A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein Page A

had been totally in character. “Hillary would step in and organize an outlet that would be acceptable on the Wellesley campus. She co-opted the real protest by creating the academic one, which, looking back on it, I think was a mature thing to do,” recalled a classmate.
    That spring, she had begun volunteer work in support of Eugene McCarthy’s candidacy. Weekends, she and a cadre of Wellesley women drove to New Hampshire to stuff envelopes and campaign for him in the state’s primary, the first in the nation. His 42 percent of the vote (to Johnson’s 49 percent) in the March primary was one of the factors leading the president to abdicate, and her fervor was further stoked when McCarthy came to thank student volunteers at his headquarters and she met him.
    Ironically, Hillary had been one of thirteen students accepted the previous year to participate in Wellesley’s Washington Internship Program for the summer of 1968—as a Republican, assigned to the party’s apparatus on Capitol Hill. By the time she arrived in D.C. in June, she was anything but enthusiastic about her earlier choice of party affiliation. The capital seemed desperate and desolate; mourning another assassinated Kennedy and coping with the after-effects of its burning after King’s assassination—on a scale unseen since the British burned the city in 1812. She spent nine weeks interning at the House Republican Conference, mostly answering telephones and delivering messages, and keeping her own counsel about her ties to the Democrats. Despite her misgivings, she found her situation manageable: she was one of thirty interns working in the office of the conference chairman, Melvin Laird, then a congressman from Wisconsin and subsequently secretary of defense under President Nixon. She made a lasting impression on Laird. “She presented her viewpoints very forcibly, always had ideas, always defended what she had in mind,” he said. She worked on two projects for him, one a white paper called “Fight Now, Pay Later” that criticized Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War without regard for the costs. She made clear to Laird that her opposition to the war was based more on the human costs than budgetary considerations. She also wrote a paper for the conference on revenue-sharing. She was for it. “Instead of the categorical fixed grants being dictated [from Washington] on how you spent every dollar, she felt it was better to return funds to the states and local communities where the decision could best be made,” said Laird. Meanwhile, she got a field-level introduction to the ways of Washington during a particularly divisive and violent time in the country’s history.
    For Hillary, the ugliness of the political atmosphere in Washington and the harsh divisions of the country were relieved somewhat by the excitement of her relationship with David Rupert, who was also interning at the GOP conference that summer. They had met on Capitol Hill at a mixer (the term was ubiquitous in certain academic and political milieux in the mid-1960s) for Republican interns. Later that evening, they headed for Georgetown for a drink and conversation. Many years later, Rupert said that he recognized almost immediately that Hillary’s Republican credentials were thin, as his own increasingly came to be. She told him that she was president of the Young Republicans club at Wellesley, but she did not hide from Rupert her alienation from party orthodoxy. He, too, opposed the war, as did the congressman he worked for that summer, Charles Goodell of New York.
    Near the end of her internship, Hillary attended the Republican convention in Miami as a volunteer in the effort to draft Nelson Rockefeller and derail Richard Nixon’s nomination for president. She knew before she got there that Rockefeller’s quest to be the nominee was hopeless, but she wanted to work against Nixon and participate in the