Hillary Clinton

• 1. Introduction

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  Around 1961, a girl from the Chicago suburbs wrote a letter to NASA. Hillary Rodham, later known as Hillary Clinton, wanted to know what she could do to become an astronaut. The reply was blunt. Women were not being accepted into the program.

  The Space Race had inspired the letter, and the rejection did not end her ambitions. Decades later she would stand on a stage as the first woman to win a presidential nomination from a major American party. In that 2016 contest against Donald Trump she won the popular vote, yet lost the Electoral College.

  The path between those two moments is odder than the headlines suggest. She began as a Republican volunteer in a conservative household. She was a lawyer, a governor's wife, a first lady, a senator and a diplomat. She was also a constant target of investigations and a lightning rod for argument.

  This documentary asks how a teenage Goldwater volunteer became a Democratic standard-bearer. It asks why her marriage, her name and her role beside a president drew such fierce reactions. And it asks what she actually did with the power she held.

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• 2. Conservative Beginnings

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  Hillary Diane Rodham was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago on the 26th of October 1947. When she was three, her Methodist family moved to the suburb of Park Ridge. Her father, Hugh Rodham, ran a small but successful textile business. Her mother, Dorothy Howell, was a homemaker. Two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony, rounded out the household.

  At Maine South High School she was a student council member and a National Merit Finalist. Her classmates voted her most likely to succeed, and she graduated in 1965 in the top five percent. Yet when she ran for class president as a senior, she lost to two boys. One of them told her she would be really stupid to think a girl could be elected president.

  Her parents pulled in two directions. Her mother wanted her to have an independent professional career. Her father, otherwise a traditionalist, felt that gender should not limit what his daughter could do.

  At age thirteen she canvassed Chicago's South Side after the razor-close 1960 presidential election. She later said that she and a teenage friend checked a voting list and found an entry showing a dozen addresses that turned out to be an empty lot. She read it as fraud against Richard Nixon. In 1964 she volunteered for Barry Goldwater.

  Two adults shaped her thinking. Paul Carlson, her history teacher, was a fervent anti-communist who handed her Goldwater's book The Conscience of a Conservative. Donald Jones, her Methodist youth minister, cared about social justice. In 1962 Jones took his youth group to Chicago's Orchestra Hall, where she heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak and briefly met him.

  Carlson and Jones clashed in Park Ridge. She would later call that quarrel an early sign of the cultural, political and religious fault lines that developed across America in the next forty years.

  In 1965 she enrolled at Wellesley College to study political science, and in her first year she led the Wellesley Young Republicans. The group leaned toward the moderate Rockefeller wing. She backed John Lindsay for mayor of New York City and Edward Brooke for the United States Senate.

  A letter to her youth minister described her as a mind conservative and a heart liberal. By her junior year she was supporting Eugene McCarthy's antiwar campaign. In early 1968 she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association.

  After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she organized a two-day student strike. She also worked with Wellesley's black students to recruit more black students and faculty. Her approach was to push for change from inside the system, rather than from outside it.

  That summer she attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. Representative Charles Goodell had invited her to help Nelson Rockefeller's late campaign for the nomination. She was upset by how Nixon's campaign portrayed Rockefeller and by what she saw as veiled racist messages. She left the Republican Party for good.

  Her senior thesis, written under Professor Alan Schechter, criticized the tactics of the community organizer Saul Alinsky. Years later, during her time as first lady, access to it was restricted at the White House's request, which fed speculation. It was eventually released.

  She graduated in 1969 with honors in political science. She also became the first student in Wellesley's history to speak at commencement, following Senator Edward Brooke on the program. Her remarks included criticism of Brooke, and the audience gave her a standing ovation that lasted seven minutes.

  Life magazine ran an article on the response, and the talk show host Irv Kupcinet invited her onto his nationally syndicated program. That summer she washed dishes at Mount McKinley National Park in Alaska. She then took a job sliming salmon at a cannery in Valdez. The cannery fired her after she complained about unhealthy conditions, and it shut down overnight.

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• 3. Heart Over Head

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  At Yale Law School, Rodham joined the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action. In her second year she worked at the Yale Child Study Center. There she learned about new research on early childhood brain development and assisted on Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, published in 1973. She also handled child abuse cases at Yale-New Haven Hospital and gave free legal advice through New Haven Legal Services.

  In the summer of 1970 a grant took her to Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project. She was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, where she studied migrant workers' education, health and housing. Edelman became a lasting mentor. Political advisor Anne Wexler recruited her to Joseph Duffey's Senate campaign in Connecticut, and Rodham later credited Wexler with her first job in politics.

  In spring 1971 she began dating a fellow law student named Bill Clinton. That summer she interned at the Oakland law firm Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, known for civil liberties and radical causes. Clinton scrapped his own summer plans and moved in with her in California. The next summer they campaigned in Texas for George McGovern, who lost.

  She took her Juris Doctor in 1973 after staying an extra year to be near Clinton. He proposed after graduation, and she said no, unsure about tying her future to his. She spent the next year in postgraduate study on children and medicine.

  Late in 1973 the Harvard Educational Review published her first scholarly article, Children Under the Law. It described children as powerless individuals and argued against treating them as equally incompetent from birth until legal age. Courts, she wrote, should presume competence case by case unless evidence showed otherwise. Scholars in the field cited it often.

  In 1974 she joined the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington and advised the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate. Richard Nixon resigned in August of that year. The consultant Betsey Wright had moved from Texas to guide Rodham's career, and she saw a future senator or president.

  Still, Bill Clinton kept asking her to marry him. She failed the District of Columbia bar exam and passed Arkansas's. As she later wrote, she chose to follow her heart instead of her head.

  In August 1974 she moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Clinton taught law and was running for Congress. She became one of only two women on the University of Arkansas law faculty. She directed a new legal aid clinic, and with other women she founded the city's first rape crisis center. Clinton lost that congressional race to the Republican incumbent, John Paul Hammerschmidt.

  The couple married on the 11th of October 1975 in a Methodist ceremony in their living room. Rodham kept her own surname. She wanted separate professional lives and no appearance of conflict of interest, and she told a friend it showed that she was still herself. Both mothers, more traditional, were upset.

  In February 1977 she joined Little Rock's Rose Law Firm. She handled patent infringement and intellectual property cases while doing unpaid child advocacy work. That year she co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. President Jimmy Carter put her on the board of the Legal Services Corporation, and from mid-1978 to mid-1980 she chaired it, the first woman to do so.

  Bill Clinton's election as governor in November 1978 made her Arkansas's first lady in January 1979. That same year she became the first woman made a full partner at Rose Law. For years she earned more than her husband. Daughter Chelsea was born on the 27th of February 1980.

  In 1978 and 1979, seeking extra income, she traded cattle futures. An initial $1,000 grew to nearly $100,000 in ten months, when she stopped. Around the same time the couple joined Jim and Susan McDougal in the Whitewater real estate venture. Both would become controversies in the 1990s.

  Bill Clinton lost his re-election bid in November 1980 and won the governorship back in 1982. During that comeback she began calling herself Hillary Clinton, sometimes Mrs. Bill Clinton, to ease voters' worries. After the win she went back to Hillary Rodham Clinton. She chaired the Arkansas Education Standards Committee from 1983 and fought the Arkansas Education Association in a long battle. The result was mandatory teacher testing and state standards for curriculum and class size.

  In 1985 she introduced the Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youth, which helps parents prepare children for school. At Rose Law, colleagues called her a rainmaker for the clients she brought in. The National Law Journal twice named her among America's 100 most influential lawyers, in 1988 and 1991.

  She also sat on corporate boards, including TCBY, Lafarge and Walmart. At Walmart, from 1986 to 1992, she was the first woman on the board, after pressure on founder Sam Walton. She pushed for more environmentally friendly practices, but largely failed to get more women into management and stayed silent on the company's anti-union reputation. The journalist Dan Kaufman later argued that this record cost her credibility with organized labor, and slightly less than half of union members voted for Trump in 2016.

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• 4. Two for the Price of One

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  Before the New Hampshire primary in 1992, tabloids printed claims that Bill Clinton had an affair with Gennifer Flowers. The Clintons went on 60 Minutes together. Bill denied the affair but admitted causing pain in his marriage, and the appearance was credited with rescuing his campaign.

  Hillary then made remarks that stung. She dismissed Tammy Wynette's outlook in the song Stand by Your Man. She also said she could have stayed home baking cookies and having teas but chose a career. Stay-at-home mothers and their defenders criticized her, and she later called the comments ill-considered.

  Bill told voters that electing him meant getting two for the price of one. In August 1992 Daniel Wattenberg's article in The American Spectator, titled The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock, attacked her past ideological and ethical record. At least twenty other major publications drew similar comparisons.

  When her husband took office in January 1993, she became the first first lady with a postgraduate degree and a professional career of her own. She was also the first to have an office in the West Wing, alongside the usual East Wing offices. During the transition she sat in the innermost circle vetting appointees. Her choices filled at least eleven top-level posts and dozens of lower ones.

  Only Eleanor Roosevelt had been seen as so openly empowered a presidential wife. Critics called it inappropriate for a first lady to play a central role in policy. Supporters replied that she acted like any other White House advisor and that voters had known what to expect.

  In January 1993 the president named her to chair a task force on National Health Care Reform. He hoped she would repeat her Arkansas education success. The resulting proposal would have required employers to cover workers through individual health maintenance organizations. Opponents mocked it as Hillarycare, and even some congressional Democrats resisted.

  Despite Democratic control of both chambers, the plan never gathered enough support for a floor vote. It was abandoned in September 1994. In her memoir she acknowledged that her political inexperience played a part, though she pointed to many other causes.

  Her approval ratings had hovered in the high 50s during her first year. They fell to 44 percent in April 1994 and 35 percent by September. Republicans used the plan against Democrats in the 1994 midterms, and many analysts counted it as a major cause of the Democratic losses, especially among independents. Afterward the White House downplayed her role in shaping policy.

  Her later record was more successful. With senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, she pushed for the State Children's Health Insurance Program of 1997, which gave state support to children whose parents could not afford coverage. She also initiated the Adoption and Safe Families Act that year, which she regarded as her greatest accomplishment as first lady.

  In 1999 she helped pass the Foster Care Independence Act, which doubled federal money for teenagers aging out of foster care. Working with Attorney General Janet Reno, she helped create the Office on Violence Against Women at the Justice Department.

  Welfare reform produced a harder choice. Congress sent two bills without protections for people leaving welfare, and she urged her husband to veto both. He did. During his 1996 campaign a third bill restored some protections but cut benefits elsewhere. Though others urged her to push for another veto, she backed it as the best political compromise available, and it became the Welfare Reform Act of 1996.

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• 5. Women's Rights and Scrutiny

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  In September 1995, before delegates from over 180 countries at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Clinton declared that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights. She argued forcefully against abuses of women worldwide, including inside China itself. She resisted pressure from both her own administration and Chinese officials to soften her words. Women around the world would recite her phrases for years.

  She traveled to 79 countries as first lady, breaking Pat Nixon's record. She held no security clearance and did not attend National Security Council meetings. Still, she played a part in American diplomacy. In the late 1990s she was among the most prominent international voices criticizing the Taliban's treatment of Afghan women. She also helped create Vital Voices, a U.S.-sponsored initiative encouraging women's participation in politics abroad.

  She wrote as well. In 1996 she published It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, and she toured ten cities that January. The book spent 18 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List, three of them at number one. By 2000 it had sold 450,000 hardcover and 200,000 paperback copies. Its audio recording won her the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

  Between 1995 and 2000 she also wrote a weekly newspaper column, Talking It Over. She chaired Save America's Treasures, which matched federal funds with private donations to restore historic items, including the flag that inspired The Star-Spangled Banner. She also created the first White House Sculpture Garden. Her eight-year redecoration of the White House with the Arkansas designer Kaki Hockersmith drew mixed reviews.

  The investigations ran alongside all of this. On the 26th of January 1996, she became the first spouse of a president subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury, in the Whitewater inquiry. After several independent counsels, a final report in 2000 found insufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing by either Clinton.

  Other controversies followed. The White House travel office affair became known as Travelgate. Her 1978 and 1979 cattle trading prompted claims of conflict of interest, but no formal investigation was opened, and she was never charged. In June 1996 officials discovered that hundreds of FBI background reports on former Republican staffers had been improperly accessed, an episode nicknamed Filegate. The 2000 report found no credible evidence that she was involved.

  In 1998 investigators revealed that the president had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern. At first Hillary called the allegations part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. She later said her husband's early denials had misled her. When the evidence became undeniable, she publicly reaffirmed her commitment to the marriage.

  Privately, she was reportedly furious and unsure about staying. Residence staff noticed pronounced tension. The public split on her. Some women admired her poise, some pitied her, and others called her an enabler or accused her of staying for political influence. Her approval rating jumped to around 70 percent, the highest of her time as first lady.

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• 6. Senator From New York

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  In November 1998 New York's long-serving senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced his retirement. Representative Charles Rangel and other Democrats urged Clinton to seek the open seat. The Clintons bought a house in Chappaqua, New York, in September 1999. She became the first presidential wife to run for elected office.

  She expected to face New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. In May 2000 he withdrew after a prostate cancer diagnosis, while problems in his marriage became public. Her opponent became Representative Rick Lazio. Critics called her a carpetbagger, since she had never lived in New York or taken part in its politics. Her campaign manager was Bill de Blasio.

  She began with a listening tour of all 62 counties in small-group settings, and she spent much time in Republican-leaning Upstate regions. She promised 200,000 jobs over her term, along with tax credits for job creation and tuition. In a September debate Lazio seemed to crowd her personal space while pressing her to sign a fundraising pledge. The race, with Giuliani's early effort, drew a record combined $90 million.

  On the 7th of November 2000 she won with 55 percent to Lazio's 43 percent. She was sworn in on the 3rd of January 2001. George W. Bush's inauguration was still 17 days away, so she held the titles of first lady and senator at once. No one had done that before, and no one has since.

  She kept a low profile at first and built ties with senators from both parties. She became a regular at the Senate Prayer Breakfast. After the September 11 attacks, she worked with Chuck Schumer to secure $21 billion for redeveloping the World Trade Center site, and she took a leading role in examining the health problems of first responders.

  Her votes on war drew the sharpest scrutiny. She backed the 2001 action in Afghanistan, citing both counterterrorism and the lives of Afghan women. In October 2002 she voted for the Iraq War Resolution. In February 2005 she visited Iraq and co-introduced a bill to add 80,000 soldiers to the Army.

  By late 2005 she called immediate withdrawal a mistake but said Bush's pledge to stay until the job was done gave Iraqis an open-ended invitation not to look after themselves. By 2014 and 2015 she said she had got the Iraq vote wrong. In 2007 she responded to General David Petraeus's report by saying it required a willing suspension of disbelief.

  In 2003 Simon & Schuster released her memoir Living History. It set a first-week sales record for nonfiction, sold more than a million copies in its first month, and was translated into twelve languages. Simmie Knox painted her official White House portrait, unveiled in June 2004.

  She voted against John Roberts's 2005 confirmation as chief justice and against Samuel Alito's in 2006, filibustering the latter. In 2005 she asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate hidden sex scenes in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. She also helped found a progressive counterweight to conservative institutions, shaping conversations behind the Center for American Progress and advising David Brock's Media Matters for America.

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• 7. The Primary Fight

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  On the 20th of January 2007, Clinton announced on her website that she was forming a presidential exploratory committee. She said she was in and in to win. No woman had been nominated by a major party for president, and no first lady had ever run. In early 2007 she led the Democratic polls, with Barack Obama and John Edwards her strongest rivals.

  Her biggest weakness was her past support for the Iraq War, which Obama had opposed from the start. Both candidates set early fundraising records. Late in October she performed poorly in a debate. Obama's message of change began to land better with Democrats than her message of experience.

  On the 3rd of January 2008, she finished third in the Iowa caucus, behind Obama and Edwards. Polls predicted an Obama win in New Hampshire, but on the 8th of January she narrowly beat him. It was the first time a woman had won a major party's presidential primary for delegate selection. Many linked the result to the day before the vote, when her eyes welled with tears and her voice broke answering a voter.

  The contest then turned bitter. Remarks by Bill Clinton and other surrogates, and one by Hillary about Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson, were widely read as casting Obama as a racially oriented candidate. Democratic voting became more polarized, and she lost much of her support among African Americans. She lost South Carolina on the 26th of January by two to one.

  The damage was lasting. It eroded her standing with the party establishment and helped lead Ted Kennedy to endorse Obama. On Super Tuesday, the 5th of February, with twenty-two states voting, she won the largest ones, including California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Obama won more states, and the popular vote split almost evenly. He earned more pledged delegates through the party's proportional rules.

  Her campaign had expected to clinch the nomination by Super Tuesday and was unprepared for a long fight. It lagged in online fundraising, and she began loaning money to it. Staff turmoil led to several top-level changes. Obama then won the next eleven contests in February, taking a significant delegate lead.

  On the 4th of March she broke the streak in Ohio, among other places. Her criticism of NAFTA, a major legacy of her husband's presidency, helped in a state where the trade deal was unpopular. Obama dominated caucuses, which her campaign had largely ignored. She did well among Hispanic, older, non-college and working-class white voters.

  Her last hope lay with the party-appointed superdelegates. After the final primaries on the 3rd of June, Obama had enough delegates to be the presumptive nominee. On the 7th of June she ended her campaign and endorsed him.

  The final pledged delegate count was 1,763 for Obama and 1,640 for Clinton. Each of them received over 17 million votes, breaking the previous record. She was the first woman to run in every state's primary or caucus. She also far surpassed Shirley Chisholm's 1972 marks for votes and delegates won by a woman. She spoke passionately for Obama at the 2008 convention and campaigned for him through the fall.

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• 8. Secretary of State

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  On the 20th of November 2008, after initial reluctance, Clinton told President-elect Obama she would be his secretary of state. He announced the nomination on the 1st of December. She called it a difficult and exciting adventure. Bill Clinton accepted restrictions on his activities for the William J. Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, and a Saxbe fix was signed into law in December 2008.

  Confirmation hearings began on the 13th of January 2009. The Foreign Relations Committee voted 16-1 in her favor, and the full Senate confirmed her 94-2 on the 21st of January. She resigned from the Senate that day, becoming the first former first lady in the Cabinet.

  Within days she phoned dozens of world leaders and remarked that there was a lot of damage to repair. She worked with Obama in a pragmatic, largely non-ideological way. They met weekly, though without the daily closeness of some earlier pairs. She also formed an alliance with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Her main internal reform was the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, first issued in late 2010, which called for leading through civilian power.

  In the 2009 Afghanistan debate she backed the military's request for 40,000 troops and no public withdrawal deadline. She prevailed over Vice President Joe Biden's opposition. She ultimately accepted Obama's compromise of an additional 30,000 troops tied to a withdrawal timetable.

  In March 2009 she handed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a reset button symbolizing a fresh start with Dmitry Medvedev's Russia. Cooperation improved, but relations declined after Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. In October 2009 in Switzerland, she helped salvage the signing of a Turkish-Armenian accord that established diplomatic relations and opened their border.

  From 2010 she helped build an international sanctions regime against Iran's nuclear program. That effort eventually led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. In January 2010 she compared the Iron Curtain to the divide between free and unfree Internet. It was the first time a senior American official clearly described the Internet as a key element of foreign policy.

  The 2011 Egyptian protests were the administration's hardest test so far. Her description of Hosni Mubarak's government moved from stable, to calling for orderly transition, to condemning violence against protesters. As Arab Spring protests spread, she admitted the American response was sometimes contradictory. On Libya, she joined Susan Rice and Samantha Power in favoring intervention over Gates's objections. The 2011 intervention gained Arab and U.N. approval, and Gaddafi was overthrown. Libya then became a failed state, and the wisdom of the intervention is still debated.

  On the 2nd of May 2011, a raid in Pakistan killed Osama bin Laden. Clinton had argued for it, saying the goal outweighed the risk to ties with Pakistan. She also helped decide against releasing photographs of his body. That December she told the United Nations Human Rights Council that gay rights are human rights.

  She also made the first visit to Burma by a secretary of state since 1955, meeting opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. She called the twenty-first century America's Pacific century, a phrase tied to the pivot to Asia. In Syria she and CIA Director David Petraeus proposed arming and training vetted rebels in mid-2012, but White House officials rejected it.

  In December 2012 she was hospitalized for a few days with a blood clot in her head. Doctors found it while following up on a concussion from fainting. The fall followed severe dehydration from a viral stomach illness, and she recovered fully.

  She called her strategy smart power, mixing military force with diplomacy, development, technology and human rights. Her so-called Hillary Doctrine held that violence against women and inequality within a state are tied to its instability. She visited 112 countries, the most of any secretary of state. She was the first to reach places like Togo and East Timor. Time magazine said her endurance was legendary.

  Her last day in office was the 1st of February 2013, with John Kerry nominated as successor. Analysts noted she left no signature breakthrough, and Republicans criticized her over the failure to prevent or answer the 2012 Benghazi attack. Another issue followed her out of the State Department. Her use of a private email server there led to intense scrutiny. No charges were filed, yet it became the most-covered topic of her 2016 campaign.

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