Make. I have said, and i believe that there is a good possibility that sometime in the next 20 years we will have a woman president. Hillary clinton locked many firsts in her role as first lady, Political Partners since law school, the clintons survived scandals and even the impeachment of president bill clinton. And as she considers a another bid for the white house herself, Hillary Clintons story is being written still. Welcome to cspans yearlong series, first ladies influence and damage. Tonight, we will tell you the story of the space of our 42nd president , Hillary Clinton. Here to tell us of the story are too journalist to know the clintons well. Gayle from vanity fair is a biographer of Hillary Clinton. Her 2000 book was called hillarys choice. David is from the Washington Post, author of two books about the clinton including a 1995 biography of bill clinton. Welcome to both of you. As we start, here i want to play a bit of a video from 1992. It is one of five or six Hillary Clinton clips that has become emblematic of her. This is one of them. This historian, when she talked about how she might approach the role of first lady and how involved she would be, lets listen. Those of us who have tried to have a career and an independent life, certainly someone like myself will provide that with full public involvement. Children, but also other issues. I have done the best i can and i suppose we will be subject to that kind of thing. I dont know what to say other than that. It is sad. This is still my profession which i entered before my husband. As they campaigned in 1992, they were promoting the idea of two for one. This should be a very involved first lady. As the administration unfolded, how did this work out for them . They made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. The public was not prepared for the two for one presidency. I dont know if they ever will be. But i think that it was stunning to suddenly see this really intelligent, outspoken, totally confident woman who had been given the role of coal president. If we had a copresidency, that might be a really cool thing, because partners in power i think are more and more happening. But at that time, hillary had gone from the fifties to the seventies in the four years at wellesley. She was suddenly plunged into the new womens movement. It took an ability to raise a president. He was brilliant but all over the place. To swallow a pandemic is really an overkill for the american public, and it took her i think almost six years to really figure out how to do it. I had an occasion to meet her once in the ladiesroom and she kind of let down her hair and said the society said i dont know what to do anymore. Nothing i do works. I understand i am really threatening to man, the velocity of change between men and women and the way the country is going from one generation to the boomers is overwhelming, especially to men. I am threatening to them and i dont know what to do about that. You was she a transitional figure or oneofakind . I would say she was almost one of a kind. The role model that she modeled herself after was eleanor roosevelt, but there was a great difference between the two. Bill clinton and Hillary Clinton from the very beginning saw that they could get places together that they couldnt do apart. Eleanor was very active as a first lady, but she was really on her own track, separate from president roosevelt, whereas bill clinton relied on hillary for much of his policy from the very beginning, going all the way back to arkansas. That two for one comment he made was a reality to them, and throughout his presidency, it helped and hurt at various times. We saw that the outset that Hillary Clinton was a first lady with quite a few first. Lets show some of those to you. She was the first first lady to have a post graduate degree, a law degree. She was the first to have an office in the west wing, where the policy is made. She was later on the first to testify before a grand jury as the investigations were ramping up. After office, she was the first to be elected and service and United States senator, the first to run for president herself, and the first to serve as secretary of state. We will be talking about all of that with our two or guests, but, first we have to go back to the beginning. Hillary clinton was born in chicago as Hillary Diana ross autumn to parents and dorothy roth him. Tell me about her childhood and what was significant about it . The most significant thing was the way she saw herself, which was from the age of eight or ten, as a star. One of her fantasies was, and she wrote about this, she would get out on her lawn and dance in the sun and spin under the sun and imagine that god was beating the sundown on her, only her, and that heavenly cameras were filming her every move. She made that a reality. For many years now, maybe not heavenly, maybe say tan occult powers, but the cameras nonetheless or following her every move. She made it happen. But she came from parents, her father had worked and was born in scratch, and pennsylvania working in factories and mines as he made his way to chicago. Where did this come from . I wouldnt quite call her a traditional housewife. She was a housewife, but she was very strong and independent and infused that into hillary. Her father was a republican. It was 99. 5 white in the town, it was the deep part of the midwest middle class. It was very sheltered in that sense. Children were the chosen ones and hillary found herself as the chosen of the chosen ones. She had her fathers politics, but as gayle, said the politics were sort of incidental. She was very strongly methodist throughout her life, but it started in her early teenage years. He was challenging hillary to think about the rules outside of park ridge. That was going on even before she had blossomed or changed her politics. We talk about this minister who would take these white suburban kids and take them to chicago to see how other people live. He was enormously affected by that. She knew then that park ridge was a bubble and they want to know more about how the real world worked. When they move to park ridge, that vicious social hierarchy of fouryearolds who didnt admit her and a little girl named sues a used to beat her up every day. She came back crying and one day her mother said this house is no place for cowards. The boys were watching. Their mouths were agape and hillary came back home and said, now i can play with the boys. And she has been doing that ever since. She was also a preteen, if i have the age right, she was reading Barry Goldwaters conscious of the conservative. She was a teenager biden. Still, very young to be reading that. I was reading those books, but not as a teenager. She also had a High School Teacher who was very conservative, influencing her in the other direction. Do you know about the role he played in her life . She had conservative teachers in that period, but so did all of us. I dont think that teacher had a profound influence, no more so than her father. But it was enough to have her thinking in those directions politically, but not internally. You i think those were the two key influences, and as i say, it transcended politics. Two other ways from other had an important influence on her. She wanted her to have equal liberty, and so she used a carpenters level as a visual to say keep the bubble in the middle. And they want to warn her to never get divorced because dorothy rodhams parents had been divorced and it hurt her. So hillary never agreed to give bill clinton a divorce, even though at one point he wanted it. So she had a powerful influence. But the other amazing thing about hillary was when she met Martin Luther king, introduced by don jones, the methodist minister . He introduced her to Martin Luther king, who she heard in chicago. And she realized that there were no black people that she saw in her class or in park ridge and she read up on it and realized that the emancipation proclamation had not really been carried out and she wanted to do something about it. Her omaha moment at wellesley, the day martin little king was shot, she came and screaming and sobbing and saying this cannot go on. And that was when she really turned off from being a goldwater girl to being a real progressive marcher, a real liberty. That was 1968. And she would graduate the next year. I think that was a moment where she turned into an activist, but you can see her politics changing since she got to wellesley. As did hundreds of thousands of people of that generation of kids when they got to college. As the war was going on and civil unrest. All of that. And how did she get to wellesley . As a midwestern girl . She was a very smart student. She was the president of her High School Class and it was an all girls school in suburban boston. And her parents drove her out in the canada lack, the rodhams catalog. But it made him furious that it was a liberal girls school and he never visited her there until her graduation. But the fascinating thing about hillary that you also here is that she wrote a number of letters to a high school friend, which she gave me. She had a four year identity crisis. She had to select her identity and she laid them out like a smorgasbord. She said shall i be a pseudohippie . No, that was okay because she didnt care about her appearance, but she was a methodist. She read catcher into ryan hated it. She said maybe im a missing throw, and then she wrote to a friend and said can you be a compassionate missing throughout . And she sort of was. Could she be an alienated academic . She finally came to a decision. She decided that she hated looking inward. She couldnt stand introspection. Her father had taught her that any expression of emotionality was a sense of weakness. She wrote about. That noah motion shown. She decided she would help other people live their best lives and help to save the world. She became president of the student body at wellesley . Is that correct . Yes. She was selected to give a speech that thrust her on to the national spotlight. What was not all about . She had a speech written because her generation did not want to hear from a moderate republican, even though he was a black man, about entering the workforce and going on to be competitive and so on. So she got up and said, we dont believe in just materialism and competitiveness. We are looking for ecstatic experiences. Her student body just got up in uproar of applause. The faculty was mortified. He rodham got out of town as fast as he could. But she was already a star in life magazine. I asked her what was the most exciting experience of your twenties and she said falling in love with bill clinton. I said what attracted you to him and she said he wasnt afraid. The African American senator was from massachusetts. This was the essence of hillarys speech. We are all exploring a world that none of us understand. Including tragically, universities. Thats not the way of life for us. We are searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrative modes of lifting. That was the speech that hugh roth im did not want to hear. As you know if you have been following, the thing that makes this Program Different and interesting for us at the table or your questions and we welcome them three different ways. You can call. As we will put the phone numbers on the screen and get your calls. You can post a comment on the cspan facebook page. Its a lively discussion going on about Hillary Clinton on our facebook page. And you can tweet us and you can use at cspan and let me ask a question on twitter. A viewer wants to know whether or not hillary wanted to drop out of college, but her mother encouraged her to stay. Is that part of her biography . Did she ever consider dropping at a college . I dont remember reading that. She did go through a year of depression. There were a number of high borne Society Girls at wellesley and that was not her bag at all. She wasnt sure she was smart enough at the beginning. And she was depressed. She was in her sophomore year. She may have considered. It i think it was more like taking a year off instead of dropping out. How did she get to Yale Law School . What was the decision to study law . That is what someone who wanted to have an active life and affecting change would do in that era. She got to yell law school in 1969, actually the year before bill clinton. I think she, not so much that she wanted, she may have wanted it more than he did, but they both sought as a way to get the life they wanted. Both in politics and in affecting social change. Yale law school was a very socially active place during that period. Classes were the opposite of harvard law. I was not like everything was different. What was the environment for women studying at Yellow School . There werent very. Many i think there is Something Like five in the class. So she was quite unique, there and she has been an every venue. And i dont know, she didnt speak an awful lot about sexism or prejudice. She was just too darn smart. And when she and bill decided to enter a contest with the Barristers Union and presenting the case before a live jury, she got the work and build the presenting. He was brilliant at presenting but he goofed off during the preparation and it was hillary who made a real impression on one of the judges, john door, who later hired her for the Impeachment Committee on richard nixon. They are working together in that prize trial, capturing everything that is to come. One of the fellow law students described it as bill clinton was all to kill a mockingbird and hillary was all chicago lawyer. We have a clip from 1994 where Hillary Clinton talks about how she and bill clinton met. Lets watch. He was standing out in the hallway, and i just, i dont know. Do you know those moments that just click . I was sitting there and i just started staring at him and i began to look at him and i thought i really like the way he looks and i need to get to know him. Then he caught my eye and began staring back at me and so here i am in the library not reading and he is surrounded by people talking at him, not talking back. Finally, i thought this is ridiculous. Im in this class with this person. I put my books down and i went up and said, if you are going to keep looking at me, and im going to keep looking at you, we ought to at least know each others names. I am Hillary Rodham who are you. He said he couldnt remember his name. That makes me feel so good. But anyway, he stumbled out on bill clinton. Do you really want me to go on about this . laughs it was the last day of class. A class we hardly ever went to. But occasionally we saw them. I was walking out the door and he kind of got to the door and said where are you going. He said he needed to register for classes for the next year. We stood in this endless line to register, and we talked and talked, and i finally got up to the line. The registrar, a wonderful woman i have kept in touch with said hillary, what are you going to take. I started to fill it out and she said bill, why are you here. You registered yesterday. People always want to know, and you both of explored this. What is at the heart of this relationship . What attracted these two people so strongly to one another . They seem so different in many ways. I think in the case of hillary, she had me not as popular with boys. And she liked big handsome honks. Here is a big, handsome, red haired guy with elvis sideburns and rougher round the edges. And he was just walking after her go like a love sick hound dog panting behind her and it really made her feel like a woman. That was a new experience for her. But then she realized how good hillary was and how they clicked. She could really do something with this guy. You . No she could really bring him up. And when she left the watergate, the Impeachment Committee to go out to little rock, arkansas, fayetteville actually, her best friends would say you are crazy. You are leaving a fabulous career in washington where you are in line to be in political life. She, said bill clinton will be president someday. And im going to marry him. David . From bill clintons perspective, theres a lot of people interested but hillary is different. During that period, his roommates at yale would say that he would prepare four times when hillary was coming over because he wanted to impress her so much. The reason was that he wouldnt put up with what she called his arkansas nonsense. She had the guts to say come off it, bill. Beyond that, they also did have a lot in common. They were different personalities but they had the same ambitions and saw they could do more together than they could apart. They shared a level politics, movies, books, intellectual things, and there was a spark there i think that hillary from the very beginning was head over heels for him. I think that bill just saw her as someone different. How long did it take from that first meeting to marriage . How did the relationship progress . It was several years, but what happened in between was quite fascinating. When bill was running for his first congressional race and his campaign was chaotic, and he was losing, hillary dropped everything and flew out there and came into the Little Campaign area and they issued the college girl that he was having a romance without the side door. She said what is going on this is a mess. That, night the night before the, vote they knew they were going to lose, the Campaign Manager and his wife all got locked in a room together to find out what was really going wrong here. Hillary was giving the third degree. The wife said i had to take bill clintons girlfriend as a babysitter to get her out of the way. She said youve got bill clinton a girl . And she started swearing and cursing. It was a melee. And through the whole thing, no one ever mentioned, with the passively of a buddha, bill clinton. And that set the mold for the way she dealt with all of those interruptions. It was never his fault. There was always someone elses fault. Did in 1970 got married in 1975. When she came to arkansas, they were law professors together at the university of arkansas. And that, setting it set the tone