The commission held hearings and found widespread discrimination and after one year issued a report urging the bar association to publicly recognize that gender bias exists in the profession and to begin to eliminate it.
The ABA responded to the work of Hillary’s commission by adopting a resolution that committed the association and its members to “refuse to participate in, acquiesce in, or condone barriers to the full integration and equal participation of women in the legal profession.“ The voice vote of approval was unanimous. Hillary told the delegates, ”Despite the progress that has been made, there still exist instances of subtle discrimination against women.“ In 1991, the group created the Goal IX Report Card, an annual accounting designed to measure the progress of women in the association.
Hillary’s idealistic aims were tempered by her pragmatic politics. She did not name the host country or any other country in her speech, though she was aware of China’s efforts to muzzle opponents. Even after the Chinese government blacked out her speech on the closed-circuit TV in the hall, she said nothing.
Hillary told CNN that she had been referring to violations by China. But Bill, eager to improve ties with Beijing, insisted “there was no attempt to single any country out.”
The Beijing speech became, Hillary wrote, “a manifesto for women all over the world.” Indeed, her message was beamed all over the world. Her speech lifted her “from being a really first-rate First Lady,” observed Donna Shalala, “to being an extraordinary one.”
With utility rates in Arkansas skyrocketing, ACORN pushed through a ballot initiative requiring utilities to lower rates for residential users in Little Rock and to increase them for business. The measure passed.
Business fought back. The engine driving the challenge was the Rose Law Firm, which enlisted Hillary to help. Hillary could hardly decline to fight her friends, especially so early in her career. This was the by-product of Hillary’s choice to join Rose. She would advocate for clients who would be on the opposite sides of the causes she had formerly championed.
The winning brief was crafted by Hillary and a colleague. The judge embraced the theory--that the ordinance amounted to an unconstitutional taking of property.
The next day there was a plenary session on global warming. The marquee attraction was Al Gore. Hillary and Gore had vied for Bill’s attention during his presidency, and that rivalry had only intensified after the Clintons left the White House. Bill privately told confidants that he believed that if Hillary emerged as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, Gore would enter as a left-of-Hillary alternative.
One month later, Hillary unveiled a comprehensive clean-energy plan, tailed along the lines she had mentioned at the conference. She suffered the same fat as Gore: Nobody paid attention.
[In a speech introducing the plan,] after praising solar power and wind technology, Hillary turned her attention to her villains--the oil companies--and discussed the legislation she hoped to pass that would force them to change their ways. Unless they diversified away from fossil fuels and into preferred, renewable technologies, her bill would require that they be assessed heavy windfall-profits taxes. This new revenue source, estimated at $50 billion, would finance a government energy fund that invested in innovative energy research.
Hillary introduced her promised legislation to create a federal “Strategic Energy Fund” financed by oil company taxes. But her energy bill, while music to the ears of the Left, overreached her colleagues. Hillary could not find another senator to cosponsor her bill.
Taking on the air-quality problem was a brilliant move. She successfully carved out a post-September 11 issue that played to her strengths while also meeting the needs of her constituents. Along the way it also created some space between her and the Bush administration and an opportunity to return to the base of her party.
Hillary learned that children needed their own advocates when they were victims. A lawyer filed a lawsuit on behalf of a woman who sued the Connecticut Department of Social Services, attempting to overturn its decision that foster parents were not eligible to adopt. Hillary lost the case, but it introduced Hillary to a new calling. “I realized that what I wanted to do with the law was to give voice to children who were not being heard.”
Hillary’s mom, Dorothy Rodham, had overcome deep emotional scars with the unselfish help of caring adults and now Hillary knew she wanted to give this gift too. “I want to be a voice for America’s children,” she declared.
Bill and Hillary set two ambitious goals--rewriting the complex rules that governed 14% of the economy & meeting the deadline of delivering a proposal to Congress within 100 days.
The country seemed comfortable with the historic decision to put a First Lady in charge of a major policy challenge. It didn’t take long for the honeymoon to end. The Washington Times, in an article entitled “First Lady’s Task Force Broke Law on Secrecy,” claimed that reporters had been barred from the first meeting of the task force--an apparent violation of a law because Hillary was not a federal employee and the law allows outsiders to be kept out of advisory committee meetings only if all participants are federal employees.
With each passing day that week, Hillary seemed to grow more comfortable in her role as an energized street fighter for a shattered city. She was inevitable overshadowed by Mayor Giuliani, who would be acclaimed as “America’s Mayor” for his resolve in lower Manhattan. And yet, for many New Yorkers, the images of Hillary fighting for the $20 billion in federal assistance for lower Manhattan, and standing atop the rubble with the president and Mayor Giuliani, dispelled any lingering doubts that she was a carpetbagger celebrity politician with few authentic toes to her new home state.
Hillary sits on three Senate committees--Armed Services, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Environment and Public Works.
Hillary landed her most important post, a slot on the Armed Services Committee, after the 2002 midterm elections. It was a conscious decision to burnish her national-security resume after September 11.
Hillary had previously impressed the army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. John Keene, one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq, with her grasp of military culture. Hillary learned how to fit into a community that had long harbored hostility toward her husband.
Hillary’s service on the Armed Services Committee enabled her to reach out to the military. It also allowed her to travel on official business to war zones
While their plan was hatched together, Hillary had her own ideas about what it would take to achieve victory. She concluded that if she had any chance of winning the ultimate prize of her life, she would need to pursue it her way. That meant, among other things, carefully crafting a persona and a narrative to present to the American public that knew both so much and so little about her.
Hillary’s high school government teachers warned her that college would likely change her conservative politics. “You’re going to Wellesley, and you’re going to become a liberal and a Democrat.” Hillary blanched and replied, “I’m smart, I know where I stand on the issues. And that’s not going to change.”
In the mid-1960s, student activism, spurred by growing disenchantment with the war in Vietnam and racism at home, was beginning its ascent. Wellesley was beginning to change too, though more tentatively than other campuses. Hillary’s class would accelerate the transformation of Wellesley from a genteel island to a campus with much more in common with the “beatnik” Harvard Square vibe.
For Hillary, Yale Law School presented itself as the perfect venue to accomplish such goals. Yale was in the throes of a revolution in the American legal profession and also in the way the institution dealt with social and cultural change.
Hillary was one of 27 women entered Yale Law School in 1969--barely more than 10%, though as Hillary observed, “It was a breakthrough at the time and meant that women would no longer be token students at Yale.”
They presented proposed articles of impeachment on July 19, 1974, and the House Judiciary Committee approved three of the articles, citing abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress. Nixon resigned less than a month later.
Hillary saw clearly that if his political career was going to be rebuilt, it would have to happen in Arkansas, not Washington. The fact that Hillary used her maiden name was increasingly perceived as an issue in the Clinton camp. A few months after the election, Hillary heard a pitch from Vernon Jordan, “You are in the South. And in the South, you are not Hillary Rodham, you’re Mrs. Clinton.“ Hillary did not argue.
”I learned the hard way that some voters were offended by the fact that I kept my maiden name.“ She changed her name to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Whatever Hillary may have personally felt as a feminist who came of age in the 1960s, her devotion to Bill’s ambitions--which also meant her ambitions--outweighed all else.
The comeback worked, and by 1983, Bill and Hillary were once again living in the governor’s mansion.
These arguments resonated. In the eyes of the voters, the relationship became a non-issue. But previously undisclosed law firm records show that Hillary didn’t ask the firm to segregate her share of the state business until two months after White’s unsuccessful attack. Hillary eventually rectified the situation by repaying her share of past state fees “in any year Bill served as Governor,” which she calculated at $12,235.83.
Right before Super Tuesday, 1992, the New York Times published an article that disclosed the real estate partnership between the McDougals and the Clintons, the connections to the failed savings and loan, and the existence of Hillary’s name on her law firm’s filings on behalf of the savings & loan before state regulators.
The piece raised questions about a governor being in business with someone whose company was regulated by the state, and the governor’s wife being involved in representing that business partner before state regulators that the governor had appointed. The article also reported that McDougal’s savings and loan had been subsidizing the unsuccessful real estate venture with the Clintons.
Clinton aides emphasized that Whitewater never made the Clintons any money.
Nearly 20,000 delegates, guests, and media were in the arena. Millions were watching at home. Whey Hillary took the stage, she was nervous, but the crowd greeted her with a wall of enthusiastic noise. She began by speaking about Chelsea, then went on to rebut Dole’s critique of her book, It Takes A Village. The crowd roared its approval. Afterward, Hillary felt as if she had truly connected with her audience. For so long, she had stood alongside the object of the audience’s affection. Now she was the one they were applauding. It was a rush like none other. “I knew then she was bitten by the bug,” one friend recalled. “I could tell she wanted to hear those cheers again and again.”
The First Lady’s highly charged phrase to describe the Clinton enemies--“a vast right wing conspiracy”--infuriated the men and women working in Ken Starr’s office, to whom the word “conspiracy” connoted criminal activity on their part. Starr took the unusual step of releasing a statement describing Hillary’s allegation as “nonsense.”
But the First Lady’s invocation reached its intended audience. One week later, a poll showed that 59% believed that “Clinton’s political enemies are conspiring to bring down his presidency.”
Why choose New York? Hillary confided that she’d investigated “some other states, but they have a number of qualified people running who had worked hard and long to be congressional candidates.”
Hillary said that the other thing that was appealing about a Senate run was that it would be a rare thing in American politics--a candidacy by acclamation. “I’m being drafted. It is so rare to be drafted in this way. the nature of politics is such that you have to seize the moment when and if it comes, or it may never come again.” She wanted to be wanted.
To buy a house, she needed a few million dollars. She & Bill had already stretched by paying $1.7 million for a home in Chappaqua. Bill was poised to make lots of money. But in early 2001, the couple was still saddled with significant legal debts of more than $5 million.
In January, 2001, Hillary signed a book contract to tell her story. She was paid an advance of $8 million. Two weeks later, Hillary and Bill paid $2,850,000 to buy a colonial in northwest Washington. The house is named Whitehaven.
In 2006, Whitehaven served as a presidential campaign salon. Immediately after her reelection as senator, Hillary hosted political leaders from NH and IA in her home.
Coming to a decision involved a knotty set of calculations. Hillary had put down, as she put it, a “pretty pugnacious” marker the day after Sept. 11 by saying that those helping terrorists would face the “wrath” of the US. Retreating from that muscular stance would be tricky. On the other hand, if she voted yes, she would be giving Bush the authority to launch a pre-emptive war--a concept that reminded her of the failed war in Vietnam.
Voting against the resolution would also mean retreating from the policies of another president--her husband. Bill has signed a law in 1998 that contained non-binding provisions calling for regime change. Finally, there was Hillary’s concern that she could never win the presidency if she didn’t prove that she was tough enough.
Hillary said, “The message sent loudly and clearly by the American people was that we desperately need a new course.“ By this point, she had traveled all over the map regarding Iraq, carried along by the shifts in public opinion and her own ambition to appear both strong and decisive, traits she new she’d need as president.
As she finalized her plans for a presidential bid, Hillary asked allies from NH how her vote for the war would play out in the campaign. AS she saw it, she had two options: chart a new course or continue to tread water.
She continued to support “phased redeployment,” as opposed to the immediate withdrawal of 50,000 troops proposed by John Edwards, or a dramatic funding cutoff mentioned by others. Her approach, she told a reporter, stemmed from being “cursed with the responsibility gene.
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The above quotations are from Her Way The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Jeff Gerth & Don Van Natta Jr. . Click here for main summary page. Click here for a profile of Hillary Clinton. Click here for Hillary Clinton on all issues.
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