American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power Read online

  A rock hurled by a protester screaming profanities narrowly missed Hillary’s head. But like other student activists, she preferred to be “shocked by the police brutality we saw.”

  Back at Wellesley, Hillary decided to write her thesis on the work of Saul Alinsky, the leftist firebrand whose 1947 book, Reveille for Radicals, was regarded by many as the bible of the protest movement. Colorful, outspoken, and often outrageous, Alinsky believed the only way to effect change was by confronting those in power—with protest marches, strikes, and sit-ins.

  Hillary was an ardent admirer of both Alinsky and Marxist theoretician Carl Oglesby, who denounced America’s “ruling class” and had nothing but praise for Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and Mao. While she never took issue with their goals, Hillary did not agree with their assertion that change could only be initiated from the outside. For her trenchant analysis of Alinsky and Chicago’s Community Action Program, part of the larger War on Poverty, Hillary received an A-plus. Hillary’s political science professor, Alan Schecter, deemed all her work not merely insightful but “brilliant.”

  Alinsky was so impressed with Hillary that he offered her a chance to work with him after graduation, but she turned him down. Although he told her she was throwing her life away—and the chance to make a real difference in the lives of the poor and disenfranchised—Hillary applied to several of the country’s top law schools. “The only way to make a real difference,” Hillary countered, “is to acquire power.”

  Accepted at both Yale and Harvard law schools, Hillary was having difficulty choosing—until an imperious Harvard professor stated flatly, “We don’t need any more women at Harvard.” She had already been leaning toward Yale, but that encounter, Hillary said, “removed any doubts about my choice.”

  She may have questioned Saul Alinsky’s overall strategy, but she embraced many of his tactics. The agitator emeritus believed in a win-at-all-cost approach in the battle for power, and that that required zeroing in with laserlike intensity on one’s enemies. Advised Alinsky: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

  Senator Edward Brooke was Hillary’s first major target, and the speech in which she castigated him caught the eye of the national media. No less an authority than Life magazine proclaimed her one of the eloquent new voices of a restless generation.

  Looking for a little adventure that summer following graduation, Hillary escaped to Alaska and a job gutting salmon in a makeshift processing plant that had been set up on a Valdez pier. She was soon promoted to the assembly packing line, where after several days she began noticing that the fish looked “weird. They’re black,” she told her less-than-amused foreman. “Maybe they aren’t fit to be eaten.” She was fired on the spot, and told to return the next day to pick up her check. When she did, the entire operation had been dismantled.

  In the fall of 1969, Hillary went from an all-female environment to a law school where, out of 235 students, she was one of only twenty-seven women. Hillary made a conscious choice not to change her appearance for the purpose of attracting the opposite sex; she was determined to fit in as the male students’ intellectual equal. That meant she still shied away from makeup, paid little attention to the state of her hair, and refrained from shaving her legs. Her wardrobe now consisted of several pairs of denim bell-bottoms, paisley-printed peasant blouses, sandals, black silk pajama bottoms, and of course her trademark thick glasses—a dozen pairs, ranging from wire-rimmed to aviator to oversized red plastic frames.

  “She didn’t want to be thought of as pretty,” a fellow student recalled. “She wanted to be thought of as smart. And she didn’t particularly want the distraction of a boyfriend—not when there were so many important things going on in the world. She wanted to be involved, but not necessarily with a man.”

  No sooner did she sign up for classes than Hillary introduced herself to the leaders of the protest movement at Yale. With unrest growing on the nation’s campuses, she was intent on playing a key role. Hillary got her first break in April of 1970, when the murder trial of Black Panther founder Bobby Seale was about to start in New Haven. Seale and seven other Panthers had been charged with ruthlessly killing one of their own, Alex Rackley, but not before torturing, beating, and scalding him. Afterward, said police, they mutilated the body. The Panthers had suspected Rackley of being a police informant, and believed he had tipped off the authorities to a New York bombing conspiracy.

  New Haven braced for rioting as thousands of angry Panther supporters flooded into New Haven. Another Panther leader, convicted cop killer Hughie Newton, was freed from San Quentin in California on $50,000 bail and showed up to support Seale, calling for full-scale revolution against “Fascist Amerika.” Jane Fonda also arrived in town to whip up the crowd, raising her hand in a Black Power salute.

  Like many members of what was now called the New Left, Hillary admired both Newton and Seale. (Seale had already gained fame as one of the Chicago Eight, the group tried for leading the disruptions at the Democratic National Convention.) She suspected that Seale had been set up by the FBI and, doubting whether he could ever receive a fair trial, prepared to take part in a huge May Day rally in support of the Panthers. Hillary remained sympathetic to the Panthers, even when their supporters were suspected of setting fire to Yale’s International Law Library. While she joined a bucket brigade of faculty and students to douse the flames, Hillary was thinking of ways to aide Seale and his cohorts.

  In their trademark black leather uniforms, storm-trooper boots, dark glasses, and black berets, the Panthers cultivated a swaggering, menacing image that, according to one former member, appealed to the “strong masochistic streak” in the New Left. The party had been formed out of an Oakland, California, street gang in 1967 by Seale and Huey Newton. Panthers, many of whom had done prison time for serious crimes, brandished weapons and patrolled the streets in armed cadres, focusing on cases of police brutality that they said proliferated in the ghetto.

  Although it was Stokely Carmichael who coined the slogan “Black Power” and booted whites out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Panthers were the first to blatantly reject the notion of peaceful protest. They also differed from other reform-minded groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Urban League in that theirs was an openly Marxist organization with a forthright revolutionary agenda.

  The Panthers had remained a local Bay Area phenomenon until October 1967, when a single bloody incident thrust them center stage. Newton, the party’s self-proclaimed “minister of defense,” was leaving a party celebrating the end of his probation for a knifing incident when he was stopped by Oakland policeman John Frey. There was a struggle, and within minutes Frey was dead—the victim of five gunshot wounds, including two in the back at close range. A backup officer was wounded, as was Newton.

  With the help of such fellow Panther ideologues as Seale and convicted rapist turned Soul on Ice author Eldridge Cleaver, the Newton trial became a cause célèbre. At Yale and other campuses, posters went up on dormitory walls showing Newton sitting on a rattan throne, a rifle in one hand, a spear in the other. Hillary was among the thousands of students who proudly wore buttons that demanded that California authorities FREE HUEY.

  Newton’s defense team would argue that there was a distinct possibility that the backup officer, not their client, had actually shot his partner in the scuffle. In what would soon become a standard tactic, they contended it was not Newton who was on trial but the system.

  Newton was found guilty of manslaughter, but the conviction was overturned on a technicality. The new darling of the Left, Newton went to live in a glass-walled penthouse overlooking Oakland’s Lake Merritt. There he and Seale held court, guzzling vodka and expounding endlessly on the coming revolution before a rapt audience of students, journalists—and several of Hollywood’s leading directors, screenwriters, and actors.

  Hillary sympathized with the Panther
s, and saw them as a legitimate political force to be reckoned with. They were, in fact, fast becoming a criminal menace. In addition to dealing drugs and taking protection money, the Panthers would be involved in numerous shoot-outs with police across the country.

  As for the handsome, charismatic Newton, he turned out to be a chronic alcoholic and abuser of drugs. In 1974, he would flee to Cuba after being accused of fatally shooting a seventeen-year-old prostitute in the face because she failed to recognize him and of pistol-whipping a tailor for affectionately calling him “baby.” Three years later, Newton returned to face the charges, which were dropped after both trials ended in hung juries. Later, he served time for a parole violation and for misappropriating funds raised by the Panthers for one of their Oakland community projects.

  In 1984, Newton received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz, but only after allegedly threatening to kill his professor if he didn’t receive passing marks. And there would be continuing skirmishes with the law until August 1989, when Newton was shot to death after being locked out of an Oakland crack house.

  In 1970, however, the Black Panthers were lionized by Hillary and her like-minded friends. It was a cocktail party held in the Panthers’ honor at the Manhattan apartment of Leonard Bernstein that formed the basis of Tom Wolfe’s bestselling book Radical Chic.

  Chic was not the word to describe Hillary Rodham—far from it. She was practical, focused, and, though she would scrupulously avoid mentioning it in later years, committed to doing whatever she could to aid Bobby Seale and his fellow Panther defendants in their murder trial.

  Before she could decide on a course of action, however, four students were gunned down during antiwar demonstrations at Kent State. On hearing the news, Hillary rushed out of the law school in tears. A few days later, she traveled to Washington to speak at a banquet marking the fiftieth anniversary of the League of Women Voters. Wearing a black armband, she scarcely kept her emotions in check as she railed against the war, Richard Nixon, and capitalist America. “How much longer can we let corporations run us?” she demanded. “Isn’t it about time that they, as all the rest of our institutions, are held accountable to the people?”

  When she returned to Yale, Hillary signed up for a project begun by one of her professors, outspoken leftist Thomas (cheerfully referred to by students and faculty alike as “Tommy the Commie”) Emerson. Hillary was assigned the job of making certain that there would always be a law school student on hand at the Panther trial to monitor the proceedings and point out any civil rights abuses on the part of prosecutors to the American Civil Liberties Union.

  Hillary and her fellow students did not confine themselves to compiling information for the ACLU, however. Emerson introduced Hillary to famed radical lawyer Charles Garry, a member of the Panther defense team, and soon her band of student watchdogs were feeding whatever information they gleaned directly to the Panther attorneys. In later years Hillary would take pains never to mention her friendship with Garry, whose clients included People’s Temple founder Jim Jones and Angela Davis as well as Newton and Seale.

  Incredibly, Hillary dismissed out of hand the evidence against Garry’s clients, which included signed confessions from two of the defendants and a chilling audiotape of the victim’s “trial” by his fellow party members before he was summarily executed.

  Nor did it seem to matter to Hillary that the Panthers were waging a campaign of intimidation directed at Yale and the surrounding community. “If Bobby dies,” Bobby Seale’s supporters chanted as they marched through the campus, “Yale fries!” At one point, Panther David Hilliard showed up at a campus rally to proclaim “there ain’t nothing wrong with taking the life of a motherfucking pig.”

  In her memoirs, Hillary would praise Yale President Kingman Brewster for his leadership during this period. That “leadership” consisted of shutting down classes and throwing open the doors of the university to demonstrators. Basically calling for the Panthers’ acquittal regardless of the evidence, the esteemed Brewster expressed doubts that radicals could receive a fair trial anywhere in the United States.

  Hillary also admired William Sloane Coffin, Yale’s left-leaning chaplain and a luminary of the antiwar movement. Just six years earlier, an undergraduate named George W. Bush was devastated when Coffin had unkind words to say about his father, who had just run for the Senate in Texas and lost. Now Coffin declared that the Panthers’ “white oppressors” should back off—that it was “morally wrong for this trial to go forward.”

  By the end of her first year at Yale, Hillary was already known around campus as a major voice in the student antiwar movement. And while former friends and classmates would later claim they did not regard her as a true radical, her outspoken and highly effective support of those causes indicated otherwise. “You’ve got to remember that when people say they don’t remember her as a radical,” says one former antiwar activist, “it’s because they were probably Maoists or worse. Consider the source. Hillary was a radical, all right, but a very businesslike radical.”

  She had already begun making important contacts in the nation’s capital. While in Washington to deliver her fiery speech to the staid League of Women Voters, Hillary had met perhaps her most important mentor, noted civil rights lawyer and children’s rights pioneer Marian Wright Edelman.

  A 1963 graduate of Yale Law School, Edelman was the first black woman admitted to the bar in Mississippi and headed up the NAACP legal defense fund in that state. Over the next several years, she risked her life organizing voter registration drives and demonstrations to protest segregation. By the time Hillary got to know her, Edelman, whose husband Peter was once an aide to Bobby Kennedy, had used her considerable leverage to establish the Washington Research Project in D.C. The project would soon evolve into the Children’s Defense Fund.

  Hillary, motivated in part by stories of her mother’s horrendous childhood, signed on to work with Senator Walter Mondale’s subcommittee studying migrant labor. Hearkening back to her own experience babysitting the children of farmworkers in Illinois, Hillary interviewed scores of laborers about conditions in migrant labor camps.

  Even before the hearings started, Hillary was seething. Minute Maid, which had just been acquired by the Coca-Cola Company, was one of the companies targeted by the investigation. On Capitol Hill, Hillary waited patiently for the arrival of Coke president J. Paul Austin, who was scheduled to testify. As soon as she spotted him, Hillary pointed a finger at the hapless executive. “We’re going to nail your ass,” Hillary said point-blank. “Nail your ass!”

  Later, Hillary would work with the staff of Yale–New Haven Hospital drafting legal guidelines for the medical treatment of battered children, and write papers on the legal rights of minors for the nonprofit Carnegie Council on Children. Years later, Hillary would be wrongly accused of advocating changes in the law that would allow children to sue their parents if they didn’t want to take out their garbage—a misconception she would attempt to correct in her folksy, upbeat, and cautiously moderate book It Takes a Village.

  But Hillary’s earlier writings may more accurately reflect her true beliefs because they are not intended to mollify a wider audience. They are crafted in the strident prose of the committed social engineer, and make an explicit argument for the state to play a more active role in child rearing. Referring to children as “political beings,” Hillary challenged the autonomy of the family. “The pretense that children’s issues are somehow above or beyond politics endures,” she complained, “and is reinforced by the belief that families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children.”

  Hillary did, in fact, argue that children be given fundamentally the same rights in court as their parents—including, if the need arose, the right to sue them. “Ascribing rights to children,” wrote the woman who would one day bar her own teenage daughter from getting a tattoo, “will force from the judiciary and the legislature institutional support for the child’s po
int of view.”

  During her stint in New Haven’s Legal Services office, Hillary was taken under the wing of a young legal aid lawyer named Penn Rhodeen. Hillary helped Rhodeen represent one black foster mother who wanted to adopt a two-year-old girl she had raised since birth. Connecticut had a strict policy, however, that barred adoption by foster parents. Despite their best efforts, Rhodeen and Hillary lost the case, and the little girl was taken from the only mother she had ever known.

  Hillary was “passionate” on the subject of children’s rights, Rhodeen said. But no one was under the impression that she would be willing to toil in obscurity as a legal aid lawyer. Hillary already had her eye on several top law firms in Washington and New York.

  In the meantime Hillary, by now a bona fide star on campus, basked in the adulation of her fellow students. “We were simply,” one said, “awed by her. She was so forceful, so self-assured that when she just took charge you accepted that it was the natural order of things.”

  Hillary would meet her match in that turbulent fall of 1970 when she spotted an orange-bearded “Viking” holding forth in the student lounge. The tall, scruffy-looking character was draped over a sofa and boasting loudly that, for starters, Arkansas grew the world’s biggest watermelons.

  Bill Clinton, Hillary soon learned, was a Rhodes scholar who had just returned from two years at Oxford. Clinton, in turn, asked their mutual friend Robert Reich what he knew about this serious girl with the Mr. Magoo glasses. For the next several weeks, they sized each other up—until one November evening when Hillary, slaving over books in the law library, spotted Bill talking to a fellow student in the hallway. As he listened to Jeff Gleckel try to talk him into writing for the Yale Law Journal, the man from Arkansas had trouble focusing. “His glance began to wander and he seemed to be looking over my shoulder,” Gleckel recalled. At Hillary, as it turned out.