugh Jr. (born 1950) and Anthony (born 1954). Hillary attended Maine East High School, where she was involved in many extracurricular activities; was active in the Methodist church, and worked for Republican campaigns as a Goldwater Girl. In her memoirs Hillary Clinton described herself in 1964 as "an active Young Republican" and "a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit." Columnist Robert Novak observed, "As a politically attuned honor student, she must have known that Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators who joined Southern Democratic segregationists opposing the historic voting rights act of 1964 inspired by King."

As a tenth-grader, she heard the Rev. Martin Luther King speak in person, and years later she remarked in a speech "As a young girl I had the great privilege of hearing Dr. King speak in Chicago. The year was 1963....[Dr. King] called on us, he challenged us that evening to stay awake during the great revolution that the civil rights pioneers were waging on behalf of a more perfect union." In the eleventh grade, she was class vice-president, and she was in the top 5% of her class when she graduated in 1965.

College

Hillary Rodham entered Wellesley College, an elite woman's college near Boston, and seemingly a Republican activist. During the summer of 1968, she participated in Wellesley's Washington Internship Program where she worked as an intern in the office of Melvin Laird, a congressman from Wisconsin, and attended the Republican convention in Miami as a Nelson Rockefeller supporter; Rockefeller would eventually lose the nomination to Richard Nixon.

She was the commencement speaker at her graduation from Wellesley in 1969, during which she argued forcefully against the war in Vietnam and said, "And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible." In her speech, she also acknowledged the influence of her roommate and friend Eleanor D. Acheson in helping Hillary become the first student in Wellesley College history to deliver its commencement address. Ms. Acheson, a lawyer and lesbian lobbyist,—the granddaughter of President Harry Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson—is credited for having introduced the young Hillary to political circles.

Saul Alinsky

Letter by Hillary Rodham dated 1971, sent to community organizer and leftist radical Saul Alinsky.

By 1968 Rodham had abandoned her Republicanism in favor of liberalism, and in June 1969, she appeared in Life magazine, having written a statement advancing a cause of leftist politics and activism. She also embraced a book, Reveille for Radicals, a work originally written in 1946 by a former archaeologist and full-time communist, Saul Alinsky, who in his book taught how to organize a community to the point where the "have-nots" (the poor) take from the "haves" (the middle-classes and rich), and she admitted that she had read it many times before her first of several meetings with him.

In a letter written in 1971, Rodham had asked Alinsky when his new book, Rules For Radicals was going to be published:

"When is that new book coming out — or has it come and I somehow missed the fulfillment of Revelation? I have just had my one-thousandth conversation about Reveille [for Radicals] and need some new material to throw at people. You are being rediscovered again as the New Left-type politicos are finally beginning to think seriously about the hard work and mechanics of organizing. I seem to have survived law school, slightly bruised, with my belief in and zest for organizing intact."

Rules For Radicals outlined twelve basic rules for overthrowing a government, and Rodham read it voraciously. Alinsky's methods included "demonizing" and "ridiculing" the opposition, using the expertise of poor as a weapon, and using lies and innuendo to their fullest advantage. Alinsky wrote:

"A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage—the political paradise of communism...An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth—truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations...."

In her 1969 thesis entitled "There Is Only The Fight" she praised Alinsky and his methods for community organizing:

"His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers. The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them...Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared — just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths — democracy."

Alinsky died in 1972, a short time after Rules For Radicals was published. Later on, at the behest of the Clinton White House, Rodham's thesis would be hidden, obtainable to a select few, and it would be in 2005 that it would be uncovered, despite being hidden by the college at Clinton's request. The two things that became clear in the following years was the fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton was solidly on the left, using the Alinsky method of overthrowing the Constitutional system of the United States, as well as going to any length to conceal her radicalism—and the lies of others within the Democratic Party—from the public.

Radical activism

In 1969, she attended Yale law school, where she was one of only 27 women among 235 law students. Hillary spent a considerable amount of time as a volunteer for the Black Panthers on trial in Connecticut for the torture and killing of a federal agent. Eight Black Panthers, including national chairman Bobby Seale, were brought to trial in New Haven, Conn., on charges of the murder of Alex Rackley. According to Pulitzer Prize winning author Carl Bernstein, Hillary attended the trial daily. She was a campus leader during the protests in support of the Panthers. The New Haven trial climaxed national awareness of the Panthers. Unlike her view in later years Hillary claimed in her memoir there was an actual distinction between "legitimate opposition and criminal behavior."

Other activities

On May 7, 1970, she addressed the League of Women Voters in Washington, a sign of her growing prominence. Always active in campus politics, she ended up becoming something of a communications facilitator, as she had been at Wellesley, between potentially radical student elements and the college administration during the era of extreme student unrest in 1970. She was written up on hometown and New England newspapers, and was interviewed on Irv Kupcinet's nationally syndicated TV talk show from Chicago. That summer, she worked in Washington for Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project, where she conducted research on migrant children's health and education difficulties, especially in the South. At Yale in 1971, she met Bill Clinton, her future husband, also a law student at Yale.

Allegations of dishonesty, theft and unethical behavior

She briefly worked as a Congressional lawyer, although she was later fired around the time of the Watergate affair by her supervisor, Jerry Zeifman (himself a Democrat) for "lying, unethical behavior." Which included stealing the briefs for the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas dealing with an impeachment proceeding in 1970 and writing in her brief that there was no precedent to impeachment proceedings requiring counsul.

She graduated from Yale Law School (JD 1973) a year later than necessary, having remained an extra year to be near Bill. As a staff attorney for the Children's Defense Fund, she specialized in children's advocacy law. She married Bill on October 11, 1975; daughter Chelsea was born in 1980.

Arkansas

As her husband built a political career in Arkansas as governor, she was a partner in the locally prestigious Rose Law Firm, 1976-1992. Nationally she continued her legal advocacy for children and chaired the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, which played a pioneering role in raising awareness of issues like sexual harassment and equal pay.

During the 1970s and '80s, the Clintons invested in the Whitewater Development Corporation which later became the subject of a federal investigation, prosecutions and convictions. Jim and Susan McDougal, and then-Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker were convicted of multiple counts of financial fraud, even though President Clinton testified for four hours for the defense.

On the evening Bill Clinton lost his bid for a Congressional seat in 1974, Hillary is reported to have cursed out a Jewish aide using nasty words.

Legal Services Corporation

Hillary Clinton was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to head the controversial Legal Services Corporation (LSC) in 1978 and remained on the Board until 1983. Under Hillary Clinton's leadership, the LSC began moving away from its legislated task of providing poor people with free lawyers and began an activist agenda to influence public policy through class action lawsuits. One case involved bringing lawsuits to force New York's Transit Authority to hire heroin addicts. The LSC also violated its own rules by organizing political campaigns against a state referendum and against Ronald Reagan.

Clinton failed the District of Columbia Bar Exam in the 1970s.

Allegations of civil rights violations

The Hill magazine reported Hillary Clinton may have been involved in civil rights violations by monitoring illegal wiretaps and domestic spying on political opponents during the 1992 camapaign. After the revelations came to light in a book entitled, Her Way by Don Van Natta Jr., an investigative reporter at the New York Times, and Jeff Gerth, who spent 30 years as an investigative reporter at the paper, a Republican official remarked,

“

it is rather unbelievable that [Hillary] Clinton would listen in to conversations being conducted by political opponents, but refuse to allow our intelligence agencies to listen in to conversations being conducted by terrorists as they plot and plan to kill us.

”