HILLARY AND CHILDREN 1970
Stop Hillary!
Vote no to a Clinton dynasty
By Doug Henwood
It’s widely known that Hillary and Bill met when they were students at Yale Law School; it’s less known that their first date essentially involved crossing a picket line. Bill suggested they go to a Rothko exhibition at the university’s art gallery, but it was closed because of a strike by unionized employees. After clearing away some garbage that had piled up during the strike, Bill convinced a guard to let them in. Hillary was impressed — and not for the first time — by his powers of persuasion. She found him “complex,” with “lots of layers.”
By Yale Law standards, Hillary was a conservative, which meant that she opposed the Vietnam War but still basically believed in American institutions. Despite looking like a hippie in her tinted glasses and candy-striped slacks, she had no patience for the utopianism of the time.
In 1973, the year after she graduated from law school, she published a paper in the Harvard Educational Review on the legal rights of children. She’d gotten interested in the topic when she heard Marian Wright Edelman — the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar — speak at Yale. After the lecture, she approached Edelman and ended up working at her D.C.-based public-interest law firm during the summer of 1970, focusing on the conditions of migrant farm laborers and their families.
Although the right would later denounce Hillary’s paper as a radical anti-family screed, which supposedly advocated turning over the work of child-rearing to the state, it was anything but. In “Children Under the Law,” she concluded that the state was obliged to intervene only in the case of actual harm to children — a standard that had to be extremely strict:
Only medically justifiable reasons for intervention should be acceptable. Parental behavior that does not result in medically diagnosable harm to a child should not be allowed to trigger intervention, however offensive that behavior may be to the community.
It was the first in a series of legal articles on children and families, and an early instance of what she would characterize as a lifelong interest in such issues. Hillary later chaired the board of Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) — though her relationship with her former mentor would be strained by Bill’s 1996 welfare legislation, which Edelman angrily condemned, declaring that his “signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.”
Soon after his own graduation, Bill returned to Arkansas — first for a stint as a law professor, and then to run for Congress. He advised John Doar, who was putting together the legal team for the Nixon impeachment case, to hire Hillary, who was then at the CDF. Yet according to Maraniss, Bill also sounded out the Arkansas politician David Pryor for his thoughts on how this might affect his own political future. “He knew that his career would be in politics,” Pryor told Maraniss, “and the question was whether Hillary’s connection with the Watergate committee might have political ramifications.”
In any case, she was hired. On the impeachment-committee staff, Hillary became friends with Bernard Nussbaum, who would later serve as Bill’s White House counsel. She told him — and anyone else who would listen — that her boyfriend was destined to be president someday. Nussbaum, not surprisingly, thought this was delusional. In Sheehy’s account, Hillary tore into him:
You asshole. Bernie, you’re a jerk. You don’t know this guy. I know this guy. So don’t pontificate to me. He is going to be president of the United States.
Of course, expectations were high for her too. So what to do after the impeachment committee dissolved in 1974? She could go back to the CDF. She could go to Washington, work at a law firm, and get a feel for politics — a route complicated by her having failed the D.C. bar exam, an embarrassing fact she kept secret for thirty years. Or she could move to Arkansas to be with Bill. She had visited a few times, but moving to the sticks made her nervous.