Hillary Clinton Biography
Summary
"Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton" (born October 26, 1947) is the junior United States Senator from New York, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election. She is married to Bill Clinton-the 42nd President of the United States-and was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001.
A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham attracted national attention in 1969 when she delivered a controversial address as the first student to speak at commencement exercises for Wellesley College. She began her career as a lawyer after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, moving to Arkansas and marrying Bill Clinton in 1975, following her career as a Congressional legal counsel; she was named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979 and was listed as one of the one hundred most influential lawyers in America in 1988 and 1991. She served as the First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992, was active in a number of organizations concerned with the welfare of children, and was on the board of Wal-Mart and several other corporate boards.
As First Lady of the United States, she took a prominent position in policy matters. Her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval by the U.S. Congress in 1994, but in 1997 she helped establish the State Children's Health Insurance Program and the Adoption and Safe Families Act. She became the first First Lady to be subpoenaed, testifying before a Federal grand jury as a consequence of the Whitewater scandal in 1996. She was never charged with any wrongdoing in this or several other investigations during her husband's administration. The state of her marriage to Bill Clinton was the subject of considerable public discussion following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998.
Moving to New York, Clinton was elected to the United States Senate in 2000, the first time a First Lady was elected to public office and the first female Senator from that state. There she initially supported the George W. Bush administration on some foreign policy issues, which included voting for the Iraq War Resolution. She has subsequently opposed the administration on its conduct of the Iraq War and has opposed it on most domestic issues. She was re-elected by a wide margin in 2006. Long described as a polarizing figure in American politics, during 2007 she has consistently been the front-runner in polls for the 2008 Democratic nomination for President.
Early life and education
Early life
Hillary Diane Rodham was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, and was raised in a United Methodist family, first in Chicago, and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois. Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was a son of Welsh and English immigrants and operated a small but successful business in the textile industry. Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham, of English, Scottish, French Canadian, Welsh, and possibly Native American descent, was a homemaker. She has two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony.
As a child, Hillary Rodham was involved in many activities at church and at her public school in Park Ridge. She participated in tennis and other sports and earned awards as a Brownie and Girl Scout. She attended Maine East High School, where she participated in student council, the debating team and the National Honor Society. For her senior year she was redistricted to Maine South High School, where she was a National Merit Finalist and graduated in 1965. Her parents encouraged her to pursue the career of her choice.
Raised in a politically conservative household, at age thirteen she helped canvass South Side Chicago following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, finding evidence of vote fraud against Republican candidate Richard Nixon, and volunteered for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964. Her early political development was shaped most strongly by her energizing high school history teacher, like her father a fervent anti-communist, and by her Methodist youth minister, like her mother concerned with issues of social justice; with the minister she saw and met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in Chicago in 1962.
Credit
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article about Hillary Clinton.
