Over the next four years, the tumultuous upheaval that would sweep through America – the fight for racial equality, the beginnings of the women’s movement, and the exploding opposition to the Vietnam War – would touch Wellesley as well. But in the early weeks of her first semester, Hillary mostly felt lonely and overwhelmed.
For the first time in her life, she seemed out of her league. Her classmates were at least as accomplished as she was, but many of them were also more worldly and sophisticated. Some had lived abroad or spoke other languages fluently. The closest she had come to foreign travel was crossing the border once into Canada. Her foreign language in high school had been Latin. Her French professor suggested, “Mademoiselle, your talents lie elsewhere.” She struggled with maths and geology.
About a month into school, she called her parents and told them she didn’t belong there. Her father, who missed her, gave her permission to come back home. But in a role reversal, her mother took a hard line. Dorothy told her, “I don’t want you to be a quitter.”
Hillary gradually found her bearings. She enjoyed political science, which became her major, but began to lobby against a list of required courses, including ones on the Old and New Testaments. She joined the Young Republicans, becoming the president in her freshman year. In that role, she organised a panel discussion titled, “Why be a Republican?”
In the autumn of 1966, she encouraged classmates to campaign for Republican candidates, especially the Republican candidate for Senate, Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke. (He would become the first popularly elected African American senator.) “The girl who doesn’t want to go out and shake hands can type letters or do general office work,” she told the school newspaper.
At the same time, she tried to step out of her comfort zone. She had never had a classmate or friend who was black. Wellesley had been admitting black students since the 1880s, but only six of the more than 400 members of the class of ’69 were black. Until Hillary’s year, the school had never put black and white room-mates together – and when it finally did, officials considered the move an experiment. (The school also paired Jews with Jews and Catholics with Catholics.)
Early on, Hillary became friends with an African American classmate, and the two decided to go to church together. When she told some of her friends in Park Ridge, they accused her of trying to make a political statement by challenging a white church rather than acting from good intentions.
Later, Hillary acknowledged that she felt “self-conscious about my motives.” If she had seen someone else doing that while she was still in high school, she wrote to her former youth minister Don Jones, she would have thought, “Look how liberal that girl is trying to be going to church with a Negro.”
But, she said, “I was testing me as much as I was testing the church.”
She developed friendships with the other black students in her class and became a supporter of the black student group they formed called Ethos. Among other things, Ethos pushed Wellesley to drop its segregated room assignments.
A classmate remembered that many white students were afraid to talk about discrimination and racial issues. “But Hillary’s attitude was, ‘What’s so embarrassing? If we’re not willing to talk about it, how are we going to get past it? If prejudice exists, let’s talk about it.’”
Race was also an ongoing topic of discussion with Geoffrey Shields, a Harvard junior from another Chicago suburb, whom she started dating early in her freshman year. The two met at a Harvard party and found common ground talking about politics and social issues. One of Shields’s room-mates was a black student who was active in racial issues, and the three of them discussed integration at length. “It was a time of awakening” for the two Midwestern white kids, Shields said later.
Hillary and Shields saw each other most weekends during her freshman and sophomore years and into her junior year, talking, hanging out, and attending parties, often at Harvard. They danced to Elvis, the Beatles, and the Supremes. They took long walks around Wellesley’s Lake Waban while discussing writers and philosophers. After one of those walks, Hillary gave him a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.
As her Republican roots were challenged, her politics began to shift, but she remained intensely pragmatic. Even in the middle of an impassioned debate, she would point out to him, “You can’t accomplish anything in government unless you win.”
She wasn’t just about ideas. On occasion, they took hiking trips to Vermont and visited Cape Cod. She also took in some Harvard football games with Shields, a former all-state high school football player, and tossed around Frisbees and footballs.
“I thought she was attractive, interesting to talk to, and she was a good dancer,” Shields said later. More than anything, she loved the back and forth of a meaningful discussion. “The time when she seemed to light up the most,” he said, “was when there was a good interesting, heated debate about issues, particularly issues that had a practical impact on the world – racial issues, the Vietnam War, civil rights, and civil liberties.”
How serious they were as a couple isn’t clear. In an interview years later, he called the relationship “healthy” and “normal in every way.” Hillary has never written or spoken about him by name, saying only that she had two boyfriends serious enough to meet her parents. She and Shields saw each other over the summer and met each other’s families, but in extensive correspondence with others, she didn’t mention him. At some point after he graduated, they reverted to being friends. (He also ended up in her law-school class, though neither of them seems to have spoken publicly about that.)
Excerpted with permission from Hillary: A Biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Karen Blumenthal, Bloomsbury.
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