but she passed away when she was only 47, less than a week after I graduated from high school.
She was New York City debate champ at 12, but then disqualified because they decided she was a professional.
She graduated from Hunter College High School at 14. Cornell would not take her, because they did not take students under 16, so she spent a year at Hunter College before Cornell relented and accepted her as a 15 year old sophomore.
Her maiden name was Livingston, the name her father’s grandparents and father were given when they came through Castle Gardens (before Ellis Island) during the Civil War. The heavy Polish-Yiddish accent of Levitsky was not acceptable to immigration, so they gave them a good “American” name of Livingston.
When she arrived at Cornell, she was heavily recruited for sororities — after all, Livingston was a distinguished New York name.
Until they discovered she was Jewish, and her mother had been born in Poland. And they blackballed her.
Whereupon she took on the establishment and got Cornell to change its rules, so that no one could pledge Greek until their second semester.
At the time of her death she was among the first (if not the very first) female Assistant Attorneys General, who took 32 cases to the Court of Appeals (highest court in the state) and won every one.
That is part of the reason.
My wife is brilliant, having graduated from her prep school with perhaps the highest average in the history of the school, having been Junior Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude at Harvard, having won a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford, where her masters thesis of over 500 pages was supervised by one of the world’s great experts on Shakespeare, who when he recommended her to her doctoral program told her she was the best student he had ever had and he told her graduate school so.
She had that scholarship because her primary recommendation was from one of the two greatest scholars in Byzantine Icon Painting, with whom she had taken an upper class / graduate course as a freshman, populated mainly by Byzantine Studies and History of Arts majors. At the end of the course he tried to persuade her to major in his field, but when she declined he offered to help her any way he could in the future.
She won the top prize in her field for her dissertation.
Those are the two most important women in my life, although my sister is no slouch, nor are other women I have been fortunate to know.
I have known many in political life, some in high office, who do not hold a candle to either my mother or my wife — or to many of the other women I have been blessed to have as part of my now nearly 7 decades on this planet.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg was once asked how many women on the Supreme Court were enough and she became the Notorious RBG with her answer — how about 9? When the questioner expressed shock she pointed out no one had objected when it had been 9 men.
My mother, at age 21, was 2nd in her class at Columbia law, by far less than 1%. The person first went to clerk on the Supreme Court. My mother could not get a job as a lawyer, until she went and joined the firm founded by her father and his brother.
I look around the world.
Golda Meir
Margaret Thatcher
Indira Gandhi
Benazir Bhutto
and so many others who have been heads of government around the world.
Were Hillary Clinton not qualified, it might not make a difference.
But she is superbly qualified.
And this country is long overdue to have a woman at its head.
In my lifetime we had a President, Richard Nixon, who was glad not to have a woman in his cabinet.
In my lifetime we saw the first — and then the 2nd, 3rd and 4th — women on our nation’s highest court.
In my lifetime, we saw a President — Lyndon Baines Johnson — sworn in as President by a female judge.
In my lifetime we have gone from one woman in the Senate — Margaret Chase Smith of ME — to two states having both senators female, Washington and California.
I support Hillary Clinton for President.
She is superbly qualified.
She is an inspiration to many.
She is already the most admired woman in the world.
That some in America dislike or even hate her is undeniable. Some of that is racism. Some of that is political difference.
I don’t care.
In 2008 Barack Obama was not my first choice, but he was as qualified as anyone else running — except maybe Hillary Clinton — and it was long overdue for this country to accept a person of color in our highest position.
It was overdue then, and is even more overdue now, that we have a woman as head of our country.
Hillary Clinton is fully qualified, perhaps as qualified as anyone who has ever sought the office of President of the United States.
I would be happy to support if were that the only reason.
She is a woman.
I enthusiastically support her more precisely because she is a woman.
On behalf of all the talented females I have taught, so that they too can aspire to their greatest dreams.
On behalf of gifted women like my sister, and especially my wife.
And most of all because of the woman who helped shape who I am, Sylvia Livingston Bernstein, who would turn 101 on election day.
Peace.