Hillary Clinton went undercover...

[cynatnite]

She exposed segregation at private schools in the south.

She was instrumental in assuring disabled children would be able to attend school.

I've always been a strong supporter of hers, but I didn't know any of this.

Just WOW!

[Hekate]

1. Wow indeed

[Jayd4sho]

2. How Hillary Clinton Went Undercover to Examine Race in Education

[link:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/28/us/politics/how-hillary-clinton-went-undercover-to-examine-race-in-education.html|



How Hillary Clinton Went Undercover to Examine Race in Education



By AMY CHOZICKDEC. 27, 2015

nytimes.com | Dec. 27, 2015




DOTHAN, Ala. — On a humid summer day in 1972, Hillary Rodham walked into this town’s new private academy, a couple of cinder-block classrooms erected hurriedly amid fields of farmland, and pretended to be someone else.

Playing down her flat Chicago accent, she told the school’s guidance counselor that her husband had just taken a job in Dothan, that they were a churchgoing family and that they were looking for a school for their son.

The future Mrs. Clinton, then a 24-year-old law student, was working for Marian Wright Edelman, the civil rights activist and prominent advocate for children. Mrs. Edelman had sent her to Alabama to help prove that the Nixon administration was not enforcing the legal ban on granting tax-exempt status to so-called segregation academies, the estimated 200 private academies that sprang up in the South to cater to white families after a 1969 Supreme Court decision forced public schools to integrate.

Her mission was simple: Establish whether the Dothan school was discriminating based on race.

“It was dangerous, being outsiders in these rural areas, talking about segregation academies,” said Cynthia G. Brown, a longtime education advocate who did work similar to Mrs. Clinton’s.

She added, “We thought we were part of the civil rights struggle, definitely.”

As issues of race and civil rights have become central to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and as Black Lives Matter activists have demanded more from her, she has frequently talked about her work for Mrs. Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund, making her advocacy for children the backbone of the biographical story she tells voters. But her experience going undercover in Dothan is a little-known aspect of that work, one she devoted just under 300 words to in her 562-page memoir, “Living History.”

A look at Mrs. Clinton’s efforts that summer, through archives and interviews with more than 50 local officials, civil rights activists and people who knew her, reveals a summer job that was both out of character for the bookish law student and a moment of awakening.


Hillary and Bill Clinton at Yale in the early 1970s. She traveled to Alabama in summer 1972, while Mr. Clinton was working on George McGovern’s presidential campaign.Credit Via Hillary Clinton campaign

Until her trip to Alabama, she had been relatively sheltered, her activism mostly confined to Ivy League debates and campus turmoil. Like many white activists from the North who traveled south to help on civil rights issues, Mrs. Clinton confronted a different world in Dothan, separate and unequal, and a sting of injustice she had previously only read about.

“I went through my role-playing, asking questions about the curriculum and makeup of the student body,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in “Living History.” “I was assured that no black students would be enrolled.”

Segregation Persists

In 1972, Mrs. Edelman’s Washington Research Project, which later became the Children’s Defense Fund, and other groups published a seminal report, “It’s Not Over in the South: School Desegregation in 43 Southern Cities 18 Years After Brown.” That year, an estimated 535,000 students attended private schools in the South, compared with 25,000 in 1966.

Mrs. Clinton was one of a handful of young researchers and interns who worked in Washington reviewing documents, looking into the schools that had been granted tax exemptions, and coordinating with activists and lawyers in the South who had been at the forefront of integration efforts.

After Mrs. Clinton spent several weeks studying the issue and establishing relationships in Atlanta and Alabama, she and other researchers were sent to different parts of the South to gather data and report firsthand on the private schools. They delivered their findings to Mrs. Edelman’s and other advocacy groups that were trying to pressure the Nixon administration.

Civil rights lawyers had had success in sending “testers” to investigate whether white and black couples received equal treatment in home rentals and purchases, as required by the Fair Housing Act, but going undercover to test private schools was less common and carried more risks.


Marian Wright Edelman this month. Mrs. Edelman sent Mrs. Clinton to Alabama to try to prove that the Nixon administration was not enforcing a ban on granting tax-exempt status to so-called segregation academies.Credit Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

“At the time, people were sort of suspicious about outsiders,” said Charles C. Bolton, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who has done extensive research on education in the South. “But they were also quick to make assumptions that all white people shared their views.”

Mrs. Clinton declined requests for an interview about her efforts to investigate segregation academies. But historical documents, descriptions of her work from friends and from others engaged in the issue, and Mrs. Clinton’s writings and public comments suggest that her trip to Dothan took her far out of her comfort zone.

She had graduated from Wellesley in 1969, and in the spring of 1971, at Yale Law School, had met Bill Clinton. That summer, the couple shared a small apartment not far from the University of California, Berkeley, while Mrs. Clinton worked at a law firm in Oakland, mostly writing legal briefs in a child custody case, according to “Living History.” They returned to Yale and lived together in a ground-floor apartment in New Haven that cost $75 a month.

In summer 1972, Mr. Clinton was in Miami working on George McGovern’s presidential campaign when Mrs. Clinton traveled from Washington to Atlanta to meet with civil rights lawyers and activists, then rented a car and drove the nearly four hours to Dothan.

“Hillary was not a derring-do type of person. It wasn’t her normal mode,” said Taylor Branch, the civil rights activist and author, who was a close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton at the time. “But,” he added, “you do these things when you’re young, and this was the era when young people did more of that than normal.”

In Dothan, Mrs. Clinton most likely stayed at the Holiday Inn on Ross Clark Circle, since locally owned hotels might have been suspicious of a single woman with black acquaintances, several people who did the same work said. While Mrs. Clinton favored corduroy bell-bottoms for casual wear, the dress code for the investigative work called for conservative blouses and skirts, her colleagues said.

She drove over the railroad tracks near downtown, east of Park Avenue, to the black part of town. There, she met local contacts who told her over a lunch of sweetened ice tea and burgers “that many of the school districts in the area were draining local public schools of books and equipment to send to the so-called academies, which they viewed as the alternatives for white students,” she wrote in “Living History.”

Years later, Mrs. Clinton does not say she ever felt afraid, but a white woman traveling alone in the South would have been “looking over her shoulder,” said Marlene Provizer, who did similar research into segregation academies in Mississippi and Georgia in the same era.

“There weren’t many folks doing this work,” she said. “I was very conscious of being ‘the other.’ ”

Blending In

With a nuclear plant under construction on the nearby Chattahoochee River, along with the Army base at Fort Rucker, outsiders were moving to Dothan, a city of 37,000 then, named after Genesis 37:17: “They have gone away, for I heard them say, ‘Let us go to Dothan.’ ”

“In a smaller town or had she gone to Mississippi, she wouldn’t have gotten away with it,” said Steve Suitts, the founding executive director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union, who has worked on the issue of private academies since the late 1960s. “People would have asked around about who she was and why she was down there and who her husband was and where they went to church.”

The local real estate agents, the bankers, the Baptist pastors and even the elected officials encouraged new families — if they were white and Christian — to consider Houston Academy, the new private academy just outside town that was able to operate because the I.R.S. granted the school tax-exempt status, according to several former students.

Mrs. Clinton does not name the school in her book, but according to public records and tax filings, Houston Academy was the only private school founded in Dothan at the time that had requested and received a tax exemption. People who worked on the issue in Alabama then said the school would have been Houston Academy.

The summer Mrs. Clinton was in Dothan, the pages of the local paper, The Dothan Eagle, erupted with editorials and angry letters from readers concerned about the effects of school integration. “The arbitrary, compulsory integration of black and white children in the classrooms in massive numbers simply does not work,” read an editorial titled “School Integration Becomes Intolerable.”

In an interview last month with Joe Madison, a black activist and radio host, Mrs. Clinton described her job in Dothan as “frankly, posing as a white parent” to “elicit information.”

In order to receive a tax exemption, Houston Academy was required to place an ad in The Eagle publicizing its “open enrollment” policy. School officials told The Birmingham News in 1970, “No black students have been accepted because no black students applied.”

Bob Moore, the original headmaster at Houston Academy, described the school in a recent interview as “just three slabs of concrete and a couple side walls” when Mrs. Clinton visited.

Mr. Moore and his wife, Dollie, who edited the school’s yearbook, The Cavalier, still live in their ranch-style home near Houston Academy, now an elite college preparatory school. “I’m not saying it didn’t happen,” Mr. Moore said of Mrs. Clinton’s account. “But I am saying I know nothing about it.”



In 1972, attending Houston Academy cost less than $750 a year, or less than $4,300 in today’s dollars. The town’s directories listed the academy as a public school because it was not affiliated with a church.

Marty Olliff, an associate professor of history and director of the Wiregrass Archives at Troy University’s Dothan campus, said he did not doubt Mrs. Clinton’s story but suggested that the exchange at the school would have been less direct than what she has described in her book and on the campaign trail.

What would have kept black people out “would have been the tuition,” Dr. Olliff said. “Not ‘you’re black, you can’t come in.’ ”

D. Taylor Flowers, the chairman of the board of Houston Academy, whose father was a founding board member, was in the ninth grade at the school (which locals call “H.A.,” jokingly saying it stands for “holy Anglo”) when Mrs. Clinton visited. “I've heard the story, and I don’t think Hillary Clinton made it up,” he said over lunch in Dothan.

The school was founded to prepare students for college, not as a segregation academy, Mr. Flowers said. But, he added, “I would be disingenuous if I said integration didn’t have anything to do with” parents’ enrolling their children in Houston Academy. “Integration was a huge social change for us.”

Over in a Minute

Mrs. Clinton spent part of that summer working on the issue of segregation academies, and only a couple of days in Dothan. But in many ways, her work on segregation academies best encapsulated her “commitment to pragmatism” in the struggle for equal rights, as her college adviser at Wellesley, Alan H. Schechter, described it.


Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Edelman at a Children's Defense Fund event in 2013. Mrs. Clinton frequently talks about her work for the organization.Credit Alex Brandon/Associated Press

Decades later, when young Black Lives Matter activists confronted Mrs. Clinton backstage at a New Hampshire campaign event on what she would do about racial injustice, she articulated the approach she had adopted that summer in Alabama.

“I don’t believe you change hearts,” she told them. “I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.”

But if Mrs. Clinton’s experience in Dothan opened her eyes to discrimination, it also provided an early education in the obstacles inherent in trying to enact social change through fact-finding and policy papers.

Ms. Brown, the education advocate who also investigated segregation academies, estimated that maybe one or two of these private schools had lost their tax-exempt status, despite years of work and multiple reports filed to the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare. “Nixon was president then, and he wasn’t going to do anything about it,” she said.

Houston Academy maintains its tax-exempt status. Today, its once bare-bones campus has a country-club feel. White columns adorn the front entrance, and the admissions office that Mrs. Clinton would have visited is now decorated with a kaleidoscope of flags of Ivy League schools.

On a recent afternoon, students in uniforms of khaki shorts and blue polo shirts ate lunch in a maze of manicured courtyards with waterfalls. The farmland that once surrounded the school is now an upper-middle-class subdivision.

In 2013, eight of Houston Academy’s 527 students were black, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The current headmaster, Scott Phillipps, said that nearly 10 percent of the students were minorities, including blacks, Indians, Latinos and Asians, and that the school, which costs around $10,000 a year, offered scholarships and tried to lure students and teachers of diverse backgrounds.

“If you want to narrowly define diversity in terms of African-Americans, that’s kind of Old South,” Dr. Phillipps said. “We’re trying to be global.”

In August 1972, when Mrs. Clinton had completed her research into segregation academies, she joined Mr. Clinton in Austin to help register voters in South Texas. She then returned to New Haven to complete her law degree, and went on to other projects for the Children’s Defense Fund before moving to Arkansas, marrying Mr. Clinton and beginning her legal and political career.

The proliferation of private schools in the South “was a gigantic event, and it blew the minds of civil rights folks and took the wind out of their sails,” said Douglas A. Blackmon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center who is working on a documentary about the effects of segregation academies.

“But in a minute, it was over,” he said of the effort to combat such schools. “And the well-intentioned work Hillary described was no match for the absolute insistence of millions of Southern whites that their kids never go to school with black kids.”

[Jayd4sho]

3. Other article about her activism days.

In Turmoil of ’68, Clinton Found a New Voice



By MARK LEIBOVICHSEPT. 5, 2007

nytimes.com | Sept. 5, 2007




WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — In September 1968, Hillary Diane Rodham, role model and student government president, was addressing Wellesley College freshmen girls — back when they were still called “girls” — about methods of protest. It was a hot topic in that overheated year of what she termed “confrontation politics from Chicago to Czechoslovakia.”

“Dynamism is a function of change,” Ms. Rodham said in her speech. “On some campuses, change is effected through nonviolent or even violent means. Although we too have had our demonstrations, change here is usually a product of discussion in the decision-making process.”

Her handwritten remarks — on file in the Wellesley archives — abound with abbreviations, crossed-out sentences and scrawled reinsertions, as if composed in a hurry. Yet Ms. Rodham’s words are neatly contained between tight margins. She took care to stay within the lines, even when they were moving so far and fast in 1968. While student leaders at some campuses went to the barricades, Ms. Rodham was attending teach-ins, leading panel discussions and joining steering committees. She preferred her “confrontation politics” cooler.

“She was not an antiwar radical trying to create a mass movement,” said Ellen DuBois, who, with Ms. Rodham, was an organizer of a student strike that April. “She was very much committed to working within the political system. From a student activist perspective, there was a significant difference.”

As the nation boiled over Vietnam, civil rights and the slayings of two charismatic leaders, Ms. Rodham was completing a sweeping intellectual, political and stylistic shift. She came to Wellesley as an 18-year-old Republican, a copy of Barry Goldwater’s right-wing treatise, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” on the shelf of her freshman dorm room. She would leave as an antiwar Democrat whose public rebuke of a Republican senator in a graduation speech won her notice in Life magazine as a voice for her generation.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s course was set, in large part, during the supercharged year of 1968. “There was a sense of tremendous change, internationally and here at home which impacted greatly how I thought about things,” Mrs. Clinton said in a telephone interview about that period, which encompassed the second half of her junior and first half of her senior years.

It was a time at once disorienting and clarifying, a period that would reinforce the future senator and presidential candidate’s suspicion of “emotional politics” while stoking her frustration with what she considered the passivity of her classmates.

Her political itinerary that year resembles a frenzied travelogue of youthful contradiction. She might have been the only 20-year-old in America who worked on the antiwar presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire that winter and for the hawkish Republican congressman Melvin Laird in Washington that summer.

She attended both the Republican National Convention in Miami (bunking at the Fontainebleu Hotel, ordering room service for the first time — cereal and a daintily wrapped peach) and the Democratic donnybrook in Chicago (smelling tear gas at Grant Park, watching a toilet fly out the window of the Hilton hotel).

The day after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain, she joined a demonstration in Post Office Square in Boston, returning to campus wearing a black armband.

“People become experiences,” Ms. Rodham wrote about all the ferment in a Feb. 23 letter to John Peavoy, a friend from high school. She added later, “The whole society is brittle.”

Looking back, it is easy to see that ambitious political science major in the first lady, United States senator and, now, presidential candidate she would become. She campaigned meticulously in student elections, going door to door and dorm to dorm. She wrote thank-you notes to professors who helped her.

In the bustle of her excursions, she showed the zeal of an emerging political junkie. And, while outspoken and often blunt, Ms. Rodham was hardly a bomb-thrower. She was, then as now, dedicated to cerebral policy debates, government process and carefully calibrated positions.

“Her opinions are mature and responsible, rather than emotional and one-sided,” Alan Schechter, a political science professor at Wellesley, wrote in a law school recommendation that year for Ms. Rodham.

A Goldwater Girl

Ms. Rodham had arrived at Wellesley in the fall of 1965, a decorated Girl Scout and teacher’s pet from a Republican household in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Ill. She had distributed leaflets for Mr. Goldwater’s presidential campaign the previous fall and was determined to rise quickly through the moribund ranks of Wellesley’s Young Republicans chapter.

As a go-getter freshman, Ms. Rodham was elected president of the group, dutifully recruiting students to help Massachusetts candidates including Edward Brooke, the future United States senator whom she would chastise in a 1969 commencement speech as being out of touch with the concerns of the new graduates.

In 1966, her public words were less audacious. “The girl who doesn’t want to go out and shake hands can type letters or do general office work,” Ms. Rodham told The Wellesley News in an appeal for Republican volunteers. Soon, though, Ms. Rodham’s views began veering leftward. She became opposed to the Vietnam War, putting her increasingly in conflict with her conservative father, Hugh Rodham.

“My opinions on most human conditions are being liberalized,” Ms. Rodham wrote in 1965 to Don Jones, a progressive Methodist minister from back home who had influenced her thinking.

“The combination of bleeding heart liberal and mental conservative is the inevitable conclusion one arrives at after following and pondering political events,” she wrote.

Around campus, Ms. Rodham wore industrial-thick glasses and a uniform of the times — clunky boots, ratty jeans, a Navy blue pea coat and a succession of turtlenecks, sweater vests and work shirts. (“I look like hell and I could care less” she wrote to Mr. Peavoy.) She was prone to capricious fashion choices. A suitemate, Connie Hoenk Shapiro, recalled asking why she had bought a particularly dreadful pair of muddy-colored shoes (with clunky 2-inch heels and a square toe) and Ms. Rodham explaining, “I felt sorry for them and wanted to give them a home.”

Friends say she had a playful streak, was game for road trips to Vermont and Cape Cod, and liked to call people by goofy nicknames. “She would sometimes refer to herself in the third person as “the Hill,” or “the Hill woman,” said her Wellesley classmate Nancy Pietrafesa, whose childhood moniker, Peach, sometimes became Peacharoo or Peacharooni in Hill-speak.

Unlike many of her peers, she never experimented with illegal drugs, Mrs. Clinton said. She embraced collegiate social rituals, attending mixers, showing up to Harvard football games (often with a book, a friend recalls) and planning a strawberries-and-cream bridal shower atop the Wellesley Bell Tower for a roommate, Johanna Branson.

Still, she was something of a sponge for all the angst and argument engulfing her generation. Ms. Shapiro recalled going to do errands one afternoon when Ms. Rodham handed her an unopened bottle of perfume she had bought and asked her to return it to the store.

“I asked why,” Ms. Shapiro recalled. “Her answer was that it was an extravagance she felt guilty about indulging in when there was so much poverty around us. We were increasingly sensitive to issues of what we now call white privilege. ”

When Dr. King was killed on the balcony of a Memphis motel on April 4, 1968, Ms. Rodham was devastated. “I can’t take it anymore,” she screamed after learning the news, her friends recalled. Crying, Ms. Rodham stormed into her dormitory room and hurled her book bag against the wall. Later, she made a telephone call to a close friend, Karen Williamson, the head of the black student organization on campus, to offer sympathy.

Ms. Rodham, who met Dr. King after a speech in Chicago in 1962, had admired his methodical approach to social change, favoring it over what she considered the excessively combative methods of groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or S.N.C.C., pronounced snick.

“Just because a person cannot approve of snicks’ attitude toward civil disobedience does not mean he wishes to maintain the racial status quo,” Ms. Rodham wrote as a freshman to Mr. Jones, the Methodist minister.

After Dr. King’s assassination provoked riots in cities and unrest on campuses, Ms. Rodham worried that protesters would shut down Wellesley (not constructive). She helped organize a two-day strike (more pragmatic) and worked closely with Wellesley’s few black students (only 6 in her class of 401) in reaching moderate, achievable change — such as recruiting more black students and hiring black professors (there had been none). Eschewing megaphones and sit-ins, she organized meetings, lectures and seminars, designed to be educational.

“I was rooted in a political approach that understood that you can’t just take to the streets and make change in America,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview. “You can’t just give a speech and expect people to fall down and agree with you.”

Even so, the killing of Dr. King created “a sense of disorder that was both unsettling and catalyzing” to Ms. Rodham, recalled Mr. Schechter, the political science professor and a mentor to her. Friends observed that she was less restrained and less deferential after Dr. King’s death.

At a panel discussion for a group of Wellesley alumni in mid-April, Mrs. Clinton bemoaned the “large gray mass” of uninvolved students. At another meeting, she argued with an economics professor who suggested that the strike take place on a weekend.

“I’ll give up my date Saturday night, Mr. Goldman, but I don’t think that’s the point,” Ms. Rodham told the professor, Marshall Goldman, according to the April 25, 1968, Wellesley News. “Individual consciences are fine but individual consciences have to be made manifest. Why do these attitudes have to be limited to two days?”

Ms. Rodham had traveled to New Hampshire several times that winter to volunteer for Mr. McCarthy, the Minnesota Democrat challenging President Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Mr. McCarthy’s message — that the antiwar movement should operate within the system, not on the streets — appealed to Ms. Rodham. The candidate urged his supporters to be respectful, prompting the young activists to cut their hair, shave their beards and be “Clean for Gene.” That summer, Ms. Rodham took to the streets herself, albeit as a safe observer. While home in Park Ridge, she and a friend, Betsy Johnson, kept hearing about all the commotion downtown at the Democratic Convention. They drove Ms. Johnson’s parents’ station wagon into Chicago to view the spectacle.

“We thought we had seen all there was to see in our sheltered neighborhood,” recalled Betsy Johnson Eberling, another former Goldwater Girl. “It was a radicalizing experience for us, to some extent.”

Mrs. Clinton has said repeatedly how “shocked” she was at the brutality she witnessed — protesters throwing rocks, police officers beating protesters — but describes the bedlam with almost scholarly detachment. In her memoir, “Living History,” she recalls spending hours that summer arguing with a friend over the “meaning of revolution and whether our country would face one.” Even if there was a revolution, the two friends concluded, “we would never participate.”

Keeping a Toe in the G.O.P.

For all her leftward movement, Ms. Rodham still kept a toe in the Republican Party, working as an intern in Washington that summer. Mr. Schechter, who supervised the Wellesley internship program, sent her to work for the House Republican Conference, then headed by Mr. Laird, the Wisconsin congressman who would later become President Richard Nixon’s defense secretary. “My adviser said, ‘I’m still going to assign you to the Republicans because I want you to understand completely what your own transformation represents,” Mrs. Clinton recalled of Mr. Schechter.

“I remember her being very bright, very aggressive and not very Republican,” said Ed Feulner, who managed the summer interns in the office and now heads the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group.

Ever diligent, Ms. Rodham did “a fine job,” said Mr. Laird, citing a “very thorough and well-researched” speech she wrote on the financing of the Vietnam War. At the end of the internship, Ms. Rodham proudly posed for a photo with House Republican leaders, including Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan. The photo hung in her father’s bedroom when he died in 1993.

Along with other interns, Ms. Rodham was invited by Representative Charles Goodell, a moderate New York Republican, to help Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s last-ditch campaign to defeat Mr. Nixon for the Republican nomination. At the party’s convention in Miami, she met Frank Sinatra, shared an elevator with John Wayne and decided to leave the Republican Party for good. “She was particularly furious at how she felt Rockefeller had been trashed by the Nixon people,” Mr. Schechter said.

“I’m done with this, absolutely,” Mrs. Clinton recalled thinking upon hearing Mr. Nixon’s acceptance speech. She characterized the Republicanism of her youth as one of fiscal conservatism and social moderation, and at odds with what she viewed as the intolerance of Miami.

“All of a sudden you get all these veiled messages, frankly, that were racist,” Mrs. Clinton said of the convention. “I may not have been able to explain it, but I could feel it.”

Back at Wellesley that fall, Ms. Rodham immersed herself in campus matters. She reveled in her role as student government president, which offered both the visibility and social validation she craved. (“I think I enjoy winning elections as a tangible proof of respect and liking,” she wrote to Mr. Peavoy.)

She won the post in the spring, after campaigning for two weeks “spouting the usual platitudes,” as she said in her letter. When she learned of her victory, she was stunned and thrilled. “Can you believe this?” she said over and over, recalled a professor, Steve London, who received a thank-you note from Ms. Rodham soon after her election. “I think it was a form letter that went out to all the faculty,” Mr. London said.

As the year was ending , Ms. Rodham was working on a 92-page honors dissertation on Saul Alinsky, the antipoverty crusader and community activist, whom she described (quoting from The Economist) as “that rare specimen, the successful radical.”

Power and Activism

Beyond Mr. Alinsky, the treatise yields insights about its author. Gaining power, Ms. Rodham asserted, was at the core of effective activism. It “is the very essence of life, the dynamo of life,” she wrote, quoting Mr. Alinsky.

Ms. Rodham endorsed Mr. Alinsky’s central critique of government antipoverty programs — that they tended to be too top-down and removed from the wishes of individuals.

But the student leader split with Mr. Alinsky over a central point. He vowed to “rub raw the sores of discontent” and compel action through agitation. This, she believed, ran counter to the notion of change within the system.

Typically, the paper, which received an A, was neatly typed, exhaustively footnoted and even included a page of acknowledgments. “Although I have no “loving wife” to thank for keeping the children away while I wrote,” Ms. Rodham said, “I do have many friends and teachers who have contributed to the process.”

In a listing of primary sources, Ms. Rodham reported that she met three times with Mr. Alinsky and that he offered her a job. “After a year trying to make sense of his inconsistency,” she wrote, explaining her demurral, “I need three years of legal rigor.”

[John Poet]

4. Thanks for posting these! eom

[Maru Kitteh]

5. That was the kind of stuff that could get you seriously hurt or worse,

back in the day.

Courage! Love. Hillary

[JSup]

6. I just don't understand...

...why the right hates her so much.

/sarcasm