A Woman in Charge (11 page)

The
Review
's inauguration had been timed to coincide with a huge May Day protest and student strike called for New York and New England to demand that charges against the Panthers be dropped because of the supposed inability of black defendants to receive a fair trial in a “white man's justice system.” The cover photo of the first issue of the
Review
pictured police wearing gas masks (and some armed with heavy weapons) to illustrate an article on “University and the Police: Force and Freedom on Campus.” Another article, “Lawyers and Revolutionaries: Notes from the National Conference on Political Justice,” exhaustively reported the remarks of Yippie Jerry Rubin, and of two of the most prominent radical lawyers of the era—William Kunstler, who had defended the so-called Chicago Seven organizers of the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention, and Charles Garry, the lead attorney for Bobby Seale.

Though Hillary has never spoken publicly of her view of the Panther trial, she was among student-observers from Professor Tom Emerson's civil liberties class who attended each day's courtroom proceedings to report possible abuses by the government, discuss them in class, write papers about them, and then prepare summaries for the American Civil Liberties Union. She took charge of scheduling the student monitors, to make certain that every minute of the trial was scrutinized. A subsequent issue of the
Review
that year—Hillary had become its associate editor by then—was devoted almost entirely to the trial, accompanied by pictures and drawings in which police were depicted as pigs. According to her friend and classmate Greg Craig, Hillary expressed her dismay to him at the choice of artwork; he was likewise appalled, though neither seemed to have tried to do anything about it.

The underlying rationale of the May Day protesters had been endorsed in a statement by Yale's president, Kingman Brewster, who, faced with the prospect of violent demonstrations, acceded to some student demands: classes were suspended, permission was granted to use dormitory dining rooms to feed protesters, and Garry was permitted to take up residence on campus during the trial. Brewster's statement is indicative of how mainstream the larger issues raised by the Panther trial had become: “I personally want to say that I am appalled that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S.” President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, who already had their sights trained on Yale because of the antiwar leadership of the university's chaplain, William Sloan Coffin, were enraged by the remarks.

On the night of April 27, as the campus prepared for what organizers were calling the May Day “uprising,” the International Law Library in the basement of Yale's grand, classicist law school building was set ablaze. Hillary rushed with a bucket brigade of students and library staff to extinguish the fire and save as many books as possible. The flames had already caused considerable damage; the water furthered the destruction. For the rest of the semester Hillary walked a beat as a member of round-the-clock security patrols protecting the university's resources and property.

The Panthers and some of their supporters had been doing their utmost to whip up trouble, announcing, “Come to New Haven for a burning on May Day.” On campuses throughout the Northeast, leaflets were distributed, proclaiming, “All power to the good shooters…[to] create peace by destroying people who don't want peace”—an unsubtle reference to assassinating the police. The National Guard was mobilized in advance of the protests, with uniformed soldiers taking up positions on the Yale campus. The night before May Day, April 30, 1970, Nixon announced that American soldiers and South Vietnamese forces had begun an invasion—“incursion” was the word he used—of Cambodia.

Though its significance was unclear at the time, the May Day demonstration in New Haven contributed to the anti-establishment fury of the Nixon era. In the next week, the logic of the antiwar movement became even more interlocked with a sense among millions of citizens, particularly young people, many of them by now radicalized, that their government was hell-bent on a course in which a new kind of American imperialism abroad and extra-constitutional governance at home were undermining the basic nature of the country's democracy and historical progress. Millions of others believed that the nation was descending into anarchy.

True to form, Hillary identified with the larger goals of the May Day protests but aligned herself with those who were determined that the demonstrations remain peaceful, purposeful, pragmatic, and aimed at achieving longer-term objectives within the system. Though she was a first-year student, she was already a figure of unusual influence and respect at the law school. That week, when an ad hoc gathering of protest leaders arguing over tactics became unruly, Hillary skillfully managed to corral the crowd and moderate a discussion that calmed matters. Accounts and memories of exactly how she came to take over the meeting are sketchy, but there is agreement that she became a kind of mediator, damping down the vitriol of some of the heated presentations of various factions, restating rhetorical excess in less incendiary language, and more or less presiding in a Robert's Rules of Order fashion. She wore blue denim bell-bottoms and a work shirt and sat rather imperiously atop a table at the front of the fractious assembly. Tempers were unusually hot because so many law students and professors were incredulous that books had been burned. Her friend Kris Rogers remembered trying to push her “far more to the left,” without success. Not for the first or last time, Hillary's forceful presence registered both with students and the administration hierarchy, as deans and demonstrators alike identified her as someone they could work with. “There was a lot of angry rhetoric being exchanged. Hillary showed extraordinary force for a very young woman,” said Dean Goldstein.

Her method reflected the unusual combination of her temperaments: she could be in-your-face, soothing, mocking, abrasive, praising, sarcastic, analytical, enthusiastic, ebullient. Even students who, many years later, came to loathe her politics, recalled her during this period with grudging admiration, and commented on how she appeared to summon all these attributes during the protests of May. Meanwhile, in expectation of the worst, New Haven businesses were boarded shut, and word traveled that blasting caps were missing from a Yale chemistry lab. Not far away, on the Connecticut Wesleyan campus, a Molotov cocktail consumed a classroom building.

Fifteen thousand demonstrators gathered in view of the Yale quadrangle on May Day, some holding “Burn Yale” signs aloft. The demonstration turned out to be remarkably peaceful. There were teach-ins: “Arrest and Search,” “Colonization and Race in Plantation Society.” Jerry Rubin, one of the day's main speakers, exhorted the crowd with a chant of, “Fuck Nixon! Fuck Nixon! Fuck Nixon!”—the principal target that day of scourging remarks about his war policies, supposed racism, and “police state tactics.” For Hillary, the substantive critique seemed more than justified. The next day, the
Yale Daily News
reported that the demonstration had brought together “the largest assemblage of long-haired youths, film crews, and National Guardsmen that New Haven has ever witnessed.” Two days later, National Guard troops shot and killed four student antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio. The famous photograph of a young woman stooped over a dead student brought Hillary to tears, she wrote.

Following the Kent State shootings, there were an average of a hundred demonstrations or student strikes per day in the country, and more than five hundred colleges and universities closed down.

In Washington on May 7, Hillary was one of the speakers at the fiftieth anniversary convention of the League of Women Voters, another indication of her increasing prominence. She wore a black armband at the podium, in memory of those killed at Kent State. Her emotions, she said later, were in evidence as she argued against the war's extension into Cambodia as “illegal and unconstitutional.” To her elders, she tried to put into context the anguished protests taking place on college campuses. At Yale, she pushed for engagement, “not disruption or ‘revolution,'” during the upheavals of 1970, she said years later. Hillary had moderated a meeting at which the law school students voted 329 to 12 to join the national student strike and to protest the American military action in Cambodia. She had called it “the unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.”

Thirty-five years later, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, by then a potential presidential nominee of her party, would argue with less vehemence—and less convincingly—that there could be no withdrawal of American military forces from Iraq until more U.S. political and military objectives were accomplished. Then, as in the case of the Vietnam War, the U.S. Senate had given the president a blank check to fight a war in which he had misrepresented the underlying factors that he claimed justified American sacrifice. Hillary was among the overwhelming majority of senators who had voted to give George W. Bush the authorization he sought. A year later, she succeeded in winning appointment to the Senate Armed Services Committee, becoming—like Margaret Chase Smith (who had served as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve)—an expert on military preparedness. Her continuing refusal to use her unprecedented influence to urge rapid withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraq alienated many of her supporters among the Democratic Party's left and others who questioned whether her evolution from Vietnam to Iraq represented evidence of youth versus maturity, or merely the political expediency of an ambitious politician who had abandoned the values and principles she had espoused in an era when she had no electoral agenda.

As a first-year law student, Hillary's oratory could still slip precipitously into vague and perplexing generalities if the subject required conceptual analysis. This seemed especially true in her appearance before the League of Women Voters, when she assumed the mantle of generational spokesperson. If she was speaking about a clearly defined subject, her thoughts would be well organized, finely articulated, and delivered in almost perfect outline form. But before the league audience she again lapsed into sweeping abstractions—though it was not hard to understand what she was getting at. “Here we are on the other side of a decade that had begun with a plea for nobility and ended with the enshrinement of mediocrity,” she declared. “Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and of the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well.” In trying to connect with women in the audience, many of them two and three times as old as she, Hillary spoke of holding “our institutions…accountable to the people,” suggesting that corporations were susceptible to pressure through “what kind of stock one owns.” She asked, “What do you do with your proxies? How much longer can we let corporations run us?” Ironically, in the next decade she would be a member of the boards of two huge corporations and represent others in court.

She was still finding her way, cruising at times on a reputation that, in fact, derived more from the audacity of her challenge to a U.S. senator in a commencement speech than the sum of her accomplishments.

In less than a year, she had been interviewed on Irv Kupcinet's nationally syndicated television talk show from Chicago, been chosen by the league to be her generation's liaison to an earlier generation of civic-inclined women, and been written up in her hometown and New England newspapers. She liked the attention, the way it set her apart from the herd of her fellows, conveying to them and their elders that she was on a different, somehow more thoughtful track. She did nothing to publicly douse the accompanying speculation that electoral politics was where she saw her future. Especially given the abdication of congressional oversight of the war, electoral politics was neither her goal nor even something she had much faith in, nor felt particularly drawn to. She still believed in public service on behalf of those in society who were among the least powerful and most marginalized or discriminated against. The people she seemed naturally drawn to helping above others were children. They were the most vulnerable of citizens and the most powerless politically—the more so if they were poor and black. She believed that the law could be put to much stronger use on their behalf and that she could find ways to make it happen.

The league convention's keynote speaker was Marian Wright Edelman. Already Hillary regarded her as something of a hero for using the system, particularly the courts, on behalf of children. Edelman's father was a Baptist preacher whose message to his own five children was the same as to his congregation in Bennettsville, South Carolina: that Christianity required service in this world. Marian embraced many of the same traditional values—self-reliance, family, hard work, equal justice, universal brotherhood, the pursuit of knowledge—that Hillary had so tenaciously held on to through the turbulence of the 1960s. She and Edelman shared a religious interpretation of social and political responsibility. Edelman, like Hillary, was fond of proverbial language and aphorisms: “You really can change the world if you care enough.” “Service is what life is all about.” “Children don't vote, but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.” The words could have just as easily rolled from Hillary's lips. Like the advocate Hillary would become, Marian also was focused, determined, winsome, and, if necessary, took no prisoners as she marched toward an imperative objective.

Edelman, eight years older than Hillary, had abandoned her plans to enter the foreign service after law school and instead chose to use her legal credentials in the struggle for civil rights in the South. She joined the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, first in New York and then in Mississippi. In 1967, while leading New York senator Robert F. Kennedy on a tour through the shacks of the Mississippi Delta, Marian met Peter Edelman—Brooklyn-born, Jewish, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, and Kennedy's principal aide on matters of civil rights. Both Edelman and Wright had gone south during college to register black voters—a dangerous enterprise, especially for a Southern black woman and a Northern Jew. Kennedy, but not Wright or Edelman, “was shocked to see starving, hungry and listless children with bloated bellies and families who had no income and were unable to purchase food stamps that cost 50 cents a person,” as she later noted in a report. Outraged, Kennedy sought immediate action from Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, who professed incredulity that there were American families without income.