Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

WELLESLEY, Mass.—In the fall of 1968, in the wake of one of the most violent, volatile summers in American history, as young people clashed with police and clamored for an end to the war in Vietnam and the draft and for greater racial justice and women’s rights, the student body president at Wellesley College stood in front of the incoming freshman class and talked to them about the merits of conversation and committees.

“On some campuses, change is effected through non-violent or even violent means,” not-yet-21-year-old Hillary Rodham, the future Hillary Clinton, told the approximately 400 newest students of the country’s preeminent women’s college. “Although we, too, have had our demonstrations, change here is usually a product of discussion in the decision-making process.” She had just spent much of her summer in Washington, interning on Capitol Hill. At a historic juncture of acute anti-establishment fervor, she told them to trust the system. Progress at Wellesley, she explained, “often results through action taken by the Senate of the College Government Association.”


The idea of “President Hillary” in 2016 is thrilling for some and scary to others. But for one small group—students at Wellesley in 1968 and ‘69—it is a phenomenon they have already lived through. And while the student presidency has only so much in common with the job she’s bidding for now—welcoming new students is not exactly a state of the union address—what she did in elected office as a junior and senior in college turned out to be remarkably predictive of the kind of politician she has become.

Clinton has called the four years she spent on the secluded campus in this staid suburb of Boston “among the most exhilarating and informative of my life.” The most popular storyline from her college career is her shift from right to left on the ideological spectrum, but lots of her peers made the same transition. Much more telling, and what emerges from a close look at her role as a leader at Wellesley, is the way she ended up occupying an almost singular role in the school’s political life. During a period of immense social upheaval, she was the most prominent intermediary between her increasingly radicalized fellow students and a change-resistant faculty and administration. “Hillary tended always to be what I will call a consensus person,” classmate Connie Hoenk Shapiro told me.

The college’s archives, including seldom seen notes of hers, minutes of student government meetings and coverage in the student newspaper and other campus publications, as well as interviews with the professors with whom she was closest and more than a dozen of her classmates and contemporaries, reveal a strikingly clear picture of the political personality that has defined the Democratic presidential nominee ever since: centrist, cautious, respectful of authority, progressive but never at the expense of maintaining access to the seats of power.

While some more disaffected students saw her as overly tame for the time—“way too mainstream, talking the language of the administration, co-opted,” one of them, who’s now dead, said in 1999—many of her classmates considered her more pragmatic style important and useful in the tumultuous atmosphere.

"Hillary tended always to be what I will call a consensus person,” classmate Connie Hoenk Shapiro said. Above, Hillary Rodham participates in a panel. | Wellesley College Archives

“Rather than using her position to make us more upset … I think she was searching along with all of us,” Nancy Wanderer told me, “and she became our leader in that search, as opposed to being a very revolutionary type of person who stands up and says, ‘Let’s tear this place down because the world’s a mess.’”

“She had this uncanny ability to frame things in terms of the sensibility of those she was addressing,” Jan Krigbaum Piercy said. “She knew how to temper things.”

As she climbed the ranks of college government, from class representative to the student senate as a sophomore to chairman of the “Vil Juniors” organization and finally to student body president, she favored teach-ins over sit-ins, talking over chanting, symposia over sign-waving. She led successful initiatives that look somewhat small-bore now but felt like big deals then—convincing the college to all but eliminate antiquated curfew regulations and rules about when men from surrounding colleges could (and mostly could not) visit their dorms, getting students more latitude in choosing courses and earning them the right to take some of them pass-fail. She also was supportive of a committed group of black students who pressured the administration to agree to admit more black students, hire more black professors, institute a black studies program and end segregated room assignments. And she did these things by not only listening to the concerns of fellow students but by forging relationships with professors, deans and a college president whom those same students saw as a stodgy obstacle to change.

Hillary Rodham on campus. | Wellesley College Archives

“She was very pragmatic in terms of how do you approach the college administration,” said one of those professors, Alan Schechter, who was her political science thesis adviser.

“A lot of maturity went into that, and a lot of compromising,” said Philip Phibbs, another of her mentors in the political science department.

Students were pulling her to the left, and professors and administrators often were pulling her to the right, said Kris Olson, a classmate, “and I think she was more centrist, more of a good-government type. She was one of the few who actually had relationships on both sides, and she was pretty busy going back and forth, back and forth.”

The academic year that had started with her speech to the freshmen ended with a different speech on the last day of May—the much-more-written-about one that she gave at graduation, to her classmates and their parents, professors and administrators, and a sitting Republican U.S. senator whose remarks she gently rebuked with her own off-the-cuff thoughts. It was sufficiently noteworthy to land her in the pages of Life magazine—tapped as a bold voice of a new generation—and in the last quarter-century, from her time as First Lady and then in the Senate to her stint as Secretary of State, it has come to represent a public consummation of her turn from supporting ultra-conservative Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 to volunteering for Democratic hopeful Eugene McCarthy in 1968 as a more outspoken liberal.

New Window Hillary's speech to freshmen. | Wellesley College Archives

The graduation speech offered a largely progressive message, but she delivered it in language that was far from incendiary, more of a manifesto of moderation than a revolutionary’s battle cry. She talked about “constructive protest.” She noted a “conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left.” And, as if there was any doubt she was addressing an elite, educated crowd, she invoked a poem by T.S. Eliot, “East Coker.” She had excerpted the poem, in fact, more extensively at the beginning of the 92-page thesis she had turned in earlier that month—about Saul Alinsky, the countercultural community organizer and later a punching bag of conservative commentators. The thrust of the thesis was what Rodham viewed as the inherent limits of radical activism, and among the many resonant lines of Eliot’s work, one stands out for its applicability to the ambitious young woman who was speaking in the graduation gown: “So here I am, in the middle way …”

***

“I just couldn’t get her to reveal anything,” said Laura Grosch, a fellow Wellesley student who spent three one-hour sessions painting Rodham’s portrait.

Grosch was a junior and an art history major—she’s now a professional artist living in North Carolina—and Rodham was a freshman. They lived in the same Davis Hall dorm. Grosch wanted the practice and some extra money—she charged 30 bucks—and Rodham volunteered.

“I didn’t really know Hillary until she asked me to paint her portrait,” Grosch said in an interview last week. Over the course of the sessions, she tried through informal conversation to tease out of Rodham some essential truth to inform her painting, “something poetic”—but it was a challenge. Rodham talked a lot about politics, conservative politics, Grosch recalled. The finished product ended up first with Rodham’s parents and then with Chelsea Clinton, last Grosch heard.

Hillary's commencement speech in 1969. | Wellesley College Archives

At the time, though, what was there to reveal? Rodham wasn’t so sure herself.

She was from the middle of the country, Park Ridge, Illinois, outside of Chicago. She was a church-goer, a Methodist. Her mother was a Democrat, but quiet about it, and preached to her children an even keel by using a carpenter’s level as a visual aid—“you try to keep that bubble in the center,” she would say—but her stern, taskmaster father, on the other hand, was resolutely a Republican, even after supporting the losing presidential bids of Richard Nixon in 1960 and Goldwater four years after that. And by the spring of her freshman year, his daughter was the gung-ho head of Wellesley’s Young Republicans organization. She worked to recruit student workers for state and local Republican campaigns. “The girl who doesn’t want to go out and shake hands,” she said to the Wellesley News, “can type letters or do general office work.” She helped to organize a forum on campus called “Why be a Republican?” She told the student newspaper it was “a vehicle of education.”

In the spring of her sophomore year, Rodham gave a speech from the steps of the main academic building to a crowd of some 350 people about the need for fewer dictated curriculum requirements. “If we get this going, maybe we’ll see a change before we graduate,” she announced, according to the next day’s Boston Globe—one of the first public signals of her patient, incrementalist disposition. One of the organizers of the event, Leslie Pickering Francis, wanted her to participate in part because she was known on campus as a conservative, she told me—a student who could help show the administration that this was an idea with broad backing. Ann Rosewater, another one of the speakers, remembers it the same way. “She wasn’t polarizing,” Rosewater said.

Less than three months later, having relinquished her affiliation with the Young Republicans, Rodham joined friends at a hippie get-together on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge—“a vast ‘be-in,’” as the Globe put it. Rodham sat still as Grosch painted a flower on her chin.

Rodham’s junior year in particular was a turning point.

In the fall, she took a new course, Sociology 220, Urban Society, which was unusual for Wellesley not only because of its larger size—40 or 50 students, according to Steve London, the instructor—but because of its content. The term at the time was “the urban crisis,” but it was unavoidably a class about race relations, London told me. “These were young women who had this real thirst for knowledge about what was going on in the country at that time.”

“I can remember sitting with her and watching the TV set in our dorm watching body bags being brought back by the airplanes from Vietnam,” said Shapiro, one of her classmates.

Rodham became increasingly anti-war, which put her at odds with her father. She still self-identified as a moderate Republican, but she struggled to square this personal evolution with her political upbringing.

Rodham getting her face painted. | Courtesy of Laura Grosch

In a letter to a friend from high school, she said she was an “agnostic intellectual liberal” but “an emotional conservative.”

In a letter to her youth pastor from Park Ridge, she posed the question, “Can one be a mind conservative and a heart liberal?”

And so she started to settle somewhere in the middle.

Friends went into Harvard Square or down to New York or Washington to attend aggressive, tear gas-tense marches and rallies. They don’t remember Rodham joining them.

“No,” Shapiro said.

“Obviously, they were big chaotic events, but I don’t remember her at any of those,” Olson said.

What they do recall, though, and vividly, is often coming back to campus and talking to her about what they saw. She wanted to hear all about it.

“She was very curious and concerned about what was going on,” Olson said, “and I think trying to figure out ways to incorporate the need for change to Wellesley—but doing it in a way that would suit Wellesley.”

“Hillary,” Shapiro said, “was by no means radical.”

What she was, was a budding policy wonk—and one who wanted to be student body president.

Her role as the chair of the Vil Juniors—which made her one of the more prominent upperclassmen on campus to new freshmen—allowed her to meet, talk with and be known by students who now were potential voters in campus elections. Two dozen of them had written a song for her their first year on campus, and now they printed it in a letter to the editor in the News. The lyrics included the lines: “… so Hillary’s solving problems” and “… if everything else goes wrong, our faith in Hillary still is strong …” Rodham didn’t rest. She spent three weeks walking the halls of dorms asking for votes.

A song praising Hillary written by Davis Hall dorm freshmen. | Wellesley College News

Her platform, such as it was, characteristically leaned heavily on a faith in Robert’s Rules of Order. In committees. “As president,” she wrote in a statement about her candidacy in the News on February 15, 1968, “I would … like to explore the feasibility of having students as advisory members of committees directly concerning us such as the library policy committee.” She added: “I have been working through the Constitution Revision Committee on a plan for a joint student-faculty board to consider and encourage ideas of curricular innovation.”

She had two opponents. The biggest threat was Fran Rusan, now Fran Rusan Wilson, who was “somewhere far to the left of Karl Marx,” Wilson said earlier this year. Rodham, on the other hand, she said, “was clearly the consensus candidate running a fairly moderate campaign.”

Rodham’s election surprised no one but (maybe) herself. She gushed to London. “She said, ‘Can you believe it?’” the sociology professor told me. “Those were her exact words: ‘Can you believe I was elected president of the student government?’”

That spring, when Rodham was a kind of president-elect, the campus grew increasingly anxious. Anti-war sentiment had surged to a point where even Wellesley—never close to a radical hotbed like Berkeley or Ann Arbor or Columbia—seemed like its own brand of tinderbox. “I stayed up all night,” she would say more than two decades later to a writer from the alumni magazine, “to talk students out of staging a Vietnam War protest that would embarrass our college.”

And that April, when the assassination of Martin Luther King made racial tensions spike, adding to the combustible mix, students planned a two-day strike from classes to coincide with a national protest. Black students who had founded a civil rights group called Ethos threatened a hunger strike if the administration of the college wouldn’t agree to their demands for more black students and more black professors. All of them considered Rodham a friend.

“Hillary was always supportive of the African-American students,” Karen Williamson, one of the most active Ethos members, told me. “I know she signed the petitions.”

“I remember her being supportive of all the things we were doing—but she didn’t have a leadership role,” said Janet McDonald Hill, another leader.

“I would say supportive. I would not say active,” said Olson, who co-founded a companion organization, Wellesley Against Racism, or WAR. “Hillary was supportive but from a more centrist position. I think that’s what enabled her to win elections and stay in good communication with the administration.” Today, Olson remembers saying to Rodham, “Look, things are going to erupt, and you’re the one who can talk to Ruth”—Ruth Adams, then the president of Wellesley—“so why don’t we figure out a way to do this in a constructive fashion?”

Did that approach of Rodham’s, I asked Olson—presence more than insistence, association more than agitation—help Ethos and WAR eventually achieve their aims?

“It brought more people in, people who otherwise would have seen us as a lunatic fringe,” Olson said. “Hillary allowed access, I think, in ways that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.” The mood was mollified when the administration quickly agreed to address the Ethos demands.

In the educational sessions on the days of the student strike at Wellesley—some of the sessions Rodham helped put together—she stood up to an economics professor who suggested students not going to class was “a know-nothing attitude” and not much of a sacrifice. “Let’s give up weekends,” he said. “I’ll give up my date Saturday night,” Rodham said to him, according to the News, “but I don’t think that’s the point. Individual consciences are fine, but individual consciences have to be made manifest.”

She was also a panelist in one of the sessions—and she asked Schechter to moderate.

“She could’ve picked a faculty member who was more radical,” Schechter said this month. “She picked me because she knew I’d do a more academic approach. They really were teach-ins—they weren’t neutral, but they were not inflammatory at all. Taking over a building and trashing it invariably alienates a larger portion of the population.”

It’s how Schechter felt. It’s how she felt, too, he thought.

“She was not eager to act out,” he said.

Rodham readied for her summer internship in Washington. On May 16, 1968, she was quoted in the News. “I’m going to find out how the system works,” she said.

***

Almost half a century later, in the archives in the campus library, the typed-out minutes of the meetings Rodham ran as college government president show an interesting, unmistakable pattern: Rodham is mentioned actually relatively infrequently. She opens the meetings, and she usually closes them. The rest of the time, it’s almost always other people doing the talking.

To the young women, professors and administrators who had come to know her through her first three years on campus, this was not a surprise.

She was a capable orator, many of them told me, but was much more comfortable as a listener.

“She was listening, learning and working with a variety of different student views,” said Phibbs, the political science professor, who was her student government adviser.

Hillary Rodham at a Wellesley student rally in October 1968. | Wellesley College Archives

“I think she was very good at bringing people along, explaining why process works, why it allows your voice to be heard,” said Eleanor Dean “Eldie” Acheson, another classmate and a lifelong friend. “You can’t just stand there in a vacuum and scream and yell about this stuff. You need to understand where other people are coming from.”

She would meet weekly with Adams, the president, keen on communication with college authority figures.

In her first all-college meeting as student government president, according to the News on September 26, 1968, Rodham announced a “newly-created joint committee of faculty and students that is to consider proposals, redirect suggestions and make specific recommendations to Academic Council on academic concerns. The committee is envisioned as a creative, innovative force that can involve Senate—hence, the students—in academic decisions.” In an op-ed she submitted to the News, she stressed that this wasn’t just a vehicle for student demands. “The committee,” she explained, “will include nine students, four faculty members and the president of the college …”

As interesting as her absence in the minutes of the meetings is her presence—when she talked, what she talked about, and how.

In a meeting in October, for example, members of Ethos seethed at what they now perceived as school officials’ lack of urgency in implementing the changes they had agreed to after the threatened hunger strike. One dean, according to the minutes, “talked of the problems that could arise in filling in the background gaps for students admitted with inadequate preparation.” The stance—and the implication—infuriated Hill, Williamson and other leaders of Ethos. “WE WILL NOT BE RAPED,” an Ethos-signed letter to the editor said in the News. Rodham’s response was considerably more measured.

“Miss Rodham,” read the minutes of the meeting, “expressed the hope that the Wellesley community as a whole would become more involved with the college and would work for the ideas expressed above.”

The take in the News? “Hillary Rodham … remarked that it is because of the possibility and the potential of the College that ‘we are so frustrated.’”

In a meeting in November, conversation shifted to the notion of increased student participation in Academic Council, up until that point a cloistered space for members of the faculty. Professors objected. Opinions ranged from no to not now. One of their questions, according to the minutes: “What kinds of students would be participating on Academic Council—radicals or conservatives?”

After a lengthy back-and-forth, the student body president spoke up.

New Window An Academic Council report on a disagreement about student participation in the group. Hillary's diffusion of the conflict showed an "early talent for mediation," said sociology professor Janet Z. Giele. | Wellesley College Archives



“Miss Rodham questioned if it would be politic to approach individual faculty members and discuss the matter of student participation with them,” read the minutes. “Mrs. Giele”—Janet Z. Giele, a sociology professor—“replied that she did think that the individual approach was good especially since many faculty members have a fear of being backed against a wall and mass protest serves to increase this fear. Mrs. Giele cautioned students to steer away from the use of the word ‘demand,’ saying that it only alienated people who might otherwise be quite sympathetic to student ideas.”

Tension diffused, the meeting was adjourned.

Giele, who went on to teach at Brandeis University but still lives in Wellesley, noted to me the future Hillary Clinton’s “early talent for mediation.”

In a meeting in December, members of the student council, members of the faculty and members of the administration argued over a student proposal to loosen substantially curfews for all students except first-semester freshmen. A dean worried that this “would be betraying the parents who had not granted their daughters blanket permission and would be putting the college in a difficult position.” Schechter, a faculty rep, urged compromise—that the college should no longer “act as a chaperone” but also that the students should slow down, to make this change “effective next year.” Playing off her mentor and thesis adviser, “Miss Rodham,” according to the minutes, “announced that if Senate passed Mr. Schechter’s amendment, Senate would mail a letter to parents explaining what had been done and would take responsibility for the action.” Schechter countered that “any kickback would be directed to the college,” not the students. The student body president’s response was typical: “Miss Rodham expressed the hope that any reaction would increase student-dean interaction.”

The 1968 Wellesley Christmas card with Hillary Rodham. | Wellesley College Archives

Alums found in their mailboxes a Christmas card from the college. It showed Adams, the president, standing in the doorway of her house, with two members of student government on the steps below her. Up front was Rodham, plaid skirt, notebook in her arms, smile on her face.

And throughout that year, and especially in the second semester, the future 2016 Democratic nominee—if current polling holds, the first female president in the history of the country—worked on her thesis about Alinsky, the radical activist. Today, more than her speech at commencement that landed her in Life, those 92 pages read like a capstone of her own intellectual and ideological evolution at Wellesley—and her demeanor and methodology from there.

“Alinsky’s conclusion that the ‘ventilation’ of hostilities is healthy in certain situations is valid, but across-the-board ‘social catharsis’ cannot be prescribed,” she wrote. “Catharsis has a way of perpetuating itself so that it becomes an end in itself.” She continued: “Interestingly, this society seems to be in a transition period, caught between conflict and consensus.” It was clear where this 21-year-old stood: “… as our ‘two societies’—the establishment, the anti-establishment—“move further apart contrived conflict serves to exacerbate the polarization.”

Later, in her first memoir, Hillary Rodham Clinton would make it plain. Alinsky “believed you could change the system only from the outside,” she wrote in Living History. “I didn’t.” Back in May of 1969, at the end of her thesis, she mentioned in her list of sources that Alinsky, whom she had interviewed twice, had offered her a job—as a community organizer in Chicago. It wasn’t for her. “I need three years of legal rigor,” she wrote. The system beckoned. She was a summer away from the start of law school at Yale.