Hillary Clinton's senior thesis at Wellesley in 1969 has finally been read by the press, even though it has been available to the public in the Wellesley archives since 2001.
Hillary, as a 21 year old college senior and class president at Wellesley College outside Boston in 1969, wrote about the tactics of 'radical' community organizer Saul D. Alinsky, who was a famous community organizer in the 1930s through to the 1960's. In his 'Rules for Radicals,' Alinsky addressed the 1960s generation of leftist radicals, outlining his views on organizing for mass power.
Alinsky encouraged unity and communication in social movements, and often wrote that revolutionaries should revolt from within the system than from without. He argued that the most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends, and that an intermediate end for radicals should be democracy because of its relative ease to work within to achieve other ends of social justice. Alinsky is often credited with laying the foundation for grassroots political organizing that dominated the 1960s and continues today among our progressive left.
Bill Dedman, an investigative reporter with MSNBC.com decided to be the first out of his peers to finally read the thesis, instead of endlessly speculating on it for years like his peers. In my mind, that fact speaks volumes on the state of the press today. Think about it. This thesis has been the source of endless speculation among both the left and the right since 1992, and was only available to read since 2001, but no reporter has taken the initiative to drive to Boston to read the thesis before now. Six years. Laziness at the extreme. But I digress.
As Dedman writes, the thesis has been speculated by the right to be a tome of Marxist or socialist views and the thesis has been speculated by the left as proof of her political agnosticism, a lack of any ideology besides a brutal willingness to attack opponents and accumulate power. (well, the right speculates on that too).
The thesis is titled "There Is Only the Fight..." As Dedman notes, this title borrows from T.S. Eliot's line: "There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again."
I, myself, have not read the thesis, but from what Dedman writes about it, I fail to se what the controversy or mystery is.
Here are some excerpts from Dedman concerning the thesis:
Rodham opened the thesis by casting Alinsky as he cast himself, in a "peculiarly American" tradition of democrats, from Thomas Paine through Martin Luther King. "Democracy is still a radical idea," she wrote, "in a world where we often confuse images with realities, words with actions."
And yet, she continued, "Much of what Alinsky professes does not sound ‘radical.’ His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers. The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them and recognizes the necessity of changing the present structures of our lives in order to realize them."
...
Rodham’s thesis describes trying to pin him down on his personal philosophy: "Alinsky, cringing at the use of labels, ruefully admitted that he might be called an existentialist," she wrote. Rodham tried to ask him about his moral relativism — particular ends, he said, often do justify the means — but Alinsky would only concede that "idealism can parallel self-interest."
In her paper, she accepted Alinsky's view that the problem of the poor isn't so much a lack of money as a lack of power, as well as his view of federal anti-poverty programs as ineffective. (To Alinsky, the War on Poverty was a "prize piece of political pornography," even though some of its funds flowed through his organizations.) "A cycle of dependency has been created," she wrote, "which ensnares its victims into resignation and apathy."
...
Rodham closed her thesis by emphasizing that she reserved a place for Alinsky in the pantheon of social action — seated next to Martin Luther King, the poet-humanist Walt Whitman, and Eugene Debs, the labor leader now best remembered as the five-time Socialist Party candidate for president.
To me, at least, what is said in a thesis 38 years ago is not of concern to me. What is of a concern to me is Hillary Clinton's attempts to hide or distance herself from it or any connection to Alinsky for the last twenty years. Indeed, I even think that Hillary has mischaracterized Alinsky's opinions in order to show some separation.
For example:
"I agreed with some of Alinsky's ideas," she explained in "Living History," her 2003 biography, "particularly the value of empowering people to help themselves. But we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't."
Alinsky didn't want to work from within the system?
From Wiki:
"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system...
Quote Source
Further, Bill and Hillary Clinton went to even greater steps to hide the thesis.
Just as conservative authors have speculated, it was the Clintons who asked Wellesley in 1993 to hide Hillary Rodham's senior thesis from the first generation of Clinton biographers, according to her thesis adviser and friend, professor Alan H. Schechter, who describes taking the call from the White House. [See sidebar: "A stupid political decision."]
Wellesley's president, Nannerl Overholser Keohane, approved a broad rule with a specific application: The senior thesis of every Wellesley alumna is available in the college archives for anyone to read -- except for those written by either a "president or first lady of the United States." So far, that action has sealed precisely one document: Hillary Rodham’s senior honors thesis in political science, entitled " ‘There Is Only the Fight...’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model."
At the time, the Clintons were moderates, and fashioning the "Third Way"-triangulation politics that we have come to know and loathe. Any connection to a leftist of any kind would not have looked good.
This is why the current 'radical' left despises her so much. It is not her Iraq vote. It is not her unwillingness to apologize for it. It is things like this. Her constantly running away from her past. It may be that Hillary is no longer a leftist, and it may be she has chosen a more practical and pragmatic path because she is a pragmatist. But why the fear of any connection to liberalism? To activists? To leftists? To the social movements of the 1960's?
I like Hillary, as I am also a pragmatist. But I don't like this running and hiding, the equivocal nature that has marked much of Bill and Hillary Clinton's public life over the last two decades.
Barack Obama is not afraid of similar connections to Alinsky:
A decade later, another political science major started out on the path that Hillary Rodham had rejected, going to work for a group in the Alinsky mold. That was Barack Obama, now a U.S. senator from Illinois and her leading opponent for the Democratic nomination. After attending Columbia University, he worked as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago for the Developing Communities Project. Obama and others of the post-Alinsky generation described their work in the 1990 book "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois," in which Obama wrote that he longed for ways to close the gap between community organizing and national politics. After three years of organizing, he turned to Harvard Law School and then the Illinois legislature.
Barack's bio and campaign has highlighted his experience in community organizing. Clinton has hidden her connections to it.
What does Clinton fear? Why is she ashamed to be one of us?