Edward McClelland: How 1968 changed Hillary
| Forty years and four days ago, Hillary Rodham stormed into a friend's dorm room at Wellesley College and slammed her book bag against a wall.
"I can't stand it anymore!" she screamed, in tears. "I can't take it!"
It was April 4, 1968, and Hillary had just heard the news of Martin Luther King's assassination. The entire nation was grieving that day, but Hillary's anguish was especially palpable, because King himself had started her on her path to political awareness, when she'd shaken his hand after a sermon in Chicago.
The next day, Hillary marched in Boston's Post Office Square, returning to campus wearing a black armband. At a student body meeting at Houghton Memorial Chapel, she boldly spoke in favor of a two-day strike, nearly shouting down a professor who suggested that students give up their weekends instead.
"I'll give up my date Saturday night, Mr. Goldman, but I don't think that's the point," she said. "Individual consciences are fine, but individual consciences have to be made manifest."
Just four years earlier, Hillary had been a suburban Goldwater Girl, wearing a 10-gallon hat adorned with the candidate's catchphrase -- AuH2O -- and devouring "The Conscience of a Conservative," the Arizona senator's campaign biography, the way some young people take to the me-first bromides of Ayn Rand. The story of her conversion from high school Republican to Seven Sisters campus liberal is the story of how the Democratic Party was gentrified in the 1960s, its lunch-bucket rank and file making way for college-educated professionals consumed with issues of civil rights and unjust wars. And its ironic coda is that Hillary Clinton, once one of the activist newcomers, now depends for her electoral survival on reviving the party's old blue-collar base.
Hillary's Republicanism was a family heirloom. Her father lost a race for alderman in Chicago before fleeing to the suburb of Park Ridge, and had hated the city's Democratic machine ever since. In 1960, Hugh Rodham supported Richard M. Nixon for president. His 13-year-old daughter went along enthusiastically. The day after John F. Kennedy won the election, Hillary's social studies teacher came to class bearing bruises, inflicted, he claimed, by Democratic goons who didn't like the way he was questioning poll watchers in his Chicago precinct.
Outraged, Hillary and her best friend, Betsy Johnson, sneaked downtown to join a group of Republicans investigating the stolen election. The two girls were dropped off on the South Side, where they canvassed apartment houses and taverns, looking for evidence of ghost voters, which they never found....
Kevin O'Keefe, now a Chicago lawyer, met Hillary in 1966, on a double date with a University of Illinois frat brother. Hillary still thought of herself as a Republican, and when the conversation turned to her favorite subject -- politics -- "she made some kind of remark about Daley and Democrats in Chicago, and I bet it was a suburban Republican comment," O'Keefe said in an interview.
Her Republican identity couldn't withstand the era's events, especially the Vietnam War. In the winter of 1968, Hillary spent weekends in New Hampshire working on the presidential campaign of Minnesota's dovish Sen. Eugene McCarthy.
When King was assassinated, Hillary was student body president at Wellesley. Despite her anger, and her harsh speech at the chapel, she turned out to be a moderating influence on campus. Hillary and O'Keefe talked often of the possibility of revolution that year, but both agreed they would never take part. In a democracy, you had to work within the system. The week of King's death, Hillary was true to that philosophy. There was talk of a hunger strike, but Hillary helped work out a more practical solution: pressuring the administration to recruit black faculty and students.
After Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death, in June, Hillary spent hours on the phone with O'Keefe, sharing her grief.
"I think that by certainly '68, she was thinking more like a Democrat than a Republican," O'Keefe averred. "She started to see a world beyond Park Ridge. It was a management town. There was no poverty. They didn't see strikes or lockouts."...
Read entire article at Salon
"I can't stand it anymore!" she screamed, in tears. "I can't take it!"
It was April 4, 1968, and Hillary had just heard the news of Martin Luther King's assassination. The entire nation was grieving that day, but Hillary's anguish was especially palpable, because King himself had started her on her path to political awareness, when she'd shaken his hand after a sermon in Chicago.
The next day, Hillary marched in Boston's Post Office Square, returning to campus wearing a black armband. At a student body meeting at Houghton Memorial Chapel, she boldly spoke in favor of a two-day strike, nearly shouting down a professor who suggested that students give up their weekends instead.
"I'll give up my date Saturday night, Mr. Goldman, but I don't think that's the point," she said. "Individual consciences are fine, but individual consciences have to be made manifest."
Just four years earlier, Hillary had been a suburban Goldwater Girl, wearing a 10-gallon hat adorned with the candidate's catchphrase -- AuH2O -- and devouring "The Conscience of a Conservative," the Arizona senator's campaign biography, the way some young people take to the me-first bromides of Ayn Rand. The story of her conversion from high school Republican to Seven Sisters campus liberal is the story of how the Democratic Party was gentrified in the 1960s, its lunch-bucket rank and file making way for college-educated professionals consumed with issues of civil rights and unjust wars. And its ironic coda is that Hillary Clinton, once one of the activist newcomers, now depends for her electoral survival on reviving the party's old blue-collar base.
Hillary's Republicanism was a family heirloom. Her father lost a race for alderman in Chicago before fleeing to the suburb of Park Ridge, and had hated the city's Democratic machine ever since. In 1960, Hugh Rodham supported Richard M. Nixon for president. His 13-year-old daughter went along enthusiastically. The day after John F. Kennedy won the election, Hillary's social studies teacher came to class bearing bruises, inflicted, he claimed, by Democratic goons who didn't like the way he was questioning poll watchers in his Chicago precinct.
Outraged, Hillary and her best friend, Betsy Johnson, sneaked downtown to join a group of Republicans investigating the stolen election. The two girls were dropped off on the South Side, where they canvassed apartment houses and taverns, looking for evidence of ghost voters, which they never found....
Kevin O'Keefe, now a Chicago lawyer, met Hillary in 1966, on a double date with a University of Illinois frat brother. Hillary still thought of herself as a Republican, and when the conversation turned to her favorite subject -- politics -- "she made some kind of remark about Daley and Democrats in Chicago, and I bet it was a suburban Republican comment," O'Keefe said in an interview.
Her Republican identity couldn't withstand the era's events, especially the Vietnam War. In the winter of 1968, Hillary spent weekends in New Hampshire working on the presidential campaign of Minnesota's dovish Sen. Eugene McCarthy.
When King was assassinated, Hillary was student body president at Wellesley. Despite her anger, and her harsh speech at the chapel, she turned out to be a moderating influence on campus. Hillary and O'Keefe talked often of the possibility of revolution that year, but both agreed they would never take part. In a democracy, you had to work within the system. The week of King's death, Hillary was true to that philosophy. There was talk of a hunger strike, but Hillary helped work out a more practical solution: pressuring the administration to recruit black faculty and students.
After Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death, in June, Hillary spent hours on the phone with O'Keefe, sharing her grief.
"I think that by certainly '68, she was thinking more like a Democrat than a Republican," O'Keefe averred. "She started to see a world beyond Park Ridge. It was a management town. There was no poverty. They didn't see strikes or lockouts."...