In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science.[20] During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans;[21][22] with this Rockefeller Republican-oriented group,[23] she supported the elections to mayor of John Lindsay (New York City) and to U.S. senator of Edward Brooke (Massachusetts).[24] She later stepped down from this position, as her views changed regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.[21] In a letter to her youth minister at this time, she described herself as "a mind conservative and a heart liberal".[25] In contrast to the 1960s current that advocated radical actions against the political system, she sought to work for change within it.[26][27]
In her junior year, Rodham became a supporter of the antiwar presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy.[28] In early 1968, she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association and served through early 1969.[26][29] Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rodham organized a two-day student strike and worked with Wellesley's black students to recruit more black students and faculty.[28] In her student government role, she played a role in keeping Wellesley from being embroiled in the student disruptions common to other colleges.[26][30] A number of her fellow students thought she might some day become the first female President of the United States.[26]
To help her better understand her changing political views, Professor Alan Schechter assigned Rodham to intern at the House Republican Conference, and she attended the "Wellesley in Washington" summer program.[28] Rodham was invited by moderate New York Republican Representative Charles Goodell to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller's late-entry campaign for the Republican nomination.[28] Rodham attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami. However, she was upset by the way Richard Nixon's campaign portrayed Rockefeller and by what she perceived as the convention's "veiled" racist messages, and left the Republican Party for good.[28] Rodham wrote her senior thesis, a critique of the tactics of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, under Professor Schechter.[31] (Years later, while she was first lady, access to her thesis was restricted at the request of the White House and it became the subject of some speculation.[31])
In 1969, she graduated with a bachelor of arts,[32] with departmental honors in political science.[31] After some fellow seniors requested that the college administration allow a student speaker at commencement, she became the first student in Wellesley College history to speak at the event, following commencement speaker Senator Brooke.[29][33] Her speech received a standing ovation lasting seven minutes.[26][34][35] She was featured in an article published in Life magazine,[36] due to the response to a part of her speech that criticized Senator Brooke.[33] She also appeared on Irv Kupcinet's nationally syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New England newspapers.[37] That summer, she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthful conditions).[38]
Yale Law School and postgraduate studies
Rodham then entered Yale Law School. There she served on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action.[39] During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center,[40] learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973).[41][42] She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale–New Haven Hospital[41] and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free legal advice for the poor.[40] In the summer of 1970 she was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. There she researched migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education.[43] Edelman later became a significant mentor.[44] Rodham was recruited by political advisor Anne Wexler to work on the 1970 campaign of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Duffey, with Rodham later crediting Wexler with providing her first job in politics.[45]
In the late spring of 1971 she began dating Bill Clinton, also a law student at Yale. That summer she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.[46] The firm was well known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes (two of its four partners were current or former Communist Party members);[46] Rodham worked on child custody and other cases.[nb 3] Clinton canceled his original summer plans in order to live with her in California;[50] the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school.[47] The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.[51] She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973,[32] having stayed on an extra year to be with Clinton.[52] He first proposed marriage to her following graduation but she declined, uncertain if she wanted to tie her future to his.[52]
Rodham began a year of postgraduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center.[53] Her first scholarly article, "Children Under the Law", was published in the Harvard Educational Review in late 1973.[54] Discussing the new children's rights movement, it stated that "child citizens" were "powerless individuals"[55] and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but that instead courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis.[56] The article became frequently cited in the field.[57]
