Hillary Diane Rodham '' A WOMAN MADE OF STEEL ''
Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.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-Canadian, and Welsh descent.Hillary has two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony. On May 28, 1994, Tony married Nicole Boxer, daughter of Senator Barbara Boxer, in a ceremony at the White House attended by 250 guests. Before the marriage ended in divorce, they had a child Zachary, born in 1995. Zachary held a unique distinction of being both the grandson and nephew of sitting U.S. senators.
As a child, Rodham was a favorite of her teachers at the public schools she attended in Park Ridge. She participated in sports, such as swimming and baseball, and earned numerous badges as a Brownie and a Girl Scout. She has often told a storyof being inspired by U.S. efforts during the Space Race and sending a letter to NASA around 1961 asking what she could do to become an astronaut, only to be told that no women were being accepted into the program. She attended Maine East High School, where she participated in student council, the school newspaper, and was selected for National Honor Society.She won election as class vice president for her junior year, but then lost an election for class president for her senior year against two boys, one of whom told her, "you are really stupid if you think a girl can be elected president." For her senior year, she and other students were transferred to the then new Maine South High School, where she was a National Merit Finalist and graduated in the top five percent of her class of 1965. Rodham's mother wanted her to have an independent, professional career, and her father, otherwise a traditionalist, felt that his daughter's abilities and opportunities should not be limited by gender.
Raised in a politically conservative household, Rodham helped canvass Chicago's South Side at age thirteen following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she saw evidence of electoral fraud (such as voting list entries showing addresses that were empty lots) against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964. Rodham's early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anti-communist), who introduced her to Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw, and afterwards briefly met, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. at a 1962 speech in Chicago's Orchestra Hall.
When Bill Clinton took office as president in January 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the First Lady of the United States, and her press secretary reiterated 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 the White 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.
some critics called it inappropriate for the first lady to play a central role in matters of public policy. Supporters pointed out that Clinton's role in policy was no different from that of other White House advisors and that voters had been well aware that she would play an active role in her husband's presidency. Bill Clinton's campaign promise of "two for the price of one" led opponents to refer derisively to the Clintons as "co-presidents" or sometimes the Arkansas label "Billary". The pressures of conflicting ideas about the role of a first lady were enough to send Hillary Clinton into "imaginary discussions" with the also-politically-active Eleanor Roosevelt. From the time she came to Washington, Hillary also found refuge in a prayer group of The Fellowship that featured many wives of conservative Washington figures. Triggered in part by the death of her father in April 1993, she publicly sought to find a synthesis of Methodist teachings, liberal religious political philosophy, and Tikkun editor Michael Lerner's "politics of meaning" to overcome what she saw as America's "sleeping sickness of the soul"; that would lead to a willingness "to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium." Other segments of the public focused on her appearance, which had evolved over time from inattention to fashion during her days in Arkansas to a popular site in the early days of the World Wide Web devoted to showing her many different, and frequently analyzed, hairstyles as first lady, to an appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine in 1998
In January 1993, President Clinton named First Lady Clinton to chair a
Task Force on National Health Care Reform, hoping to replicate the
success she had in leading the effort for Arkansas education reform. Unconvinced regarding the merits of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), she privately urged that passage of health care reform be given higher priority. The recommendation of the task force became known as the Clinton health care plan,
a comprehensive proposal that would require employers to provide health
coverage to their employees through individual health maintenance
organizations. Its opponents quickly derided the plan as "Hillarycare",
and it faced opposition from even some Democrats in Congress. Some protesters against the proposed plan became vitriolic, and during a
July 1994 bus tour to rally support for the plan, Clinton wore a
bulletproof vest at times
When New York's long-serving U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced his retirement in November 1998, several prominent Democratic figures, including Representative Charles Rangel of New York, urged Clinton to run for Moynihan's open seat in the Senate election of 2000. Once she decided to run, the Clintons purchased a home in Chappaqua, New York, north of New York City, in September 1999. She became the first first lady of the United States to be a candidate for elected office. Initially, Clinton expected to face Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of New York City, as her Republican opponent in the election. Giuliani withdrew from the race in May 2000 after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and matters related to his failing marriage became public, and Clinton instead faced Rick Lazio, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives representing New York's 2nd congressional district. Throughout the campaign, opponents accused Clinton of carpetbagging, as she had never resided in New York nor participated in the state's politics before the 2000 Senate race.
Clinton began her campaign, which was managed by Bill de Blasio, by visiting every county in the state, in a "listening tour" of small-group settings. She devoted considerable time in traditionally Republican Upstate New York regions. Clinton vowed to improve the economic situation in those areas, promising to deliver 200,000 jobs to the state over her term. Her plan included tax credits to reward job creation and encourage business investment, especially in the high-tech sector. She called for personal tax cuts for college tuition and long-term care.
The contest drew national attention. Lazio blundered during a September debate by seeming to invade Clinton's personal space trying to get her to sign a fundraising agreement. The campaigns of Clinton and Lazio, along with Giuliani's initial effort, spent a record combined $90 million. Clinton won the election on November 7, 2000, with 55 percent of the vote to Lazio's 43 percent. She was sworn in as U.S. senator on January 3, 2001,
making her the first (and so far only) woman to have held an elected
office either while (for a brief period) or after serving as first lady.
In November 2004, Clinton announced that she would seek a second Senate term. Clinton easily won the Democratic nomination over opposition from antiwar activist Jonathan Tasini. The early frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, withdrew from the contest after several months of poor campaign performance.Clinton's eventual opponent in the general election was Republican candidate John Spencer, a former mayor of Yonkers. Clinton won the election on November 7, 2006, with 67 percent of the vote to Spencer's 31 percent, carrying all but four of New York's sixty-two counties. Her campaign spent $36 million for her re-election, more than any other candidate for Senate in the 2006 elections. Some Democrats criticized her for spending too much in a one-sided contest, while some supporters were concerned she did not leave more funds for a potential presidential bid in 2008. In the following months, she transferred $10 million of her Senate funds toward her presidential campaign
In mid-November 2008, President-elect Obama and Clinton discussed the possibility of her serving as U.S. Secretary of State in his administration. She was initially quite reluctant, but on November 20, she told Obama she would accept the position. On December 1, President-elect Obama formally announced that Clinton would be his nominee for Secretary of State. Clinton said she did not want to leave the Senate, but that the new position represented a "difficult and exciting adventure". As part of the nomination and in order to relieve concerns of conflict of interest, Bill Clinton agreed to accept several conditions and restrictions regarding his ongoing activities and fundraising efforts for the William J. Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative
The appointment required a Saxbe fix, passed and signed into law in December 2008.Confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began on January 13, 2009, a week before the Obama inauguration; two days later, the Committee voted 16–1 to approve Clinton. By this time, her public approval rating had reached 65 percent, the highest point since the Lewinsky scandal. On January 21, 2009, Clinton was confirmed in the full Senate by a vote of 94–2.Clinton took the oath of office of Secretary of State and resigned from the Senate that same day. She became the first former first lady to serve in the United States Cabinet.
When Clinton left the State Department she became a private citizen for the first time in thirty years. She and her daughter joined her husband as named members of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation in 2013. There she focused on early childhood development efforts, including an initiative called Too Small to Fail and a $600 million initiative to encourage the enrollment of girls in secondary schools worldwide, led by former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Clinton also led the No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project, a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to gather and study data on the progress of women and girls around the world since the Beijing conference in 1995; its March 2015 report said that while "There has never been a better time in history to be born a woman ... this data shows just how far we still have to go."The foundation began accepting new donations from foreign governments, which it had stopped doing while she was secretary.
She began work on another volume of memoirs, and made appearances on the paid speaking circuit.There she received $200,000–225,000 per engagement, often appearing before Wall Street firms or at business conventions. She also made some unpaid speeches on behalf of the foundation. For the fifteen months ending in March 2015, Clinton earned over $11 million from her speeches. For the overall period 2007–14, the Clintons earned almost $141 million, paid some $56 million in federal and state taxes, and donated about $15 million to charity. As of 2015, she was estimated to be worth over $30 million on her own, or $45–53 million with her husband.
Clinton resigned from the foundation's board in April 2015, when she began her presidential campaign, and the foundation said it would accept new foreign governmental donations from six Western nations only.
As a child, Rodham was a favorite of her teachers at the public schools she attended in Park Ridge. She participated in sports, such as swimming and baseball, and earned numerous badges as a Brownie and a Girl Scout. She has often told a storyof being inspired by U.S. efforts during the Space Race and sending a letter to NASA around 1961 asking what she could do to become an astronaut, only to be told that no women were being accepted into the program. She attended Maine East High School, where she participated in student council, the school newspaper, and was selected for National Honor Society.She won election as class vice president for her junior year, but then lost an election for class president for her senior year against two boys, one of whom told her, "you are really stupid if you think a girl can be elected president." For her senior year, she and other students were transferred to the then new Maine South High School, where she was a National Merit Finalist and graduated in the top five percent of her class of 1965. Rodham's mother wanted her to have an independent, professional career, and her father, otherwise a traditionalist, felt that his daughter's abilities and opportunities should not be limited by gender.
Raised in a politically conservative household, Rodham helped canvass Chicago's South Side at age thirteen following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she saw evidence of electoral fraud (such as voting list entries showing addresses that were empty lots) against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964. Rodham's early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anti-communist), who introduced her to Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw, and afterwards briefly met, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. at a 1962 speech in Chicago's Orchestra Hall.
When Bill Clinton took office as president in January 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the First Lady of the United States, and her press secretary reiterated 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 the White 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.
some critics called it inappropriate for the first lady to play a central role in matters of public policy. Supporters pointed out that Clinton's role in policy was no different from that of other White House advisors and that voters had been well aware that she would play an active role in her husband's presidency. Bill Clinton's campaign promise of "two for the price of one" led opponents to refer derisively to the Clintons as "co-presidents" or sometimes the Arkansas label "Billary". The pressures of conflicting ideas about the role of a first lady were enough to send Hillary Clinton into "imaginary discussions" with the also-politically-active Eleanor Roosevelt. From the time she came to Washington, Hillary also found refuge in a prayer group of The Fellowship that featured many wives of conservative Washington figures. Triggered in part by the death of her father in April 1993, she publicly sought to find a synthesis of Methodist teachings, liberal religious political philosophy, and Tikkun editor Michael Lerner's "politics of meaning" to overcome what she saw as America's "sleeping sickness of the soul"; that would lead to a willingness "to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium." Other segments of the public focused on her appearance, which had evolved over time from inattention to fashion during her days in Arkansas to a popular site in the early days of the World Wide Web devoted to showing her many different, and frequently analyzed, hairstyles as first lady, to an appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine in 1998
When New York's long-serving U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced his retirement in November 1998, several prominent Democratic figures, including Representative Charles Rangel of New York, urged Clinton to run for Moynihan's open seat in the Senate election of 2000. Once she decided to run, the Clintons purchased a home in Chappaqua, New York, north of New York City, in September 1999. She became the first first lady of the United States to be a candidate for elected office. Initially, Clinton expected to face Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of New York City, as her Republican opponent in the election. Giuliani withdrew from the race in May 2000 after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and matters related to his failing marriage became public, and Clinton instead faced Rick Lazio, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives representing New York's 2nd congressional district. Throughout the campaign, opponents accused Clinton of carpetbagging, as she had never resided in New York nor participated in the state's politics before the 2000 Senate race.
Clinton began her campaign, which was managed by Bill de Blasio, by visiting every county in the state, in a "listening tour" of small-group settings. She devoted considerable time in traditionally Republican Upstate New York regions. Clinton vowed to improve the economic situation in those areas, promising to deliver 200,000 jobs to the state over her term. Her plan included tax credits to reward job creation and encourage business investment, especially in the high-tech sector. She called for personal tax cuts for college tuition and long-term care.
In November 2004, Clinton announced that she would seek a second Senate term. Clinton easily won the Democratic nomination over opposition from antiwar activist Jonathan Tasini. The early frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, withdrew from the contest after several months of poor campaign performance.Clinton's eventual opponent in the general election was Republican candidate John Spencer, a former mayor of Yonkers. Clinton won the election on November 7, 2006, with 67 percent of the vote to Spencer's 31 percent, carrying all but four of New York's sixty-two counties. Her campaign spent $36 million for her re-election, more than any other candidate for Senate in the 2006 elections. Some Democrats criticized her for spending too much in a one-sided contest, while some supporters were concerned she did not leave more funds for a potential presidential bid in 2008. In the following months, she transferred $10 million of her Senate funds toward her presidential campaign
In mid-November 2008, President-elect Obama and Clinton discussed the possibility of her serving as U.S. Secretary of State in his administration. She was initially quite reluctant, but on November 20, she told Obama she would accept the position. On December 1, President-elect Obama formally announced that Clinton would be his nominee for Secretary of State. Clinton said she did not want to leave the Senate, but that the new position represented a "difficult and exciting adventure". As part of the nomination and in order to relieve concerns of conflict of interest, Bill Clinton agreed to accept several conditions and restrictions regarding his ongoing activities and fundraising efforts for the William J. Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative
The appointment required a Saxbe fix, passed and signed into law in December 2008.Confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began on January 13, 2009, a week before the Obama inauguration; two days later, the Committee voted 16–1 to approve Clinton. By this time, her public approval rating had reached 65 percent, the highest point since the Lewinsky scandal. On January 21, 2009, Clinton was confirmed in the full Senate by a vote of 94–2.Clinton took the oath of office of Secretary of State and resigned from the Senate that same day. She became the first former first lady to serve in the United States Cabinet.
When Clinton left the State Department she became a private citizen for the first time in thirty years. She and her daughter joined her husband as named members of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation in 2013. There she focused on early childhood development efforts, including an initiative called Too Small to Fail and a $600 million initiative to encourage the enrollment of girls in secondary schools worldwide, led by former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Clinton also led the No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project, a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to gather and study data on the progress of women and girls around the world since the Beijing conference in 1995; its March 2015 report said that while "There has never been a better time in history to be born a woman ... this data shows just how far we still have to go."The foundation began accepting new donations from foreign governments, which it had stopped doing while she was secretary.
She began work on another volume of memoirs, and made appearances on the paid speaking circuit.There she received $200,000–225,000 per engagement, often appearing before Wall Street firms or at business conventions. She also made some unpaid speeches on behalf of the foundation. For the fifteen months ending in March 2015, Clinton earned over $11 million from her speeches. For the overall period 2007–14, the Clintons earned almost $141 million, paid some $56 million in federal and state taxes, and donated about $15 million to charity. As of 2015, she was estimated to be worth over $30 million on her own, or $45–53 million with her husband.
Clinton resigned from the foundation's board in April 2015, when she began her presidential campaign, and the foundation said it would accept new foreign governmental donations from six Western nations only.
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