In between cramming for finals and finishing up my first year of concentration on children, we spent long hours driving around in his 1970 burnt-orange Opel station wagon―truly one of the ugliest cars ever manufactured―or hanging out at the beach...
Bill Clinton was hard to miss in the autumn of 1970. He arrived at Yale Law School looking more like a Viking than a Rhodes Scholar returning from two years at Oxford. He was tall and handsome somewhere beneath that reddish brown beard and curly man...
My decision to go the Yale law school was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within. When I entered Yale in the fall of 1969, I was one of twenty-seven women out of 235 students to matriculate. This seems like a paltry...
I had applied for the Wellesley Internship Program in Washington, D.C., and though dismayed and unnerved by the assassinations, I was still committed to going to Washington. The nine-week summer program placed students in agencies and congressional...
I arrived at Wellesley carrying my fathers political beliefs and my mothers dreams and left with the beginnings of my own. I didnt hit my stride as a Wellesley student right away. My struggles with math and geology convinced me once and for all to g...
I clearly expected to work for a living, and I was lucky to have parents who never tried to mold me into any category or career. In fact, I dont remember a friends parent or a teacher ever telling me or my friends that girls cant do this or girls sh...
What you dont learn from your mother, you learn from the world is a saying I once heard from the Masai tribe in Kenya. By the fall of 1960, my world was expanding and so were my political sensibilities. John E Kennedy won the presidential election,...
Like so many who grew up in the Depression, his fear of poverty colored his life. He could not stand personal waste. If one of my brothers or I forgot to screw the cap back on the toothpaste tube, my father threw it out the bathroom window. We would...
Each summer, as children, my brother and I spent most of August at the cottage Grandpa Rodham had built in 1921 about twenty miles northwest of Scranton in the Pocono Mountains overlooking Lake Winola. The rustic cabin had no heat except for the cas...
Neither was willing to care for their children, so they sent their daughters alone on a 3-day train trip from Chicago to Alhambra in California to live with their paternal grandparents. My mother's grandfather, Edwin Sr., a former British sailor, le...
