I spent many years of my late teens, early twenties, in a house full of friends on Dover Road, right next to the Nehoiden Golf Course, property of Wellesley College. The college was our neighbour; Green Beech of Lake Waban, our swimming spot. One summer, my friends and I even worked tending the terraced gardens of the Honeywell Estate that overshadows Lake Waban. The Honeywells are the College’s neighbour if not benefactor.
It was about this time that I first heard of the person who became Hillary Clinton. Hillary Rodham was the class president over my last year staying at Dover Road. At graduation that year, the guest speaker at Wellesley College was Ed Brooke, U.S. Senator of Massachusetts, and the first African-American elected senator since Reconstruction. Senator Brooke was the kind of Republican who could do well in Massachusetts, and politically a far cry from today’s Party of Lincoln. He would have made Lincoln proud. His speech that day certainly would not have troubled Lincoln a whit.
When it was Hillary’s turn to speak, she mercilessly, and unfairly attacked her guest for the state of the world and his call for non-violence. It was not the text that she had submitted previously. She urged the students to act in concord with the students at the Sorbonne. Oh, it was 1969 and Hillary wanted to turn the clock back to 1968.
Her intervention certainly brought her notoriety; she advanced herself as a personality at the expense of her guest. It was opportunistic, it was self-promotional, it was dishonest, and it helped form my opinion of the person behind the assault.
Hillary had been granted power, the first member of a graduating class to be given the honour of speaking, and she used it not for the greater good, but for her own self-promotion. She fooled the administration of the school that was granting her their diploma; she betrayed her classmates. And for what? A call for revolution? At Wellesley College?
Well, she left Wellesley and went unheard of for a while. When next she surfaced the Goldwater Girl-cum-revolutionary had been reborn a new Democrat.
As the students at the Sorbonne always say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.