Part 2 (1/2)

”She was so ambitious,” a cla.s.smate recalled in a 1993 New Yorker profile.

”She already knew the value of networking, of starting a rolodex, even back then. She cultivated relations.h.i.+ps with teachers and administrators even more than with students. While she was noticed across the board and she had her circle of friends, I would not say she was popular. She was a little too intimidating for that.”*20 Hillary's last act at Wellesley was to create a defining radical moment for her in 1969. She gave a commencement address that has been mythologized by her adherents as ”The Speech,” the touchstone that friends, journalists, biographers, and future Republican opposition research a.n.a.lysts have returned to again and again.

THE SPEECH.

It was the spring of 1969. Richard Nixon was president, and it was becoming increasingly clear that his promise of ”peace with honor”

was not intended to be a surrender. Tons of bombs were raining on Hanoi. Draft riots and resistance to the war intensified, and the campuses of America were in turmoil.

The commencement speaker at Hillary's graduation was Senator Edward Brooke, the first African American to sit in the United States Senate since Reconstruction. He was a liberal Republican from Ma.s.sachusetts and an accomplished lawyer who had once smashed organized crime rings as a prosecutor.

As a Young Republican, Hillary had once supported Senator Brooke.

She had even campaigned for him in her soph.o.m.ore year. But now he was tainted, beyond repair, given his partisan a.s.sociation with Nixon (though Brooke would later help sink the nomination of G. Harrold Carswell, Nixon's appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court).

There was widespread interest among Hillary's friends, especially Eldie Acheson, in staging a counter-commencement. After much back-and-forth, University President Ruth Adams reluctantly agreed to allow a designated speaker to have a few words at the commencement.

According to Joyce Milton's The First Partner, Adams extracted a promise from Hillary that she would submit a prepared text of her remarks and stick to it.

For three days, Hillary and her friends put together a speech. To this day, Hillary's staff do not expect the speeches they produce to be delivered as written. On the stump, Hillary extemporizes, pulls together her theme with reactions to what has just been said.

Her first big speech was a forerunner of that style. It was pure reaction, a rebuke that reads polite on the page, but was hard, even rude, when delivered.

Senator Brooke, when he spoke, expressed empathy with the students and their anguish over racial and social injustice as the root cause of human misery and the chief obstacle to the proper development of our nation. He praised Hillary's generation as an expression of an America that ”has identified more precisely than ever before the nature and magnitude of its acute social problems.” He even sounded themes that should have played well with Hillary--that societyy has a responsibility to alleviate poverty, hunger, unemployment, inferior education, and inadequate health care. Brooke's Republicanism was not the ”individual responsibility” ethos of Barry Goldwater, but the liberal Republicanism that had resonated in Hillary's social conscience.

But then he went on to speak the unspeakable on an American college campus in 1969. ”Whatever the romantics may say about violence in our national life,” Brooke said, ”the use of force is repugnant to the spirit of American politics.” He denounced the radical Students for a Democratic Society and suggested that the fringes of the protest movement might be giving comfort to America's enemies.

This was more infuriating to Wellesley's fas.h.i.+onable leftists than hearing Vice President Spiro Agnew directly lash into the students without apology, or restraint. That this combination of criticism and ”empathy” enraged young Hillary shows how radicalized she had become. It wasn't enough to be a black liberal Republican with a liberal social agenda because liberal Republicans weren't willing to go all the way and expunge by force the evil that Hillary saw manifest in the Vietnam War, resistance to every demand by the civil rights movement, and in failure to eradicate poverty.

”Senator Brooke gave an address that was pretty close to being just absolutely disconnected with the four years of our experience at Wellesley,” says Acheson. ”Hillary decided it could not go unremarked upon, and before her speech, gave an extemporaneous critique of Brooke's remarks.”*21 In 1992, in a Newsweek interview with Eleanor Clift, Hillary characterized Brooke as giving ”a very traditional, conventional speech in which he basically took a kind of Republican apologist line about what was happening, what President Nixon was doing.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton continued: ”It was exactly the kind of message my cla.s.smates felt they didn't want as their last remembrance of Wellesley. When I spoke, I responded to his not really having addressed the concerns of the people about to go into this world.”*22 Noted feminist bete noire Camille Paglia has given a s.e.xual interpretation of what happened on that spring day. She wondered if Hillary was ”las.h.i.+ng out in a visceral response to the invasion of her all-woman's school by a glamorous, lordly male who, from my one pa.s.sing encounter with him as he sauntered elegantly down the Capitol steps in 1972, had a distinctly roving eye.”*23 Whatever the cause, something about Brooke pushed Hillary's b.u.t.ton as she stepped before the podium.

Introduced by College President Ruth Adams as ”cheerful, good-humored, good company, and a good friend to us all,” Hillary quickly extinguished all hopes that charity., generosity, respect, and good manners might reign that day. Surprise, then shock, rippled through the audience as Hillary ripped into a United States senator, a civil rights icon, a black man before a liberal audience.

”Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do anything,” she said, with the pompous, angry, impatient, and self-righteous tone that was so typical of campus ”leaders” of that era. ”We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of the making what appears impossible, possible.”

After bitterly rejecting Senator Brooke's effort to express support for her colleagues' ideals, she characterized him as a craven apologist for Nixon. She then went on to attack the dispa.s.sionate terminology that she perceived was being employed to evaluate her country's many ills.

”What does it mean to hear that 13.3 percent of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human construction. How can we talk about percentages and trends?”

Hillary said of her cla.s.smates: ”Our att.i.tudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade--years dominated by men and dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the s.p.a.ce program--so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at age eighteen.

It just inspired us to do something about that gap.”

Hillary reminded everyone of the many concessions that she and her cla.s.smates wrested from the school administration. The rest of the speech was part sixties psychobabble, with its undertones of German existential philosophy, and part youthful, egocentric angst.

”We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty,” she said. ”But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and compet.i.tive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us.”

After this impenetrable declaration, she went even further into the depths of murky sixties thinking: ”We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.” A line for which one craves Camille Paglia's exegesis.

Much of the rest of the speech discussed ”authentic reality” versus ”inauthentic reality.” Performed by a spirited woman to an audience of young women of similar leanings, it undoubtedly made a strong impression of youthful idealistn. But is entirely incomprehensible today.

Even in today's liberal culture, such a convoluted stew would be seen not as a courageous declaration of ident.i.ty, but as a hopeless meandering of feminist plat.i.tudes and catchy sound bites that would cause listeners, students, and faculty alike to look away out of embarra.s.sment for the speaker. As a style it could be called the first person, subjective.

Another student who gave a commencement address at Brown University that year exemplified the same selfindulgent style and non-linear thought processes. That student, Ira Magaziner, was brought twenty-four years later to the White House by first lady Hillary to create and manage her health care proposal.

Echoing Hillary's ascent into rhetorical fantasy, the theme of Magaziner's address was ”realities exist but they're not real to me.”

Magaziner, soon to head to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, said, ”I can't believe us spending millions of dollars to send soldiers to West Germany to engage in a war game. I can't believe financing the burning of our crops while millions starve. I can't believe a.n.a.lysts seriously discussing how decisions are made by whether Johnson or Nixon feel that their place in history is going to be preserved if they make certain decisions while people die.” You can tell why Hillary and Ira became such close compatriots.

Magaziner and Hillary Rodham can be forgiven for these youthful flights because they were repeating a peculiar self-centered idealism, seemingly rooted not so much in morality as in aesthetics: A view that somehow the world and society had a responsibility to produce results that made the student, or teacher, or community activist feel better personally.

The elites of American education, the best and the brightest, sought to create proteges by giving young leaders an unprecedented freedom to discover their own truths. And they did: They found truths no one before or since has quite recognized. This generation of leaders, chosen, taught, and celebrated by elite academics embraced an inexpressible ideal, whose core characteristic was a feeling of unending ent.i.tlement.

The world had to do more than improve. It was expected to reorder itself, to become a great pinwheel to spin around tender egos and emotional needs.

Whatever the reaction of listeners in Hillary's Wellesley graduation audience like Paul Nitze, the diplomat, and Eldie's distinguished grandfather Dean Acheson (he actually later asked Hillary for a copy of her speech), the reaction of Hillary's peers was immediate and unanimous. They gave her a seven-minute standing ovation. Hillary was soon profiled with other young Americans in a Life magazine piece, t.i.tled ”The Cla.s.s of '69.” Looking bespectacled and bemused, an excerpt of her speech ran under her photo: ”Protest is an attempt to forge an ident.i.ty.”

Later, she confessed that she had celebrated at the end of commencement day by breaking a campus rule. She swam in the school's Lake Waban. She stripped to her bathing suit, and carefully folded her clothes and gla.s.ses on the sh.o.r.e, only to have them confiscated by a security officer. ”Blind as a bat, I had to feel my way back to my room,” she said.*24 Hillary took off that summer with other students to do odd jobs around the country, winding up in Alaska. She took a job at a fish cannery, where she informed the owner that she did not believe that his fish appeared fit for consumption. She may have expected him to close down his cannery and change his methods. Instead, he fired her.*25 SAUL ALINSKY, HILLARY'S RADICAL PROPHET.

When William Jefferson Clinton took the oath of office, Wellesley suddenly adopted a new-found policy of putting the thesis of any graduates who became first lady under lock and key. It is hard to imagine that this unique provision was adopted without the strong support, if not the instigation, of the highly secretive first lady.

The contents of Hillary's thesis, and why she would want it hidden from public view, have long been the subject of intense interest.

Most likely, she does not want the American people to know the extent to which she internalized and a.s.similated the beliefs and methods of Saul Alinsky.

It was Alinsky, legendary organizer and left-wing folk hero, who was responsible for bringing Martin Luther King, Jr., to Chicago.

Hillary first met him under the auspices of the Reverend Jones and the University of Life. Born in Chicago in 1909, Alinsky did graduate work at the University of Chicago in criminology. He studied prison life at Joliet State Prison and took a particular interest in the Capone gang.

He emerged as a radical leader when he joined forces with the impoverished families of the ”Back of the Yards” area in Chicago, near the old stockyards, site of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Skillfully building up local support and enlisting the backing of the Catholic Church, he campaigned for increased social services and enhanced government support for housing programs.

”I acted in such a way that within a few weeks, the meat-packers publicly p.r.o.nounced me a subversive menace,” Alinsky later wrote.

”The Chicago Tribune's adoption of me as a public enemy of law and order, a radical's radical, gave me a perennial and constantly renewable baptismal certificate in the city of Chicago.”*26 Alinsky a.s.sembled a staff of followers that drew from the lessons learned in the 1930s. In time, they spread their organizing mission to the black ghetto of Rochester, New York, and the Mexican-American barrios of California. Alinsky became a confederate of both Martin Luther King and California farm-worker organizer Cesar Chavez. He took it as a matter of pride that he was arrested frequently and touted that he was under FBI surveillance.

In 1947 Alinsky wrote Reveille for Radicals, a bestseller in which he argued against the labor model of trying to reform capitalism, arguing instead for a more direct takeover of power. The sequel, Rules for Radicals, published in 1971, had a galvanizing effect on the young radicals wending their way through the elite universities of the East Coast. The generation of social protest had found its Socrates in this portly, balding man with the wizened face.

One of Alinsky's adherents was d.i.c.k Morris, future Clinton political consultant, who incorporated Alinsky's methods in running draft clinics and busing thousands of students to the peace marches in Was.h.i.+ngton. Another was Hillary Rodham, future first lady and ”co-president” of the United States.

To understand Hillary and much of her subsequent life, it is important to learn the philosophy and tactics of the mentor who has had more apparent influence on her than any other.

For Alinsky, the goal of the political organizer is to help his followers acc.u.mulate power. He harbors the strong belief that the role of the organizer is to be a neutral agent, a kind of ideological agnostic seeking no particular outcome and advancing no philosophy other than the winning of power.

The trick, Alinsky suggests, is taking on whatever protective coloration one needs to win the trust of one's charges. To this degree, he offers nothing but stinging criticism for any organizer whose language or demeanor turns off would-be followers. He admonishes the children of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) generation to change their off-putting dress and language, to not be ashamed of their middle-cla.s.s roots. ”Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and ways of life of the middle cla.s.s,” he writes in Rules for Radicals. Alinsky teaches: They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt.

They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the big middle-cla.s.s majority. Therefore, it is useless sel-indulgence for an activist to put his past behind him. Instead, he should realize the priceless value of his middle-cla.s.s experience. His middle-cla.s.s ident.i.ty, his familiarity with the values and problems, are invaluable for organization of his own people.