The First Time I Heard About Hillary Rodham

[louis c]

Here is a true story from my youth.

I've been a member of DU since 2004 (I know, I let my star expire, but truly, the check is in the mail), so some of you may have read some of my posts before.

I'm 63 years old and politics has been in my blood since birth. My Dad was a school board member or a city councilor in my home town for 5 decades.

But mostly, he was well known for being an administrative assistant to Senator Edward W. Brooke. They were the best of friends. In fact, my father Christened Brooke's oldest daughter, Remi, when she converted to Catholicism.

I was a McCarthy Democrat at 16 years old. An anti-Vietnam War activist at 17 years old.

So, here's the story. In 1969 my late Father (He was 42 years old at the time) comes home for dinner very, very upset. He accompanied the Senator to a commencement exercise at Wellesley College. he said that this "girl" got up and blasted the Senator, right while he sat there, after he spoke at their graduation, and embarrassed him. Mostly for not being enough of a force against the war, but also for not speaking up against poverty and other liberal causes. She lectured him. Right there. As he sat there, politely.

I defended the "girl", not knowing who she was. I told my father that I loved and respected Ed for all he has done for our family, but his voice should be stronger against the war and would carry more weight against Nixon, because he was a Republican.

Boy, that didn't go over well at the dinner table. We had many a debate over the war and politics. But I learned a lot from my Father, because we had some real tough political debates in our time. I love my Father and admired his courage. Looking back at it all now, it took real balls for an Italian to back a black man for elective office in my home town. And my dad was with Ed Brooke from 1960.

But, I digress. Back to the night in 1969, when my Father was upset with this unknown "girl" who embarrassed his friend and was defended at his own dinner table by his ungrateful, punk of a son. Even if we were both right, in retrospect, he believed neither of us "got it" at the time.

I relate this story because my Dad and I were as close as a Father and Son could be. I ran his campaigns and he won every time, right up to his death in 1997. We would joke about that day in 1969, especially when Bill Clinton became President and that "girl" in our story became "First Lady".

So, when twenty something Democrats want to talk about speaking truth to power or be political revolutionaries, that's great. But please respect those of us who were there before you and were "once like you are now". And especially remember, there are few, if any young people today who ever made a political mark like Hillary Rodham did in Massachusetts when she was just 22 years old.


Hillary D. Rodham's 1969 Student Commencement Speech

Ruth M. Adams, ninth president of Wellesley College, introduced Hillary D. Rodham '69, at the 91st commencement exercises.

Introduction

In addition to inviting Senator Brooke to speak to them this morning, the Class of '69 has expressed a desire [for a student] to speak to them and for them at this morning's commencement. There was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be: Miss Hillary Rodham. Member of this graduating class, she is a major in political science and a candidate for the degree with honors. In four years she has combined academic ability with active service to the College, her junior year having served as a Vil Junior, and then as a member of Senate and during the past year as president of College Government and presiding officer of College Senate. She is also cheerful, good humored, good company, and a good friend to all of us and it is a great pleasure to present to this audience Miss Hillary Rodham.

Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham

I am very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am speaking for today is all of us—the 400 of us—and I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be brief because I do have a little speech to give.

Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3 percent of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective.

The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade—years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program—so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often: "Why, if you're dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?" Well, if you didn't care a lot about it you wouldn't stay. It's almost as though my mother used to say, "I'll always love you but there are times when I certainly won't like you." Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education.

Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founder's parking lot. We protested against the rigid academic distribution requirement. We worked for a pass-fail system. We worked for a say in some of the process of academic decision making. And luckily we were in a place where, when we questioned the meaning of a liberal arts education there were people with enough imagination to respond to that questioning. So we have made progress. We have achieved some of the things that initially [we] saw as lacking in that gap between expectation and reality. Our concerns were not, of course, solely academic as all of us know. We worried about inside Wellesley questions of admissions, the kind of people that should be coming to Wellesley, the process for getting them here. We questioned about what responsibility we should have both for our lives as individuals and for our lives as members of a collective group.

Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community were our concerns for what happened beyond Hathaway House. We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world. We were lucky in that one of the first things Miss Adams did was to set up a cross-registration with MIT because everyone knows that education just can't have any parochial bounds any more. One of the other things that we did was the Upward Bound program. There are so many other things that we could talk about; so many attempts, at least the way we saw it, to pull ourselves into the world outside. And I think we've succeeded. There will be an Upward Bound program, just for one example, on the campus this summer.

Many of the issues that I've mentioned—those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility—have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multimedia age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling.

We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen heralded across the newspapers. Senator Brooke has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words—integrity, trust, and respect—in regard to institutions and leaders we're perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.

Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper or Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive—now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see—but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.

But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity—a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in "East Coker" by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.

And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word consequences of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to a woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.

There are two people that I would like to thank before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner who wrote this poem which is the last thing that I would like to read:

My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To transform the future into the present.
We have no need of false revolutions
In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds
And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.
It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.
And once those limits are understood
To understand that limitations no longer exist.
Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible.

[onecaliberal]

1. Hmmm

Hillary, who enrolled there in 1965, served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans during her first year there.

[louis c]

2. She certainly became a Democrat before Bernie

He joined the party 18 months ago.

Hmmmmm

[onecaliberal]

5. Bernie is a better Dem than Hillary and most of the others too.

Bernie is a politician for the people. He has not been purchased by special interests. He HAS spent his entire life working for those who have little to nothing, he did not have every advantage in life as some did. He is a moral and decent man.

[louis c]

8. I love Bernie, too

and no Democrat should be criticizing either one of them.

Don't think that I don't admire and respect the man.

You see, I, too, am a Democratic Socialist.

Every time I refer to myself as that with my contemporaries, they cringe. I never get a chance to explain. You know, the whole FDR thing and Social Security and Medicare. Public Schools and how we need affordable housing subsidized by the government. I can't get ten words out of my mouth and they call me names.

You can't educate the voters about Socialism and convince them to vote for you in one election cycle.

I was once like you are now. I was for George McGovern in 1972. The most intelligent and bravest man to run for President in the 20th century. He carried only my home state of Massachusetts (the one and only). They savaged him. We had the luxury, at the time, of having safe control of the House and Senate and a Liberal Supreme Court.

We no longer have that luxury or that safety net.

[frazzled]

4. Yeah, and she was soon organizing sit-ins against the war

convincing the college to start an Upward Bound program for inner-city youth, organizing a protest and teach-in after the assassination of MLK, fighting for the admission of more black students and faculty ... and then gave the first-ever speech at a graduation by a student, and in it had the guts to criticize the sitting (Republican) senator of the state, to his face.

How long you gonna hang onto that first year thing, when she was 19? Cause we could talk about Elizabeth Warren, of approximately the same age as Hillary, who remained a full-fledged voting Republican stalwart until she was 46 years old. I suppose that doesn't count. One year of a 19-year-old vs an adult who remained a Republican throughout Vietnam, civil rights issues, Nixon, Reagan, the women's movement, Nicaragua, Watergate, Beirut, the whole shebang. Wanna talk?

Hypocrisy, thy name is ... Hillary haters.

[Skid Rogue]

3. Interesting...

So, here's the story. In 1969 my late Father (He was 42 years old at the time) comes home for dinner very, very upset. He accompanied the Senator to a commencement exercise at Wellesley College. he said that this "girl" got up and blasted the Senator, right while he sat there, after he spoke at their graduation, and embarrassed him. Mostly for not being enough of a force against the war, but also for not speaking up against poverty and other liberal causes. She lectured him. Right there. As he sat there, politely.

This story is part of a PBS, Frontline Documentary called "Hillary's Class." The film makers interviewed her classmates from Wellesley. They talked about how uncomfortable they were when Hillary started giving the Senator hell from the podium, but how deep down inside they were all cheering her on. It was a great story. Wish to heck they hadn't pulled it out of Frontline's video archives.

I totally forgot about it until your post. Thanks. I think I'll go in search of "Hillary's Class" again.

[louis c]

6. If Hillary wants to connect to younger voters

this is the story she should tell.

There are archived news stories at the time.

It would make one hell of an ad.

[Starry Messenger]

7. k&r

[Kokonoe]

9. Edward William Brooke III, the first African American popularly elected to the United States Senate.

And Hillary D. Rodham got up and blasted the Senator, right while he sat there, after he spoke at their graduation, and embarrassed him.

Now thats a textbook example of standing up to a popular black man in 1969.

[Lucinda]

10. Brooke was a moderate Republican who spoke out against Stokley Carmichael so I suspect

the objection to him was related to his views on civil rights issues.

[Kokonoe]

11. He thought his view was radical.

He was a blazing Liberal by today's standard.
First Republican to call on President Nixon to resign.
A leader in enactment of the Equal Credit Act (women are equal)
Led Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
For expansion of the Voting Rights Act

He was a black man pain in the ass for the establishment, and a young girl outed him.

[louis c]

12. No need to lecture me on Ed Brooke

I actually did know him personally.

However, in 1969 he needed a nudge. The country was moving ahead of him, rather than vice-versa, which was always the case.

In 1962 he was elected Attorney General of Massachusetts. In 1966, he became the first elected black US Senator. In 1968, MLK and RFK were killed.

Men were drafted to fight in a war they didn't support. There were riots in the streets. Brooke's voice was needed and he eventually answered the call.

But he was not quite there in 1969 and Hillary and many like her brought Ed Brooke and many like him to the proper view.