My senior year at Wellesley would further test and articulate my beliefs. For my thesis I analyzed the work of a Chicago native and community organizer named Saul Alinsky, whom I had met the previous summer. Alinsky was a colorful and controversial figure who managed to offend almost everyone during his long career. His prescription for social change required grassroots organizing that taught people to help themselves by confronting government and corporations to obtain the resources and power to improve their lives. I agreed with some of Alinsky’s ideas, particularly the value of empowering people to help themselves. But we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn’t. Later he offered me the chance to work with him when I graduated from college, and he was disappointed that I decided instead to go to law school. Alinsky said I would be wasting my time, but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within. I took the law school admissions test and applied to several schools.

  After I was accepted by Harvard and Yale, I couldn’t make up my mind where to go until I was invited to a cocktail party at Harvard Law School. A male law student friend introduced me to a famous Harvard law professor straight out of The Paper Chase, saying, “This is Hillary Rodham. She’s trying to decide whether to come here next year or sign up with our closest competitor.” The great man gave me a cool, dismissive look and said, “Well, first of all, we don’t have any close competitors. Secondly, we don’t need any more women at Harvard.” I was leaning toward Yale anyway, but this encounter removed any doubts about my choice.

  All that remained was graduation from Wellesley, and I thought it would be uneventful, until my classmate and friend Eleanor “Eldie” Acheson decided our class needed its own speaker at graduation. I had met Eldie, the granddaughter of President Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, in a freshman political science class where we had to describe our political backgrounds. Eldie later told The Boston Globe that she was “shocked to find out that not just Hillary, but other very smart people, were Republican.”

  The discovery “depressed” her, but “it did explain why they won presidential elections from time to time.”

  Wellesley had never had a student speaker, and President Ruth Adams was opposed to opening that door now. She was uncomfortable with the student milieu of the 1960s. I had weekly meetings with her in my capacity as President of college government, and her usual question to me was a variant of Freud’s: “What do you girls want?” To be fair to her, most of us had no idea. We were trapped between an outdated past and an uncharted future. We were often irreverent, cynical and selfrighteous in our assessments of adults and authority. So, when Eldie announced to President Adams that she represented a group of students who wanted a student speaker, the initial negative response was expected.

  Then Eldie upped the pressure by declaring that if the request was denied, she would personally lead an effort to stage a counter-commencement. And, she added, she was confident her grandfather would attend. When Eldie reported that both sides were dug in, I went to see President Adams in her little house down on the shore of Lake Waban.

  When I asked her, “What is the real objection?” she said, “It’s never been done.” I said, “Well, we could give it a try” She said, “We don’t know whom they are going to ask to speak.” I said, “Well, they asked me to speak.” She said, “I’ll think about it.”

  President Adams finally approved.

  My friends’ enthusiasm about my speaking worried me because I didn’t have a clue about what I could say that could fit our tumultuous four years at Wellesley and be a proper send-off into our unknown futures.

  During my junior and senior years, Johanna Branson and I lived in a large suite overlooking Lake Waban, on the third floor of Davis. I spent many hours sitting on my bed looking out the window at the still lake waters, worrying about everything from relationships to faith to antiwar protests. Now, as I thought about all that my friends and I had experienced since our parents dropped off such different girls four years before, I wondered how I could ever do justice to this time we shared. Luckily, my classmates started coming by the suite to leave favorite poems and sayings; wry takes on our shared journey; suggestions for dramatic gestures. Nancy “Anne” Scheibner, a serious religion major, wrote a long poem that captured the zeitgeist. I spent hours talking to people about what they wanted me to say and hours more making sense of the disparate and conflicting advice I received.

  I went out to dinner the night before graduation with a group of friends and their families and ran into Eldie Acheson and her family. When she introduced me to her grandfather, she told Dean Acheson, “This is the girl who’s going to speak tomorrow,” and he said, “I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say.” I felt nauseated. I still wasn’t sure what I was going to say, and I hurried back to my dorm to pull an allnighter―

  my last one in college.

  My parents were excited about seeing their daughter graduate, but my mother had been experiencing health problems. A doctor had prescribed blood thinners, and he advised her not to travel for a while. So, regrettably, she couldn’t come to my graduation, and my father wasn’t keen on coming alone.

  When I told my parents that I would be speaking, however, he decided he had to be there. And, in typical Hugh Rodham fashion, he flew to Boston late the night before, stayed out by the airport, took the MTA to campus, attended graduation, came to the Wellesley Inn for lunch with some of my friends and their families and then went right back home. All that mattered to me was that he made it to my graduation, which helped diminish the disappointment I felt over my mother’s absence. In many ways, this moment was as much hers as mine.

  The morning of our graduation, May 31, 1969, was a perfect New England day. We gathered in the Academic Quadrangle for the commencement ceremony on the lawn between the library and the chapel. President Adams asked me what I was going to say, and I told her it was still percolating. She introduced me to Senator Edward Brooke, our official commencement speaker and the Senate’s only African American member, for whom I had campaigned in 1966 when I was still a Young Republican. After staying up all night trying to piece a speech together from a communally written text, I was having a particularly bad hair day, made worse by the mortarboard perching on top. The pictures of me that day are truly scary.

  Senator Brooke’s speech acknowledged that our “country has profound and pressing social problems on its agenda” and that “it needs the best energies of all its citizens, especially its gifted young people to remedy these ills.” He also argued against what he called “coercive protest.” At the time, the speech sounded like a defense of President Nixon’s policies, notable more for what it didn’t say than what it did. I listened in vain for an acknowledgment of the legitimate grievances and painful questions so many young Americans had about our country’s direction. I waited for some mention of Vietnam or civil rights or of Dr. King or Senator Kennedy, two of our generation’s fallen heroes. The Senator seemed out of touch with his audience: four hundred smart, aware, questioning young women. His words were aimed at a different Wellesley, one that predated the upheavals of the 1960s.

  I thought how prescient Eldie had been to know that a predictable speech like this one would be such a letdown after the four years we, and America, had experienced. So I took a deep breath and began by defending the “indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest.” Paraphrasing Anne Scheibner’s poem, which I quoted at the end, I stated that “the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”

  I spoke about the awareness of the gap between the expectations my class brought to college and the reality we experienced. Most of us had come from sheltered backgrounds, and the personal and public events we encountered caused us to question the authenticity, even the reality, of our pre-college lives. Our four years had been a rite of passage different from the experiences of our parents’ generation, which had faced greater external challenges like the Depression and World War II. So we started asking questions, first about Wellesley’s policies, then about the meaning of a liberal arts education, then about civil rights, women’s roles, Vietnam. I defended protest as “an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age” and as a way of “coming to terms with our humanness.” It was part of the “unique American experience” and “if the experiment in human living doesn’t work in this country, in this age, it’s not going to work anywhere.”

  When I had asked the class at our graduation rehearsal what they wanted me to say for them, everyone answered, “Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust.” I acknowledged how hard it was to convey a feeling that permeates a generation.

  And, finally, I spoke of the struggle to establish a “mutuality of respect between people.”

  Running throughout my words, however, was an acknowledgment of the fears many of us felt about the future. I referred to a conversation from the previous day with a classmate’s mother “who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she’s afraid.” I said, “Fear is always with us, but we just don’t have time for it. Not now.”

  The speech was, as I admitted, an attempt to “come to grasp with some of the inarticulate, maybe even inarticulable things that we’re feeling” as we are “exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty.” This speech may not have been the most coherent one I have ever delivered, but it struck a chord with my class, which gave me an enthusiastic standing ovation, partly, I believe, because my efforts to make sense of our time and place―played out on a stage in front of two thousand spectators―reflected the countless conversations, questions, doubts and hopes each of us brought to that moment, not just as Wellesley graduates, but also as women and Americans whose lives would exemplify the changes and choices facing our generation at the end of the twentieth century.

  Later that afternoon, I took one last swim in Lake Waban. Instead of going to the little beach by the boathouse, I decided to wade in near my dorm, an area officially off-limits to swimming. I stripped down to my bathing suit and left my cut-off jeans and T-shirt in a pile on the shore with my aviator-like eyeglasses on top. I didn’t have a care in the world as I swam out toward the middle, and because of my nearsightedness, my surroundings looked like an Impressionist painting. I had loved being at Wellesley and had taken great solace in all seasons from its natural beauty. The swim was a final goodbye. When I got back to shore, I couldn’t find my clothes or my glasses.

  I finally had to ask a campus security officer if he had seen my belongings. He told me that President Adams had seen me swimming from her house and directed him to confiscate them. Apparently, she was sorry she had ever let me speak. Dripping wet, I followed him, somewhat blindly, to retrieve my possessions.

  I had no idea that my speech would generate interest far beyond Wellesley. I had only hoped that my friends thought I had been true to their hopes, and their positive reaction heartened me. When I called home, however, my mother told me that she had been fielding phone calls from reporters and television shows asking me for interviews and appearances.

  I appeared on Irv Kupcinet’s interview show on a local Chicago channel, and Life magazine featured me and a student activist named Ira Magaziner, who addressed his graduating class at Brown University. My mother reported that opinion about my speech seemed to be divided between the overly effusive―“she spoke for a generation”―to the exceedingly negative―“who does she think she is?” The accolades and attacks turned out to be a preview of things to come: I have never been as good as or as bad as my most fervid supporters and opponents claimed.

  With a big sigh of relief I took off for a summer of working my way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mt. McKinley National Park (now known as Denali National Park and Preserve) and sliming fish in Valdez in a temporary salmon factory on a pier. My job required me to wear knee-high boots and stand in bloody water while removing guts from the salmon with a spoon. When I didn’t slime fast enough, the supervisors yelled at me to speed up. Then I was moved to the assembly packing line, where I helped pack the salmon in boxes for shipping to the large floating processing plant offshore. I noticed that some of the fish looked bad. When I told the manager, he fired me and told me to come back the next afternoon to pick up my last check. When I showed up, the entire operation was gone. During a visit to Alaska when I was First Lady, I joked to an audience that of all the jobs I’ve had, sliming fish was pretty good preparation for life in Washington.

  YALE

  When I entered Yale Law School in the Fall of 1969, I was one of twenty-seven women out of 235 students to matriculate. This seems like a paltry number now, but it was a breakthrough at the time and meant that women would no longer be token students at Yale.

  While women’s rights appeared to be gaining some traction as the 1960s skittered to an end, 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.

  Professor Charles Reich, who became best known to the general public for his book The Greening of America, was camping out with some students in a shantytown in the middle of the law school’s courtyard, to protest the “establishment,” which, of course, included Yale Law School. The shantytown lasted a few weeks before being peacefully disassembled. Other protests, however, were not so peaceful. The decade of the 1960s that had begun with so much hope ended in a convulsion of protest and violence. White, middle-class antiwar activists were found plotting to build bombs in their basements.

  The nonviolent, largely black civil rights movement splintered into factions, and new voices emerged among urban blacks belonging to the Black Muslims and Black Panther Party. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI infiltrated dissident groups and, in some cases, broke the law in order to disrupt them. Law enforcement sometimes failed to distinguish between constitutionally protected, legitimate opposition and criminal behavior. As domestic spying and counterintelligence operations expanded under the Nixon Administration, it seemed, at times, that our government was at war with its own people.

  Yale Law School historically attracted students interested in public service and our conversations inside and outside the classroom reflected a deep concern about the events enveloping the country. Yale also encouraged its students to get out in the world and apply the theories they learned in the classroom. That world and its realities came crashing down on Yale in April 1970, when eight Black Panthers, including party leader Bobby Seale, were put on trial for murder in New Haven. Thousands of angry protesters, convinced the Panthers had been set up by the FBI and government prosecutors, swarmed into the city. Demonstrations broke out in and around campus. The campus was bracing for a huge May Day rally to support the Panthers when I learned, late on the night of April 27, that the International Law Library, which was in the basement of the law school, was on fire. Horrified, I rushed to join a bucket brigade of faculty, staff and students to put out the fire and to rescue books damaged by flames and water. After the fire was out, the law school’s Dean, Louis Pollak, asked everyone to gather in the largest classroom. Dean Pollak, a gentleman scholar with a ready smile and an open door, asked us to organize roundthe-clock security patrols for the remainder of the school year.

  On April 30, President Nixon announced that he was sending U.S. troops into Cambodia, expanding the Vietnam War. The May Day protests became a larger demonstration, not only to support a fair trial for the Panthers, but also to oppose Nixon’s actions in the war. Throughout the era of student protests, Yale’s President, Kingman Brewster, and the university chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, had taken a conciliatory approach, which helped Yale avoid the problems occurring elsewhere. Rev. Coffin became a national leader of the antiwar movement through his articulate moral critique of American involvement.

  President Brewster addressed student concerns and appreciated the anguish felt by many. He had even said he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries”

  to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States. Faced with the prospect of violent demonstrators, Brewster suspended classes and announced that the dorms would be open to serve meals to anyone who came. His actions and statements inflamed alumni, as well as President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew.

  Then, on May 4, National Guard troops opened fire on students protesting at Kent State University in Ohio. Four students were killed. The photograph of a young woman kneeling over the body of a dead student represented all that I and many others feared and hated about what was happening in our country. I remember rushing out the door of the law school in tears and running into Professor Fritz Kessler, a refugee who fled Hitler’s Germany. He asked me what the matter was and I told him I couldn’t believe what was happening; he chilled me by saying that, for him, it was all too familiar.

  True to my upbringing, I advocated engagement, not disruption or “revolution.” On May 7, I kept a previously planned obligation to speak at the convention banquet of the fiftieth anniversary of the League of Women Voters in Washington, D.C., an invitation stemming from my college commencement address. I wore a black armband in memory of the students who had been killed. My emotions, once again, were close to the surface as I argued that the extension of America’s Vietnam War into Cambodia was illegal and unconstitutional. I tried to explain the context in which protests occurred and the impact that the Kent State shootings had on Yale law students, who had voted 239-12 to join more than three hundred schools in a national strike to protest “the unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” I had moderated the mass meeting where the vote took place, and I knew how seriously my fellow students took both the law and their responsibilities as citizens. The law students, who had not previously joined other parts of the university in protest actions, debated the issues in a thoughtful, albeit lawyerly, fashion. They were not the “bums” that Nixon labeled all student protesters.