American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power Read Online Free PDF

In addition to campaigning as a Goldwater Girl, Hillary proposed holding a mock political convention in the school gym. The teacher who oversaw the “convention” knew that Hillary was campaigning for Goldwater, just as he knew Hillary’s friend Ellen Press was a supporter of incumbent Lyndon Johnson. To make things more interesting, Press was given the task of representing Goldwater while Hillary played LBJ. “I resented every minute of it,” she recalled.
    Hillary was voted Most Likely to Succeed when she graduated from Maine Township High in 1965. That fall Dorothy and Hugh made the grueling eight-hundred-mile drive to Wellesley for the first time—somehow managing to get lost in Boston and ending up in Harvard Square. Harvard was teeming with shaggy-maned radicals and scruffy potheads—or at least that’s the way it looked to Hugh Rodham. He threatened to turn back. But when theRodhams finally did find their way to Wellesley, Hillary’s father was relieved at what he saw. There were no bearded hippies; in fact, with the exception of the stray tweed-jacketed faculty member, there were no men at all.
    A collection of brick-and-stone neo-Gothic buildings sprinkled across five hundred wooded acres, Wellesley was regarded by many as the country’s most beautiful college campus. The sylvan setting was an important part of Wellesley’s genteel image. Since its founding in 1875, Wellesley (like the other Seven Sisters—Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, and Vassar) catered to the pampered daughters of America’s privileged elite.
    The college’s unsurpassed academic reputation, the manicured grounds, the status, the contacts, the sense of tradition—the most famous of these involved rolling hoops into Lake Waban to see which Wellesley grad would be the first to marry—all were factors in Hillary’s decision to attend Wellesley. One reason eclipsed all the others: Hillary had chosen Wellesley precisely because it was so far away from her autocratic father.
    Nevertheless, as she watched her parents drive away, Hillary felt “lonely, overwhelmed, and out of place.” Most of her classmates had gone to boarding schools, vacationed every year in places like Palm Beach and the Côte d’Azur, and spoke several languages. They also seemed to have the edge academically. Hillary excelled in what would become her major, political science, but faltered in geology, math, and French. After a month, she placed a collect call to Park Ridge and told her parents, “I’m not smart enough to be here.”
    Hugh Rodham had never praised his daughter for getting into the exclusive college and would just as soon have paid for Hillary to attend a cheaper school somewhere in the Midwest. He told her to come home. Dorothy, however, insisted she stay. “Don’t be a quitter,” she said. “We’re not quitters.”
    Hillary remained at Wellesley, focusing on her own ambitious scheme to restructure Illinois’s state Republican organization sothat by the time she graduated she could make a serious run for office. Hillary also threw herself into her studies and class activities, taking over the Young Republicans and winning a seat in the student senate.
    Hillary had a room to herself in the Stone-Davis dormitory, a neo-Gothic structure perched on a hill with breathtaking views of Lake Waban. She would remain at Stone-Davis for all four of her years at Wellesley, dining each day with her friends in a flower-filled, glass-walled gazebo. Already adept at networking, Hillary quickly determined who was important to know on campus—and who might be of use to her in the future. Among the friends she would make during this period: Teddy Roosevelt’s great-granddaughter Susan Roosevelt, who would go on to marry future Massachusetts Governor William Weld, and Eleanor “Eldie” Acheson, granddaughter of Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson.
    With no men on campus to impress during the week, the women of Wellesley paid