Living History: Then & Now
What can Hillary Clinton’s autobiography, tell us today?
For my next project, I need to understand Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been described as ‘the most famous woman that nobody really knows.’ On the American scene, there are few rivals to her claim to be the most well- known, and divisive female politician of the last thirty years. She is one of a handful of people known simply by her first name although that is reinforced by the debate over whether she should properly be referred to a Hillary Rodham Clinton rather than Hillary Clinton. And of course, she also helped to give us Donald Trump.
Understanding her entails reading her autobiographical accounts, even though historians know that autobiography is a slippery thing when it comes to Truth; although, let it also be conceded, that Truth itself has an innate slipperiness. Historians may approach the genre with scepticism, but they know as well that occasionally an autobiography can surprise you and reveal things that the subject did not know she was revealing.
I suspect for most people who read Hillary’s accounts of her own life, the main surprise is that the person, who has been a lightning rod for many conservatives for three decades or more, is actually pretty conservative: she’s deeply religious, and has a brand of earnestness that many Americans, but far fewer Brits, feel comfortable with.
Of course, when it first came out in 2003, most readers would have understood that Living History was inseparable from Hillary’s political ambitions. Husband, Bill, may have had his two terms in the White House and could focus on his legacy, but the former First Lady, halfway through her first term as a Senator, was clearly not finished. Hence, the memoir was simultaneously a campaign biography with some sections geared to appeal to those voters who might change their minds once they learned that Hillary was not the feminist revolutionary caricature that the Right had created.
Certainly, the opening chapters about her childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois, a suburb northwest of Chicago, seem designed to make her palatable to independents, of whom there was many more in 2008 when she lost the nomination to Barack Obama than in 2016 when she lost the presidency to Donald Trump. Outlining her background, she stresses her mother’s tough childhood and her father’s obdurate, self-reliant, conservatism, and her own commitment to Methodism and such wholesome experiences as being a Brownie and Girl Scout. When she left home for Wellesley College in Massachusetts in the mid-1960s, she was a Goldwater Republican.
Her subsequent political transformation, however, had already begun thanks partly to a progressive young minister, Don Jones, at Park Ridge’s First United Methodist. He took his church group to hear Martin Luther King speak at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall in the early 1960s. Given my own interest in the topic, I was struck by the fact that Hillary makes no mention of King’s much longer and more controversial campaign in the Windy City in 1966 when white Chicago showed that it would much prefer King to confine his protests to the South. By that stage, Hillary had just started college. But the omission of the episode may also reflect that in 2003, there were fewer votes to be gained by aligning yourself with the later King who wanted to tackle northern racism and favoured radical solutions like a guaranteed income and a massive switch of priorities from defense spending to social services.
One might also note that Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis was focused on the activist philosophy of Saul Alinsky. Arguably, Alinsky’s belief that popular mobilization was easier if you had a clear enemy or adversary informed Hillary’s efforts at school reform in Arkansas where she portrayed the teachers’ union as an obstacle to progress. It demonstrated that as the wife of the governor, she was part of a policy-making team. Conversely, in Congress, she was later outmaneuvered on healthcare reform when conservative and health industry lobbyists successfully mobilized the public against Big Government. Ultimately, her dream of becoming President would falter: first before the Obama challenge (itself informed by Alinsky’s Chicago social movement approach); and then by Trump’s populism, which certainly followed Alinsky in terms of giving his followers a clear enemy: namely, “Crooked Hillary.”
Explaining her decision to go east for college, Hillary Clinton recounts how she was influenced by two trainee teachers at her high school who suggested she try for one of the New England women’s colleges that they had attended. As an all-female college, Wellesley was a place where young women could, in her words, ‘be recognized for their ability, hard work and achievements.’ At many co-ed colleges, older gender stereotypes prevailed and women were expected instead to pursue their future husbands more than their future careers.
Wellesley, like many campuses across the country, was on the cusp of change by 1966. Some of these changes, Hillary says, she now regrets. As the student government President, she helped to secure the lifting of the strict rules on male visiting and the elimination of a required curriculum. Writing over thirty years later, she is not sure of the benefits. The sight of boys and girls lying and sitting in hallways in her daughter, Chelsea’s coed dorm at Stanford has made her wonder how they ever get any studying done, and with hindsight she feels that two of the courses from which she learned the most were required, not elective. However, above all else, she stresses that the biggest force for change in the lives of her generation was Vietnam and the divisions it fostered.
By 1968, the war had made the Goldwater girl into one of Eugene McCarthy’s kids, supporting his efforts to challenge President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. Drawn to politics, but moving steadily away from her Republican roots, Hillary still served as an intern to the House Republican Conference that year, meeting future President Gerald Ford (then House Minority Leader), future Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird , and New York Congressman Charles Goodell. The last invited her to work at the Republican National Convention in a last-ditch effort to wrestle the nomination from Richard Nixon and give it to New York’s liberal Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Hillary sees Nixon’s ascendancy as the beginning of the GOP’s transformation. She concludes: ‘I didn’t leave the Republican Party as much as it left me.’ A declaration that has to be a deliberate echo of Ronald Reagan’s appeal to disaffected Democrats.
Confirming the intensity of Hillary’s commitment to politics as she headed into her senior year at college, she recalls how she and her close friend Betsy Johnson responded to TV coverage of the mass anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago by going downtown to see for themselves. In Grant Park they witnessed what was later described as a ‘police riot’ due to the violent tactics employed to break up the protests. They smelt the tear gas before they saw the police. But decades later, sensitized to the politics of balanced commentary, Hillary mentions the fact that someone behind them threw a rock and screamed profanities before the police charged and she and Betsy scrambled for safety. Obviously, this is not the same as Donald Trump saying that at the neo-Nazi rally rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that saw a protester killed, there were ‘good people on both sides,’ but you can still see a political calculus at work. By the summer of 1968, Hillary was already thinking about law school and possibly a career in politics or public service, but it would no longer be linked to the hard-right politics of her father.
In the spring of 1969, as the students’ spokesperson, Hillary met with Wellesley College’s President Ruth Adams to ask her to reconsider her decision to deny their request for a student speaker at the upcoming commencement. With threats of staged protests at the graduation unless she backed down, Adams eventually agreed on the understanding that the moderate, level-headed Hillary would be that speaker for the Class of 1969. On May 31, she spoke after Massachusetts’ Senator Edward Brooke, the Senate’s only African American member and a Republican. His address had disappointed her because, she recalls, it seemed to ignore ‘the legitimate grievances and painful questions so many young Americans had about our country’s direction.’ Instead, without mentioning either Vietnam or civil rights, he warned against ‘coercive protest.’
In response, Hillary felt compelled to defend the ‘indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest.’ She defended protest as ‘an attempt to forge an identity’ and as a way of ‘coming to terms with our humanity.’ She also spoke of the struggle to establish a ‘mutuality of respect between people’ and of how fear was eroding trust. Here, too, one can detect Alinsky’s influence. However inarticulate Hillary judges her speech to have been in retrospect, on the day it drew a standing ovation from her peers. She featured in Life magazine and on television. Already, people were expecting her to run for office. At that moment, she was far better known than Bill Clinton by some margin.
As Hillary moves her story forward to her time at Yale Law School and her fateful meeting with Bill, she also tries to summarize what America was like as the Sixties came to a close. ‘While women’s rights appeared to be gaining some traction as the 1960s skittered to an end,’ she writes, ‘everything else seemed out of kilter and uncertain. Unless you lived through those times, it is hard to imagine how polarized America’s political landscape had become.’
It was reading these lines that made me ponder Hillary Clinton’s sense of history. My sense was that the previous chapter with its account of her shift from Republican to Democrat was shaped by a desire to appeal to moderates or independents; in short, she tilted right. However, the essence of her commencement address with its defence, indeed celebration of critique and protest could easily be read as appealing to progressives; an attempt to shore up her base. Similarly, on one level, her language describing the end of the Sixties — words like ‘skittered,’ ‘out of kilter,’ and ‘uncertain’ could come from the Right’s revisionist history of the decade as the time when America took a wrong turn and government became too big and personal responsibility went out the window; a time when old morals were dumped for new uncertainties.
Reading her words in 2024, her rueful evocation of the time as one of unimaginable political polarization seems odd. That’s not to say that, as historian, I don’t recognize the profound sense of America as a nation in chaos in the aftermath of 1968; it explains the success of the new Nixon and the emergence of his Silent Majority. But this is Hillary Clinton writing — the same woman who lived through the 1990s, and warned of a vast right-wing conspiracy across the media and politics. This is also the defeated presidential candidate of 2016, the woman who lost to Donald Trump despite being projected to win. Surely if the late 1960s offered an experience of a polarized political landscape, it should have prepared her for what was to come. And didn’t Alinsky argue that polarization was part of radical mobilization: a necessary sharpening of lines to enable change?
America’s politics is as divided today as it has ever been. One shivers at the tally of evils. The so-called ‘culture wars’ consume energy on both sides. The news in an age of 24-hour coverage and social media has lost public trust; even the truth seems fake; and AI promises better fakes. The threats in a post-pandemic world-at-war seem truly existential. We face a climate crisis and a race for growth and AI also promised more deadly warfare. Fear is perhaps our gravest enemy, yet nothing seems to stir political focus groups as profoundly as the iteration of our fears and their attachment to political opponents or to others (migrants/ terrorists/ fill-in-the-blank). Reading Hillary’s memoir, I came away with a sense that Living History is not the same as learning from it.
