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She was born Hillary Diane Rodham on October 26, 1947 in Chicago. Her father was Hugh Rodham, the owner of a textile supply company and her mother was Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham. Hillary was the eldest of three children. She has two younger brothers: Hugh Rodham Jr. (born 1950) and Anthony Rodham (born 1954). She is 5'6" tall with blonde hair and blue eyes. Her religion is Methodist.
Hillary attended Wellesley College from 1965 to 1969 where she was Senior Class president. She attended Yale Law School, from 1969-1973, and was a member of the board of editors of the Yale Law Review. She took one year of post-graduate studies at the Yale Child Study Center from 1973-1974, on the subject of children and medicine. Earlier in her life, she applied to NASA and was stunned to learn that girls were not accepted for the astronaut program. She was active in young Republican groups and campaigned for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 (she was a "Goldwater Girl") but changed her party affiliation after hearing a speech in Chicago by Reverend Martin Luther King. She once worked in a canning factory in Alaska, in 1969. In 1970, she secured a grant and first went to work for the Children's Defense Fund. The following summer, she first came to Washington, D.C. working on Senator Walter Mondale's subcommittee on migrant workers. In the summer of 1972, she worked in the western states for the Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern's campaign. Upon graduation from law school, she served as staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the spring of 1974, she returned to Washington as a member of the presidential impeachment inquiry staff advising the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives during the Watergate Scandal. After the Nixon resignation in August of 1974, she became a faculty member of the University of Arkansas Law School, located in Fayetteville, where her Yale Law School classmate and boyfriend Bill Clinton was teaching as well.
Hillary and Bill were married on October 11, 1975, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Before he proposed marriage, Bill Clinton secretly purchased a small house in Fayetteville that she had noticed and remarked that she had liked. When he proposed marriage to her and she accepted, he revealed that they owned the house. They married and lived here, briefly, before relocating to the state capital of Little Rock, Arkansas, from which he conducted his first campaign, for U.S. Congress. Their daughter Chelsea Victoria Clinton, was born on February 27, 1980.
After her marriage, Hillary Clinton kept her maiden name for work and joined the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the board of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978. That same year, Bill Clinton was elected to the first of five terms as Governor of Arkansas. The following year she became a full partner at the Rose Law Firm. She was twice named to the list of “The 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.” She also represented and later served on the board of Arkansas businesses including TCBY ("Too Good to Be Yoghurt"), and Wal-Mart. As First Lady of Arkansas for twelve years, she chaired the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and served on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital, Legal Services, and the Children's Defense Fund. Mrs. Clinton wrote a weekly newspaper column entitled "Talking It Over."
Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992 in a campaign that exposed his marital infidelity to his wife. Bill Clinton was able to surmount the issue in a masterful disaplay of damage countrol with Hillary's support. At the 1993 Inauguration, the Clintons created a new precedent by having a president-elect's child, their daughter Chelsea, join at the podium at the moment of the oath-of-office administration.
Within the first five days of becoming First Lady, Hillary Clinton was named by her husband to head the President's Task Force on Health Care Reform. In this capacity, she became the third First Lady to testify before Congress, appearing to the House committee on health insurance reform in September 1993. When the plan devised was attacked as too complicated or an intention leading to "socialized medicine" the Administration decided not to push for a vote and it never came to a vote in the Senate or House. The most successful component of her accomplishments as First Lady was initiating the Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997, a federal effort that provided state support for those children whose parents were unable to provide them with health coverage. She also raised awareness of illnesses that were affecting veterans of the Gulf War, with the possibility of their suffering the toxic side effects of chemical "Agent Orange" used in warfare.
She lobbied for passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 and the Foster Care Independence bill, to help older, unadopted children transition to adulthood. She hosted numerous White House conferences that related to children's issues, including early childhood development (1997) and school violence (1999).
Hillary Clinton was the only First Lady to keep an office in the West Wing of the White House. But she and her husband were known to disagree. Regarding his 1993 passage of welfare reform, the First Lady had reservations about federally supported childcare and Medicaid. When issues that she was working on were under discussion at the morning senior staff meetings, she would attend. She persuaded Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to convene a meeting of corporate CEOs for their advice on how companies could be persuaded to adopt better child care measures for working families. With Attorney General Janet Reno, the First Lady helped to create the Department of Justice's Violence Against Women office. She was also one of the few international figures at the time who spoke out against the treatment of Afghani women by Islamist fundamentalist Taliban that had seized control of Afghanistan.
Hillary Clinton became a target for those who disagreed with the Administration. The American Conservative Union, for example, solicited money to fight what they termed the First Lady's "radical agenda." She authored books during her tenure. For the spoken word version of her book regarding family policies, It Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton was the recipient of the recording industry's Grammy Award.
Just five months into the Administration, with the firing of the White House travel office staff, followed to months later by the suicide of Vincent Foster, White House counsel and friend and former law partner of the First Lady, Hillary Clinton found herself implicated in numerous investigations. At the end of 1993, a story broke in the media that a Justice Department investigation into a failed Arkansas real estate venture, concerning a potential development in the Ozarks called "Whitewater," mentioned her as a potential witness in the inquiry. There were suggestions in the media that she had somehow illegally profited. There was similar media speculation when it was disclosed that she had greatly profited in trading cattle futures through an experienced investor. Political pressure, however, led to the President's appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the charges, a move the First Lady opposed. On January 26, 1996, she testified before a grand jury concerning the Whitewater scandal. The investigations led to no criminal charges against Hillary Clinton.
In time, the personal behavior of the President during an illicit affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky would be the only charge in which he would be found guilty, leading to the historic articles of impeachment brought against him in late 1998, of which he was acquitted in February of 1999. During the Lewinsky scandal, Hillary Clinton supported her husband's contentions of innocence regarding marital infidelity, believing the rumors, along with the other charges, to be the result of a "vast right-wing conspiracy." In August 1998, however, when independent counsel Kenneth Starr questioned the President directly in the White House, he confessed that he had lied regarding the extent of the affair. Hillary Clinton later admitted to being deeply wounded personally, but still made a strong statement of commitment to him and the Administration, believing a private matter had been wrong turned into a political attack. Her support of him at that critical juncture was believed to be an important factor in preventing a call for his resignation.
In 1999, Hillary Clinton formed an exploratory committee to pursue the possibility of running for the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She officially declared herself a candidate for the position several months later and on November 7, 2000, Hillary Clinton became the first First Lady ever elected to public office, winning the U.S. Senate seat from New York State. She was sworn in as a U.S. Senator on January 1, 2001 but remained First Lady until January 20 of that year, serving simultaneously for twenty days as a member of one branch of government while married to the leader of another branch. She sat on four Senate Committees with a total of eight subcommittee assignments. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center in downtown New York City, Senator Clinton worked to secure $21.4 billion in funding to assist clean up and recovery, to provide health tracking for first responders and volunteers at Ground Zero and to create grants for redevelopment. She visited American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and became a national advocate both in public and in her Senate work on behalf of retaining and improving health and other benefits for veterans. She was a vocal opponent of the Bush Administration's tax cuts.
Her memoirs Living History were published in 2003 and sold over 3 million copies. When her husband, former President Clinton required immediate heart surgery in October of 2004, Senator Clinton cancelled her public schedule to be with him. She resides in Chappaqua, New York and Washington, D.C.
On 20 January 2007, two years to the day before the next presidential inauguration, Senator Clinton filed with the Federal Elections Commission to declare her formation of an exploratory presidential campaign committee. Nine months later, she formally declared her candidacy for the U.S. Presidency. Throughout the end of 2007 and into early 2008, Senator Clinton joined in several debates with all the other Democratic presidential candidates. In January of 2008, she began the primary season, campaigning across the country, and continuing her fundraising, which would total over $100 million. Although she had been considered as the favored candidate and likely nominee of her party, Senator Clinton garnered 1,896 delegates, just short of the 2,201 required for the nomination. On 3 June 2008, Senator Obama won the necessary number of delegate pledges. Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign several days later and delivered a stirring concession speech in Washington, D.C. to her supporters. She addressed the National Democratic Convention and endorsed the candidacy of Obama. Throughout the fall, she campaigned vigorously on his behalf and after he won the 2008 election, he named her as his Secretary of State.
In January of 2009, Hillary Clinton became the 67th Secretary of State, the third woman and the only former First Lady to serve in this capacity. In that role Secretary Clinton had traveled to 77 countries. She called the action of U.S. ally Israel of building settlements in disputed areas with Palestine to be “insulting,” threatened action against Iran to forego a nuclear weapons development, and criticized the firing of short-range missiles by North Korea into South Korea as “provocative and belligerent behavior,” as “threatening peace and stability in Asia.” A strong supporter of fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan, she urged that nation’s president Harmad Kharzi into assuming a more pro-active role in reducing the influence of the Taliban in his country. She was also the leading American voice criticizing the disclosures of confidential information through Wikileaks.
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has focused special attention beyond her required duties to focus on the international rights of women. Equal access to education, employment, health care and legal recourse for women in all countries have been important issues for her. In a 15 July 2009 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, she offered the following forecast of the challenges and opportunities of the U.S. as it entered the second decade of the 21st Century: "We are determined to channel the currents of change toward a world free of violent extremism, nuclear weapons, global warming, poverty, and abuses of human rights, and above all, a world in which more people in more places can live up to their God-given potential.”
She has recently concluded her term as secretary of state. Many speculate that she will pursue another run at the Presidency in 2016. Having been unsuccessful in her first attempt to be the first female President of the United States, the glass ceiling that she cracked in 2008 may yet be shattered in 2016.