Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton born on October 26, 1947, at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
An American attorney, politician and member of the Democratic Party. As the wife of the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, she was First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. She then represented New York in the United States Senatefrom 2001 to 2009. In the 2008 election, Clinton was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. From 2009 to 2013, she was the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving under President Barack Obama. Clinton formally announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the 2016 election on April 12, 2015.
She was raised in a United Methodist family, first in Chicago and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois.Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham (1911–1993), was of Welsh and English descent; he managed a successful small business in the textile industry. Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell (1919–2011), was a homemaker of English, Scottish, French, and Welsh descent. Hillary has two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony.
A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham was the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley College in 1969 and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973. After a stint as a Congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas and married Bill Clinton in 1975. Rodham cofounded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in 1977; in 1978, she became the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation; and in 1979, the first female partner at Rose Law Firm.The National Law Journal twice listed her as one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America. As First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992 with her husband as Governor, she led a task force that reformed Arkansas’s education system. During that time, she sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart and several other corporations.
As First Lady of the United States, her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan of 1993, failed to gain approval from the U.S. Congress. In 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a leading role in advocating the creation of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. Her years as First Lady drew a polarized response from the American public.
The only First Lady to have been subpoenaed, she testified before a federal grand jury in 1996 regarding the Whitewater controversy, but was never charged with wrongdoing in this or several other investigations during the Clinton presidency. Her marriage endured the Lewinsky scandal in 1998.
After moving to New York, Clinton was elected in 2000 the first female senator from the state; she is the only First Lady ever to have run for public office. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she supported military action in Afghanistan and the Iraq Resolution, but subsequently objected to the George W. Bush administration’s conduct of theIraq war. She opposed most of Bush’s domestic policies. Clinton was re-elected to the Senate in 2006. Running in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, Clinton won far more primaries and delegates than any other female candidate in American history, but narrowly lost the nomination to Obama.
Selected to serve as Secretary of State by Obama, Clinton was confirmed by the Senate in January 2009, and served until February 2013. She was at the forefront of the U.S. response to the Arab Spring and advocated the U.S. military intervention in Libya. As Secretary of State, she took responsibility for security lapses related to the 2012 Benghazi attack, which resulted in the deaths of American consulate personnel, but defended her personal actions in regard to the matter.
Clinton visited more countries than any other Secretary of State. She viewed “smart power” as the strategy for asserting U.S. leadership and values, by combining military power with diplomacy and American capabilities in economics, technology, and other areas. She encouraged empowerment of women everywhere and used social mediato communicate the U.S. message abroad. Leaving office at the end of Obama’s first term, she authored her fifth book and undertook speaking engagements before announcing her second run for the presidency in April 2015.
Bill Clinton – Hillary Clinton Announces 2008 Presidential Run
Yale Law School and postgraduate studies
Rodham then entered Yale Law School. There she served on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action. During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center, learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work,Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973). She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free legal advice for the poor. In the summer of 1970 she was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman‘s Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale‘s Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. There she researched migrant workers‘ problems in housing, sanitation, health and education. Edelman later became a significant mentor. Rodham was recruited by political advisor Anne Wexler to work on the 1970 campaign of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Duffey, with Rodham later crediting Wexler with providing her first job in politics.
Hillary Rodham Clinton celebrates husband Bill Clinton’s victory in the Democratic runoff for governor in Little
In the late spring of 1971 she began dating Bill Clinton, also a law student at Yale. That summer she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. The firm was well known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes (two of its four partners were current or formerCommunist Party members) Rodham worked on child custody and other cases. Clinton canceled his original summer plans in order to live with her in California; the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school. The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned inTexas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973, having stayed on an extra year to be with Clinton. He first proposed marriage to her following graduation but she declined, uncertain if she wanted to tie her future to his.
Rodham began a year of postgraduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center. Her first scholarly article, “Children Under the Law”, was published in the Harvard Educational Review in late 1973. Discussing the new children’s rights movement, it stated that “child citizens” were “powerless individuals”and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but that instead courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis. The article became frequently cited in the field.
Role as First Lady
When Bill Clinton took office as president in January 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the First Lady of the United States, and announced that she would be using that form of her name. She was the first First Lady to hold a postgraduate degree and to have her own professional career up to the time of entering theWhite House. She was also the first to have an office in the West Wing of the White House in addition to the usual First Lady offices in the East Wing. She was part of the innermost circle vetting appointments to the new administration and her choices filled at least eleven top-level positions and dozens more lower-level ones. After Eleanor Roosevelt, Clinton is regarded as the most openly empowered presidential wife in American history.
First Term
Upon entering the Senate, Clinton maintained a low public profile and built relationships with senators from both parties. She forged alliances with religiously inclined senators by becoming a regular participant in the Senate Prayer Breakfast. She served on five Senate committees: Committee on Budget (2001–2002), Committee on Armed Services (2003–2009), Committee on Environment and Public Works (2001–2009), Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (2001–2009) and Special Committee on Aging. She was also a member of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (2001–2009).
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Clinton sought to obtain funding for the recovery efforts in New York City and security improvements in her state. Working with New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, she was instrumental in securing $21 billion in funding for the World Trade Center site’s redevelopment. She subsequently took a leading role in investigating the health issues faced by 9/11 first responders. Clinton voted for the USA Patriot Act in October 2001. In 2005, when the act was up for renewal, she worked to address some civil liberties concerns with it, before voting in favor of a compromise renewed act in March 2006 that gained large majority support.
Clinton strongly supported the 2001 U.S. military action in Afghanistan, saying it was a chance to combat terrorism while improving the lives of Afghan women who suffered under the Taliban government. Clinton voted in favor of the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution, which authorized President George W. Bush to use military force against Iraq.
From the East Coast to Arkansas
During her postgraduate study, Rodham served as staff attorney for Edelman’s newly founded Children’s Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children.
The way we were: Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton in 1969
Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1984 with Chelsea, 4.
In 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal. Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard Nussbaum,Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for impeachment. The committee’s work culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974.
By then, Rodham was viewed as someone with a bright political future: Democratic political organizer and consultant Betsey Wright had moved from Texas to Washington the previous year to help guide her career, and Wright thought Rodham had the potential to become a future senator or president. Meanwhile, Clinton had repeatedly asked Rodham to marry him and she continued to demur. After failing the District of Columbia bar exam and passing the Arkansas exam, Rodham came to a key decision. As she later wrote, “I chose to follow my heart instead of my head”. She thus followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, rather than staying in Washington where career prospects were brighter. He was then teaching law and running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in his home state. In August 1974, Rodham moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and became one of only two female faculty members in the School of Law at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She gave classes in criminal law, where she was considered a rigorous teacher and tough grader, and was the first director of the school’s legal aid clinic. She still harbored doubts about marriage, concerned that her separate identity would be lost and that her accomplishments would be viewed in the light of someone else’s.
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