American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power by Christopher P. Andersen Read Free Book Online Page A

introduced Hillary to famed radical lawyer Charles Garry, a member of the Panther defense team, and soon her band of student watchdogs were feeding whatever information they gleaned directly to the Panther attorneys. In later years Hillary would take pains never to mention her friendship with Garry, whose clients included People’s Temple founder Jim Jones and Angela Davis as well as Newton and Seale.
    Incredibly, Hillary dismissed out of hand the evidence against Garry’s clients, which included signed confessions from two of the defendants and a chilling audiotape of the victim’s “trial” by his fellow party members before he was summarily executed.
    Nor did it seem to matter to Hillary that the Panthers were waging a campaign of intimidation directed at Yale and the surrounding community. “If Bobby dies,” Bobby Seale’s supporters chanted as they marched through the campus, “Yale fries!” At one point, Panther David Hilliard showed up at a campus rally to proclaim “there ain’t nothing wrong with taking the life of a motherfucking pig.”
    In her memoirs, Hillary would praise Yale President Kingman Brewster for his leadership during this period. That “leadership” consisted of shutting down classes and throwing open the doors of the university to demonstrators. Basically calling for the Panthers’ acquittal regardless of the evidence, the esteemed Brewster expressed doubts that radicals could receive a fair trial anywhere in the United States.
    Hillary also admired William Sloane Coffin, Yale’s left-leaningchaplain and a luminary of the antiwar movement. Just six years earlier, an undergraduate named George W. Bush was devastated when Coffin had unkind words to say about his father, who had just run for the Senate in Texas and lost. Now Coffin declared that the Panthers’ “white oppressors” should back off—that it was “morally wrong for this trial to go forward.”
    By the end of her first year at Yale, Hillary was already known around campus as a major voice in the student antiwar movement. And while former friends and classmates would later claim they did not regard her as a true radical, her outspoken and highly effective support of those causes indicated otherwise. “You’ve got to remember that when people say they don’t remember her as a radical,” says one former antiwar activist, “it’s because they were probably Maoists or worse. Consider the source. Hillary was a radical, all right, but a very businesslike radical.”
    She had already begun making important contacts in the nation’s capital. While in Washington to deliver her fiery speech to the staid League of Women Voters, Hillary had met perhaps her most important mentor, noted civil rights lawyer and children’s rights pioneer Marian Wright Edelman.
    A 1963 graduate of Yale Law School, Edelman was the first black woman admitted to the bar in Mississippi and headed up the NAACP legal defense fund in that state. Over the next several years, she risked her life organizing voter registration drives and demonstrations to protest segregation. By the time Hillary got to know her, Edelman, whose husband Peter was once an aide to Bobby Kennedy, had used her considerable leverage to establish the Washington Research Project in D.C. The project would soon evolve into the Children’s Defense Fund.
    Hillary, motivated in part by stories of her mother’s horrendous childhood, signed on to work with Senator Walter Mondale’s subcommittee studying migrant labor. Hearkening back to her own experience babysitting the children of farmworkers in Illinois,Hillary interviewed scores of laborers about conditions in migrant labor camps.
    Even before the hearings started, Hillary was seething. Minute Maid, which had just been acquired by the Coca-Cola Company, was one of the companies targeted by the investigation. On Capitol Hill, Hillary waited patiently for the arrival of Coke president J. Paul Austin, who was scheduled to testify. As