Free A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein Page A

movement (as it was then known), she was hardly one of its pioneers or even a firebrand of its second wave. By the time of her graduation, she still reflected the traditions of her upbringing, but also had been hugely influenced by the movement’s accomplishments, so visible on the two coasts of America especially. Moreover, what was happening in America in regard to women—literally liberating them in a fundamental sense—was consistent with her mother’s ambitious aspirations for her daughter. Who better than Hillary Rodham to be the exemplar of Wellesley’s transition? She could toe the line with one foot and drag the institution forward with the other.
    Aspects of Wellesley seemed stultified for the age: incoming freshmen were forced to wear beanies; room assignments were made on the basis of race and religion—not just Jewish students with Jewish students, but Episcopalians with Episcopalians, and Catholics with Catholics. Wellesley wasn’t nearly as politically engaged as many other schools in the era. “There was a teacher who used to rage at the class because they were so timid,” recalled a graduate of only a few years before. “It was just a group of young women who didn’t want to take a stand on anything, including, Is it a major chord or a minor chord?”
    Hillary appeared to come late to embrace real solidarity with women as a class. Other women who encountered her over the next two decades, including some of her close friends, felt she could be oblivious to the obstacles impeding her gender, because her own experience was so singular. “She was neither intimidated nor inhibited by any barrier or stereotype—so much so that any weakness she might have is a lack of empathy for others, for whom those barriers have been more difficult. Hillary barged through with such force that she didn’t even seem to take note,” said Betsey Wright, one of the women with whom she was closest from the time of her law school graduation through her husband’s governorship.
    The evolution of Hillary’s politics during her years at Wellesley—1965 to 1969—was characteristic of millions of her generation, especially Midwesterners from conservative families who went off to college in the East and found themselves moving toward (and sometimes beyond) liberalism as they grappled with the three great issues of the day: civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the role of women. Some were radicalized (incongruously, many of the leaders of the Weathermen, for instance, were Midwesterners), but Hillary’s progression was predictably even-keeled.
    No doubt Hillary was a product of her time, an era in which many young people chose to protest violently, and others “turned on, tuned in, and dropped out,” as Timothy Leary had put it. But she always followed a sensible course. Hillary’s methodology and goals in terms of politics were reform, not radical change. A faculty adviser said, “I would argue that everything that Hillary has done in her adult life…strikes me as a classic Wellesley kind of graduate concern: families, children, and social reform.”
    Greg Craig, who knew Hillary well during her law school years and would become White House counsel to Bill Clinton a generation later, said, on the basis of his conversations with her, “It seemed that the 1960s had passed relatively by” at Wellesley. Hundreds upon hundreds of students from Harvard, Yale, Vassar, and Columbia mobilized and went south to participate in the Freedom Rides and voting drives of the so-called Mississippi Summer. But Wellesley’s women were much more removed, and Craig concluded that, far from committing herself to such direct activism, “Hillary was in learning mode then and listening mode.” He discerned little of the hardness that characterized so many later portraits of her. “I had no sense of the toughness, of the intensity. I