A Woman in Charge

  Her method reflected the unusual combination of her temperaments: she could be in-your-face, soothing, mocking, abrasive, praising, sarcastic, analytical, enthusiastic, ebullient. Even students who, many years later, came to loathe her politics, recalled her during this period with grudging admiration, and commented on how she appeared to summon all these attributes during the protests of May. Meanwhile, in expectation of the worst, New Haven businesses were boarded shut, and word traveled that blasting caps were missing from a Yale chemistry lab. Not far away, on the Connecticut Wesleyan campus, a Molotov cocktail consumed a classroom building.

  Fifteen thousand demonstrators gathered in view of the Yale quadrangle on May Day, some holding “Burn Yale” signs aloft. The demonstration turned out to be remarkably peaceful. There were teach-ins: “Arrest and Search,” “Colonization and Race in Plantation Society.” Jerry Rubin, one of the day’s main speakers, exhorted the crowd with a chant of, “Fuck Nixon! Fuck Nixon! Fuck Nixon!”—the principal target that day of scourging remarks about his war policies, supposed racism, and “police state tactics.” For Hillary, the substantive critique seemed more than justified. The next day, the Yale Daily News reported that the demonstration had brought together “the largest assemblage of long-haired youths, film crews, and National Guardsmen that New Haven has ever witnessed.” Two days later, National Guard troops shot and killed four student antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio. The famous photograph of a young woman stooped over a dead student brought Hillary to tears, she wrote.

  Following the Kent State shootings, there were an average of a hundred demonstrations or student strikes per day in the country, and more than five hundred colleges and universities closed down.

  In Washington on May 7, Hillary was one of the speakers at the fiftieth anniversary convention of the League of Women Voters, another indication of her increasing prominence. She wore a black armband at the podium, in memory of those killed at Kent State. Her emotions, she said later, were in evidence as she argued against the war’s extension into Cambodia as “illegal and unconstitutional.” To her elders, she tried to put into context the anguished protests taking place on college campuses. At Yale, she pushed for engagement, “not disruption or ‘revolution,’” during the upheavals of 1970, she said years later. Hillary had moderated a meeting at which the law school students voted 329 to 12 to join the national student strike and to protest the American military action in Cambodia. She had called it “the unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.”

  Thirty-five years later, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, by then a potential presidential nominee of her party, would argue with less vehemence—and less convincingly—that there could be no withdrawal of American military forces from Iraq until more U.S. political and military objectives were accomplished. Then, as in the case of the Vietnam War, the U.S. Senate had given the president a blank check to fight a war in which he had misrepresented the underlying factors that he claimed justified American sacrifice. Hillary was among the overwhelming majority of senators who had voted to give George W. Bush the authorization he sought. A year later, she succeeded in winning appointment to the Senate Armed Services Committee, becoming—like Margaret Chase Smith (who had served as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve)—an expert on military preparedness. Her continuing refusal to use her unprecedented influence to urge rapid withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraq alienated many of her supporters among the Democratic Party’s left and others who questioned whether her evolution from Vietnam to Iraq represented evidence of youth versus maturity, or merely the political expediency of an ambitious politician who had abandoned the values and principles she had espoused in an era when she had no electoral agenda.

  As a first-year law student, Hillary’s oratory could still slip precipitously into vague and perplexing generalities if the subject required conceptual analysis. This seemed especially true in her appearance before the League of Women Voters, when she assumed the mantle of generational spokesperson. If she was speaking about a clearly defined subject, her thoughts would be well organized, finely articulated, and delivered in almost perfect outline form. But before the league audience she again lapsed into sweeping abstractions—though it was not hard to understand what she was getting at. “Here we are on the other side of a decade that had begun with a plea for nobility and ended with the enshrinement of mediocrity,” she declared. “Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and of the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well.” In trying to connect with women in the audience, many of them two and three times as old as she, Hillary spoke of holding “our institutions…accountable to the people,” suggesting that corporations were susceptible to pressure through “what kind of stock one owns.” She asked, “What do you do with your proxies? How much longer can we let corporations run us?” Ironically, in the next decade she would be a member of the boards of two huge corporations and represent others in court.

  She was still finding her way, cruising at times on a reputation that, in fact, derived more from the audacity of her challenge to a U.S. senator in a commencement speech than the sum of her accomplishments.

  In less than a year, she had been interviewed on Irv Kupcinet’s nationally syndicated television talk show from Chicago, been chosen by the league to be her generation’s liaison to an earlier generation of civic-inclined women, and been written up in her hometown and New England newspapers. She liked the attention, the way it set her apart from the herd of her fellows, conveying to them and their elders that she was on a different, somehow more thoughtful track. She did nothing to publicly douse the accompanying speculation that electoral politics was where she saw her future. Especially given the abdication of congressional oversight of the war, electoral politics was neither her goal nor even something she had much faith in, nor felt particularly drawn to. She still believed in public service on behalf of those in society who were among the least powerful and most marginalized or discriminated against. The people she seemed naturally drawn to helping above others were children. They were the most vulnerable of citizens and the most powerless politically—the more so if they were poor and black. She believed that the law could be put to much stronger use on their behalf and that she could find ways to make it happen.

  The league convention’s keynote speaker was Marian Wright Edelman. Already Hillary regarded her as something of a hero for using the system, particularly the courts, on behalf of children. Edelman’s father was a Baptist preacher whose message to his own five children was the same as to his congregation in Bennettsville, South Carolina: that Christianity required service in this world. Marian embraced many of the same traditional values—self-reliance, family, hard work, equal justice, universal brotherhood, the pursuit of knowledge—that Hillary had so tenaciously held on to through the turbulence of the 1960s. She and Edelman shared a religious interpretation of social and political responsibility. Edelman, like Hillary, was fond of proverbial language and aphorisms: “You really can change the world if you care enough.” “Service is what life is all about.” “Children don’t vote, but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.” The words could have just as easily rolled from Hillary’s lips. Like the advocate Hillary would become, Marian also was focused, determined, winsome, and, if necessary, took no prisoners as she marched toward an imperative objective.

  Edelman, eight years older than Hillary, had abandoned her plans to enter the foreign service after law school and instead chose to use her legal credentials in the struggle for civil rights in the South. She joined the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, first in New York and then in Mississippi. In 1967, while leading New York senator Robert F. Kennedy on a tour through the shacks of the Mississippi Delta, Marian met Peter Edelman—Brooklyn-born, Jewish, a former clerk for Supreme Co
urt Justice Arthur Goldberg, and Kennedy’s principal aide on matters of civil rights. Both Edelman and Wright had gone south during college to register black voters—a dangerous enterprise, especially for a Southern black woman and a Northern Jew. Kennedy, but not Wright or Edelman, “was shocked to see starving, hungry and listless children with bloated bellies and families who had no income and were unable to purchase food stamps that cost 50 cents a person,” as she later noted in a report. Outraged, Kennedy sought immediate action from Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, who professed incredulity that there were American families without income.

  Marian and Peter married in 1968 and settled in Washington, where she continued her civil rights work. That year, she helped organize the Poor People’s Campaign of Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It was intended to be the most massive campaign of civil disobedience undertaken by the civil rights movement. Protest activities in Washington, including many intended to shut down the city, were to be supported by simultaneous demonstrations throughout the country. The campaign was meant to draw unusual attention to family issues and the punishing handicaps suffered by children born into poverty. But it failed to strike a national chord. Many of the fragile pitched tents and ramshackle huts erected by the campaigners, between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall, were occupied that spring and early summer by poor black parents and their children. But internecine struggles in the civil rights movement, incessant rain and flooding that turned the encampment on the Mall into a village of mud huts, and the pall cast by Kennedy’s and King’s assassinations in the spring doomed the campaign.

  From her experiences as an activist, her disappointment in the failed campaign, and her own intimate familiarity with black poverty in the South, Marian began to conceive the idea of a national organization that would become a voice for and legal defender of poor, minority, abused, and handicapped children. This was what Peter Edelman had talked to Hillary about in Colorado. When Marian came to Yale a few months later to speak about the state of the civil rights movement and her plans for a new organization dedicated to children’s advocacy, Hillary introduced herself and raised the possibility of working for her when the school term finished in June. Edelman told her there was no money to pay her. Hillary persisted. What if she could figure out a way of getting paid? “Of course,” Edelman responded.

  Marian’s speech at Yale seemed to touch on the themes of Hillary’s most ardent social, political, and personal concerns—both those she articulated to others and some she sensed perhaps only through the deepest of her own feelings. Since childhood, Hillary had heard teachers, preachers, politicians, and theoreticians talk about the future of the country and the world being in the hands of the next generation—hers. Almost all of it sounded like lip service to her, which was what she had tried to express both in her commencement speech and to the League of Women Voters.

  The only public woman Hillary had ever looked to as a plausible role model had been Margaret Chase Smith. But Smith’s accomplishments, unlike Edelman’s, had derived almost literally from following in her husband’s footsteps. Smith had been his secretary while he was a member of Congress, and upon his death was elected to finish his term. When she first ran for the Senate, Smith leaned heavily on her qualifications for governance—as a housewife: she compared management of public affairs with running a household. “Women administer the home. They set the rules, enforce them, mete out justice for violations, thus, like Congress, they legislate. Like the Executive, they administer; like the courts, they interpret the rules. It is an ideal experience for politics.” Increasingly, it seemed to Hillary that Smith was a fine role model—for a previous generation. Marian Wright Edelman was a woman of her own time.

  Four weeks after the league convention, Hillary moved to Washington for the summer and went to work for her new mentor. Hillary had persuaded the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council to fund an internship—through a grant—for Edelman’s new organization, the Washington Research Project. “I always liked people who could find ways to get things done,” said Edelman.

  She put Hillary to work developing information for a Senate investigation into the living and working conditions of migrant farm laborers and their families. The subcommittee conducting the inquiry was headed by Senator Walter Mondale, who had worked closely with Edelman to obtain passage of the Child and Family Services Act, a legislative milestone that required compensatory education and day care for poor infant and school-age children. Hillary knew something of the conditions that migrant workers faced from her days babysitting for some of their children in Illinois. Several had attended her elementary school for a few months each year, and on Saturday mornings during the fall crop season, she babysat at a migrant camp with other members of her Sunday school class.

  Hillary’s assignment in Washington built on that experience. She was asked to come up with hard information about migrant children’s health and education difficulties. Her research focused on the South, where migrant children were confronted by, among other things, a particularly cruel form of discrimination. School districts in Virginia first, and then increasingly in other Southern states, had turned formerly all-white public schools into private, segregated academies to escape court-ordered desegregation. The white children of migrant workers could not afford tuition for the academies; black and Hispanic children of migrant workers were excluded by race. The Nixon administration was inclined to grant tax-exempt status to the academies as part of its strategy for achieving an “emerging Republican majority”—by appealing to Southern segregationists who had traditionally voted Democratic. For Hillary, her summer was an education in how the most powerless citizens were further punished by malevolent government and misuse of the law.

  With her introduction to Marian Edelman and work with Mondale’s subcommittee, Hillary could sense that her experiential path was finally leading toward a satisfying destination, even a kind of maturity, in which her life’s passions and concerns could be used in the spirit that John Wesley had enunciated. She studied the filthy camps for migrant workers who serviced the Florida citrus groves and tended the green fields of adjacent states, where they made possible the South’s bountiful harvest. As in the fields outside the Chicago of her childhood, the people who suffered most grievously were the children, whose preordained futures were the product of their parents’ misfortune. Her documentation of extreme examples of the cruelties of migrant labor life, especially the plight of migrant children without schooling, sanitation facilities, or decent housing, was the basis for some of the most dramatic testimony compiled that fall in hearings convened by Mondale. Among the migrant camps Hillary scrutinized were ones serving the Coca-Cola Company, which had recently acquired the Minute Maid brand. Her strategy was to have Coca-Cola’s president, J. Paul Austin, brought before the committee to testify, and held up as an egregious example of corporate callousness. Here was a recognizable villain for the piece. The effectiveness of Austin’s example would become a basic component of her approach to political action over the next quarter-century. Still, no legislation resulted from the committee’s work. That in itself reinforced her negative impression of electoral politics.

  The hearings, however, had made for good Washington theater, timed to mark the tenth anniversary of Edward R. Murrow’s celebrated Harvest of Shame broadcast, which had vividly revealed the despicable conditions in which migrant workers and their children subsisted. Hillary took great satisfaction from what she had uncovered for the committee’s investigation, but in reality, what she had learned was that the lives of migrants hadn’t improved. At the hearings, several fellow students from Yale Law School sat across the witness table from the senators: they were present as summer associates on behalf of corporate clients of the law firms where they were interning. She made her contempt for such lawyering clear, and upbraided them for their choice. “I’m not interested in corporate law. My life is too short to spend it making money for some big
anonymous firm,” she had said. Her summer working with Edelman became “a personal turning point.” She would concentrate her studies on how the law affected children.

  That fall, she commuted between New Haven and Washington, an ideal vocational and educational arrangement. On Capitol Hill she monitored hearings for Edelman and evaluated legislation that might have impact on the lives of children. In New Haven, she developed a unique curriculum and work program for herself, which combined aspects of law, medicine, and psychology. She audited classes at Yale’s medical school and worked at the Yale–New Haven Hospital on problems of children’s physical and mental health, including child abuse, which was being seriously studied for the first time as a significant sociological phenomenon. She helped establish the hospital’s legal procedures dealing with incoming cases of suspected child abuse. At the Yale Child Study Center, she spent much of the academic year observing clinical sessions with children and attending subsequent case discussions with their doctors. The center’s director, Dr. Al Solnit, and one of her law school professors, Joe Goldstein, asked her to become their research assistant on a book they were editing with Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter. The work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, became a standard text of the era. As a result of Hillary’s work on the book, “I began to think through a lot of the issues that affect children, both visible and invisible, and the role that the law can and cannot play.” Like many law students, she was assigned to the local office of the federally funded National Legal Services Program, where a young legal aid lawyer named Penn Rhodeen instructed her on advocacy for neglected and abused children.