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:
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:
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