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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The former Goldwater Girl became a member of the Democratic Party's new vanguard. But that's not how many liberals see her today.
By Edward McClelland
Read more: Civil Rights, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, News, Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr., 2008 election, Edward McClelland
Reuters photo
Hillary Clinton speaks during Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations Jan. 17, 2000, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.
April 8, 2008 | CHICAGO -- Forty years and four days ago, Hillary Rodham stormed into a friend's dorm room at Wellesley College and slammed her book bag against a wall.
"I can't stand it anymore!" she screamed, in tears. "I can't take it!"
It was April 4, 1968, and Hillary had just heard the news of Martin Luther King's assassination. The entire nation was grieving that day, but Hillary's anguish was especially palpable, because King himself had started her on her path to political awareness, when she'd shaken his hand after a sermon in Chicago.
The next day, Hillary marched in Boston's Post Office Square, returning to campus wearing a black armband. At a student body meeting at Houghton Memorial Chapel, she boldly spoke in favor of a two-day strike, nearly shouting down a professor who suggested that students give up their weekends instead.
"I'll give up my date Saturday night, Mr. Goldman, but I don't think that's the point," she said. "Individual consciences are fine, but individual consciences have to be made manifest."
Just four years earlier, Hillary had been a suburban Goldwater Girl, wearing a 10-gallon hat adorned with the candidate's catchphrase -- AuH2O -- and devouring "The Conscience of a Conservative," the Arizona senator's campaign biography, the way some young people take to the me-first bromides of Ayn Rand. The story of her conversion from high school Republican to Seven Sisters campus liberal is the story of how the Democratic Party was gentrified in the 1960s, its lunch-bucket rank and file making way for college-educated professionals consumed with issues of civil rights and unjust wars. And its ironic coda is that Hillary Clinton, once one of the activist newcomers, now depends for her electoral survival on reviving the party's old blue-collar base.
Hillary's Republicanism was a family heirloom. Her father lost a race for alderman in Chicago before fleeing to the suburb of Park Ridge, and had hated the city's Democratic machine ever since. In 1960, Hugh Rodham supported Richard M. Nixon for president. His 13-year-old daughter went along enthusiastically. The day after John F. Kennedy won the election, Hillary's social studies teacher came to class bearing bruises, inflicted, he claimed, by Democratic goons who didn't like the way he was questioning poll watchers in his Chicago precinct.
Outraged, Hillary and her best friend, Betsy Johnson, sneaked downtown to join a group of Republicans investigating the stolen election. The two girls were dropped off on the South Side, where they canvassed apartment houses and taverns, looking for evidence of ghost voters, which they never found.
"We had clipboards. and we had to register whether people lived there," said Johnson, now Betsy Ebeling, in an interview. "[What we did] was kind of jaw-dropping."
By the time she reached high school, Hillary was being exposed to the influences that would shape her later liberalism. Among them was Don Jones, the youth pastor at First Methodist Church. Fresh out of seminary, Jones was a pretty hip guy for early '60s suburbia: He drove a red Chevy Impala and turned his pupils on to Bob Dylan, French cinema and civil rights. In 1962, he took a group of young people to downtown Chicago, where they listened to Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a sermon accusing people who ignore social change of "sleeping through a revolution."
Jones found the topic "poignant and apt" for the teenagers, he said recently. Civil rights was "the biggest social revolution we've had in this country," but it was almost never discussed in Park Ridge. After the sermon, Jones took his students backstage and introduced them to King. Eventually, the young pastor was nudged out of First Methodist for his progressivism. But he and Hillary began a correspondence, and more than 20 years later, when Jones was teaching at Rice University in Houston, Hillary invited him to the Arkansas governor's mansion in Little Rock.
"Hillary began to reminisce," Jones said. "One of the very first things she said was, 'I'll never forget you arranging all of us to go backstage to personally meet Martin Luther King. At the time, I didn't realize how important that event would become for me.'"
When Hillary went off to Wellesley College, she took Park Ridge's politics with her. As a freshman, she was elected president of the school's Young Republicans chapter. But Hillary was also a proponent of King's civil rights movement, recalled her political science professor, Alan Schechter. And as an ambitious young woman hoping for a legal career, she was strongly in favor of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on gender. Signed by President Lyndon Johnson, it "was seen by the students as the Democratic Party pushing for women's rights, and that was an issue that resonated with them," Schechter said.
"I guess you can say I am becoming more liberal," she wrote to Don Jones, "but what does 'more' mean when you start from nothing?"
Kevin O'Keefe, now a Chicago lawyer, met Hillary in 1966, on a double date with a University of Illinois frat brother. Hillary still thought of herself as a Republican, and when the conversation turned to her favorite subject -- politics -- "she made some kind of remark about Daley and Democrats in Chicago, and I bet it was a suburban Republican comment," O'Keefe said in an interview.
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