Slate
Hillary Rodham’s 1969 commencement speech, and the
young poetry professor who saw it.
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Hillary Rodham speaks at Wellesley College in 1969.
Courtesy of Wellesley College Archives/Photo by Stimmell
In politics as in show business, certain public figures attract meanings
beyond reason. Often, at the generating core of that vague penumbra of guesswork
and exaggeration, lurks a blunt, explicit question, like: “What is a modern
woman?” The cloud emanated by such a crude, hidden core is tangential to the
person's actual character and work. Something like that pervades what may be a
culminating stage—running for president, or not—for Hillary Rodham
Clinton.
I use the full three names advisedly. I first noticed her when she was
Hillary Rodham, well before she met Bill Clinton. It was 1969, at Wellesley
College, where Hillary was a senior and I was a freshman professor teaching
poetry classes. The famous commencement address she gave that year was the
beginning of her story as a national figure—but even before then, she was
already the object of speculation and the bright light to which theories
flew.
Wellesley was not an easy fit for me. Decidedly nonpreppy, I had never been
to Massachusetts before the interview. I had not attended an Ivy League school
nor a prep school— not even a summer camp. In the first batch of mail on my desk
was a formal letter from the trustees of Wellesley College announcing that they
had voted to approve a change in the college charter, removing a passage that
declared Wellesley faculty would be composed of Christian men and women.
Impossible for me not mutter an ironic, secular-Jewish “Just in time.” Plus, I
was a man. Like the students, I was in my 20s, but in some ways they were more
confidently at home on that campus than I was.
It was in a poetry writing workshop that I first heard the name, pronounced
with a peculiar—and it turns out prophetic—complexity of countertones: envy and
superiority, something that was close to awe and something else that was not
quite disdain: “Hillary Rodham!” said a pretty young woman with long
hair—just the name—and the other pretty young women with long hair nodded and
murmured their recognition.
In the same group, memorably, someone had presented a poem mentioning a
lawyer. As the discussion rambled, somebody said, looking around at her fellow
poets for confirmation: “Nobody here would marry a lawyer!” ... and no
one in the group disagreed.
Ha. Even at the time, I must have been a little skeptical of their
solidarity, suspected that many in the room would become lawyers, marry lawyers,
divorce lawyers to marry other lawyers, deliver babies who would grow up to
become lawyers. But in the political and cultural vapor of that year and that
place, it was No lawyers (or lawyers' wives) here!
Hillary must have already been accepted to Yale Law School by then. Possibly
an unacknowledged or suppressed understanding that she was ahead of them on a
track they denied, but would follow, underlay the scornful yet impressed way my
students pronounced their classmate's name. Maybe those poets, would-be hippies,
and wannabe radicals had a sneaking, subconscious thought that Hillary's way of
being a woman was magnetic, predictive, and (pardon the expression) correct? In
fairness to those poetry students, their forms of rebellion, however misty or
fashionable, had also affected—had even formed—Hillary Rodham, the onetime
Goldwater Girl from Illinois.
I never taught Hillary nor did I meet her in those years. (Decades later, as
first lady, she helped foster the
Favorite Poem Project; in 1998, she and President Clinton took
part in a Favorite Poem reading in the White House.) But I did get to see the
young Hillary in action—unforgettably—at the Wellesley College
commencement.
The speaker at my graduation from Rutgers was Adlai Stevenson. Sad to say, I
don't remember anything he said. At Stanford, my wife's commencement speaker was
Warren Burger. I was there, but of what the chief justice had to say I remember
nothing. But I do remember that on May 31, 1969, at Wellesley, I saw a gifted,
electrifying natural in action, calling for something better than what we
had.
For some people the event has become legendary. Many others may never have
heard of it. The commencement speaker was U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke. Brooke was—
now here's a period detail—a Republican moderate. Smooth, handsome, a
World War II combat veteran, he was also the first African-American popularly
elected to the United States Senate. He co-authored the Fair Housing Act, and he
was actively pro-choice. In other words, with the eyes of 2013, Brooke can be
seen as a heroic fantasy of courage and wisdom. In the eyes of 1969, he was seen
as blandly complacent.
In politics as in show business, certain public figures attract meanings
beyond reason. Often, at the generating core of that vague penumbra of guesswork
and exaggeration, lurks a blunt, explicit question, like: “What is a modern
woman?” The cloud emanated by such a crude, hidden core is tangential to the
person's actual character and work. Something like that pervades what may be a
culminating stage—running for president, or not—for Hillary Rodham
Clinton.
I use the full three names advisedly. I first noticed her when she was
Hillary Rodham, well before she met Bill Clinton. It was 1969, at Wellesley
College, where Hillary was a senior and I was a freshman professor teaching
poetry classes. The famous commencement address she gave that year was the
beginning of her story as a national figure—but even before then, she was
already the object of speculation and the bright light to which theories
flew.
Wellesley was not an easy fit for me. Decidedly nonpreppy, I had never been
to Massachusetts before the interview. I had not attended an Ivy League school
nor a prep school— not even a summer camp. In the first batch of mail on my desk
was a formal letter from the trustees of Wellesley College announcing that they
had voted to approve a change in the college charter, removing a passage that
declared Wellesley faculty would be composed of Christian men and women.
Impossible for me not mutter an ironic, secular-Jewish “Just in time.” Plus, I
was a man. Like the students, I was in my 20s, but in some ways they were more
confidently at home on that campus than I was.
It was in a poetry writing workshop that I first heard the name, pronounced
with a peculiar—and it turns out prophetic—complexity of countertones: envy and
superiority, something that was close to awe and something else that was not
quite disdain: “Hillary Rodham!” said a pretty young woman with long
hair—just the name—and the other pretty young women with long hair nodded and
murmured their recognition.
In the same group, memorably, someone had presented a poem mentioning a
lawyer. As the discussion rambled, somebody said, looking around at her fellow
poets for confirmation: “Nobody here would marry a lawyer!” ... and no
one in the group disagreed.
Ha. Even at the time, I must have been a little skeptical of their
solidarity, suspected that many in the room would become lawyers, marry lawyers,
divorce lawyers to marry other lawyers, deliver babies who would grow up to
become lawyers. But in the political and cultural vapor of that year and that
place, it was No lawyers (or lawyers' wives) here!
Hillary must have already been accepted to Yale Law School by then. Possibly
an unacknowledged or suppressed understanding that she was ahead of them on a
track they denied, but would follow, underlay the scornful yet impressed way my
students pronounced their classmate's name. Maybe those poets, would-be hippies,
and wannabe radicals had a sneaking, subconscious thought that Hillary's way of
being a woman was magnetic, predictive, and (pardon the expression) correct? In
fairness to those poetry students, their forms of rebellion, however misty or
fashionable, had also affected—had even formed—Hillary Rodham, the onetime
Goldwater Girl from Illinois.
I never taught Hillary nor did I meet her in those years. (Decades later, as
first lady, she helped foster the
Favorite Poem Project; in 1998, she and President Clinton took
part in a Favorite Poem reading in the White House.) But I did get to see the
young Hillary in action—unforgettably—at the Wellesley College
commencement.
The speaker at my graduation from Rutgers was Adlai Stevenson. Sad to say, I
don't remember anything he said. At Stanford, my wife's commencement speaker was
Warren Burger. I was there, but of what the chief justice had to say I remember
nothing. But I do remember that on May 31, 1969, at Wellesley, I saw a gifted,
electrifying natural in action, calling for something better than what we
had.
For some people the event has become legendary. Many others may never have
heard of it. The commencement speaker was U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke. Brooke was—
now here's a period detail—a Republican moderate. Smooth, handsome, a
World War II combat veteran, he was also the first African-American popularly
elected to the United States Senate. He co-authored the Fair Housing Act, and he
was actively pro-choice. In other words, with the eyes of 2013, Brooke can be
seen as a heroic fantasy of courage and wisdom. In the eyes of 1969, he was seen
as blandly complacent.
It was the radical spirit of 1969 that led Wellesley's administrators to
invite a student speaker, an unprecedented move. Wellesley by tradition had no
valedictorian. One alumna said, “Many of us are still recovering from the shock”
of having a student speaker, as Judith Martin (Wellesley '59), also known as
Miss Manners, reported in her Washington Post piece about attending the
event.
Brooke's talk was carefully middle-of-the-road: the safest route for a black
politician elected in Massachusetts, with its 97 percent nonblack population.
Not long before, he had explicitly denounced Georgia's segregationist Gov.
Lester Maddox on one side of him and black separatist Stokely Carmichael on the
other. In his Wellesley talk, Brooke stressed his conviction that things had
been getting better: “When all is said and done,” he said (quoted in the
Fitchburg Sentinel of June 2, 1969), “I believe the overwhelming
majority of Americans will stand firm on one principle: coercive protest is
wrong, and one reason that it is wrong is that it is unnecessary.”
His phrase “coercive protest” was a clever speechwriter's attempt to
characterize the widespread student demonstrations (and other demonstrations) of
the time—clever but horribly deficient in relation to the voter registration
efforts in Mississippi, which had led to murder and police criminality. Brooke
seemed to be averting his eyes from American forces napalming villages and
defoliating forests in Vietnam, and from the violent disorder in segregated
American cities. After the recent years of assassinations, urban riots,
demonstrations, and student strikes, the words “coercive protest” were
pusillanimous.
The senator accepted polite applause. Next, Wellesley's alumna-shocking
innovation of a student speaker was briefly explained by Ruth Adams, the college
president—a job made difficult by turbulent times, even on a genteel campus as
pacific as Wellesley's. (Showing impatience with her alma mater, Judith Martin
in her Post story wrote about Brooke's bland commencement address:
“Given at Harvard, that speech would have invited a mass walkout.”)
Hillary Rodham came to the microphone and explained to the assembly of
seniors, families, alumnae, faculty, trustees, and reporters that before her
prepared remarks she would respond briefly to Brooke. What I recall vividly
about her impromptu remarks is less what the 21-year-old student politician had
to say than the shrewdly controlled way she formulated her objection to Brooke's
performance. How could somebody so young have improvised a devastatingly
courteous, even courtly critique of the senatorial bromides?
I remember a rhetoric of respectful regret, along the lines of: “Senator, we
hoped you might have said something about conditions in our cities,” and
“Senator, we need you to speak about the escalation of war in Southeast Asia.”
She expressed sadness at her need to say that empathy was not enough, that she
and the other students needed Brooke's guidance, not empty generalities. The
“art of the possible” was not enough. Brooke had mentioned as good news that the
percentage of Americans below the poverty line had decreased to 13.3 percent.
“That's a percentage” she said, with polite disdain.
Her remarks worked, though the present Hillary Clinton might wince at young
Hillary's scorn for percentages, her telling the senator he owed his audience
something better than “a lot of rhetoric.” The poise, good manners, and fearless
cogency of those improvised remarks gave them not just rhetorical power, but
authority. Hillary Rodham's speech—the first ever given by a graduating
senior at Wellesley—was interrupted by frequent applause and followed by a
standing ovation that lasted (says the Fitchburg Sentinel, confirming
my memory) for seven minutes.
No need to exaggerate: Hillary's language as reported in transcripts and news
reports is not stirring or imaginative, though some may find some of the terms
surprising:
“ ... a prevailing, acquisitive,
and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not
the way of life for us. We're searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and
penetrating mode of living. And so our questions, our questions about our
institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government
continue.”
For those of us who were there, this is pretty standard language of 1969.
What was amazing, and not standard, was the gift for rising to an occasion: a
political gift and a matter of talent surging toward its realization. As part of
the prepared part of her speech, Hillary Rodham read a poem by a classmate, a
composition also touchingly of that era. On that day in May, in other words, the
notes that were struck may have been unremarkable, but the occasion was like
hearing a very young, uniquely gifted musician play: something in the sheer,
expressive command—a word used about athletes, as well as musicians—was
extraordinary, unmistakable, and already formed.
Those poetry students had their idea of what a woman was or would be in their
generation. The founders of Wellesley College and the trustees who revised its
charter in 1969 had their ideas. So too did the alumni who were shocked by the
tradition-breaking student commencement speaker, or approving, or some of each.
In some vague way, I must have had my own ideas about such matters. But whether
or not Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, it was Hillary Rodham who
pointed the way in 1969.
