Living History (7 page)

The Republican Convention was my first inside look at big-time politics, and I found the week unreal and unsettling. The Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach was the first real hotel I had ever stayed in, since my family favored either sleeping in the car on the way to Lake Winola or staying in small roadside motels. Its size, opulence and service were a surprise. It was there that I placed my first-ever room service order. I can still see the giant fresh peach that came wrapped in a napkin on a plate when I asked for peaches with cereal one morning. I had a rollaway bed shoehorned into a room with four other women, but I don’t think any of us slept much. We staffed the Rockefeller for President suite, taking phone calls and delivering messages to and from Rockefeller’s political emissaries and delegates. Late one night, a Rockefeller campaign staffer asked everybody in the office if we wanted to meet Frank Sinatra and got back the predictably enthusiastic screams of delight at the prospect. I went with the group to a penthouse to shake hands with Sinatra, who courteously feigned interest in meeting us. I took the elevator down with John Wayne, who appeared under the weather and complained all the way down about the lousy food upstairs.

Although I enjoyed all my new experiences, from room service to celebrities, I knew Rockefeller would not be nominated. The nomination of Richard Nixon cemented the ascendance of a conservative over a moderate ideology within the Republican Party, a dominance that has only grown more pronounced over the years as the party has continued its move to the right and moderates have dwindled in numbers and influence. I sometimes think that I didn’t leave the Republican Party as much as it left me.

I came home to Park Ridge after the Republican Convention with no plans for the remaining weeks of summer except to visit with family and friends and get ready for my senior year. My family was on the annual pilgrimage to Lake Winola so I had the house to myself, which was just as well since I’m sure I would have spent hours arguing with my father over Nixon and the Vietnam War. My dad really liked Nixon and believed he would make an excellent President. About Vietnam, he was ambivalent. His questions about the wisdom of U.S. involvement in the war were usually trumped by his disgust with the longhaired hippies who protested it.

My close friend Betsy Johnson had just returned from a year of study in Franco’s Spain.

Although much had changed since our high school days―the neat flips and sweater sets we used to wear had been displaced by lanky hair and frayed blue jeans―one constant remained: I could always count on Betsy’s friendship and shared interest in politics. Neither of us had planned to go into Chicago while the Democratic Convention was in town.

But when massive protests broke out downtown, we knew it was an opportunity to witness history. Betsy called and said, “We’ve got to see this for ourselves,” and I agreed.

Just like the time we had gone downtown to check voting lists in junior high school, we knew there was no way our parents would let us go if they knew what we were planning.

My mother was in Pennsylvania, and Betsy’s mom, Roslyn, thought of going downtown as a visit to Marshall Field’s to shop and Stouffer’s for lunch, wearing white gloves and a dress. So Betsy told her mother, “Hillary and I are going to the movies.”

She picked me up in the family station wagon, and off we went to Grant Park, the epicenter of the demonstrations. It was the last night of the convention, and all hell broke loose in Grant Park. You could smell the tear gas before you saw the lines of police. In the crowd behind us, someone screamed profanities and threw a rock, which just missed us. Betsy and I scrambled to get away as the police charged the crowd with nightsticks.

The first person we ran into was a high school friend whom we hadn’t seen in a while.

A nursing student, she was volunteering in the first-aid tent, patching up injured protesters.

She told us that what she had been seeing and doing had radicalized her, and she seriously thought there might be a revolution.

Betsy and I were shocked by the police brutality we saw in Grant Park, images also captured on national television. As Betsy later told The Washington Post, “We had had a wonderful childhood in Park Ridge, but we obviously hadn’t gotten the whole story”

Kevin O’Keefe and I spent hours that summer arguing about the meaning of revolution and whether our country would face one. Despite the events of the last year, we both concluded there would not be one, and, even if there was, we could never participate. I knew that despite my disillusionment with politics, it was the only route in a democracy for peaceful and lasting change. I did not imagine then that I would ever run for office, but I knew I wanted to participate as both a citizen and an activist. In my mind, Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi had done more to bring about real change through civil disobedience and nonviolence than a million demonstrators throwing rocks ever could.

My senior year at Wellesley would further test and articulate my beliefs. For my thesis I analyzed the work of a Chicago native and community organizer named Saul Alinsky, whom I had met the previous summer. Alinsky was a colorful and controversial figure who managed to offend almost everyone during his long career. His prescription for social change required grassroots organizing that taught people to help themselves by confronting government and corporations to obtain the resources and power to improve their lives. I agreed with some of Alinsky’s ideas, particularly the value of empowering people to help themselves. But we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn’t. Later he offered me the chance to work with him when I graduated from college, and he was disappointed that I decided instead to go to law school. Alinsky said I would be wasting my time, but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within. I took the law school admissions test and applied to several schools.

After I was accepted by Harvard and Yale, I couldn’t make up my mind where to go until I was invited to a cocktail party at Harvard Law School. A male law student friend introduced me to a famous Harvard law professor straight out of The Paper Chase, saying, “This is Hillary Rodham. She’s trying to decide whether to come here next year or sign up with our closest competitor.” The great man gave me a cool, dismissive look and said, “Well, first of all, we don’t have any close competitors. Secondly, we don’t need any more women at Harvard.” I was leaning toward Yale anyway, but this encounter removed any doubts about my choice.

All that remained was graduation from Wellesley, and I thought it would be uneventful, until my classmate and friend Eleanor “Eldie” Acheson decided our class needed its own speaker at graduation. I had met Eldie, the granddaughter of President Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, in a freshman political science class where we had to describe our political backgrounds. Eldie later told The Boston Globe that she was “shocked to find out that not just Hillary, but other very smart people, were Republican.”

The discovery “depressed” her, but “it did explain why they won presidential elections from time to time.”

Wellesley had never had a student speaker, and President Ruth Adams was opposed to opening that door now. She was uncomfortable with the student milieu of the 1960s. I had weekly meetings with her in my capacity as President of college government, and her usual question to me was a variant of Freud’s: “What do you girls want?” To be fair to her, most of us had no idea. We were trapped between an outdated past and an uncharted future. We were often irreverent, cynical and selfrighteous in our assessments of adults and authority. So, when Eldie announced to President Adams that she represented a group of students who wanted a student speaker, the initial negative response was expected.

Then Eldie upped the pressure by declaring that if the request was denied, she would personally lead an effort to stage a counter-commencement. And, she added, she was confident her grandfather would attend. When Eldie reported that both sides were dug in, I went to see President Adams in her little house down on the shore of Lake Waban.

When I asked her, “What is the real objection?” she said, “It’s never been done.” I said, “Well, we could give it a try” She said, “We don’t know whom they are going to ask to speak.” I said, “Well, they asked me to speak.” She said, “I’ll think about it.”

President Adams finally approved.

My friends’ enthusiasm about my speaking worried me because I didn’t have a clue about what I could say that could fit our tumultuous four years at Wellesley and be a proper send-off into our unknown futures.

During my junior and senior years, Johanna Branson and I lived in a large suite overlooking Lake Waban, on the third floor of Davis. I spent many hours sitting on my bed looking out the window at the still lake waters, worrying about everything from relationships to faith to antiwar protests. Now, as I thought about all that my friends and I had experienced since our parents dropped off such different girls four years before, I wondered how I could ever do justice to this time we shared. Luckily, my classmates started coming by the suite to leave favorite poems and sayings; wry takes on our shared journey; suggestions for dramatic gestures. Nancy “Anne” Scheibner, a serious religion major, wrote a long poem that captured the zeitgeist. I spent hours talking to people about what they wanted me to say and hours more making sense of the disparate and conflicting advice I received.

I went out to dinner the night before graduation with a group of friends and their families and ran into Eldie Acheson and her family. When she introduced me to her grandfather, she told Dean Acheson, “This is the girl who’s going to speak tomorrow,” and he said, “I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say.” I felt nauseated. I still wasn’t sure what I was going to say, and I hurried back to my dorm to pull an allnighter―

my last one in college.

My parents were excited about seeing their daughter graduate, but my mother had been experiencing health problems. A doctor had prescribed blood thinners, and he advised her not to travel for a while. So, regrettably, she couldn’t come to my graduation, and my father wasn’t keen on coming alone.

When I told my parents that I would be speaking, however, he decided he had to be there. And, in typical Hugh Rodham fashion, he flew to Boston late the night before, stayed out by the airport, took the MTA to campus, attended graduation, came to the Wellesley Inn for lunch with some of my friends and their families and then went right back home. All that mattered to me was that he made it to my graduation, which helped diminish the disappointment I felt over my mother’s absence. In many ways, this moment was as much hers as mine.

The morning of our graduation, May 31, 1969, was a perfect New England day. We gathered in the Academic Quadrangle for the commencement ceremony on the lawn between the library and the chapel. President Adams asked me what I was going to say, and I told her it was still percolating. She introduced me to Senator Edward Brooke, our official commencement speaker and the Senate’s only African American member, for whom I had campaigned in 1966 when I was still a Young Republican. After staying up all night trying to piece a speech together from a communally written text, I was having a particularly bad hair day, made worse by the mortarboard perching on top. The pictures of me that day are truly scary.

Senator Brooke’s speech acknowledged that our “country has profound and pressing social problems on its agenda” and that “it needs the best energies of all its citizens, especially its gifted young people to remedy these ills.” He also argued against what he called “coercive protest.” At the time, the speech sounded like a defense of President Nixon’s policies, notable more for what it didn’t say than what it did. I listened in vain for an acknowledgment of the legitimate grievances and painful questions so many young Americans had about our country’s direction. I waited for some mention of Vietnam or civil rights or of Dr. King or Senator Kennedy, two of our generation’s fallen heroes. The Senator seemed out of touch with his audience: four hundred smart, aware, questioning young women. His words were aimed at a different Wellesley, one that predated the upheavals of the 1960s.

I thought how prescient Eldie had been to know that a predictable speech like this one would be such a letdown after the four years we, and America, had experienced. So I took a deep breath and began by defending the “indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest.” Paraphrasing Anne Scheibner’s poem, which I quoted at the end, I stated that “the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”

I spoke about the awareness of the gap between the expectations my class brought to college and the reality we experienced. Most of us had come from sheltered backgrounds, and the personal and public events we encountered caused us to question the authenticity, even the reality, of our pre-college lives. Our four years had been a rite of passage different from the experiences of our parents’ generation, which had faced greater external challenges like the Depression and World War II. So we started asking questions, first about Wellesley’s policies, then about the meaning of a liberal arts education, then about civil rights, women’s roles, Vietnam. I defended protest as “an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age” and as a way of “coming to terms with our humanness.” It was part of the “unique American experience” and “if the experiment in human living doesn’t work in this country, in this age, it’s not going to work anywhere.”

When I had asked the class at our graduation rehearsal what they wanted me to say for them, everyone answered, “Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust.” I acknowledged how hard it was to convey a feeling that permeates a generation.

And, finally, I spoke of the struggle to establish a “mutuality of respect between people.”

Running throughout my words, however, was an acknowledgment of the fears many of us felt about the future. I referred to a conversation from the previous day with a classmate’s mother “who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she’s afraid.” I said, “Fear is always with us, but we just don’t have time for it. Not now.”