Hillary Clinton
Related: About this forumNYT, Sept., 2007: In Turmoil of '68, Hillary Found a New Voice ("a voice for her generation") (HRC)
In September 1968, Hillary Diane Rodham, role model and student government president, was addressing Wellesley College freshmen girls back when they were still called girls about methods of protest. It was a hot topic in that overheated year of what she termed confrontation politics from Chicago to Czechoslovakia.
Dynamism is a function of change, Ms. Rodham said in her speech. On some campuses, change is effected through nonviolent or even violent means. Although we too have had our demonstrations, change here is usually a product of discussion in the decision-making process.
Her handwritten remarks on file in the Wellesley archives abound with abbreviations, crossed-out sentences and scrawled reinsertions, as if composed in a hurry. Yet Ms. Rodhams words are neatly contained between tight margins. She took care to stay within the lines, even when they were moving so far and fast in 1968. While student leaders at some campuses went to the barricades, Ms. Rodham was attending teach-ins, leading panel discussions and joining steering committees. She preferred her confrontation politics cooler.
She was not an antiwar radical trying to create a mass movement, said Ellen DuBois, who, with Ms. Rodham, was an organizer of a student strike that April. She was very much committed to working within the political system. From a student activist perspective, there was a significant difference.
As the nation boiled over Vietnam, civil rights and the slayings of two charismatic leaders, Ms. Rodham was completing a sweeping intellectual, political and stylistic shift. She came to Wellesley as an 18-year-old Republican, a copy of Barry Goldwaters right-wing treatise, The Conscience of a Conservative, on the shelf of her freshman dorm room. She would leave as an antiwar Democrat whose public rebuke of a Republican senator in a graduation speech won her notice in Life magazine as a voice for her generation....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/us/politics/05clinton.html?mwrsm=Twitter via NYTimes
Rose Siding
(32,623 posts)He rued working within the system, or the Democratic Party, for change and seems to have let that slip as it suits him.
Hillary, in her dissertation on Alinsky wrote:
Ms. Rodham endorsed Mr. Alinskys 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.