Who is Hillary Clinton?
Hillary Clinton, wife of former president Bill Clinton, has become one of the most prominent women in American politics. Hillary Rodham was born on 26 October 1947. She was raised in Illinois as the only daughter of middle class, politically conservative Methodist parents. She was an excellent student who attended Wellesley College and Yale Law School before beginning her career as a staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund. On 11 October 1975, Hillary Rodham married fellow Yale alumnus Bill Clinton. He was elected Governor of Arkansas in 1978 and Hillary Clinton became the first woman named as full partner in the prominent Rose Law Firm in 1979. The couple’s only daughter, Chelsea Clinton, was born on 27 February 1980. In 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected the 42nd President of the United States, he joked to voters that the Clinton administration offered “two for the price of one.” Never one to sit on the sidelines, Hillary Clinton spent her time as First Lady working to increa
One theory, which functions as a kind of cargo cult among some American liberals, is that behind the bland, smiling, exterior and the thick gauze of platitudes, crouches a fiery liberal feminist, ready, when she has finally amassed enough power – say in her second term as president –to spring forth and save the world. If Carl Bernstein’s exhausting 600-page biography, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, accomplishes anything, it should be to euthanize this touching hope. Hillary Rodham Clinton was always a moderate, given to centrist, technocratic. In her lifetime, she has glided effortlessly from one side to another on key issues – the death penalty, for example, or entitlements for poor women and children – all the while maintaining the self-righteousness granted, supposedly, by her Methodist God. In Bernstein’s account the mystery of Hillary is largely explained by her fraught relationship with Bill. She was pretty enough, but an awkward, wonky, young woman; he w
