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A closer look at Hillary Rodham Clinton

By Nancy Peacock

DelMio Producer

    Even if she weren’t running for president seven years after serving two terms as first lady, Hillary Clinton’s memoir Living History would be well worth the read because it provides a personal road map for how Hillary interprets the world. Like most autobiographies of current political figures, Living History serves as extended job interview, giving her the opportunity to describe her beliefs and how they have served her throughout her life.
    Unlike her husband’s hardscrabble Arkansas beginnings, Hillary was a middle-class child of the post-war Greatest Generation. Hugh Rodham was one of the men who came back from World War II. He married and raised a nuclear family while running a small business in Chicago. The political optimism of the early 1960s spawned a generation of young people who championed racial equality, the end of poverty and the beginning of world peace. While these seem like goals upon which many people could agree, by the end of that decade no one seemed to agree on much of anything. Martin Luther King’s nonviolence had been eclipsed by the Black Panther’s revolution. As Hillary writes, “Unless you lived through those times, it is hard to imagine how polarized America’s political landscape had become.”
    In high school, Hillary had assumed her father’s political philosophy as a Republican, volunteering in the 1964 election campaign as a “Goldwater Girl.” But by the time she was elected president of student government in her junior year at Wellesley, she had become a supporter of Democratic anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy.
    She and a high school friend watched the violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and were appalled by the police brutality. Yet Hillary eschewed radical confrontation. Her decision to enter law school, she writes, “was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within.”
    Three days after the Kent State University shootings in 1970, Hillary Clinton was wearing a black armband but speaking at the League of Women Voters convention in Washington, D.C. The keynote speaker at the convention was Marian Wright Edelman, the first black woman admitted to the bar in Mississippi. It was Edelman, Hillary writes, “whose example helped direct me into my lifelong advocacy for children.”
    Her observations as a volunteer representing children in foster care and abused children at the Child Study Center in Yale-New Haven Hospital culminated in an article for the Harvard Educational Review.
    “Who would have predicted that during the 1992 presidential campaign, nearly two decades after I wrote the article, conservative Republicans like Marilyn Quayle and Pat Buchanan would twist my words to portray me as anti-family?” Hillary Clinton writes. “Some commentators actually claimed that I wanted children to able to sue their parents if they were told to take out the garbage. I couldn’t foresee the later misinterpretation of my paper; nor could I have predicted the circumstances that would motivate the Republicans to denounce me. And I certainly didn’t know that I was about to meet the person who would cause my life to spin in directions that I could never have imagined.”
    Meeting and falling in love with Bill Clinton at Yale Law School only intensified her passion for social change. Yet after they married and moved to Arkansas, she worked as a lawyer while her husband ran for public office. The only time in Hillary’s adult life she has not had a paying job were the eight years she spent in the White House.
    As part of the first generation of women who were encouraged to juggle a career and a family, Hillary Clinton explains the practicalities of supporting a family when your husband is governor of a state that never paid more than $35,000 a year, before taxes. “That was a good income in Arkansas, and we lived in the Governor’s Mansion and had an expense account that covered meals, which made it a better one. But I worried that because politics is an inherently unstable profession, we needed to build up a nest egg.”
    Her effort to build the nest egg by giving $1,000 to a friend’s husband who dealt in commodities, plus a failed real estate investment in Whitewater Estates, were some of the initial fodder used to launch the special prosecutor’s investigation that hounded the Clintons during their White House years. Hillary Clinton provides a detailed accounting of the independent counsel that began with an investigation of the Clintons’ investments by Robert Fiske and ended with the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Kenneth Starr.
    What emerges from this book should encourage her supporters and frighten her critics: After eight years in the political pressure cooker of Bill Clinton’s White House, Hillary Clinton is an accomplished, resilient politician. When her early efforts to reform health care were shot down, she turned her attention back to advocacy of children and women’s issues, both domestically and internationally. In 1995, Hillary Clinton began traveling on diplomatic missions without the president, representing the United States at the request of the State Department in five countries throughout South Asia. These official state visits continued through the remainder of Clinton’s presidency and have given Hillary an unprecedented amount of political experience in South America, the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
    “The most difficult decisions I have made in my life were to stay married to Bill and to run for the Senate from New York,” she writes near the end of her book. Having succeeded in both decisions, Hillary is now attempting a goal no other woman has ever attained. To read Living History is to comprehend what it takes to make the journey. 

Nancy Peacock is a former reporter, columnist and editor whose freelance articles have been published in BusinessWeek, Midwest Living, and Cleveland Magazine. She is the author of eight published books and resides in Medina, Ohio.