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

foregone conclusion. The Democratic convention in Chicago was another matter. When Hillary saw news reports of protesters flooding the streets of the city, she and a friend, Betsy Johnson, were determined to be part of the action. Telling their parents they were off to the movies, the two young women jumped in the Johnson family station wagon and headed for Grant Park, the center of the protests.
    A rock hurled by a protester screaming profanities narrowly missed Hillary’s head. But like other student activists, she preferred to be “shocked by the police brutality we saw.”
    Back at Wellesley, Hillary decided to write her thesis on the work of Saul Alinsky, the leftist firebrand whose 1947 book, Reveille for Radicals, was regarded by many as the bible of the protest movement. Colorful, outspoken, and often outrageous, Alinsky believed the only way to effect change was by confronting those in power—with protest marches, strikes, and sit-ins.
    Hillary was an ardent admirer of both Alinsky and Marxist theoretician Carl Oglesby, who denounced America’s “ruling class” and had nothing but praise for Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and Mao.While she never took issue with their goals, Hillary did not agree with their assertion that change could only be initiated from the outside. For her trenchant analysis of Alinsky and Chicago’s Community Action Program, part of the larger War on Poverty, Hillary received an A-plus. Hillary’s political science professor, Alan Schecter, deemed all her work not merely insightful but “brilliant.”
    Alinsky was so impressed with Hillary that he offered her a chance to work with him after graduation, but she turned him down. Although he told her she was throwing her life away—and the chance to make a real difference in the lives of the poor and disenfranchised—Hillary applied to several of the country’s top law schools. “The only way to make a real difference,” Hillary countered, “is to acquire power.”
    Accepted at both Yale and Harvard law schools, Hillary was having difficulty choosing—until an imperious Harvard professor stated flatly, “We don’t need any more women at Harvard.” She had already been leaning toward Yale, but that encounter, Hillary said, “removed any doubts about my choice.”
    She may have questioned Saul Alinsky’s overall strategy, but she embraced many of his tactics. The agitator emeritus believed in a win-at-all-cost approach in the battle for power, and that that required zeroing in with laserlike intensity on one’s enemies. Advised Alinsky: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
    Senator Edward Brooke was Hillary’s first major target, and the speech in which she castigated him caught the eye of the national media. No less an authority than Life magazine proclaimed her one of the eloquent new voices of a restless generation.
    Looking for a little adventure that summer following graduation, Hillary escaped to Alaska and a job gutting salmon in a makeshift processing plant that had been set up on a Valdez pier. She was soon promoted to the assembly packing line, where after several days she began noticing that the fish looked “weird. They’re black,” she told her less-than-amused foreman. “Maybethey aren’t fit to be eaten.” She was fired on the spot, and told to return the next day to pick up her check. When she did, the entire operation had been dismantled.
    In the fall of 1969, Hillary went from an all-female environment to a law school where, out of 235 students, she was one of only twenty-seven women. Hillary made a conscious choice not to change her appearance for the purpose of attracting the opposite sex; she was determined to fit in as the male students’ intellectual equal. That meant she still shied away from makeup, paid little attention to the state of her hair, and refrained from shaving her legs. Her wardrobe now consisted of several pairs of denim bell-bottoms, paisley-printed peasant