openpolitics.com

What her Wellesley classmates remember about Hillary’s first term—in 1968.

.. She had just spent much of her summer in Washington, interning on Capitol Hill. At a historic juncture of acute anti-establishment fervor, she told them to trust the system. Progress at Wellesley, she explained, “often results through action taken by the Senate of the College Government Association.”

.. During a period of immense social upheaval, she was the most prominent intermediary between her increasingly radicalized fellow students and a change-resistant faculty and administration.

“Hillary tended always to be what I will call a consensus person,” classmate Connie Hoenk Shapiro told me.

.. centrist, cautious, respectful of authority, progressive but never at the expense of maintaining access to the seats of power.

.. “She knew how to temper things.”

.. The graduation speech offered a largely progressive message, but she delivered it in language that was far from incendiary, more of a manifesto of moderation than a revolutionary’s battle cry.

.. The thrust of the thesis was what Rodham viewed as the inherent limits of radical activism

.. by the spring of her freshman year, his daughter was the gung-ho head of Wellesley’s Young Republicans organization.

.. “If we get this going, maybe we’ll see a change before we graduate,” she announced, according to the next day’s Boston Globe—one of the first public signals of her patient, incrementalist disposition.

.. In a letter to a friend from high school, she said she was an “agnostic intellectual liberal” but “an emotional conservative.”

.. “Can one be a mind conservative and a heart liberal?”

.. Her platform, such as it was, characteristically leaned heavily on a faith in Robert’s Rules of Order.

.. Black students who had founded a civil rights group called Ethos threatened a hunger strike if the administration of the college wouldn’t agree to their demands for more black students and more black professors. All of them considered Rodham a friend.

“Hillary was always supportive of the African-American students,” Karen Williamson, one of the most active Ethos members, told me. “I know she signed the petitions.”

.. Rodham helped put together—she stood up to an economics professor who suggested students not going to class was “a know-nothing attitude” and not much of a sacrifice.

.. the typed-out minutes of the meetings Rodham ran as college government president show an interesting, unmistakable pattern: Rodham is mentioned actually relatively infrequently. She opens the meetings, and she usually closes them. The rest of the time, it’s almost always other people doing the talking.

.. She was a capable orator, many of them told me, but was much more comfortable as a listener.

.. she stressed that this wasn’t just a vehicle for student demands. “The committee,” she explained, “will include nine students, four faculty members and the president of the college …”

.. “Alinsky’s conclusion that the ‘ventilation’ of hostilities is healthy in certain situations is valid, but across-the-board ‘social catharsis’ cannot be prescribed,” she wrote. “Catharsis has a way of perpetuating itself so that it becomes an end in itself.”