Her critics argue that she can claim no major diplomatic successes, but Hillary Clinton’s four globe-trotting years as secretary of state cemented her image as a powerful stateswoman.
SHE is perhaps the most admired, most criticised, most over-analysed woman in US history. Hillary Clinton has been a public fixture for 37 years and at 67, she is aiming once again to win over a skeptical United States.
Who, after all, remains unfamiliar with the lives of Clinton and her husband Bill? They have not just endured but suffered and thrived in symbiotic tandem under the political spotlight since 1977, the year before Bill’s election as governor of Arkansas.
Parts of first lady Clinton’s archives have been made public and candid papers of her confidante Diane Blair, who died in 2000, are available at the University of Arkansas.
Bill’s sexual proclivities were laid out in explicit detail. Clinton herself has recalled the rage she felt against her mentor-husband after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the threat of divorce and the marriage-counselling.
By 1993, People magazine offered a cover story peek into “The Real Woman Hillary Clinton”.
Twenty-two years later, following a US Senate stint and four years as the international face of the Obama administration – and her recent announcement that she is again running for president – she remains omni-present in the public eye.
Hillary Diane Rodham was born on Oct 26, 1947, and raised in a middle-class household in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge.
She adored her mother Dorothy but described her father Hugh Rodham, born from Welsh immigrants, as a stubborn and rigid taskmaster. He not only imposed his work ethic on his daughter, but also his frugality. She still puts uneaten olives back in the jar and is loath to waste anything, she wrote in her 2003 autobiography Living History.
Clinton shared her father’s Republican convictions in adolescence, as well as his thunderous laugh. The family is Methodist, and to this day she remains in the church.
At the age of 13, she began taking odd jobs to help finance her studies. Smart and ambitious, Clinton was admitted in 1965 to Wellesley, an elite women’s college near Harvard where she was eventually elected president of her class.
With 1960s United States in turmoil, Clinton’s academic years opened her eyes to civil rights and gender equality struggles, and the cultural divide over Vietnam.
After she was accepted to the prestigious Yale Law School in 1969, she met Bill Clinton, the “Viking” from Arkansas who would change the course of her life.
After a period in Washington in 1974, when a commission hired her to help investigate the Watergate scandal, she gave in and joined Bill in Arkansas. He was soon elected Arkansas governor and she joined a prestigious law firm, eventually becoming its first female partner.
She soon dropped her maiden name and became Hillary Clinton, first lady of Arkansas and then the nation after her husband’s White House election victory in 1992.
Her style contrasted with her predecessors’. She played an active political role, symbolised by the location of her office in the West Wing.
Her relations with lawmakers and journalists, however, quickly soured. Republicans branded her a radical feminist.
She also suffered intense humiliation during her husband’s presidential affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in 1998. But her popularity has never been higher than the 67% approval rating she enjoyed in December 1998, according to a Gallup poll at the time.
Pressured by friends and associates in Hillaryland, the first lady launched herself into politics, winning an election in 2000 to be the new US senator from New York.
She laid low during the 2004 presidential race, but four years later she entered the fray to challenge fellow senator Barack Obama, who savaged her vote supporting the Iraq war.
Clinton chose to run on her experience, refusing to campaign on gender. But Americans opted instead on the 40-something political neophyte Obama, bringing hope of change after eight years of George W. Bush.
After finding detente with his party rival, Obama appointed Clinton secretary of state. Her critics argue that she can claim no major diplomatic successes, but her four globe-trotting years in the post cemented her image as a powerful stateswoman.
In his definitive 2007 Clinton biography, journalist Carl Bernstein cited his subject’s dominant characteristic as “passion”, exuded in her “enthusiasm, humour, tempestuousness, inner strength,” and her “lethal (almost) powers of retribution”.
A Machiavellian image – one painted by her many enemies – clings to Clinton, especially in the eyes of voters who remember the turmoil of the 1990s.
Only voters born after 1980 have a majority opinion of her as “honest and trustworthy”, according to a CNN poll. Republicans continue to describe her as living in a self-centered bubble.
Fuelling that perception, Clinton said last year that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House, largely due to her husband’s legal fees, even though the couple owned two million-dollar homes.
Both husband and wife went on to make several million dollars from speaking fees. — AFP/nst
