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

soon as she spotted him, Hillary pointed a finger at the hapless executive. “We’re going to nail your ass,” Hillary said point-blank. “Nail your ass!”
    Later, Hillary would work with the staff of Yale–New Haven Hospital drafting legal guidelines for the medical treatment of battered children, and write papers on the legal rights of minors for the nonprofit Carnegie Council on Children. Years later, Hillary would be wrongly accused of advocating changes in the law that would allow children to sue their parents if they didn’t want to take out their garbage—a misconception she would attempt to correct in her folksy, upbeat, and cautiously moderate book It Takes a Village.
    But Hillary’s earlier writings may more accurately reflect her true beliefs because they are not intended to mollify a wider audience. They are crafted in the strident prose of the committed social engineer, and make an explicit argument for the state to play a more active role in child rearing. Referring to children as “political beings,” Hillary challenged the autonomy of the family. “The pretense that children’s issues are somehow above or beyond politics endures,” she complained, “and is reinforced by the belief that families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children.”
    Hillary did, in fact, argue that children be given fundamentally the same rights in court as their parents—including, if the need arose, the right to sue them. “Ascribing rights to children,” wrote the woman who would one day bar her own teenage daughter from getting a tattoo, “will force from the judiciary and the legislature institutional support for the child’s point of view.”
    During her stint in New Haven’s Legal Services office, Hillary was taken under the wing of a young legal aid lawyer named Penn Rhodeen. Hillary helped Rhodeen represent one black foster mother who wanted to adopt a two-year-old girl she had raised since birth. Connecticut had a strict policy, however, that barred adoption by foster parents. Despite their best efforts, Rhodeen and Hillary lost the case, and the little girl was taken from the only mother she had ever known.
    Hillary was “passionate” on the subject of children’s rights, Rhodeen said. But no one was under the impression that she would be willing to toil in obscurity as a legal aid lawyer. Hillary already had her eye on several top law firms in Washington and New York.
    In the meantime Hillary, by now a bona fide star on campus, basked in the adulation of her fellow students. “We were simply,” one said, “awed by her. She was so forceful, so self-assured that when she just took charge you accepted that it was the natural order of things.”
    Hillary would meet her match in that turbulent fall of 1970 when she spotted an orange-bearded “Viking” holding forth in the student lounge. The tall, scruffy-looking character was draped over a sofa and boasting loudly that, for starters, Arkansas grew the world’s biggest watermelons.
    Bill Clinton, Hillary soon learned, was a Rhodes scholar who had just returned from two years at Oxford. Clinton, in turn, asked their mutual friend Robert Reich what he knew about this serious girl with the Mr. Magoo glasses. For the next several weeks, they sized each other up—until one November evening when Hillary, slaving over books in the law library, spotted Bill talking to a fellow student in the hallway. As he listened to Jeff Gleckel try to talk him into writing for the Yale Law Journal, the man from Arkansas had trouble focusing. “His glance began to wander and he seemed to be looking over my shoulder,” Gleckel recalled. At Hillary, as it turned out.
    Finally, Hillary pushed her chair back, got up, and walked toward the two men. “Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me,” she said, “and I’m going to keep staring back, we should at least introduce ourselves. I’m Hillary Rodham.”
    Bill’s mind went blank. He