Hello. This is Hillary Clinton. I want to thank you for letting me speak with you about an issue that is central to our childrens future and critical in our fight to restore this nations economy, solving our Nations Health care crisis. There is no prescription or role model or cookbook for being first lady. The future is created every day. The future is not something that is out there waiting to happen to us. The future is something that we make. Well, i have said, and i believe, that theres a good possibility that sometime in the next 20 years we will have a woman president. Hillary clinton logged 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. As she considers another bid for the white house herself, Hillary Clintons story is still being written. Good evening and welcome to cspans year long series first ladies influence and image. Well tell you the story of Hillary Clinton. Here to tell us of this story for the next 90 minutes are two journalist who is know the clintons well, gail sheehy from her base of vanity fair. Her book in 2000 was called hillarys choice. And David Maraniss is author in the Washington Post and 1995 biography of bill clinton first in his class. Welcome to both of you. Thank you. I want to play a bit of video from 1992. Its one of those and itthers probably five or six. This is during the campaign when she talked about how she might approach the role of first lady and how involved she was going to be. Lets listen. Those of us who try to have a career, have a independent life, make a difference, certainly someone like myself whos combined that with a full active political involvement, ive done the best i can to lead my life. And i suppose still be subject to that kind of attack. Its not true and i dont know what else to say other than thats sad to me. You know, i suppose i could have stayed home and baked cookies and had tea, but what i decided to do was to fulfill my profession which i entered before my husband was in public life. As they campaigned in 1992, they were promoting this idea of two for one, the fact she would be a very involved first lady. As the administration unfolded, how did that work out for her . Well, they made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. The pub llic was not prepared f a two for one presidency. I dont know that they ever will be. I think that the it was stunning to suddenly see this really intelligent, outspoken, totally confident woman who had been given the role of copresident. 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 was you know, she had gone from the 50s to the 70s in her four years at wellesley. She was plunged into a new Womens Movement period. It took a hillary to raise a president. She did have to keep him in the channel because he was brilliant but all over the place and reckless. So, to swallow all of that was really quite 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 at renaissance weekend once in the ladys room and she kind of let down her said and this is 94. She said i just dont faux had what to do anymore. She said, nothing i do works. She said, i understand that im really threatening to men, that the velocity of change between men and women and the way the country is going and from one generation to the boomers and overwhelming, especially to men. Im threatening to them and i dont know what to do about it. So, were looking at first ladies in a global sense. Was she a transitional figure or one of a kind . I would say she was almost one of a kind. I mean, the role model that she modelled herself after was eleanor roosevelt. But there was a great difference between the two which was that bill clinton and Hillary Clinton from the very beginning saw that they could get places together that they couldnt apart. So, whereas eleanor was very active as a first lady, she was really on her own tract 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. So, that two for one comment which he made wasnt the press saying that, was a reality to them. And throughout his presidency, it helped and hurt at various times. We said at the outset that Hillary Clinton was a first lady with quite a few firsts. Lets show some of those to you. Shes the first first lady to have a graduate degree. Hers was a law degree. She was the first to have an office in the west wing which is 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 serve as United States senator, the first of course to run for president herself, and the first to serve as secretary of state. Were going to be talking about all that and more with our two guests gail sheehy and David Maraniss. But first we have to go back to the beginning. Hillary clinton was born in chicago as Hillary Diane rodham to hugh and dorothy rodham. Tell me about her childhood and what was significant about it. The most significant was the way she saw herself which was from the age of eight or ten, a star. One of her fantasies was and she wrote about this was she would get out on her lawn and dance in the sun and spin under the sun and imagine that god was beaming the sun down on her, only her, and that heavenly cameras were filming her every move. She made that a reality. You know, for many years now, maybe not heavenly, maybe sa tan cal cameras, but cameras nonetheless are following her every move. She made it happen. So, David Maraniss, her father worked in scranton, pennsylvania, worked in the factories and mines as a youth, amade his way to chicago. Her mother was a traditional housewife. Where did this come from in Hillary Clinton . I wouldnt call her mother a traditional housewife. She was a housewife but she was very strong and independent and infused that into hillary. Her father was a rockribbed republican. Park ridge was 99. 5 white. It was in the deep heart of the midwest middle class. It was very sheltered in that sense. The children were the chosen ones and hillary thought of herself as the chosen of the chosen ones. But she also so, she had her fathers politics. But as gail said, the politics were sort of incidental to who she thought she was. She even had she was very strongly a methodist throughout her life, but it started in her early teenage years. And her youth minister, don jones, was a very progressive person who was challenging hillary and many of the other kids to sort of think about the world outside of park ridge. So, that was going on in her mind even before she blossomed or changed her politics. You told the story in your book about a minister who would take white suburban kids living a sheltered life and take them to chicago to see how other people were living. Right. The poor people and migrant workers. She was enormously affected by that. She knew then that park ridge was a bubble and she wanted to know more about how the real world worked. But i have to say that her mother told me, i think one of the significant stories about her childhood. When they moved to park ridge, the vicious social hierarchy of four year olds didnt admit her and a little girl named susie used to beat her up every day. Her mother said this place is no place for cowards, you knock that girl off her pins. Thats what hillary did. Hillary came back home and said, now i can play with the boys. And shes been doing that ever since. She has. She was also a preteen, if i have the age right who was reading barry gold waters conscious of a conservative. I didnt read those sort of books as a teenager. She also had a High School Teacher who was very conservative who was influencing her the other direction. Do you know about the role he played in her life . Well, she did have some conservative teachers in that period but so did all of us. So i dont think that 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 sort of internally. So, i would not say that any teachers at Maine Township High School had any influence on her than the youth minister at the Methodist Church or her mother. I think those were the key influences. It transcended politics. Two ways in which her mother had an important influence on her. She wanted her to have equilibrium. So, she used a carpenters level as a visual to say keep the bubble in the middle. And then she also wanted to warn her, never get divorced, because she, dorothy rodhams parents had been divorced and abandoned her and blythed her life. So, hillary never agreed to give bill clinton a divorce even though at one point he wanted it. So, she had a powerful influence. The other amazing thing about hillary was when she met Martin Luther king introduced by don jones she was really taken. The methodist minister. The methodist minister 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 she realized that the emancipation proclamation hasnt really been carried out. And she wanted to do something. And her aha moment was at wellesley when she came in the day Martin Luther king was shot, she came in screaming and sobbing, and she said this can not go on. That was when she turned from being a little goldwater girl to being a real progressive marcher, a real liberal. How did that was 1968. And she she would graduate the next year. I think that was a moment where she turned into an activist. You can see her politics changing as soon as she got to wellesley really, 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 rights and all of th that, yeah. How did she get to wellesley, this midwestern girl . She was a very smart student. She was the president of her high school class. It was an all girls school near suburban boston. And, you know, her parents drove her out in the cadillac, hugh rodhams cadillac. It made her father furious when he realized it was snobby Eastern Liberal girls school and he never visited her there until her graduation. It was the fascinating thing to me about her wellesley years, she wrote a number of letters to her High School Friend which she gave me. She had a fouryear identity crisis. She had to select her identity and she laid them out like a smorgasbord. Can i do a hippy . No. That was okay because she didnt care about her appearance. But she was a moral methodist. She read catcher and the rye and hated it. She said i dont like people much. Maybe im a misentloep. She wrote can i be a compassionate misentloep . She finally came to a decision. She chose her identity. She hated looking inward. She couldnt stand introspection, and her father had taught her that any expression of emotionality was a sense of weakness. She wrote about that, no emotion in show. So, she decided she would help other people lead their best lives and help to save the world. She became president of the student body at wellesley, is that correct . She did. And she was selected to give a speech at wellesley that thrust her on the National Spotlight for the first time. Right. What was that all about . Well, she had a speech which she put down because her generation did not want to hear from a moderate republican even though he was a black man about entering the work force and going on to be competitive and so on. So, she got up and said, we dont believe in materialism and competitiveness. Were looking for ecstatic experiences. Well, you know, her student body just got up and gave an up roar of applause. The faculty was mortified. And hugh rodham got out of town as fast as he could. But it got her into life magazine and she was already a star. And then i asked her, well, what was the most ecstatic experience of your 20s. She said, falling in love with bill clinton. I said, what attracted you to him . She said, he wasnt afraid of me. If you dont mind ill read the paragraph that gail was talking about. This is the essence of hillarys speech. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create uncertainty. There are some things we feel, feelings that are per vailing an inquisitive and corporate life including tragically universities is not the way of life for us. Were serging for immediate, ecstatic moments. Thats the speech that hugh rodham did not want to hear. As you know if youve been watching us along the way, the thing that makes this Program Different and interesting for us at the table are your questions. And we welcome them three different ways. You can call us. Well put the phone numbers on the screen and mix your calls in throughout the 90 minutes. You can post a comment on cspans facebook page. Theres a lively discussion going on about Hillary Clinton on our facebook page. You can tweet us, using cspan. Let me ask a question via twitter as were in this period of her life. 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 . Does she ever consider dropping out of college . I dont remember reading that in her biography. It may have been in there. She did go through a year of depression. She felt that she there were a lot of high born Society Girls at wellesley and that wasnt her bag at all. She wasnt sure she was smart enough at the beginning. And she was depressed i think in her sophomore year. She may have considered it. I think it was more like taking a year off than actually dropping out for good. How did she yet to Yale Law School . What was the decision to study law . That was somebody who wanted to have an active life affecting change would do in that period. She got to yale in 1969 a year before bill clinton did and took a fiveyear program to get through Yale Law School. But i think she did it not so much that she wanted she wanted to be a lawyer more than he ever did, but they both saw it as a way to the life that they wanted in politics and in affecting social change. Our next and Yale Law School im sorry was a very socially active place during that period. The classes were the opposite of harvard law. It wasnt like everything was rigid. It was very loose. Would she have considered harvard law and chose yale . Yes, she did choose yale. What was the environment for women studying at Yale Law School when she arrived. There werent very many. There were Something Like five in her class. So, she was quite unique there as she has been in every venue. I dont know if she she didnt speak an awful lot about sexism or prejudice, but she was just too darn smart. And when she and bill decided to enter a contest with the baunio in presenting a case before a live jury, it was she that did all the work and writing and bill did the presenting. He was brilliant at presenting but goofed off during the preparation. And it was hillary who made a real impression on one of the judges, john doar, who later hired her for the Impeachment Committee on richard nixon. You know, theyre working tooth in that trial sort of captured everything that was to come where one of the fellow law students described them as bill clinton was all to kill a mockingbird and hillary was all chicago lawyer. We have a clip from 1994 when 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. You know those moments sort of like click, you know . And i was sitting there and i just started staring at him. And i just began to look at him. And i thought, you know, i really like the way he looks. I need to get to know him. He caught my eye and began staring back at me. Here i am in the library not reading. Here he is surrounding by people talking at him, not talking back. So, finally i thought this is ridiculous. Im in this class with this person. So, i put my books down and i went up and said, you know, if youre going to keep looking at me and im going to keep looking at you, we ought to at least know each others names. Im Hillary Rodham, who are you. He says he couldnt remember his name. That makes me feel so good. He did sort of stumble out bill clinton. Do you really want me to go on about this . Then we ended up and it was the last day of class, this class we hardly ever went to but occasionally saw each other in. We both showed up for the last day. I was walking out the door and he kind of got to the door at the same time. He said, where are you going . I said, im going to go register for classes. He says, i need to do that. So, we walked together, stood in this endless line, registrars are endless lines. And we talked and talked and talked. I finally got up to the line, and this wonderful woman said hillary, what are you going to take . I started to fill it out. She said bill, why are you here . You registered yesterday. So, people always want to know. You both have explored this. What is at the heart of this relationship. What was it that 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 not been popular with boys in a boy girl sense. And here was this she liked big handsome hunks. And here was this big handsome redhaired guy with elvis side burns and rough around the edges and had this southern charm. And he was just walking after her out of class, kind of like a love sick hound dog kind of panting behind her. And it really made her feel like a woman. And that was very that was a new experience for her. But then she realized how brilliant