Hillary Rodham Clinton


Clinton, Hillary Rodham

(rŏd`əm), 1947–, U.S. senator and secretary of state, wife of President Bill ClintonClinton, Bill
(William Jefferson Clinton), 1946–, 42d President of the United States (1993–2001), b. Hope, Ark. His father died before he was born, and he was originally named William Jefferson Blythe 4th, but after his mother remarried, he assumed the surname of his
..... Click the link for more information. , b. Chicago, grad. Wellesley College (B.A. 1969), Yale Law School (LL.B., 1973). After law school she served on the House panel that investigated the Watergate affairWatergate affair,
in U.S. history, series of scandals involving the administration of President Richard M. Nixon; more specifically, the burglarizing of the Democratic party national headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C.
..... Click the link for more information. . She was in private practice from 1977 until 1992, becoming an expert on children's rights. After her husband's election as president, she initially played a highly visible role in his administration, co-chairing the task force that proposed changes in the U.S. health-care system. Less publicly involved in policy issues after that program failed to gain support, she won sympathy for her support of her husband during the Lewinsky scandalLewinsky scandal
, sensation that enveloped the presidency of Bill Clinton in 1998–99, leading to his impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives and acquittal by the Senate.
..... Click the link for more information.  and the subsequent impeachment proceedings. She became the first first lady to be subpoenaed by a grand jury when she testified about the WhitewaterWhitewater,
popular name for a failed 1970s Arkansas real estate venture by the Whitewater Development Corp., in which Gov. (later President) Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, were partners; the name is also used for the political ramifications of this scheme.
..... Click the link for more information.  affair in 1996. In 2000, Clinton won election as a Democrat to the U.S. senate from New York, becoming the first wife of a president to win election to public office; she was reelected in 2006. A candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, she lost to Barack ObamaObama, Barack
(Barack Hussein Obama 2d), , 1961–, 44th president of the United States (2009–17), b. Honolulu, grad. Columbia (B.A. 1983), Harvard Law School (J.D. 1991).
..... Click the link for more information. , but she subsequently served (2009–13) as secretary of state after he was elected president. Her use of a private email server while at the State Dept. was widely criticized, including by the FBI, and it became an issue when she ran for president in 2016. After defeating Senator Bernie SandersSanders, Bernie
(Bernard Sanders), 1941–, American politician, b. Brooklyn, N.Y. The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he spent a year at Brooklyn College and graduated from the Univ. of Chicago (B.A., 1964). He moved to Vermont in 1964.
..... Click the link for more information.  to become the first woman nominated for U.S. president by a major political party, she chose Senator Tim KaineKaine, Tim
(Timothy Michael Kaine), 1958–, U.S. politician, b. St. Paul, Minn., B.A. Univ. of Missouri, 1979, J.D. Harvard, 1983. After a clerkship, he was a lawyer in private practice, and taught legal ethics as an adjunct professor (1988–94) at the Univ.
..... Click the link for more information.  as her running mate. The Clinton-Kaine ticket subsequently lost the election (although it won the popular vote) to Donald TrumpTrump, Donald John,
1946–, 45th president of the United States (2017–), b. New York City. Prior to his election as president in 2016, he was a business executive and television personality rather than a political leader. After attending Fordham Univ.
..... Click the link for more information.  and Mike PencePence, Mike
(Michael Richard Pence), 1959–, U.S. politician, b. Columbus, Ind., grad. Hanover College, 1981, Indiana Univ. law school, 1986. A Republican, he twice ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives before he won the first of his six terms in 2000.
..... Click the link for more information.  in one of the bitterest, most personal, and socially divisive contests in recent U.S. history. Clinton is the author of It Takes a Village (1996); two memoirs, Living History (2003) and Hard Choices (2014); and What Happened (2017), an account of the 2016 race from her perspective.

Bibliography

See biographies by D. Radcliffe (1994), D. Brock (1996), G. Sheehy (1999), G. Troy (2006), C. Bernstein (2007), and J. Gerth and D. Van Natta, Jr. (2007); W. H. Chafe, Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal (2012); J. Allen and A. Parnes, HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (2014).

Clinton, Hillary Rodham

(1947– ) lawyer, First Lady; born in Park Ridge, Ill. The daughter of a prosperous fabric store owner, she graduated from Wellesley College (1969) and Yale University Law School (1973). In 1975 she married Bill Clinton, a fellow Yale Law School graduate. She practiced law while he became attorney general and then governor of Arkansas, and during this time gained a national reputation for her contributions to issues of women's and children's rights and public education, through her publications, public advocacies, and court cases. (In 1991, before most Americans had heard of her, The National Law Journal named her one of the 100 most powerful lawyers in America.) During the 1992 presidential campaign, she emerged as a dynamic and valued partner of her husband, and as president he named her to head the Task Force on National Health Reform (1993). Inevitably there were charges of everything from old-fashioned nepotism to new-fashioned feminism, and she became the butt of both good-natured humor and vicious accusations, but less partisan observers recognized her as simply an example of the new American woman.