In the ’60s, a Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out in Letters

[applegrove]

In the ’60s, a Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out in Letters
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: July 29, 2007
WASHINGTON, July 28

"They were high school friends from Park Ridge, Ill., both high achievers headed East to college. John Peavoy was a bookish film buff bound for Princeton, Hillary Rodham a driven, civic-minded Republican going off to Wellesley. They were not especially close, but they found each other smart and interesting and said they would try to keep in touch.

Which they did, prodigiously, exchanging dozens of letters between the late summer of 1965 and the spring of 1969. Ms. Rodham’s 30 dispatches are by turns angst-ridden and prosaic, glib and brooding, anguished and ebullient — a rare unfiltered look into the head and heart of a future first lady and would-be president. Their private expressiveness stands in sharp contrast to the ever-disciplined political persona she presents to the public now.

“Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three and a half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me,” Ms. Rodham wrote to Mr. Peavoy in April 1967. “So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”

Befitting college students of any era, the letters are also self-absorbed and revelatory, missives from an unformed and vulnerable striver who had, in her own words, “not yet reconciled myself to the fate of not being the star.”

........SNIP"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/us/politics/29letter.html?hp

[Frustratedlady]

1. I believe the link is wrong.

[applegrove]

2. I changed the link. Sorry about that.

[Frustratedlady]

3. Thanks.

She's rather sad and insecure, which surprises me. I've never read much about Hillary, but I didn't expect that. Thanks again for the link.

[applegrove]

4. Some people don't come into their own untill they are way out of

there teen years.