I came home to Park Ridge after the Republican Convention with no plans for the remaining weeks of summer except to visit with family and friends and get ready for my senior year. My family was on the annual pilgrimage to Lake Winola so I had the house to myself, which was just as well since I’m sure I would have spent hours arguing with my father over Nixon and the Vietnam War. My dad really liked Nixon and believed he would make an excellent President. About Vietnam, he was ambivalent. His questions about the wisdom of U.S. involvement in the war were usually trumped by his disgust with the longhaired hippies who protested it.
My close friend Betsy Johnson had just returned from a year of study in Franco’s Spain.
Although much had changed since our high school days―the neat flips and sweater sets we used to wear had been displaced by lanky hair and frayed blue jeans―one constant remained: I could always count on Betsy’s friendship and shared interest in politics. Neither of us had planned to go into Chicago while the Democratic Convention was in town.
But when massive protests broke out downtown, we knew it was an opportunity to witness history. Betsy called and said, “We’ve got to see this for ourselves,” and I agreed.
Just like the time we had gone downtown to check voting lists in junior high school, we knew there was no way our parents would let us go if they knew what we were planning.
My mother was in Pennsylvania, and Betsy’s mom, Roslyn, thought of going downtown as a visit to Marshall Field’s to shop and Stouffer’s for lunch, wearing white gloves and a dress. So Betsy told her mother, “Hillary and I are going to the movies.”
She picked me up in the family station wagon, and off we went to Grant Park, the epicenter of the demonstrations. It was the last night of the convention, and all hell broke loose in Grant Park. You could smell the tear gas before you saw the lines of police. In the crowd behind us, someone screamed profanities and threw a rock, which just missed us. Betsy and I scrambled to get away as the police charged the crowd with nightsticks.
The first person we ran into was a high school friend whom we hadn’t seen in a while.
A nursing student, she was volunteering in the first-aid tent, patching up injured protesters.
She told us that what she had been seeing and doing had radicalized her, and she seriously thought there might be a revolution.
Betsy and I were shocked by the police brutality we saw in Grant Park, images also captured on national television. As Betsy later told The Washington Post, “We had had a wonderful childhood in Park Ridge, but we obviously hadn’t gotten the whole story”
Kevin O’Keefe and I spent hours that summer arguing about the meaning of revolution and whether our country would face one. Despite the events of the last year, we both concluded there would not be one, and, even if there was, we could never participate. I knew that despite my disillusionment with politics, it was the only route in a democracy for peaceful and lasting change. I did not imagine then that I would ever run for office, but I knew I wanted to participate as both a citizen and an activist. In my mind, Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi had done more to bring about real change through civil disobedience and nonviolence than a million demonstrators throwing rocks ever could.
My senior year at Wellesley would further test and articulate my beliefs. For my thesis I analyzed the work of a Chicago native and community organizer named Saul Alinsky, whom I had met the previous summer. Alinsky was a colorful and controversial figure who managed to offend almost everyone during his long career. His prescription for social change required grassroots organizing that taught people to help themselves by confronting government and corporations to obtain the resources and power to improve their lives. I agreed with some of Alinsky’s ideas, particularly the value of empowering people to help themselves. But we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn’t. Later he offered me the chance to work with him when I graduated from college, and he was disappointed that I decided instead to go to law school. Alinsky said I would be wasting my time, but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within. I took the law school admissions test and applied to several schools.
After I was accepted by Harvard and Yale, I couldn’t make up my mind where to go until I was invited to a cocktail party at Harvard Law School. A male law student friend introduced me to a famous Harvard law professor straight out of The Paper Chase, saying, “This is Hillary Rodham. She’s trying to decide whether to come here next year or sign up with our closest competitor.” The great man gave me a cool, dismissive look and said, “Well, first of all, we don’t have any close competitors. Secondly, we don’t need any more women at Harvard.” I was leaning toward Yale anyway, but this encounter removed any doubts about my choice.
All that remained was graduation from Wellesley, and I thought it would be uneventful, until my classmate and friend Eleanor “Eldie” Acheson decided our class needed its own speaker at graduation. I had met Eldie, the granddaughter of President Truman’s
