Read American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power for Free Online

knowing people in power does not become a prerequisite to office holding.”
    Politically, Hillary’s metamorphosis from Goldwater Girl to student activist was continuing apace. By the time she was a junior, Hillary was waving placards at antiwar rallies and chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” In March 1968 she drove up to Manchester, New Hampshire, to campaign for Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar Minnesota senator who was challenging LBJ in the Democratic presidential primaries.
    Hillary was buoyed by McCarthy’s strong showing in New Hampshire, and by the subsequent entry of Robert F. Kennedy into the race. But perhaps the single most pivotal event in Hillary’s political transformation was the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. Upon hearing the news, Hillary became hysterical. Once she regained her composure, she called her black friends at Wellesley to commiserate, then organized a small group to march with demonstrators at Post Office Square in Boston.Later Hillary, frustrated by Wellesley’s business-as-usual atmosphere, organized a two-day campus strike.
    Bobby Kennedy’s assassination just two months later intensified Hillary’s growing sense of despair and bewilderment. Yet she went ahead with plans that summer to intern in Washington, even though it meant reporting to the House Republican Conference. The group was then headed by Minority Leader Gerald Ford, and Hillary found herself working closely with New York Congressman Charles Goodell and Melvin Laird of Wisconsin. Hillary grew especially fond of Mel Laird, who would later serve as President Nixon’s defense secretary. Although they disagreed about the conduct of the Vietnam War, Laird took Hillary and the other interns seriously and actively sought out their opinions. (In stark contrast to a President whose exploitation of White House interns would lead to impeachment, she would later recall that Laird and the other congressmen she encountered treated women as equals. “I have pretty good antennae,” Hillary said the day before the Lewinsky scandal erupted, “for people who are chauvinist or sexist or patronizing toward women.”)
    At the end of her internship, Hillary was asked by Goodell to go to the Republican convention in Miami and work on behalf of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s eleventh-hour campaign to snatch the GOP nomination from Richard Nixon. Hillary would later say this first look into “big-time politics” was “unreal and unsettling”—for reasons that went beyond the power struggle between Nixon and Rockefeller.
    For starters, it marked the first time that Hillary, whose tightfisted father would never spring for something so extravagant, actually stayed at a hotel—Miami’s fabled Fontainebleau—and ordered room service. During the convention, Hillary also got to meet Nixon supporters Frank Sinatra and John Wayne, both of whom “feigned interest” in meeting her.
    Hillary’s contact with another intern, David Rupert, was lessfleeting. The intense, argumentative, darkly handsome Georgetown University government major was working for Congressman Goodell, and he and the girl from Park Ridge hit it off instantly. Within a matter of weeks they were lovers. Hillary could be surprisingly spontaneous when it came to sex, Rupert recalled, but she was never one to risk an unwanted pregnancy in the heat of passion. Hillary always insisted on using birth control whenever they slept together.
    “It was an intense love affair,” Hillary’s friend Nancy Pietrefesa said. “Hillary was always attracted to arrogant, sneering, hard-to-please men, like her father.” Hillary’s highly charged relationship with Rupert, which she hid from some of the most important people in her life, would last for three years. It included parties at which Hillary presumably did her fair share of inhaling.
    Nixon’s nomination by the Miami convention hardly surprised Hillary; it had been all but a