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

little attention to their appearance—and Hillary was no exception. Her dyed-blond hair had dulled to a lifeless brown, and she pulled it back in a ponytail or schoolmarmish bun. Hillary still eschewed cosmetics, and her bottle-bottom glasses were thicker than ever. Her wardrobe was pure sixties—tie-dyed shirts, frayed jeans, beads, and sandals.
    Hillary and her classmates did make more of an effort to look presentable on weekends, when they took the train to Cambridge to go out on dates with Harvard boys. Since Wellesley had a 1 A.M . curfew on weekends, Hillary would later remember that Route 9 between Cambridge and Wellesley was “like a Grand Prix racetrack…as our dates raced madly back to campus so we wouldn’t get in trouble.”
    Hillary soon began dating Geoffrey Shields, a prelaw student at Harvard who hailed from another upscale Chicago suburb, Lake Forest. Hillary went with Shields on hiking trips and to the occasional football game, but Hillary never seemed more fully engagedthan when they were seated with friends on the floor of Shields’s Harvard dorm debating the issues of the day: poverty, civil rights, the Vietnam War. “That,” said Shields, “is when Hillary really came alive.”
    In the beginning, Hillary defended the presence of U.S. troops in Vietnam. But as a sophomore, she underwent a change of heart. Realizing that her beliefs “were no longer in sync with the Republican party,” she resigned as president of the Young Republicans. Not that she could be remotely described as a radical. Determined to bring about change by working within the system, Hillary pressed for greater minority enrollment—Wellesley counted only ten blacks among its students at the time—as well as an end to curfews.
    As confident as she was as an advocate, Hillary harbored doubts about the course her own life should take. Long before her future husband proclaimed, “That depends on what the meaning of the word ‘ is ’ is,” Hillary asked, “I wonder who is me?” Writing to John Peavoy, a high school classmate now attending Princeton, Hillary mulled over which identity was right for her: that of “educational and social reformer, alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, or compassionate misanthrope.”
    Peavoy viewed Hillary’s soul-searching as “typical of the time, and also typical of the age. With the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in full swing, there was no way you could not be involved. We were still adolescents, really. So it was not so much ‘These are tumultuous times’ as it was ‘How does all of the this affect me ?’ ”
    Ultimately, Hillary did not choose reformer, academic, pseudo-hippie, or misanthrope. Instead she settled on a fifth option: politician. “From the very beginning,” Peavoy recalled, “there was never any doubt that she was going to be the leader, at the head of something big.”
    Although she wrote to Peavoy saying that she did not regardherself as one of the “faceless masses,” Hillary felt it was her duty as a committed Methodist to lead her fellow citizens down the right path. With the pain of her high school election defeat still fresh, Hillary nonetheless decided to run for Wellesley student government president. To her amazement, she won.
    Hillary set out immediately to push her own agenda, lobbying hard for an end to Wellesley’s mandatory curriculum—a loosening of academic requirements that, years later as the parent of a college student, she would come to regret. She also campaigned successfully to end college rules barring men from setting foot in Wellesley dorm rooms.
    At twenty, Hillary was already being criticized for using her office to reward cronies with assignments to key school committees—a charge that would be leveled against her and her future husband repeatedly over the coming years. “The habit of appointing friends and members of the in-group should be halted immediately,” demanded the Wellesley News, “in order that