The Grandeur of Hillary Clinton: Untrustworthiness and Social Progress

Hillary Clinton owes her reputation for untrustworthiness to a single large and admirable decision that she made long ago; and to a series of baffled responses that her decision aroused and continues to arouse; and to the hatreds and paranoias that, like weeds or fungi, eventually sprang from the bafflement—a long history. And every new phase in the long history has done her credit, even if some of those phases require too much explanation.

The large and admirable decision was one that she made in the middle 1970s, she and Bill together, in setting out to pursue a joint career. The two of them had attended Northern and Eastern colleges and universities (and, in Bill’s case, Oxford) at a moment when, among the students, political opinions and cultural assumptions tilted sharply and even radically to the left. In 1969 Hillary was a protest leader at Wellesley, and Bill helped organize one of the big anti-Vietnam War demonstrations at Oxford—which means that both of them breathed the left-wing air and thought the thoughts, even if neither of them veered into the extremes. And then, like everyone else who had gotten caught up in the broad, liberal-and-radical, capital-M Movement of those days, they noticed after a while that leftwing breezes from the universities and the countercultural zones were not about to sweep the country. They campaigned for George McGovern. The nature of his defeat did not suggest that similar campaigns, sharply leftwing and confrontational, were a good idea for the future. Only, what was a good idea, in that case? The Clintons came up with a good idea, and it was different from everyone else’s.

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