Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois, the eldest of three children of Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, a fabric store owner and Navy Chief Petty Officer, and Dorothy Emma Howell, a homemaker. She grew up in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, raised in a conservative Methodist household where hard work and personal responsibility were primary values — her father was a Republican, and Hillary initially identified as one, serving as a 'Goldwater Girl' at 13. She was an outstanding student at Maine South High School and entered Wellesley College in 1965, where her political evolution moved leftward in response to the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. She was the first student commencement speaker in Wellesley's history, delivering a speech after Senator Edward Brooke's address that was spontaneous, direct, and received a seven-minute standing ovation — a preview of the speaker she would become.
Hillary Rodham attended Yale Law School, where she met Bill Clinton in the law library in 1971 — she famously broke the ice by walking up to him and saying 'If you're going to keep looking at me, and I'm going to keep looking back, we might as well be introduced.' After law school, she worked on the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation — formative experience that gave her an early, detailed understanding of constitutional limits and executive power. She followed Bill to Arkansas rather than pursuing the Washington opportunities that her law school reputation would have supported, teaching at the University of Arkansas School of Law and joining the Rose Law Firm, where she became a full partner. She was twice named one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal.
Hillary Clinton's tenure as First Lady (1993-2001) was marked by unprecedented involvement in policy — Bill Clinton tasked her with chairing the Task Force on National Health Care Reform in 1993, which produced a thorough proposal that failed to pass Congress but established her as the most policy-engaged First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. The failure of the health care reform effort — and the subsequent congressional investigations of the Clinton administration that consumed much of their second term — shaped her public persona in ways that were both unfair and, in some respects, revealing: she emerged from these years tougher, more strategic, and less willing to take public political risks than she had been entering them. She was elected to the US Senate from New York in 2000 — despite having never previously lived in the state — and served two terms, building a reputation for bipartisan collaboration and policy substance that somewhat rehabilitated her image from the First Lady years.
Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign — in which she was the early front-runner before being overtaken by Barack Obama in the primaries — and her subsequent service as Secretary of State (2009-2013) under President Obama form the middle act of a public career that culminated in her 2016 presidential campaign, in which she became the first woman nominated for president by a major American political party. She won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes but lost the Electoral College to Donald Trump. The loss — attributed to multiple factors including FBI Director James Comey's letter regarding her email server, Russian interference in the election, and the intense public antipathy she had accumulated across 25 years in national public life — was a watershed moment in American political history. Her memoir What Happened (2017) was the rare political book by a losing candidate that directly engaged the author's own failures and choices alongside external factors, and was praised for its candor.
