Hillary Clinton

Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois, and was raised in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. She attended public schools, participated in student government and school activities, and graduated from Maine South High School in 1965 in the top five percent of her class. As a child, she wrote to NASA asking how she could become an astronaut and was told that women were not being accepted into the program.

Rodham grew up in a politically conservative household and initially volunteered for Republican candidates, including Barry Goldwater in 1964. Her political outlook was shaped by her history teacher Paul Carlson and Methodist youth minister Donald Jones. Through Jones's youth group, she saw Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Chicago in 1962. Her views later shifted toward the Democratic Party and social justice activism.

Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College in 1965 and majored in political science. During her first year, she became president of the Wellesley Young Republicans, but her views changed as she engaged with the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. By her junior year, she supported the antiwar presidential campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy.

In 1968, Rodham was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association. After Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, she organized a student strike and worked with Black students to recruit more Black students and faculty. She also helped keep the college from becoming embroiled in the widespread campus disruptions of the period.

Rodham graduated in 1969 with departmental honors in political science and became the first student in Wellesley history to speak at commencement. Her address received a seven-minute standing ovation and attracted national attention after she criticized commencement speaker Senator Edward Brooke. She later attended Yale Law School, worked on child-abuse cases, and published the scholarly article "Children Under the Law" in 1973.

After postgraduate work at the Yale Child Study Center and legal work with the Children's Defense Fund, Rodham joined the impeachment inquiry staff advising the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate scandal. She moved to Arkansas in 1974 and became one of only two female faculty members at the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville. There she directed a legal aid clinic and helped establish the city's first rape crisis center.

Rodham married Bill Clinton in 1975 and joined the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock in 1977, specializing in patent infringement and intellectual property law while also working pro bono in child advocacy. She co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and served as the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation board. In 1979, she became the first woman to be made a full partner at the Rose Law Firm.

As Bill Clinton served as governor, she was first lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992. She chaired the Arkansas Education Standards Committee and led efforts that introduced teacher testing and statewide education standards. She also created the Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youth, which helped parents prepare young children for school and literacy.

When Bill Clinton became president in 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton became first lady of the United States. She was the first first lady to hold a postgraduate degree and an independent professional career before entering the White House, and the first to have an office in the West Wing. She played an unusually active role in policy and chaired the task force that developed the Clinton health care plan, a comprehensive proposal that failed to gain congressional approval in 1994.

Clinton later helped promote the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. Together with Attorney General Janet Reno, she helped create the Office on Violence Against Women. She also founded or chaired initiatives including Vital Voices and Save America's Treasures, and led the White House Millennium Council.

Her 1995 speech at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing became a defining moment in her public career. Declaring that "women's rights are human rights," she challenged governments and international institutions to treat violence and discrimination against women as central human-rights issues. She traveled to 79 countries as first lady and became a prominent international advocate for women and girls.

Clinton's years in the White House were also marked by intense public scrutiny, including investigations into Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, and her cattle-futures trading. In 1996, she became the first spouse of a U.S. president subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury. Her book It Takes a Village reached number one on the New York Times Best Seller List, and its audio recording won the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York in 2000, becoming the first female senator in the state's history. She was also the first presidential spouse to run for elected office and, for 17 days in January 2001, the first person to serve simultaneously as a first lady and a U.S. senator. She won reelection in 2006 with 67 percent of the vote.

In the Senate, Clinton served on committees including Armed Services, Environment and Public Works, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and the Special Committee on Aging. After the September 11 attacks, she worked with Chuck Schumer to secure federal funding for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site and investigated health issues affecting first responders.

She supported the 2001 military action in Afghanistan and voted for the 2002 Iraq War Resolution, a position she later called a mistake. She visited American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, advocated for a larger regular Army, and worked on military health benefits and base preservation. She also opposed President George W. Bush's major tax-cut packages and voted against the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

During her Senate career, Clinton co-introduced legislation concerning video-game content with Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, supported immigration reform, opposed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, and helped build political infrastructure for progressive organizations. She published her memoir Living History in 2003, which set a first-week sales record for a nonfiction work.

President Barack Obama nominated Clinton as secretary of state in 2008, and the Senate confirmed her by a vote of 94 to 2 in January 2009. She became the first former first lady to serve in the United States Cabinet. Her tenure lasted from January 21, 2009, to February 1, 2013.

Clinton sought to restore the United States' international reputation and expanded the State Department's role in diplomacy, development, economic issues, social media, and the empowerment of women. She introduced the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review and advanced a foreign-policy approach known as "smart power," which combined military strength with diplomacy, economic influence, development assistance, technology, and human-rights advocacy.

She helped organize international sanctions against Iran that contributed to the multinational Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. She supported the 2011 military intervention in Libya, played a role in the administration's response to the Arab Spring, and advocated a strategic "pivot to Asia." She also helped secure the signing of a Turkish-Armenian accord in 2009 and made the first visit to Burma by a U.S. secretary of state since 1955, meeting Aung San Suu Kyi during the country's democratic reforms.

Clinton visited 112 countries as secretary of state, a record for the position at the time. Her tenure was shaped by the 2012 Benghazi attack and by controversy over her use of a private email server for official business. She accepted formal responsibility for security failures surrounding Benghazi, and an FBI investigation into her email practices concluded without criminal charges, while describing her handling of sensitive information as extremely careless.

Clinton announced her candidacy for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination in April 2015. Her campaign emphasized middle-class incomes, universal preschool, college affordability, and strengthening the Affordable Care Act. She faced a strong challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders, whose criticism of corporate influence and economic inequality resonated with many Democratic voters.

Clinton narrowly won the Iowa caucuses, lost the New Hampshire primary to Sanders, and then won contests in Nevada and South Carolina. Her support among Black and Hispanic voters, older voters, and working-class white voters helped her build a sustained delegate lead. On June 7, 2016, she became the first woman to claim the status of presumptive presidential nominee for a major American political party.

The Democratic National Convention formally nominated Clinton on July 26, 2016. She selected Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate, becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major U.S. political party. In the general election, she lost the Electoral College vote to Republican Donald Trump, receiving 232 electoral votes to his 306, but won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes. She became the fifth presidential candidate in U.S. history to win the popular vote while losing the election.

After the 2016 election, Clinton wrote What Happened, a memoir about the campaign and its defeat, and confirmed that she would not seek public office again. In 2017, she founded Onward Together, a political action organization dedicated to supporting progressive political groups. She later endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, and addressed the Democratic National Convention in both 2020 and 2024.

Clinton continued her work as an author and public commentator. She co-authored The Book of Gutsy Women and Grandma's Gardens with Chelsea Clinton, and wrote the thriller novel State of Terror with Louise Penny. Her later media projects included the Hulu documentary Hillary, the interview podcast You and Me Both, and the television series Gutsy.

Since 2020, Clinton has served as chancellor of Queen's University Belfast. In 2023, she joined Columbia University as a professor of practice at the School of International and Public Affairs and as a presidential fellow at Columbia World Projects.