In turmoil of 1968, Clinton found a new voice

Ever diligent, Ms. Rodham did “a fine job,” said Mr. Laird, citing a “very thorough and well-researched” speech she wrote on the financing of the Vietnam War. At the end of the internship, Ms. Rodham proudly posed for a photo with House Republican leaders, including Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan. The photo hung in her father’s bedroom when he died in 1993.

Along with other interns, Ms. Rodham was invited by Representative Charles Goodell, a moderate New York Republican, to help Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s last-ditch campaign to defeat Mr. Nixon for the Republican nomination. At the party’s convention in Miami, she met Frank Sinatra, shared an elevator with John Wayne and decided to leave the Republican Party for good. “She was particularly furious at how she felt Rockefeller had been trashed by the Nixon people,” Mr. Schechter said.

“I’m done with this, absolutely,” Mrs. Clinton recalled thinking upon hearing Mr. Nixon’s acceptance speech. She characterized the Republicanism of her youth as one of fiscal conservatism and social moderation, and at odds with what she viewed as the intolerance of Miami.

“All of a sudden you get all these veiled messages, frankly, that were racist,” Mrs. Clinton said of the convention. “I may not have been able to explain it, but I could feel it.”

Back at Wellesley that fall, Ms. Rodham immersed herself in campus matters. She reveled in her role as student government president, which offered both the visibility and social validation she craved. (“I think I enjoy winning elections as a tangible proof of respect and liking,” she wrote to Mr. Peavoy.)

She won the post in the spring, after campaigning for two weeks “spouting the usual platitudes,” as she said in her letter. When she learned of her victory, she was stunned and thrilled. “Can you believe this?” she said over and over, recalled a professor, Steve London, who received a thank-you note from Ms. Rodham soon after her election. “I think it was a form letter that went out to all the faculty,” Mr. London said.

As the year was ending , Ms. Rodham was working on a 92-page honors dissertation on Saul Alinsky, the antipoverty crusader and community activist, whom she described (quoting from The Economist) as “that rare specimen, the successful radical.”

Power and activism
Beyond Mr. Alinsky, the treatise yields insights about its author. Gaining power, Ms. Rodham asserted, was at the core of effective activism. It “is the very essence of life, the dynamo of life,” she wrote, quoting Mr. Alinsky.

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

Ms. Rodham endorsed Mr. Alinsky’s central critique of government antipoverty programs — that they tended to be too top-down and removed from the wishes of individuals.

But the student leader split with Mr. Alinsky over a central point. He vowed to “rub raw the sores of discontent” and compel action through agitation. This, she believed, ran counter to the notion of change within the system.

Typically, the paper, which received an A, was neatly typed, exhaustively footnoted and even included a page of acknowledgments. “Although I have no “loving wife” to thank for keeping the children away while I wrote,” Ms. Rodham said, “I do have many friends and teachers who have contributed to the process.”

In a listing of primary sources, Ms. Rodham reported that she met three times with Mr. Alinsky and that he offered her a job. “After a year trying to make sense of his inconsistency,” she wrote, explaining her demurral, “I need three years of legal rigor.”

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