Part Seven, Who Is Hillary Rodham Clinton? After Wellesley, Hillary decided to study law at Yale; and as soon as she arrived, she threw herself into the anti-war movement, joining the League of Women Voters as a means of promoting leftist politics in the mainstream. She also involved herself in other student activities. Again, she immediately rose to the top. * She was chosen to make the 50th anniversary speech to the League, and she took the podium wearing a black arm band commemorating the students killed at Kent State. Typical of student rhetoric at the time, her speech was shrill and Marxist in tone: How much longer can we let corporations run us? Isnt it about time that they, as all the rest of our institutions, are held accountable to the people? * In the spring of 1970, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale and seven fellow Panthers went on trial in New Haven for torturing and then murdering one of the brothers whom they suspected of squealing to the cops. Huey Newton and Jane Fonda came to town to lead protest rallies. After all, black radicals---particularly those dedicated to violent revolution---couldnt be expected to receive a fair trial from a corrupt WASP legal system. Hillary Rodham organized a group of students to monitor the trial for the American Civil Liberties Union. In the course of that trial, the police bombarded rowdy students with tear gas, and someone set fire to the law library. When the students planned their reaction, it was Hillary who presided over the meeting. One fellow student would later say that no one could remember what the meeting was about---only that we were awed by her. Yale students organized a strike in support of the Panthers, and Huey Newton termed the United States fascist and called for violent revolution. By then, such activities were familiar spectacles on almost every large campus nationwide. Spoiled, self-righteous middle-class students from Massachusetts to Texas were tearing down their own universities in the name of free speech and classless society. *During her junior year, Hillary met Marian Wright Edelman, a collectivist ideologue, was using childrens rights as a weapon with which to advance her radical agenda, particularly to attack the institution of the family. As an intern, Hillary was assigned to Senator Walter Mondales subcommittee on migrant labor camps, documenting the disgraceful conditions under which they worked. * At this stage, her righteous indignation against America and its capitalist system boiled over. When Minute Maid, a subdivision of Coca-Cola, was implicated in the migrant workers scandal, the CEO of Coca-Cola came to Washington to testify. An irate Hillary, forgetting the carpenters level, confronted him at a congressional hearing and, shaking an accusing finger at him, said, Were going to nail your ass! Nail your ass! * Bobby Seales lawyer introduced Hillary to Robert Treuhaft and his wife Jessica Mitford. Both were avowed communists, and Treuhaft for years served as the attorney for the Communist Party, USA. As the result of this meeting, Hillary spent the summer of 1971 an an intern in Treeuhafts law office in Berkeley. Five mainstream journalists have focused on this aspect of Hillarys intellectual development. Many dismiss her early activism as no more than the folly of youth---a natural expression of idealism in a time of social upheaval. (What college students didnt go a little crazy in the sixties?) Perhaps, as politically correct activist themselves, journalist see nothing worrisome about such a past. (whats wrong with Saul Alinsky and Bob Treuhaft? Great Americans.) And perhaps they dont want right wingers latching onto the issue---particularly now that Hillary threatens to become a major player on the national stage. One thing is certain: Unlike Sixties revolutionary Jerry Rubin (who became a stock broker), Hillary Rodham has never put the late sixties and early seventies behind her. Because she connected with so many leftist icons while she was in college and law school, she ended up as chairman of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) and on the board of the Childrens Defense Fund. Simply put, she never surrendered her Socialist leanings and commitment to the necessity of transforming lives through the magic of Big Government, as her health-care plan would later clearly illustrate. But the injustice of capitalism and family life werent the only things on her mind at Yale. By then, shed met Bill Clinton and fallen unpredictably, unequivocally in love.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 22:23:16 +0000
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