In turmoil of 1968, Clinton found a new voice

In 1966, her public words were less audacious. “The girl who doesn’t want to go out and shake hands can type letters or do general office work,” Ms. Rodham told The Wellesley News in an appeal for Republican volunteers. Soon, though, Ms. Rodham’s views began veering leftward. She became opposed to the Vietnam War, putting her increasingly in conflict with her conservative father, Hugh Rodham.

“My opinions on most human conditions are being liberalized,” Ms. Rodham wrote in 1965 to Don Jones, a progressive Methodist minister from back home who had influenced her thinking.

“The combination of bleeding heart liberal and mental conservative is the inevitable conclusion one arrives at after following and pondering political events,” she wrote.

Around campus, Ms. Rodham wore industrial-thick glasses and a uniform of the times — clunky boots, ratty jeans, a Navy blue pea coat and a succession of turtlenecks, sweater vests and work shirts. (“I look like hell and I could care less” she wrote to Mr. Peavoy.) She was prone to capricious fashion choices. A suitemate, Connie Hoenk Shapiro, recalled asking why she had bought a particularly dreadful pair of muddy-colored shoes (with clunky 2-inch heels and a square toe) and Ms. Rodham explaining, “I felt sorry for them and wanted to give them a home.”

Friends say she had a playful streak, was game for road trips to Vermont and Cape Cod, and liked to call people by goofy nicknames. “She would sometimes refer to herself in the third person as “the Hill,” or “the Hill woman,” said her Wellesley classmate Nancy Pietrafesa, whose childhood moniker, Peach, sometimes became Peacharoo or Peacharooni in Hill-speak.

Unlike many of her peers, she never experimented with illegal drugs, Mrs. Clinton said. She embraced collegiate social rituals, attending mixers, showing up to Harvard football games (often with a book, a friend recalls) and planning a strawberries-and-cream bridal shower atop the Wellesley Bell Tower for a roommate, Johanna Branson.

Still, she was something of a sponge for all the angst and argument engulfing her generation. Ms. Shapiro recalled going to do errands one afternoon when Ms. Rodham handed her an unopened bottle of perfume she had bought and asked her to return it to the store.

Slide show Clinton cartoons MSNBC.com's editorial cartoonists weigh in on Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton's candidacy. msnbc.com

“I asked why,” Ms. Shapiro recalled. “Her answer was that it was an extravagance she felt guilty about indulging in when there was so much poverty around us. We were increasingly sensitive to issues of what we now call white privilege. ”

When Dr. King was killed on the balcony of a Memphis motel on April 4, 1968, Ms. Rodham was devastated. “I can’t take it anymore,” she screamed after learning the news, her friends recalled. Crying, Ms. Rodham stormed into her dormitory room and hurled her book bag against the wall. Later, she made a telephone call to a close friend, Karen Williamson, the head of the black student organization on campus, to offer sympathy.

Ms. Rodham, who met Dr. King after a speech in Chicago in 1962, had admired his methodical approach to social change, favoring it over what she considered the excessively combative methods of groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or S.N.C.C., pronounced snick.

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