Women of Influence: Hillary Rodham Clinton
Thus far in history only one woman has been the Presidential candidate for one of the two major political parties. She is also a former first lady and a former Secretary of State. In the presidential election of 2016, she received more votes for President than any other candidate, and while she shattered many a figurative glass ceiling, the Presidency has eluded her. Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton has served as a diplomat, a lawyer, an author, and a public speaker. She was the 67th United States secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, she was a United States senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, and she was FLOTUS (first lady of the United States) from 1993 to 2001 when her husband Bill Clinton served as President. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee for president in the 2016 presidential election, which she lost to Donald Trump.
Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, at Edgewater Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois. Her family were Methodists who lived in Chicago at the time of her birth, but who moved moved to the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge when Hillary was three years old. Her father, Hugh Rodham, managed a small textile business, which he had founded. Her mother, Dorothy Howell, was a homemaker. Hillary Clinton had two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 and earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Yale Law School in 1973.
While at Wellesley, she was actually a Republican. In the documentary about the life of 1964 Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater, entitled "Mr. Conservative," she describes how she was once a "Goldwater Girl." She interned at the House Republican Conference, and was invited by moderate New York Republican representative Charles Goodell to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller's late-entry campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 against Richard Nixon. She attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, but later said that she left the party "for good" because she was upset by the way Richard Nixon's campaign portrayed Rockefeller and by what she perceived as the convention's "veiled" racist messages.
In the spring of 1971, she began dating fellow law student Bill Clinton. During the summer, she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, where she worked on child custody and other cases. Bill Clinton canceled his original summer plans and moved to live with her in California. The couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school. The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. Bill Clinton first proposed marriage to her following graduation, but she declined. She began a year of postgraduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center. In late 1973, her first scholarly article, "Children Under the Law", was published in the Harvard Educational Review. It was about the new "children's rights" movement.
In 1974, she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., and advised the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal. She helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for it. The committee's work concluded with the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974.
After serving as a congressional legal counsel, Hillary moved to Arkansas and married future president Bill Clinton in 1975. In 1977, she co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. She was appointed the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978 and became the first female partner at Little Rock's Rose Law Firm the following year. The National Law Journal twice listed her as one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America.
When Bill Clinton was elected as Governor of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was the first lady of that state from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992. When Bill Clinton became a candidate for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination, the couple were thrust into the public spotlight just ahead of the New Hampshire primary. Tabloid publications printed allegations that Bill Clinton had engaged in an extramarital affair with a woman named Gennifer Flowers. In response, the Clintons appeared together on 60 Minutes, where Bill denied the affair, but acknowledged "causing pain in my marriage". This joint appearance was credited with rescuing his campaign. Bill Clinton said that in electing him, the nation would "get two for the price of one", referring to the prominent role his wife would assume. The attention led to attacks on Hillary Clinton's own past record.
When her husband was elected as President of the United States in 1992, she became the first lady of the United States. In that role, she was a strong advocate for healthcare reform. In 1994, her major initiative-the Clinton health care plan-failed to gain approval from Congress. In 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a leading role in advocating the creation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. Clinton advocated for gender equality at the 1995 UN conference on women.
The Whitewater controversy was the focus of media attention from its publication in a New York Times report during the 1992 presidential campaign. The Clintons had lost their late-1970s investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation. At the same time, their partners in that investment, Jim and Susan McDougal operated Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan institution that retained the legal services of Rose Law Firm and were alleged to have been improperly subsidizing Whitewater losses. Madison Guaranty later failed, and Clinton's work at Rose was scrutinized for a possible conflict of interest in representing the bank before state regulators her husband had appointed. She said she had done minimal work for the bank. Independent counsels Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr subpoenaed Clinton's legal billing records; she said she did not know where they were. After a two-year search, the records were found in the first lady's White House book room and delivered to investigators in early 1996. On January 26, 1996, Clinton became the first spouse of a U.S. president to be subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury. After several Independent Counsels had investigated, a final report was issued in 2000 that stated there was insufficient evidence that either Clinton had engaged in criminal wrongdoing.
In 1998, the Clintons' private concerns became the subject of much speculation when investigations revealed that Bill Clinton had engaged in an extramarital affair with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Events surrounding the Lewinsky scandal eventually led to the impeachment of the president by the House of Representatives; he was later acquitted by the senate. When the allegations against her husband were first made public, Hillary Clinton stated that the allegations were part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy". She called the Lewinsky charges as the latest in a long, organized, collaborative series of charges by Bill Clinton's political enemies. She later said she had been misled by her husband's initial claims that no affair had taken place. After the evidence of President Clinton's encounters with Lewinsky became incontrovertible, she issued a public statement reaffirming her commitment to their marriage. Privately, she was reported to be furious at him and was unsure if she wanted to remain in the marriage. The White House residence staff noticed a pronounced level of tension between the couple during this period. The Lewinsky scandal left Bill Clinton with substantial legal bills. In 2014, Hillary said that she and Bill had left the White House "not only dead broke, but in debt".
In 2000, Clinton was elected as the first female senator from New York. She became the first First lady to simultaneously hold elected office, and then the first former First lady to serve in the Senate. She was re-elected in 2006 and chaired the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee from 2003 to 2007. During her Senate tenure, Clinton advocated for medical benefits for first responders whose health was damaged in the September 11 attacks. She supported the resolution authorizing the Iraq War in 2002 but opposed the surge of U.S. troops in 2007.
In 2008, Clinton ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for President. She was considered to be the front-runner in the race, but was defeated by eventual winner Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries. Following the final primaries on June 3, 2008, Obama had gained enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee. In a speech before her supporters on June 7, Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed Obama. She had won 1,640 pledged delegates to Obama's 1,763 and she had 286 superdelegates to Obama's 395. Clinton and Obama each received over 17 million votes during the nomination process with both breaking the previous record. Clinton was the first woman to run in the primary or caucus of every state. Clinton's campaign ended up severely in debt; she owed millions of dollars to outside vendors and wrote off the $13 million that she lent it herself. The debt was eventually paid off by the beginning of 2013.
Clinton was appointed as U.S. secretary of state in the first term of the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013. During her tenure, Clinton established the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. She responded to the Arab Spring by advocating military intervention in Libya but was harshly criticized by Republicans for the failure to prevent or adequately respond to the 2012 Benghazi attack. Clinton helped to organize a series of international sanctions against Iran in an effort to force it to curtail its nuclear program; this effort eventually led to the multinational JCPOA nuclear agreement in 2015. Her use of a private email server when she was Secretary of State was the subject of intense scrutiny. No charges were filed against Clinton, but the email controversy would come back to haunt her when she ran for President during the 2016 presidential election.
Clinton made a second presidential run in 2016. She became the first woman to win a presidential nomination by a major U.S. political party after winning the Democratic nomination, and ran in the general election with Virginia senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Clinton lost the presidential election to Republican opponent Donald Trump in the Electoral College, despite winning a plurality of the popular vote. Clinton had held a significant lead in national polls over Trump throughout most of 2016. In early July, Trump and Clinton were tied in major polls following the FBI's conclusion of its investigation into her emails. FBI Director James Comey concluded Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her handling of classified government material. In late July, Trump gained his first lead over Clinton in major polls following a three to four percentage point convention bounce at the Republican National Convention. Clinton responded with a seven percentage point convention bounce at the Democratic National Convention. Her lead was significant following a revelation that Trump had made sexist remarks about his ability to sexually assault women with impunity.
The Clinton campaign made a serious mistake in taking a number of blue collar states for granted, while Trump campaigned heavily in those states. He managed to do significant damage control over concerns about his character. Clinton was defeated by Trump in the November 8, 2016, presidential election. By the early morning hours of November 9, Trump had received 279 projected electoral college votes, with 270 needed to win and most media sources proclaimed him the winner. Clinton then phoned Trump to concede and to congratulate him on his victory, whereupon Trump gave his victory speech. The next morning Clinton made a public concession speech in which she acknowledged the pain of her loss, but called on her supporters to accept Trump as their next president, saying: "We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead." Clinton lost the election by capturing only 232 electoral votes to Trump's 306 (both would later lose some of these votes to "faithless electors"), but she won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, or 2.1% of the voter base. She is the fifth presidential candidate in U.S. history to win the popular vote but lose the election.
Following her loss, Clinton wrote her third memoir, What Happened, and launched Onward Together, a political action organization dedicated to fundraising for progressive political groups. Since January 2020, she has been the chancellor of Queen's University Belfast in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, at Edgewater Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois. Her family were Methodists who lived in Chicago at the time of her birth, but who moved moved to the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge when Hillary was three years old. Her father, Hugh Rodham, managed a small textile business, which he had founded. Her mother, Dorothy Howell, was a homemaker. Hillary Clinton had two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 and earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Yale Law School in 1973.
While at Wellesley, she was actually a Republican. In the documentary about the life of 1964 Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater, entitled "Mr. Conservative," she describes how she was once a "Goldwater Girl." She interned at the House Republican Conference, and was invited by moderate New York Republican representative Charles Goodell to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller's late-entry campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 against Richard Nixon. She attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, but later said that she left the party "for good" because she was upset by the way Richard Nixon's campaign portrayed Rockefeller and by what she perceived as the convention's "veiled" racist messages.
In the spring of 1971, she began dating fellow law student Bill Clinton. During the summer, she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, where she worked on child custody and other cases. Bill Clinton canceled his original summer plans and moved to live with her in California. The couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school. The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. Bill Clinton first proposed marriage to her following graduation, but she declined. She began a year of postgraduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center. In late 1973, her first scholarly article, "Children Under the Law", was published in the Harvard Educational Review. It was about the new "children's rights" movement.
In 1974, she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., and advised the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal. She helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for it. The committee's work concluded with the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974.
After serving as a congressional legal counsel, Hillary moved to Arkansas and married future president Bill Clinton in 1975. In 1977, she co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. She was appointed the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978 and became the first female partner at Little Rock's Rose Law Firm the following year. The National Law Journal twice listed her as one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America.
When Bill Clinton was elected as Governor of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was the first lady of that state from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992. When Bill Clinton became a candidate for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination, the couple were thrust into the public spotlight just ahead of the New Hampshire primary. Tabloid publications printed allegations that Bill Clinton had engaged in an extramarital affair with a woman named Gennifer Flowers. In response, the Clintons appeared together on 60 Minutes, where Bill denied the affair, but acknowledged "causing pain in my marriage". This joint appearance was credited with rescuing his campaign. Bill Clinton said that in electing him, the nation would "get two for the price of one", referring to the prominent role his wife would assume. The attention led to attacks on Hillary Clinton's own past record.
When her husband was elected as President of the United States in 1992, she became the first lady of the United States. In that role, she was a strong advocate for healthcare reform. In 1994, her major initiative-the Clinton health care plan-failed to gain approval from Congress. In 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a leading role in advocating the creation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. Clinton advocated for gender equality at the 1995 UN conference on women.
The Whitewater controversy was the focus of media attention from its publication in a New York Times report during the 1992 presidential campaign. The Clintons had lost their late-1970s investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation. At the same time, their partners in that investment, Jim and Susan McDougal operated Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan institution that retained the legal services of Rose Law Firm and were alleged to have been improperly subsidizing Whitewater losses. Madison Guaranty later failed, and Clinton's work at Rose was scrutinized for a possible conflict of interest in representing the bank before state regulators her husband had appointed. She said she had done minimal work for the bank. Independent counsels Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr subpoenaed Clinton's legal billing records; she said she did not know where they were. After a two-year search, the records were found in the first lady's White House book room and delivered to investigators in early 1996. On January 26, 1996, Clinton became the first spouse of a U.S. president to be subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury. After several Independent Counsels had investigated, a final report was issued in 2000 that stated there was insufficient evidence that either Clinton had engaged in criminal wrongdoing.
In 1998, the Clintons' private concerns became the subject of much speculation when investigations revealed that Bill Clinton had engaged in an extramarital affair with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Events surrounding the Lewinsky scandal eventually led to the impeachment of the president by the House of Representatives; he was later acquitted by the senate. When the allegations against her husband were first made public, Hillary Clinton stated that the allegations were part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy". She called the Lewinsky charges as the latest in a long, organized, collaborative series of charges by Bill Clinton's political enemies. She later said she had been misled by her husband's initial claims that no affair had taken place. After the evidence of President Clinton's encounters with Lewinsky became incontrovertible, she issued a public statement reaffirming her commitment to their marriage. Privately, she was reported to be furious at him and was unsure if she wanted to remain in the marriage. The White House residence staff noticed a pronounced level of tension between the couple during this period. The Lewinsky scandal left Bill Clinton with substantial legal bills. In 2014, Hillary said that she and Bill had left the White House "not only dead broke, but in debt".
In 2000, Clinton was elected as the first female senator from New York. She became the first First lady to simultaneously hold elected office, and then the first former First lady to serve in the Senate. She was re-elected in 2006 and chaired the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee from 2003 to 2007. During her Senate tenure, Clinton advocated for medical benefits for first responders whose health was damaged in the September 11 attacks. She supported the resolution authorizing the Iraq War in 2002 but opposed the surge of U.S. troops in 2007.
In 2008, Clinton ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for President. She was considered to be the front-runner in the race, but was defeated by eventual winner Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries. Following the final primaries on June 3, 2008, Obama had gained enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee. In a speech before her supporters on June 7, Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed Obama. She had won 1,640 pledged delegates to Obama's 1,763 and she had 286 superdelegates to Obama's 395. Clinton and Obama each received over 17 million votes during the nomination process with both breaking the previous record. Clinton was the first woman to run in the primary or caucus of every state. Clinton's campaign ended up severely in debt; she owed millions of dollars to outside vendors and wrote off the $13 million that she lent it herself. The debt was eventually paid off by the beginning of 2013.
Clinton was appointed as U.S. secretary of state in the first term of the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013. During her tenure, Clinton established the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. She responded to the Arab Spring by advocating military intervention in Libya but was harshly criticized by Republicans for the failure to prevent or adequately respond to the 2012 Benghazi attack. Clinton helped to organize a series of international sanctions against Iran in an effort to force it to curtail its nuclear program; this effort eventually led to the multinational JCPOA nuclear agreement in 2015. Her use of a private email server when she was Secretary of State was the subject of intense scrutiny. No charges were filed against Clinton, but the email controversy would come back to haunt her when she ran for President during the 2016 presidential election.
Clinton made a second presidential run in 2016. She became the first woman to win a presidential nomination by a major U.S. political party after winning the Democratic nomination, and ran in the general election with Virginia senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Clinton lost the presidential election to Republican opponent Donald Trump in the Electoral College, despite winning a plurality of the popular vote. Clinton had held a significant lead in national polls over Trump throughout most of 2016. In early July, Trump and Clinton were tied in major polls following the FBI's conclusion of its investigation into her emails. FBI Director James Comey concluded Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her handling of classified government material. In late July, Trump gained his first lead over Clinton in major polls following a three to four percentage point convention bounce at the Republican National Convention. Clinton responded with a seven percentage point convention bounce at the Democratic National Convention. Her lead was significant following a revelation that Trump had made sexist remarks about his ability to sexually assault women with impunity.
The Clinton campaign made a serious mistake in taking a number of blue collar states for granted, while Trump campaigned heavily in those states. He managed to do significant damage control over concerns about his character. Clinton was defeated by Trump in the November 8, 2016, presidential election. By the early morning hours of November 9, Trump had received 279 projected electoral college votes, with 270 needed to win and most media sources proclaimed him the winner. Clinton then phoned Trump to concede and to congratulate him on his victory, whereupon Trump gave his victory speech. The next morning Clinton made a public concession speech in which she acknowledged the pain of her loss, but called on her supporters to accept Trump as their next president, saying: "We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead." Clinton lost the election by capturing only 232 electoral votes to Trump's 306 (both would later lose some of these votes to "faithless electors"), but she won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, or 2.1% of the voter base. She is the fifth presidential candidate in U.S. history to win the popular vote but lose the election.
Following her loss, Clinton wrote her third memoir, What Happened, and launched Onward Together, a political action organization dedicated to fundraising for progressive political groups. Since January 2020, she has been the chancellor of Queen's University Belfast in Belfast, Northern Ireland.