Clinton, Hillary Rodham

• Author: Jeffrey Lehman, Shirelle Phelps

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Attorney, professor, First Lady, and now senator Hillary Rodham Clinton created a new and dramatic role in national politics. With a distinguished career that ranged from working for the House Judiciary Committee to teaching CRIMINAL LAW and working as a lawyer, she assumed a key policy role in the administration of her husband, President BILL CLINTON. From 1993 to 1994 she ran that administration's top legislative priority, the failed effort at HEALTH CARE reform. Not surprisingly, her role in the administration was quite controversial. She was also exposed to criticism in the WHITEWATER scandal. However, supporters praised her for her skills as a manager and negotiator.

Clinton was born on October 26, 1947, in Chicago, the eldest of three children, to Hugh E. Rodham, a drapery businessman, and Dorothy Howell Rodham, a homemaker. She became head of the local Young Republicans chapter as a first-year student at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, but she eventually changed her party affiliation. Clinton's shift in political opinion is visible from her ongoing volunteer work for presidential candidates: In 1964, the high-school senior backed the conservative BARRY GOLDWATER;

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in 1968, the political science major supported the liberal EUGENE MCCARTHY.

At Yale Law School, Clinton did research work for the Yale Child Study Center and for Senator Walter F. Mondale and also volunteered for the child advocacy group that later became the CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND.

While working as an editor on the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, she wrote the first of several articles on CHILDREN'S RIGHTS. She was troubled by the law's refusal to consider children competent to make their own decisions until the age of 18. She concluded that the law should presume competence in children from the age of 12. Her 1979 article "Children's Rights: A Legal Perspective" argued in favor of children having the right to make a broad range of decisions, from tailoring their education to leaving an abusive home.

Yale also introduced Clinton to Bill Clinton, a fellow law student. They briefly went separate ways after graduating in 1973?he to teach law in Arkansas, she to work at the Children's Defense Fund in Massachusetts. Then, in January 1974, the 26-year-old Clinton was asked to Washington, D.C., to help impeach President RICHARD M. NIXON, whose presidency was undercut by the WATERGATE scandal. The special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee hired her to be in charge of legal procedures for its inquiry. When Nixon resigned in August...