Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton: The Nearest Miss in American Politics

In September 1995, at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, an American First Lady ignored pressure from her husband's own administration and from her Chinese hosts to soften what she planned to say, and said it anyway: "Human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all." It is the single line of hers most quoted worldwide. Twenty-one years later she would win more votes for president than any woman in history and still lose the office.

Park Ridge, Wellesley, and a Seven-Minute Ovation

Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, in Chicago, the eldest child and only daughter of Hugh Rodham, who ran a small textile business, and Dorothy Howell Rodham. She grew up in the suburb of Park Ridge with two younger brothers, in Girl Scouts, swimming, and softball. At Wellesley College she took a political science degree with departmental honors in 1969 and became the first student ever to speak at the college's commencement — an address rebuking Senator Edward Brooke, who had spoken before her, that drew a seven-minute standing ovation and a spread in Life magazine. She was twenty-one and already, to a national audience, a type: the formidably prepared young woman who does not defer.

Yale, Watergate, and Arkansas

At Yale Law School she worked at the Child Study Center on early childhood brain development, volunteered at New Haven Legal Services, and took child abuse cases at Yale-New Haven Hospital; her first scholarly article, "Children Under the Law," ran in the Harvard Educational Review in 1973. She took her J.D. that year, joined the Children's Defense Fund as a staff attorney, and then served on the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry staff during Watergate, work that ended with Richard Nixon's resignation in August 1974.

Then she went to Arkansas — the decision that shaped everything after. She joined the University of Arkansas law faculty as one of two women, founded Fayetteville's first rape crisis center, and married Bill Clinton on October 11, 1975. She joined the Rose Law Firm in 1977, made partner in 1979 as its first woman, and out-earned her husband from 1978 until they entered the White House. Chelsea was born in February 1980. As Arkansas's First Lady she chaired the state Education Standards Committee from 1983, forcing through mandatory teacher testing and statewide curriculum standards over the teachers' union. The National Law Journal twice named her one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America. She also sat on corporate boards — Walmart, where she was the first woman director, TCBY, Lafarge — and invested in the Whitewater land deal that would follow her for two decades.

The West Wing Office

As First Lady from 1993, she was the first with a postgraduate degree, a professional career, and an office in the West Wing. Her husband put her in charge of the National Health Care Reform task force in January 1993; the resulting employer-mandate plan, mocked as "Hillarycare," never reached a floor vote in either chamber and was abandoned in September 1994. Her approval fell from the high fifties to 35 percent. What followed was quieter and more durable: the State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997, co-led with Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch; the Adoption and Safe Families Act the same year, often called her greatest achievement in the role; the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999; and the Office on Violence Against Women, created with Attorney General Janet Reno. She visited 79 countries, more than any First Lady before her. She was also the first presidential spouse subpoenaed before a federal grand jury, in January 1996 over Whitewater; the independent counsel's final 2000 report found insufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and the Filegate inquiry likewise cleared her. During the Lewinsky scandal in 1998 she described the accusations as part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy"; her approval hit roughly 70 percent, the highest of her life.

The Senator from New York

She bought a house in Chappaqua in 1999, toured all 62 New York counties answering the carpetbagger charge, and beat Rick Lazio 55 to 43 in November 2000 — the first presidential wife elected to office anywhere. For seventeen days she was simultaneously First Lady and senator. She served on Armed Services, Environment and Public Works, and HELP; with Chuck Schumer she secured $21 billion for World Trade Center redevelopment and pressed the health claims of 9/11 responders. She voted for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002, a vote she would call flatly a mistake by 2014. She won re-election in 2006 with 67 percent.

Foggy Bottom

Her 2008 primary campaign began as the presumptive coronation and ended on June 7 with an endorsement of Barack Obama. She had won New Hampshire, California, New York, and New Jersey; she had also finished third in Iowa, been outmaneuvered in caucus states her campaign barely contested, and run out of strategy after Super Tuesday. Both candidates cleared seventeen million votes. She was the first woman to compete in every state contest.

Obama made her the 67th Secretary of State, sworn in on January 21, 2009. The Department's own historian records visits to 112 countries and territories between February 2009 and December 2012. She built the sanctions coalition that squeezed Iran's nuclear program toward the 2015 agreement, advocated the 2011 intervention in Libya, and made the strategic pivot to Asia her organizing idea. The 2012 attack on the American mission in Benghazi and her use of a private email server became the two facts about her tenure that most Americans could name.

The Nearest Miss

In 2016 she became the first woman nominated for president by a major American party. She won the popular vote and lost the electoral college to Donald Trump, the only woman ever to carry the national vote for the office. The email server was the single most covered subject of the campaign.

Why Hillary Is Called a Genius

When the word attaches to Clinton it is almost always about preparation rather than inspiration — the capacity to master a brief so completely that no one in the room can outargue her on the facts. The evidence is real and long: a Harvard Educational Review article at twenty-five, the first female partnership at Rose, two listings among America's hundred most influential lawyers, a health reform architecture built from scratch, and the granular sanctions diplomacy that cornered Iran. Colleagues across four decades describe the same person: relentlessly briefed, physically tireless, willing to grind out the unglamorous statute — SCHIP, adoption reform, foster care — that nobody campaigns on. The honest counter-case is that this is a specific and limited kind of intelligence, and that her failures cluster precisely where mastery of detail does not help. She lost the 1993 health fight on politics, not policy. She misread Iraq in 2002. Her 2008 campaign was outthought strategically by a first-term senator whose team understood proportional delegate math better than hers did. The email server was a self-inflicted judgment error, and 2016 turned on a national mood she was measurably slower to read than her opponent. Substantive command, not political intuition, was her distinguishing capability — and American presidential politics does not reliably reward the first over the second.

Legacy

Clinton has since become Chancellor of Queen's University Belfast, honorary founding chair of Georgetown's Institute for Women, Peace and Security, and a professor of practice at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. She remains the only woman to have won a major-party nomination and the national popular vote, which makes her career a permanent argument in American politics — read by her admirers as proof of how far the ceiling moved, and by her critics as proof of everything a résumé cannot buy.

Achievements

• Notable work: It Takes a Village
• Notable work: An Invitation to the White House
• Notable work: Living History
• Notable work: Hard Choices
• Affiliated with Yale – New Haven Hospital, Yale Review of Law and Social Action and Children's Defense Fund
• Educated at Maine South High School, Wellesley College and Yale Law School
• Worked as politician, lawyer and diplomat