Great article on Hillary's transformation in college from Goldwater Girl to committed Democrat...
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WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — In September 1968, Hillary Diane Rodham, role model and student government president, was addressing Wellesley College freshmen girls — back when they were still called “girls” — about methods of protest. It was a hot topic in that overheated year of what she termed “confrontation politics from Chicago to Czechoslovakia.”
“Dynamism is a function of change,” Ms. Rodham said in her speech. “On some campuses, change is effected through nonviolent or even violent means. Although we too have had our demonstrations, change here is usually a product of discussion in the decision-making process.”
Her handwritten remarks — on file in the Wellesley archives — abound with abbreviations, crossed-out sentences and scrawled reinsertions, as if composed in a hurry. Yet Ms. Rodham’s words are neatly contained between tight margins. She took care to stay within the lines, even when they were moving so far and fast in 1968. While student leaders at some campuses went to the barricades, Ms. Rodham was attending teach-ins, leading panel discussions and joining steering committees. She preferred her “confrontation politics” cooler.
“She was not an antiwar radical trying to create a mass movement,” said Ellen DuBois, who, with Ms. Rodham, was an organizer of a student strike that April. “She was very much committed to working within the political system. From a student activist perspective, there was a significant difference.”
As the nation boiled over Vietnam, civil rights and the slayings of two charismatic leaders, Ms. Rodham was completing a sweeping intellectual, political and stylistic shift. She came to Wellesley as an 18-year-old Republican, a copy of Barry Goldwater’s right-wing treatise, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” on the shelf of her freshman dorm room. She would leave as an antiwar Democrat whose public rebuke of a Republican senator in a graduation speech won her notice in Life magazine as a voice for her generation.
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Unlike many of her peers, she never experimented with illegal drugs, Mrs. Clinton said. She embraced collegiate social rituals, attending mixers, showing up to Harvard football games (often with a book, a friend recalls) and planning a strawberries-and-cream bridal shower atop the Wellesley Bell Tower for a roommate, Johanna Branson.
Still, she was something of a sponge for all the angst and argument engulfing her generation. Ms. Shapiro recalled going to do errands one afternoon when Ms. Rodham handed her an unopened bottle of perfume she had bought and asked her to return it to the store.
“I asked why,” Ms. Shapiro recalled. “Her answer was that it was an extravagance she felt guilty about indulging in when there was so much poverty around us. We were increasingly sensitive to issues of what we now call white privilege. ”
When Dr. King was killed on the balcony of a Memphis motel on April 4, 1968, Ms. Rodham was devastated. “I can’t take it anymore,” she screamed after learning the news, her friends recalled. Crying, Ms. Rodham stormed into her dormitory room and hurled her book bag against the wall. Later, she made a telephone call to a close friend, Karen Williamson, the head of the black student organization on campus, to offer sympathy.
Ms. Rodham, who met Dr. King after a speech in Chicago in 1962, had admired his methodical approach to social change, favoring it over what she considered the excessively combative methods of groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or S.N.C.C., pronounced snick.
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Keeping a Toe in the G.O.P.
For all her leftward movement, Ms. Rodham still kept a toe in the Republican Party, working as an intern in Washington that summer. Mr. Schechter, who supervised the Wellesley internship program, sent her to work for the House Republican Conference, then headed by Mr. Laird, the Wisconsin congressman who would later become President Richard Nixon’s defense secretary. “My adviser said, ‘I’m still going to assign you to the Republicans because I want you to understand completely what your own transformation represents,” Mrs. Clinton recalled of Mr. Schechter.
“I remember her being very bright, very aggressive and not very Republican,” said Ed Feulner, who managed the summer interns in the office and now heads the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group.
Ever diligent, Ms. Rodham did “a fine job,” said Mr. Laird, citing a “very thorough and well-researched” speech she wrote on the financing of the Vietnam War. At the end of the internship, Ms. Rodham proudly posed for a photo with House Republican leaders, including Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan. The photo hung in her father’s bedroom when he died in 1993.
Along with other interns, Ms. Rodham was invited by Representative Charles Goodell, a moderate New York Republican, to help Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s last-ditch campaign to defeat Mr. Nixon for the Republican nomination. At the party’s convention in Miami, she met Frank Sinatra, shared an elevator with John Wayne and decided to leave the Republican Party for good. “She was particularly furious at how she felt Rockefeller had been trashed by the Nixon people,” Mr. Schechter said.
“I’m done with this, absolutely,” Mrs. Clinton recalled thinking upon hearing Mr. Nixon’s acceptance speech. She characterized the Republicanism of her youth as one of fiscal conservatism and social moderation, and at odds with what she viewed as the intolerance of Miami.
“All of a sudden you get all these veiled messages, frankly, that were racist,” Mrs. Clinton said of the convention. “I may not have been able to explain it, but I could feel it.”
Alot more
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/us/politics/05clinton.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp
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