College letters show Hillary Rodham transformed from Goldwater Girl to liberal antiwar activist

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: In the ’60s, a Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out in Letters
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: July 29, 2007


(Lee Balterman/Time Life Pictures, via Getty Images)
Hillary Rodham in 1969.

....In her early letters, Ms. Rodham refers to her involvement with the Young Republicans, a legacy of her upbringing. In October of her freshman year, she dismisses the local chapter as “so inept,” which she says she might be able to leverage to her own benefit. “I figure that I may be able to work things my own way by the time I’m a junior so I’m going to stick to it,” she writes.

Still, the letters reveal a fast-eroding allegiance to the party of her childhood. She ridicules a trip she had taken to a Young Republicans convention as “a farce that would have done Oscar Wilde credit.” By the summer of 1967, Ms. Rodham — writing from her parents’ vacation home in Lake Winola, Pa. — begins referring to Republicans as “they” rather than “we.”

“That’s no Freudian slip,” she adds. A few months later, she would be volunteering on Senator Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign in New Hampshire. By the time she delivered her commencement address at Wellesley in 1969, she was citing her generation’s “indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest.”...


***

Ms. Rodham becomes expansive and wistful when discussing the nature of leadership and public service, and how the validation of serving others can be a substitute for self-directed wisdom. “If people react to you in the role of answer bestower then quite possibly you are,” she writes in a letter postmarked Nov. 15, 1967, and continues in this vein for another page before changing the subject to what Mr. Peavoy (a high school friend, now a professor at Scripps College) plans to do the following weekend....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/us/politics/29letter.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

[IowaGirl]

1. Another very interesting article. Those pants.....

are hilarious! :rofl:

[facepalm]

2. Intriguing

thanks for posting this