Back to School

Wellesley, Massachusetts

It was a tough week for Hillary Clinton trying to face down a Democratic field that had decided to go negative. She turned in a sub-par debate performance and then one of her donors suggested, on a high-profile conference call, that Tim Russert "should be shot."

But in the midst of the turmoil, her supporters remained unfazed. Kristin Ruben, a Wellesley sophomore majoring in geosciences, was camped out in front of Alumnae Hall at 5:45 in the morning last Thursday for the chance to see Clinton's 10:30 appearance. An early-morning passerby thought something might be wrong and asked Ruben if she was all right. Others began arriving around 7:30, and the line to greet Clinton in her triumphant return to her alma mater eventually topped a thousand, mostly young women, many wearing T-shirts proclaiming "I can be president too" and "Make History!" There was spontaneous clapping and cheering in the line, the Drexel debate both out of sight and out of mind. And really, who could blame them? With a Wellesley graduate running for president, there hasn't been this much excitement in feminism since Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls came to Washington in 2005 to lobby against private fuel storage.

It was, of course, not the first time Clinton had addressed the school. In 1969, young Hillary Rodham became the first student ever to speak at Wellesley's graduation, through a series of what with hindsight might be called Clintonian machinations. As she explains in her autobiography, Living History, her close friend Eleanor Acheson, granddaughter of Dean, decided that it was imperative that the school allow a student to speak. Acheson made her demand to Wellesley's president, Ruth Adams, who refused. Acheson declared "that if the request was denied, she would personally lead an effort to stage a counter-commencement. And, she added, she was confident her grandfather would attend."

Looking to play peacemaker, Clinton, who was then president of the student government, met with Adams, who said her chief concern was that she didn't know who the students would choose and whether that person could be trusted to act with decorum. Coincidentally, Clinton explained, the students had already chosen her. Following the grand tradition of college administrators the world over, Adams acquiesced.

Clinton's speech on May 31, 1969, is the stuff of legend at Wellesley--portions of it were quoted on T-shirts at the rally, and the candidate herself made reference to it several times. She wasn't quite as polished in those days:

Within the context of a society that we perceive--now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see--but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. .  .  . If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere. But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves.

The speech brought her national recognition: television appearances, radio interviews, even notice in Life magazine. The coverage was almost universally fawning.

Clinton's remarks at Wellesley this time were more on-message. There was the usual anti-Bush diatribe--"[the president] has undermined women's rights and gay rights and appointed Supreme Court justices who've chipped away at reproductive rights, undermined equal pay, and turned back the clock on school integration." She rang the torture bell, warned about global warming, gave a shout-out to Al Gore, and proclaimed that "If George Bush doesn't end this war while he is president, when I am president, I will." It was pretty much the standard fare, though perhaps not as perfectly pro-withdrawal as the crowd might have preferred.

But she still wasn't entirely coherent. She claimed that "there is no military solution" for Iraq because of the tangle of tribal and sectarian rivalries there. Scarcely a minute later, she promised to commit troops to Darfur and Burma and to "create real consequences for anyone who continues the bloodshed or obstructs the peace process." The students applauded both sentiments with equal fervor.

Clinton also attacked Bush's profligate spending, charging that "he's run up our national debt to $9 trillion so every baby born today starts life with $30,000 dollars of debt on his or her tiny shoulders." She insisted that we must end this "reckless spending," but in the course of a brief speech pledged $50 billion for AIDS research, a $1 billion "Green Building Fund," and universal health care.