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

blouses, sandals, black silk pajama bottoms, and of course her trademark thick glasses—a dozen pairs, ranging from wire-rimmed to aviator to oversized red plastic frames.
    “She didn’t want to be thought of as pretty,” a fellow student recalled. “She wanted to be thought of as smart. And she didn’t particularly want the distraction of a boyfriend—not when there were so many important things going on in the world. She wanted to be involved, but not necessarily with a man.”
    No sooner did she sign up for classes than Hillary introduced herself to the leaders of the protest movement at Yale. With unrest growing on the nation’s campuses, she was intent on playing a key role. Hillary got her first break in April of 1970, when the murder trial of Black Panther founder Bobby Seale was about to start in New Haven. Seale and seven other Panthers had been charged with ruthlessly killing one of their own, Alex Rackley, but not before torturing, beating, and scalding him. Afterward, said police, they mutilated the body. The Panthers had suspected Rackley of being a police informant, and believed he had tipped off the authorities to a New York bombing conspiracy.
    New Haven braced for rioting as thousands of angry Panther supporters flooded into New Haven. Another Panther leader, convicted cop killer Hughie Newton, was freed from San Quentin inCalifornia on $50,000 bail and showed up to support Seale, calling for full-scale revolution against “Fascist Amerika.” Jane Fonda also arrived in town to whip up the crowd, raising her hand in a Black Power salute.
    Like many members of what was now called the New Left, Hillary admired both Newton and Seale. (Seale had already gained fame as one of the Chicago Eight, the group tried for leading the disruptions at the Democratic National Convention.) She suspected that Seale had been set up by the FBI and, doubting whether he could ever receive a fair trial, prepared to take part in a huge May Day rally in support of the Panthers. Hillary remained sympathetic to the Panthers, even when their supporters were suspected of setting fire to Yale’s International Law Library. While she joined a bucket brigade of faculty and students to douse the flames, Hillary was thinking of ways to aide Seale and his cohorts.
    In their trademark black leather uniforms, storm-trooper boots, dark glasses, and black berets, the Panthers cultivated a swaggering, menacing image that, according to one former member, appealed to the “strong masochistic streak” in the New Left. The party had been formed out of an Oakland, California, street gang in 1967 by Seale and Huey Newton. Panthers, many of whom had done prison time for serious crimes, brandished weapons and patrolled the streets in armed cadres, focusing on cases of police brutality that they said proliferated in the ghetto.
    Although it was Stokely Carmichael who coined the slogan “Black Power” and booted whites out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Panthers were the first to blatantly reject the notion of peaceful protest. They also differed from other reform-minded groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Urban League in that theirs was an openly Marxist organization with a forthright revolutionary agenda.
    The Panthers had remained a local Bay Area phenomenon untilOctober 1967, when a single bloody incident thrust them center stage. Newton, the party’s self-proclaimed “minister of defense,” was leaving a party celebrating the end of his probation for a knifing incident when he was stopped by Oakland policeman John Frey. There was a struggle, and within minutes Frey was dead—the victim of five gunshot wounds, including two in the back at close range. A backup officer was wounded, as was Newton.
    With the help of such fellow Panther ideologues as Seale and convicted rapist turned Soul on Ice author Eldridge Cleaver, the Newton trial