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Reading Hillary Rodham's hidden thesis
‘A fundamental disagreement’
Hillary Rodham (who wasn't the valedictorian of the Wellesley class of '69, no matter what Wikipedia has said since July 9, 2005) was indeed an honors student and received an A on the thesis after her oral defense of it that May, recalls professor Schechter, who was one of the three graders.
Later that month she became nationally known. Given the rare honor of offering a student speech at her Wellesley commencement, she startled the faculty and parents — and thrilled many of her classmates — with a rambling rebuke to the day's main speaker, the black Republican Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, who had criticized “coercive protest.” Hillary Rodham, who spoke up for the “indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest,” got her picture in Life magazine.
Her options after graduation were attending law school at Harvard or Yale, traveling to India on a Fulbright scholarship, or taking the job with Alinsky's new training institute, which would have allowed her to live in Park Ridge with her parents, Hugh and Dorothy Rodham, and commute into Chicago.
“His offer of a place in the new institute was tempting,” she wrote in the end notes to the thesis, “but after spending a year trying to make sense out of his inconsistency, I need three years of legal rigor.” She enrolled at Yale that fall, a year ahead of a charming Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas.
“I agreed with some of Alinsky's ideas,” she explained in “Living History,” her 2003 biography, “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.”
A decade later, another political science major started out on the path that Hillary Rodham had rejected, going to work for a group in the Alinsky mold. That was Barack Obama, now a U.S. senator from Illinois and her leading opponent for the Democratic nomination. After attending Columbia University, he worked as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago for the Developing Communities Project. Obama and others of the post-Alinsky generation described their work in the 1990 book “After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois,” in which Obama wrote that he longed for ways to close the gap between community organizing and national politics. After three years of organizing, he turned to Harvard Law School and then the Illinois legislature.
‘She's a pragmatist’
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Stimmell / Wellesley College Archives Hillary Rodham addressing the 1969 graduating class at Wellesley: "Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now." |
In a 1993 interview with The Washington Post, about the time the Clinton health care plan was being formulated and the thesis was being sealed, the first lady characterized her college writing as an argument against big government, supporting Alinsky's criticism of the War on Poverty programs. “I basically argued that he was right,” she told the newspaper. “Even at that early stage I was against all these people who come up with these big government programs that were more supportive of bureaucracies than actually helpful to people. You know, I've been on this kick for 25 years.”
As news organizations are beginning their "scrubbing" of the 2008 candidates, and campaigns are digging for every scrap to use to their advantage, there is disagreement on what value should be placed on youthful writings.
Must Wellesley’s 2007 seniors scour their term papers on global warming for phrases that could derail their presidential ambitions in the year 2046?
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Wellesley College Professor Alan H. Schechter |
“It's a moronic statement,” said Hillary Rodham's thesis adviser, Alan Schechter, now an emeritus professor at Wellesley, as well as a friend and campaign contributor to Sen. Clinton.
“The notion that a 21-year-old idealist somehow remains a 21-year-old idealist their whole life — she's not a radical at all. I think she's very mainstream. She's a pragmatist. She's a much more thoughtful, cautious, careful, pragmatic person — she's been burned so often.”
The makings of a campaign ad?
That doesn't mean, said the professor of political science, that we won't see an Alinsky-Clinton attack ad. One can envision black-and-white photos of Hillary Clinton and Saul Alinsky, wearing remarkably similar Coke-bottle glasses, while the words scroll by: "radical ... socialist? ... exceptional charm ... sealed in the archives...."
But at its heart, her mentor says, the Alinsky-socialist-Rodham connection is a falsehood. "My conclusion, she was already thinking in terms of practical politics, what works, what doesn't, more than on ideology," Schechter said. "She wouldn't have paid any attention to whether Alinsky was a Marxist.”
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Bill Dedman / MSNBC.com Wellesley College, a stop on the tour for Hillary Clinton researchers |
Lacivita co-produced the "Swift Boat" ads in the 2004 presidential race questioning Democratic Sen. John Kerry’s Vietnam service. He told MSNBC.com that no fact from a candidate's life is too old for negative advertising.
"I think the last election cycle proved that there's no statute of limitations," said the Republican political consultant. "What someone did or said 35 years ago is certainly fair game, especially if you're running for president of the United States.
"I have not read her research paper. Though I can assure you that I will very soon," Lacivita added with a laugh.
He began to brainstorm what such an ad might look like:
"You have to make it relevant to world events today.
"Maybe you look at the contrast. What year did Hillary write this paper? 1969.
"And where was John McCain in 1969? A POW in Vietnam."
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