7. Wellesley: "Tomorrow, When You Are the Establishment"
Of America's most exclusive women's colleges, Wellesley was the wealthiest, its endowment one of the twenty largest in the nation among private schools overall. In the academic world, the college had been known since opening in 1875 primarily for lavish art and library collections and, after the war, for well-funded science laboratories. Even by the mid-1960s, however, Wellesley remained largely what it had been for decades, a staid, prestigious, conservative institution performing a traditional role for daughters of the upper classes. It was part liberal arts college, part finishing school, the intellectual reputation of its faculty and students never matching in rank -- or expected to match -- its financial assets.
To take classes among the picturesque Oxford-inspired buildings and green lawns, Wellesley students generally paid higher tuition and fees than even Princeton or Harvard men did. Their campus sat beside rustic Lake Waban and the neat, expensive colonial villages of Wellesley and Wellesley Hills, a still comfortable fifteen miles from Boston Common. First-year students could not have cars, be out after nine on most nights, or leave for weekends without parental permission. "Women in those places in those years weren't really encouraged to go to a school but to be educated and be well-bred," said one of them. "You have to remember that, for all its money and name, Wellesley was still mainly just a 'girls' school' in that sense."
Hillary Rodham found it "all very rich and fancy, and very intimidating to my way of thinking," she said later. She had "stayed apprehensive for about three months," she told Arkansas reporter Mara Leveritt. At the same time, others saw her as an eager, proper freshman who "at once signed on with the campus Republicans," according to one account, "and sat down to tea." "I was worried about her," her mother told a friend, "but Hillary adjusted to Wellesley without a problem. She joined clubs and was active immediately."
Fleeing their cloistered setting -- "The biggest social life on campus was tea . . . one lump or two," said her classmate Kris Rogers -- Wellesley women in numbers traditionally took the Boston transit trains on Fridays and Saturdays into Harvard Square, and Hillary joined the migration from the beginning. Not long into her first semester she began to date Jeff Shields, a quiet, diligent Harvard junior destined for law school. They saw each other more or less steadily over the next four years, in an essentially platonic relationship he remembered as "based on a lot of discourse."
There were dances, football games, parties at Shields's Winthrop House, strolls along the Charles in Cambridge and around Lake Waban back at Wellesley. At the beginning she was quiet, "tended to listen more than talk," Shields recalled. Her reticence soon disappeared. "The things that I remember most were the conversations," he told a writer. "She would rather sit around and talk about current events or politics or ideas than go bicycle riding or to a football game." The young Harvard man "fell in love with her earnestness," professed author Gail Sheehy, though while they were dating she also saw other boys from time to time, all of them, like Shields, "poli-sci, earnest idealist, policy-activist, good-government types, not wild-eyed radicals," according to Rogers.
Her freshman speeches took the Republican side of current issues, including Southeast Asia and Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. But the winter and spring of 1966 were also spent in her own methodical, characteristic sampling of college preoccupations, as if she were trying them on for style as well as substance. In the beginning she had been the grind, then the partier. "After six weeks of little human communication or companionship, my diet gave me indigestion," she wrote Don Jones about her regimen of reading and composition. "The last two weeks of February here were an orgy of decadent indulgence -- as decadent as any upright Methodist can become." Having played "social reformer" for the month of March, involved in assorted campus improvements, as she told Jones, she turned in April to become a thirty-day hippie, painting a flower on her arm. By May it was gone and she had returned to a more familiar role.
Jones thought her then and ever afterward in searching, often sharp rebellion against what they both called "sentimental liberalism"; a "sense of human frailty" pointed up for her, he told writer Donnie Radcliffe, the "difficulties of achieving justice and even the necessities of using power." The imperfection and irrationality of the mass seemed both to excuse the oppression of institutions and to render futile a more direct confrontation with power. In either case she came out of her freshman identity tasting with more scorn than ever for radical student movements. Earlier she had taken a black student with her to the Wellesley Methodist Church. "I was testing me as much as I was testing the church," she confided to Jones about her symbolic act. But when riots erupted in Chicago ghettos the following summer, giving new prominence to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael's Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she was caustic about the more insistent young activists. "Just because a person cannot approve of SNCC's attitude toward civil disobedience," she wrote Jones, "does not mean that one wishes to maintain the racial status quo."
***
During her sophomore year of 1966-67, a new militancy on Vietnam and civil rights was already marking other college campuses. With a handful of other students, including some of the African American women beginning to trickle into the college (ten attended that year), she began to urge greater black enrollment. Civil rights leaders were invited to speak to a sea of white female faces about the moral imperative of racial integration. "We were all still afraid to talk about it," Jan Piercy remembered.
Later, as a member of the student senate, Hillary would become one of the leaders of the exclusive school's version of the 1960s rebellion -- protesting Victorian curfews, asking for a reduction of mandatory courses, advocating a pass-fail grading system, even proposing to lift the century-old ban on men in Wellesley dormitories. Conducted with no reproach to administration or alumnae, it was tame and polite reform, hardly comparable to the chanting, fists-in-the-air student upheavals at other colleges throughout the nation. Like Don Jones's taking his youth group to the forbidden interior of Chicago, her Wellesley acts would seem daring if only because of the stolid setting. The wider ferment of the 1960s merely opened the way for relatively modest reformers like the young woman from Park Ridge, Her reforms addressed outmoded or embarrassing conditions while posing no threat to the basic arrangements of power.
Her college protests would be "a Hillary-style rebellion," wrote Martha Sherrill, "methodical, rational, fair." She was intent on being individually successful in her causes -- though success, as always in such easy pragmatism, increasingly defined the cause itself. "I wouldn't say she was angry," Jan Piercy said, comparing her to other student activists. "Intense anger is sometimes the result of frustration, from not being effective. And Hillary has always been effective."
By her junior year she was a recognized student leader, seen as serious but not too bookish and known as a natural go-between in increasing controversies pitting students against the administration. She had earlier chaired and held in check a volatile campuswide meeting on racial discrimination in admissions, what black students had attacked as Wellesley's "secret quota policy," and she would later act as a mediator between an African American women's group and college officials. "She had a talent for serving as a bridge between different groups of students ... tried to keep everybody talking," Kris Rogers remembered. For the moment she had found a role and obviously relished it. "Hillary couldn't say no to a meeting," thought Martha Sherrill. "Get out the Robert's Rules of Order and she would come flying through the door."
Some still wondered about her own eventual political purposes. An admiring, affectionate Jeff Shields saw her as "someone who wanted to be involved and have an impact but didn't exactly know how." Apart from her good offices in campus issues, friends observed a change in Hillary over her last two years at college, a growing involvement, as one put it, in social issues away from Wellesley and a steady shift from Republican to Democratic politics. Despite a busy schedule, she would volunteer to teach reading to poor black children in Boston's ravaged Roxbury ghetto and later help out at one of the new alternative newspapers springing up in the city. As a Young Republican she had favored the right's old nemesis, GOP moderate Nelson Rockefeller, or Representative John Lindsay of New York against more conservative rivals Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Now, by the winter of 1967-68, with opposition to the Vietnam War reaching a crescendo, she joined the student supporters of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota in his challenge of Lyndon Johnson.
Her Wellesley roommate, Johanna Branson, remembered Hillary's returning to their dorm the night of April 4, 1968, after hearing the news of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis. "She came in, the door flew back, and her book bag went crashing against the wall," Branson said. "She was completely distraught about the horror of it." While young blacks rioted in eighty cities and students prepared campus uprisings at Columbia and other universities, Hillary and a small group of Wellesley women put on black armbands to join a somber memorial march in Boston. She and others planned to march in Wellesley itself, only to have local veterans' groups threaten, as a young local minister remembered, "that we'd have our heads beaten in if we did."
In the wake of the King murder, the mood on campus was tense. She was among those asking students to boycott classes and attend a teach-in on civil rights issues, and when a professor scolded them for not giving up "weekends, something we enjoy," her reply in the college paper was instant, the first of many sharp responses to public criticism. "I'll give up my date Saturday night ... but I don't think that's the point," she wrote. "Individual consciences are fine. But individual consciences have to be made manifest." Her own was soon plain. Within weeks she was running a carefully organized campaign for president of the student government. Like her two opponents, she advocated more student control over Wellesley's social regulations and even a role for class leaders in the institution's decision making. But like them as well, she was "vague as to exactly how they would implement the change in the power structure," as the Wellesley News put it in refusing to endorse Hillary Rodham or the others. When she won the race, she was astonished at her popularity and acceptance, despite her organization and the reputation she had cultivated for three years. "I can't believe it. I can't believe it," she told a faculty friend incredulously.
Her election was only the beginning of a remarkable series of events over the months between her junior and senior years. In early June 1968 -- the bleak moment of Bill Clinton's graduation from Georgetown -- she was in riot-scarred Washington on the Wellesley Internship Program. One of thirty chosen from among three hundred applicants to aid Republican congressmen in assignments directed by Wisconsin representative (and Nixon's future secretary of defense) Melvin Laird, she spent the next eight weeks working routinely in the office of reactionary Harold Collier from Park Ridge's district. But the internship also gave her a chance to research and write for Laird and others on issues of revenue sharing and to meet several ambitious young rightwing aides who would later be prominent in the Reagan years.
In this first exposure to Washington, she left, as always, the impression of an assertive intelligence and effectiveness, whatever the substance. "She was for it," Laird would say of the Republican plan to "share revenues," shifting control of federal money and programs to states and localities. On the surface it seemed a benign scheme to dilute distant federal dictation and return decisions to communities where tax money was spent. But as is so commonly true on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures and courthouses, bland principle masked brutal politics. The vaunted "sharing," as many well knew, would simply turn over the money in state after state to more parochial, conservative, often corrupt local regimes, who could be counted on, in turn, to blunt whatever change or impact the original policies and appropriations might have intended. "Hell, can't anybody see it," a frustrated, courthouse-tutored Lyndon Johnson would say to his aides. "They want to share revenues with the boys that got all the real revenues to begin with."
From the Washington internship she went briefly to the Republican Convention in Miami, where she worked in the already failed campaign of Nelson Rockefeller to head off the presidential nomination of Richard Nixon. Like her passing involvement with Gene McCarthy's insurgency in the Democratic primaries earlier that winter and spring, her commitment to Rockefeller was spurred by his apparent promise to end the Vietnam War and address social and urban problems anew. There was, of course, a naive inconsistency between her work in Washington and that in Miami: the men she had served and impressed on Capitol Hill, the issues to which she devoted herself as an avid GOP intern, belonged to Richard Nixon and to a Republicanism that deplored Rockefeller and his policies as much as it did the Democrats. About Hillary Rodham's whole heady summer of national politics in 1968 there would be the air of the freshman sampler, trying on Congress one month, the convention the next, a matter more of scouting than of conviction.
Back in Park Ridge later that summer, she spent what was left of her vacation in languid poolside talks with old friends, punctuated by heated political arguments with her father at home. If she remained the moderate and the mediator at Wellesley, her political evolution felt far sharper in Park Ridge. "When fights flared between them," Judith Warner recounted, "the bottom line always was politics." In late August she and a neighbor, Betsy Johnson, took the train to Chicago to see for themselves the stormy demonstrations surrounding the riven Democratic Convention.
Inside the Chicago Amphitheater, the Old Guard, in the form of Mayor Daley's machine and presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey, suppressed the last remnants of Vietnam dissent in the wake of the primary defeat of McCarthy and the murder of Robert Kennedy. Blocks away, near the Conrad Hilton Hotel, a symbolic spectacle took place. There had been bloody clashes earlier in the week, with student demonstrators chanting their familiar "Fascist pig" and "Hell no, we won't go" and Chicago police shouting back, "Kill the Commies" and "Let's get the bastards." On a sultry Wednesday night a disorganized crowd, already teargassed, milled about near the hotel, "most of them pacifically inclined middle-class kids," a reporter scribbled in his notes. Then suddenly, without warning, cohorts of billy club-swinging police charged. What a later inquiry termed a "police riot" was seen in part by shocked television viewers, including young Bill Clinton in Hot Springs, and the initial revulsion in the national press was widespread. "The truth was," Tom Wicker wrote afterward in the New York Times, "these were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up."
"We saw kids our age getting their heads beaten in. And the police were doing the beating," Betsy Johnson remembered. "Hillary and I just looked at each other. We had a wonderful childhood in Park Ridge, but we obviously hadn't gotten the whole story."
In the longer aftermath of the fury, there was a systematic backlash against the victims, Mayor Daley calling the student demonstrators "a lawless violent group of terrorists [threatening] to menace the lives of millions of people." "I think we ought to quit pretending that Mayor Daley did anything wrong," presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey would say of the repression at the convention as well as in the streets. "He didn't." Within only weeks, polls showed much of the public agreeing with Daley and Humphrey. Protests continued to rage on campuses, but the nation watched with a growing unease and resentment, despising the dissenters for being wrong, hating them for being right. Having broadcast the bloody images from Chicago and deplored the brutality, most of the press soon shed its initial editorial indignation and fell in behind the recoiling public mood.
Symbolic of the divide within a generation, Hillary Rodham watched the brutality at a political as well as a physical distance -- shocked, as Betsy Johnson remembered, yet detached and apart in many ways. Elected president of the student government association, she would return to Wellesley to help organize teach-ins on the war, after similar meetings at other universities. Later that autumn, while many students boycotted the election, Hillary seemed far removed from the screams outside the Hilton or the disillusion in their wake, leaving Wellesley again and again to drive through New Hampshire and western Massachusetts, avidly distributing literature and working on phone banks for the long-compromised Hubert Humphrey, with his "politics of joy" a cheerleader still for Washington's war policy.
***
Hillary Rodham's last year at Wellesley was a combination of public accomplishment and personal disquiet. As student government president she continued to be the campus conciliator, with a genuine "empathy" for both sides, as Kris Rogers and others saw her. She was in favor of change, they remembered, but never too committed to it, thought the status quo oppressive or wasteful but was never too outraged by it. "She was really very mainstream ... not a counterculture person ... going to drop out or become radical, even in her thinking," Jeff Shields would say. "Because even when she became definitely liberal, it was always within a fairly conventional scope."
She presided over her own small salon in the common area and dining room of her dormitory. "Not a frivolous person in the least," remembered Eleanor Acheson, the granddaughter of Secretary of State Dean Acheson and a coworker in the Humphrey campaign. Acheson also thought her friend free of the usual family pressures. So many students were "tortured by insecurity, have parents driving them," Acheson told a writer decades later. "Hillary never had any of that." Her relationship with Jeff Shields ended early in her senior year. "Read between the lines," said a classmate, "that she just wasn't getting in bed with him." But despite her successes, the years at Wellesley were often more difficult than she acknowledged. Looking back on a presidential race fraught with personal attacks, her mother would insist to Judith Warner that "the trials Hillary faced as an adolescent ... made the troubles of the 1992 campaign look like a cakewalk." At that, her undergraduate years seemed still worse. "The most difficult time of her life," Dorothy Rodham would say, "[was] when she was at Wellesley."
There had been no one for her at the college quite like Don Jones. Among the faculty, Patsy Sampson thought her very "intense," giving her A-pluses in child psychology courses, which Hillary obviously relished. Alan Schechter, a young political science professor who taught constitutional law with a devotion to civil rights and liberal politics, saw her as "the best student I had taught in [my] first seven years ... at Wellesley." It was with Schechter that she wrote her senior thesis on the community-action programs of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.
No subject could have been more prophetic of the politics she and her future husband would inherit. Born in the euphoria of Johnson's early power in the mid-1960s, the larger antipoverty program was rooted in the faith of liberal economists that US postwar growth would be constant and that no meaningful redistribution of wealth or power was necessary for the realization of American democracy. "Poverty could be abolished without anyone's pocket suffering," as one historian described their presumption. The Democrats could "achieve the millennium without changing the system."
Yet there had been a fatal flaw from the beginning. A new cigarette tax in 1964 might have provided crucial billions for a direct, less politically vulnerable jobs program for the thirty to fifty million poor. Under powerful pressure from the tobacco lobby, however, Johnson and the Democratic congressional leadership had abandoned the tax. They chose instead to concentrate on regular Capitol Hill appropriations for "community action," designed to encourage economic power and popular participation at the grass roots in both urban slums and rural depressed areas. Barely two years later, by mid-1966, the efforts were doomed -- not only starved of money and attention in the vast sinking of resources into the maw of war in Southeast Asia but also under attack by Democratic officeholders all over the country, threatened by the new political and economic assertiveness of the dispossessed. Governors and mayors, congressmen and legislators had lobbied Vice President Humphrey, and Humphrey in turn warned Johnson, who with escalation of the war could afford no major defections in the ranks.
"The poor were being organized against the establishments," wrote historian Robert A. Levine, "and, not surprisingly, the establishments didn't like it a bit." Politicians of both parties were soon joined by a resentful middle class -- its own status threatened by the fiscal and social catastrophe that was Vietnam -- finding it easier, then as later, to blame those below and nonwhite than to understand political economy.
This vivid story of reform and reaction Hillary Rodham now viewed in her Wellesley thesis. Like the author of a literate but blanched bureaucratic report, she meticulously described various programs and assessed their clinical impact. In the spring of 1969 she judged that the already moribund community-action programs had been "constructive" and that the poor would now require something "broader" and more "sustained," as one of her thesis readers recalled her conclusion. But she stopped well short of analyzing the actual political murder of the programs or of discussing what the episode revealed in a larger sense about power and politics in America.
In the thesis she dealt in passing with Saul Alinsky. Since meeting him in Jones's youth group, she had heard him speak in Boston and had even gone to see him in Chicago before coming back to Wellesley for her senior year. His own reformer's approach to poverty -- "an embarrassment to the American soul," he called it -- had evolved to an elegant simplicity. The poor were poor because they lacked power and must be locally, practically organized to acquire it. Hillary Rodham judged Alinsky and his methods only marginal at best. "Organizing the poor for community actions to improve their own lives may have, in certain circumstances, short-term benefits for the poor but would never solve their major problems" is what Professor Schechter remembered as her thesis conclusion. "You need much more than that. You need leadership, programs, constitutional doctrines." Though she never defined precisely what the "much more" entailed, hers would in some respects be a sound verdict on the era that followed, when Alinsky and his disciples around the nation won hundreds of meaningful small battles for the poor and disenfranchised only to see poverty and disenfranchisement grow as never before. Packing a city councilor embarrassing a corporate board here and there would be no real remedy to the massive corruption of federal power and the lethal redistribution of national wealth and resources in the 1980s. Yet to focus on Alinsky's localism and organizing tactics was to miss just that, the other dimension of his larger critique, the apportionment of power itself. Like her appraisal of the community-action programs, her self-confident dismissal of the old Chicago hero and nemesis did not come to terms with the underlying point of it all -- politics.
Schechter and three other graders gave her As on the thesis. Her adviser thought her, like himself, a "pragmatic liberal" in the spirit of the early 1960s, someone who shared what he called his "instrumental liberalism: using government to meet the un met needs of the society to help those people who are not fully included within it." He had "high hopes for Hillary and her future," he wrote in a recommendation to Yale Law School. "She has the intellectual ability, personality, and character to make a remarkable contribution to American society." Her Wellesley thesis, however, would not be part of that contribution. Not long after graduation, enmeshed, like her husband, in politics, she instructed the college to seal her senior thesis from the public, even the tactical criticism of Alinsky and nebulous call for "leadership" having become possible career liabilities. "Hillary can't afford the negative image of the sixties," an admirer would explain a quarter century later.
Friends remembered her as in search of a "calling" those last months. The overwhelming majority of her class were still anticipating no more than marriage and family, but "feminists visiting Wellesley ... turned Hillary toward a legal career," according to Martin Kasindorf. She had decided on Yale Law after an encounter with an arrogant and sexist Harvard Law professor. "She's trying to decide whether to come here next year or attend our closest competitor," a Harvard friend said, introducing her to the faculty member. "Well, first of all, we don't have any close competitors," the man had replied. "Second, we don't need any more women."
The choice led to one last encounter with Saul A1insky. She had once contemplated following A1insky's example and "doing something in the area of organizing," Hillary would tell the Chicago Daily News in a special graduation interview. She thought his view of change through social agitation "a good point," like his political concern for the sensibilities of the middle class, "the kind of people I grew up with in Park Ridge." But when A1insky himself offered her a job that spring as an organizer, she turned him down, telling him she was going to Yale. "Well, that's no way to change anything," he had said. "Well, I see a different way than you," she replied. "And I think there is a real opportunity. "
Afterward there were repeated testimonials to her more idealistic purposes at the time, repeated surprise at the life she eventually led. "She didn't go to law school because she was interested in being a lawyer," thought Jeff Shields. "Not for the purpose of making money or becoming a corporate lawyer, but ... to influence the course of society," Schechter would add. ''I'm not interested in corporate law," she herself would declare. "My life is too short to spend it making money for some big anonymous firm." Shields believed her undecided about a career but, in any case, fiercely independent. "She didn't have any fixed ambitions in terms of knowing that she wanted to be elected to some office," Shields remembered. "She certainly didn't give any indication that she was looking to attach herself to a politician -- and I'm sure probably would have been offended by that concept if someone had raised it at the time."
With Schechter's sponsorship and a concerted last-minute campaign within the class, she became Wellesley's first student commencement speaker. An apprehensive college administration stipulated that the speech reflect a "consensus" of the class of 1969 while also being "appropriate." A drafting committee was formed, and student ideas poured in, urging her to speak candidly about the war, the assassinations of King and Kennedy, the Chicago riot, campus protests, and more from their turbulent last years. In the end the committee proudly refused to submit the speech for final review by the college president.
Though her mother stayed in Park Ridge with her brothers, Hugh Rodham drove to Boston to hear his daughter speak. The ceremonies began with Senator Edward Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican and the only African American in the Senate, making a perfunctory speech not even alluding to the war or popular unrest. Hillary Rodham followed with an unrehearsed response, "chewing out" the United States senator, as one account described it, "for being out of touch." To audible gasps from the crowd she scolded Brooke for his fey performance, "gave it to him, no ifs, ands, or buts about it," Schechter recalled. "I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting," she said, "something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now." "Hillary just sort of launched off on her own," Eleanor Acheson said. "Some people, largely mothers, thought it was just rude."
She began her prepared text with words from a classmate and poet. "The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible. We are not interested in social reconstruction, it's human reconstruction .... You and I must be free, not to save the world in a glorious crusade, but to practice with all the skill of our being the art of making possible.
"The issues of sharing power and responsibility, and of assuming power and responsibility, have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world," she said of the unrest of 1968-69. At stake were "integrity and trust and respect." Students were struggling to "come to grips with some of the inarticulate, maybe even inarticulable, things that we're feeling," she told them. "We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty." Only minutes into the address she seemed already to be losing some of the audience. "A murmur of whispered commentary buzzed under her words," said one account. "But there are some things we feel," she went on. "We feel that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including, tragically, the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government, continue." In more elaborate language it was the plaint of so many in the paradox of postwar prosperity: "Is this all there is, all we have to look forward to?" But her speech brushed the larger political reality only to retreat to abstraction, without asking or venturing more.
"Every protest, every dissent, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity," she said. "That attempt at forging ... has meant coming to terms with our own humanness." At one point she seemed utterly lost in ambivalence: "Within the context of a society that we perceive -- now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see -- but your perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs." By now there was a small background din of people shifting noisily in their chairs, whispering, even beginning to move restlessly in and out of the long rows.
Closing, she tried earnestly to reconcile dissent with the old order. "There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harks back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas." But that idea, too, she left dangling and ended abruptly on a banal, almost nationalist note: "And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere."
Her class, a few of the more recent alumnae, and some parents gave her a standing ovation, though the distraction during the address had been telling. Twenty-four years later she would look back on the speech as "full of uncompromising language." Puckered Wellesley thought so at the time. Uttered as it was only in passing in her reproach to Senator Brooke, the word Vietnam did not appear in the officially printed version of her address, and the college's first student commencement speaker appeared nowhere in a 1975 official chronicle of the institution. Yet what stood out then and later was the uncertainty and equivocation of what she had actually said, when so many others of her generation were coming to grips more simply with realities of "power and responsibility." Had she spoken at Harvard, a reporter wrote years later, the speech would have "invited a mass walkout." As it was, a few miles away at Brandeis University, more typical of the class of 1969 and sadly more prophetic, a student commencement speaker was talking about the rule of "an economic elite in our society ... which has a vested interest in preserving the social order on which their holdings depend." Valedictorian Justin Simon put it plainly: "If you support the war in Vietnam, pay for it. Don't have tax lawyers out making sure you don't pay too much."
Excerpts of her address were published by Life in a collection of student commencement speeches, accompanied by her first national photograph, showing a round-faced austere young woman with long straight hair, peering out through thick rimless glasses, the fingers of her outstretched hands joined pensively in front of her. In the same feature was a future White House aide and her own later collaborator on health-insurance reform, Ira Magaziner of Brown, who admonished his classmates, "The way things should be has got to be the way things are .... We should lose sleep because we are doing things that are wrong and we're allowing things that are wrong to go on in our society and we're accepting them." Beside the students was a premonitory passage from Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who denounced the "sniveling, hand-wringing power structure" tolerating the era's "violent rebellion." He seemed at one point to be speaking to the Rodhams and Magaziners in particular. They should accept the "rational" status quo and reject "immature" dissent, Agnew advised them scarcely four years before he left office in a bribery scandal. "Ask yourselves which kind of society you want for tomorrow -- tomorrow, when you are the establishment."
Hillary Rodham graduated from Wellesley already a paradoxical, guarded, concealed woman. Combing the same ground decades later, even the most sympathetic reporters would be troubled by how one-dimensional she then seemed, how "rational, cerebral," as one account described her, with "pain ... fears ... dreams" all seemingly missing. "She rarely, if ever," concluded Frank Marafiote, "is described by friends or family members as creative, innovative, emotional, empathetic, intuitive, introspective, sensual." Ultimately, he thought, she seems "unknowable, certainly to others, and perhaps more ominously, to herself."
After the commencement speech she left the crowd, including her father, for Lake Waban, indulging a last act of ritual revolt by stripping to a bathing suit she had worn under her graduation robe and dress and plunging into waters where student swimming was strictly prohibited. While she was out in the lake, a school security guard happened by and spitefully took her things, including her thick-lensed glasses.
She finally told the story at a 1992 Wellesley commencement. "Blind as a bat," she remembered, "I had to feel my way back to my room at Davis." The audience laughed. No one seemed to notice the more poignant meaning of the incident: literally and symbolically, she had spent the triumphal moment of her college career much as the years before and after -- ultimately, defiantly alone.