Hillary is not just “a First Lady with ambition.”

I had always assumed that Hillary was a very smart woman married to the president who decided to run for office.

But that’s not her story at all. Hillary was on track to be a political superstar long before she met Bill Clinton. In fact, it’s entirely possible that if there was no Bill Clinton, she could have been elected president in 1992.

Not long after she accepted [Bill’s marriage proposal], [Bill] told Betsey Wright that he and Hillary were going to be married. Wright was not pleased. “I really started in on how he couldn’t do that. He shouldn’t do that. That he could find anybody he wanted to be a political wife, but we’d [the women’s movement] never find anybody like her” to run for political office. Wright promptly called Hillary and told her she hoped Hillary wouldn’t marry Bill. Hillary laughed and said she was going to marry Bill and live in Arkansas. Elective office was not the only way to lead. She was going to make a difference wherever she was living. —Carl Bernstein, 'A Woman in Charge'

Hillary established a reputation for making change rather than enemies—even in college.

Hillary was elected Student Body President at Wellesley College in 1968—after a three week campaign that saw her knocking door-to-door in every single dorm on campus. As president, she focused on making change happen, rather than making enemies: “Part of her skill was finding a careful middle ground that brought progress without engendering unnecessary enmity,” her biographer Carl Bernstein wrote. "Fellow students, even those uncomfortable with her politics, were drawn to Hillary’s natural warmth, humor, and obvious ability to get the job done. There was something both generous and gracious about her character that made people like being around her. She possessed a seemingly unselfish ability to praise others, recognize their personal concerns, remember meaningful details about their lives.”

What did she get done?

At Hillary’s insistence, a summer Upward Bound program for inner-city children was initiated on campus, antiwar activities were conducted in college facilities, the skirt rule had been rescinded, grades were given on a pass-fail basis, parietal rules were a thing of the past, interdisciplinary majors were permitted for the first time. —Carl Bernstein, 'A Woman in Charge'

Just a pause here—to explain parietal rules. Wellesley was a woman's college—one of the seven sister colleges that were made to mirror the all-male Ivy League schools of the day. As a woman’s college of its time, men were not allowed in dorm rooms. Hillary helped put an end to that.

She has always been the opposite of Bernie Sanders.

The biggest difference between her and so many others in politics today? One that was there from the beginning: a “willingness to participate in the drudgery of government rather than simply direct policy from Olympian heights," Bernstein explained. "She attended committee meetings, became involved in the minutiae (of finding a better system for the return of library books, for instance), and studied every aspect of the Wellesley curriculum in developing a successful plan to reduce the number of required courses.”

As a fellow student said of her at the time: “she was more interested in the process of achieving victory than in taking a philosophical position that could not lead anywhere.” Is there any better way of contrasting her with Bernie Sanders?

The death of Martin Luther King, Jr. was a test of leadership for Hillary.

One of her most significant moments as student body president at Wellesley came in April 1968—when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated:

Hearing the news, she stormed into a dorm room, shaking and shouting. She threw her book bag against the wall. One witness said she screamed, “I can’t stand it anymore! I can’t take it!”…King was perhaps the man she admired most in the country, if not the world. She had met him in 1962, shaken his hand, sat spellbound as he preached, twice. —Carl Bernstein, 'A Woman in Charge'

It was just two months after her election as president—and the town exploded. Students threatened to go on hunger strikes if Wellesley didn’t hire more black faculty and admit more black students. Other students planned on shutting down the school.

Instead, Hillary put herself forward as a mediator between students and the administration—in search of a solution. With her leadership, a solution was struck: the college promised to recruit more minority students and faculty. Wellesley even committed to pushing other employers in the region to create better living conditions and job opportunities for minorities.

Hillary has been studying how to make government more effective for the poor since she was an undergraduate.

What did she study as an undergrad? Her thesis was on the effectiveness of public programs. She went to the same kind of impoverished neighborhoods of Chicago that Obama would one day organize in—speaking to community leaders to see if Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programs were on the right track. Her conclusion? They weren’t. The programs put too much on the shoulders of community members without providing enough federal resources to get the job done. As part of the project, she interviewed Saul Alinsky, the famed organizer—gaining his trust and even a job offer.

Hillary came to national prominence before Bill Clinton.

Hillary was the first student in Wellesley’s history to ever speak at her graduation—but that’s not what made the headlines. It's what she said. Her speech followed a guest commencement by Senator Edward Brooke, the only black member of the Senate at the time—and the only member of the chamber who wasn’t white. Hillary had campaigned for him as a freshman, but his speech was disappointing. More than disappointing, it seemed to side with Nixon on the war in Vietnam—and called anti-war and civil rights demonstrations “coercive protest.” He said he had “empathy” with their goals, but that was about it. Hillary rejected his premise:

I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest… —Hillary Clinton

Constructive protest.

I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said…Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy… —Hillary Clinton

But it wasn't enough.

She went on to highlight three key themes: integrity, respect, and trust.

Integrity: “If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know.”

Respect: “There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people…”

Trust: “Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said 'Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust.' What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in 'East Coker' by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.”

The speech gained national recognition and earned Hillary a prominent place in the student protest movement. You can read her full speech here.

She chose to go into law because politics alone couldn't get things done.

Hillary chose to go to Yale Law School because it was part of a movement—sparked by Thurgood Marshall and civil rights lawyers—that began to recognize law as a powerful force for social change. It wasn’t just Congress or the Presidency that could reshape the country. Her interests “were not in the legal academy. They were in the legal profession and the use of law in the service of people,” a classmate said.

She also chose Yale for a very different reason—it wasn’t as sexist as Harvard. On a tour of the Harvard Law School, one top professor told her: “we don’t need any more women.” Even at Yale, she was just one of 27 women in a school of 235 students. Yes, even at Yale, women only comprised 11 percent of the student body. A big difference when you’re coming from a place like Wellesley—where it’s 100 percent women.

Classes were an afterthought to her time at Yale.

She served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. And she joined pioneering children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman to research the discrimination facing migrant farm laborers and their families. She then developed this information into data for a Senate Subcommittee. As Bernstein notes, it was “an education in how the most powerless citizens were further punished by malevolent government and misuse of the law.”

She also worked to expand her own understanding:

She audited classes at Yale’s medical school and worked at the Yale–New Haven Hospital on problems of children’s physical and mental health, including child abuse—which was being seriously studied for the first time as a significant sociological phenomenon. She helped establish the hospital’s legal procedures dealing with incoming cases of suspected child abuse. At the Yale Child Study Center, she spent much of the academic year observing clinical sessions with children and attending subsequent case discussions with their doctors. The center’s director [and one of her professors]…asked her to become their research assistant on a book…Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, [that] became a standard text of the era. —Carl Bernstein, 'A Woman in Charge'

When they met, Hillary was a bigger deal than Bill Clinton.

When they first started dating at Yale, Hillary carried more cache than Bill Clinton. In fact, according to Bernstein, some thought that Bill Clinton’s initial interest in her was just a way for him to cash in on that cache. To (as Bernstein put it) trade “on her renown to advance his own stature on campus and beyond.”

She has the martial spirit that Obama lacks.

You know that recent Obama Supreme Court pick? The one that seems a little lukewarm? A little too old? A little too white? A little too middle-of-the-road for progressives? Hillary’s not like that. Here’s Bernstein defining how she differs from Bill—describing her toughness:

…A kind of military rigor: reading the landscape, seeing the obstacles, recognizing which ones are malevolent or malign, and taking expedient action accordingly. Bill’s process is different. He is slow to recognize the malevolence in others, he wants to assume the best about them, and he is willing to spend months trying to win their hearts and minds. Hillary means to cut off the enemy at the pass. —Carl Bernstein, 'A Woman in Charge'

Her first job out of law school was on the Watergate Impeachment investigation.

She was there in the Miami Convention Hall in 1968 when Nixon accepted the nomination. There in the room and disgusted by the direction of the Republican Party. And just a few years later she was on Capitol Hill, working as a lawyer on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee to take him down.

In Arkansas, she broke glass ceilings all over the place.

When Bill Clinton told his mom Virginia that his fiancé Hillary wouldn’t be taking his last name—that she would remain “Hillary Rodham”—Bill’s mom literally cried. It was so contentious that a friend called Hillary his “political Waterloo.” During Bill's run for Governor, it was just the first of a thousand so-called “scandals” targeting her:

Clinton’s opponents criticized him for having a wife with a career—a lawyer to boot—who was so independent-minded that she wouldn’t take her husband’s name. The “name issue” would become one of the most talked about of the campaign. Men and women around the state argued publicly and privately about it. “People thought even his wife didn’t like him enough to take his name,” said an acerbic political columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Meredith Oakley, who would make a name for himself writing about the Clintons. Within the campaign itself and among supporters, there were a number who urged Hillary directly to change her mind. —Carl Bernstein, 'A Woman in Charge'

But that wasn’t the only convention she flaunted. In Arkansas, she joined one of the top law firms in the state—as the firm’s first woman lawyer. She wasn’t afraid of the boy’s club. “In our morning meetings she didn’t hold her tongue,” a partner at the time remembered. “She was simply never intimidated by anyone, partner or client, and that in itself is often intimidating to others.”

Hillary went to battle with President Reagan—and won.

In the late 70s, Hillary was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to serve as chair of the board of the Legal Services Corporation. The organization served the poor and downtrodden—those who by no fault of their own couldn't afford an attorney. At the time, the Legal Services Corporation oversaw five thousand lawyers handling a million cases a year. Cases by the poor. The abused. The vulnerable. Hillary was the first woman ever to hold the post. And she was confirmed by Congress. But it wasn’t an easy job.

Republicans hated the program—and maybe none more than Ronald Reagan. In 1980, Reagan was Governor of California and angling to be the Republican Nominee for President. When he tried to cut legal services for the poor, Hillary fought back. She led an effort to convince the board to completely reject his plans in California. And she won! But Reagan wasn’t done with the Legal Services Corporation yet.

When he was elected to the presidency, Reagan struck back. He lobbied Congress to cut funding for the Legal Services Corporation. He even tried to stuff the board with appointees to shut it down. As chair, Hillary didn’t let it happen. First, she sought a restraining order to stop Reagan’s appointees from meeting and coordinating before their confirmation by the Senate. Then, she rallied with Democrats on Capitol Hill. The result? The Senate rejected Reagan’s conservative nominees. Under her leadership and in spite of Reagan, she increased the organization's funding from $90 million to $300 million—more than tripling its impact. Still in her early thirties, she had gone to battle with President Reagan—twice—and won both times.

She once served as "best person" in a friend's wedding—and wore a tuxedo.

Enough said.

Oh yeah, and through all of this, she killed it as a lawyer.

After helping take down Nixon, her first job in Arkansas was as a professor of criminal law at the University of Arkansas. A decade later, she was repeatedly listed as one of America’s 100 most powerful lawyers by The National Law Journal. And she kept publishing influential journal articles. In 1992, the New York Review of Books looked at her impact on the legal profession and declared: “She is one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades…what set her apart from other successful and scrambling lawyers was her attempt to undergird practical activity with legal theory.”

Her focus? Extending and defending the rights of children. “She deplored the ad hoc nature of reform efforts in a field where slogans and sentiment blunt responses to the right-wing defense of ‘family values,’” Garry Wills wrote in the New York Review of Books. Here’s just a quick survey of some of her writings of that time:

'Children Under the Law' in Harvard Educational Review

'Children's Policies: Abandonment and Neglect' in Yale Law Journal

'Children's Rights: A Legal Perspective' in Children's Rights: Contemporary Perspectives

'Teacher Education: Of the People, By the People, and For the People' on Teacher Education Policies, Practices, and Research’ published by the Center For Teacher Education, University of Texas

She confronted China’s human rights abuses—and advanced the women’s movement—in one of the top 100 speeches of the 20th century.

“Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.”

Hillary declared to a packed crowd. It was 1995 and she was addressing the United Nations Fourth Women’s Conference in Beijing, China. The speech is ranked number 35 on American Rhetoric’s Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century (ahead of Bill, who ranks at 90 on the list). And it almost didn’t happen. There were those throughout the Clinton Administration who cautioned against her going to China. Upsetting the Chinese government. But she insisted. And in so doing, she made a lasting impact on the global women’s movement.

One fact she mentions that isn’t underscored enough—and that she would do well to highlight during her historic election this year: “It took 150 years after the signing of our Declaration of Independence for women to win the right to vote.”

Also striking in the speech are echoes of phrases she still uses 20 years later, such as “that everyone can live up to their God-given potential.” The first six minutes of the speech focus on conference logistics—so start at 6:13—