Enraged by Brooke’s speech, she set aside her prepared remarks and proceeded extemporaneously to upbraid the senator. Her 420 classmates, who had chosen Hillary to be class speaker, felt their pulses race and their parents turn to stone. “I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while,” she began, her voice ringing. “For too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”
That she had plowed through her course reading lists was evident in the echoes of Kierkegaard and Heidegger throughout her speech: In Kierkegaard’s warning that the “despair at not willing to be oneself” was the first form of “sickness unto death”; and in Heidegger’s description of the “inauthenticity” that comes from fleeing the terrifying necessity for self-creation by “allowing others to direct my life … when I surrender to ‘them,’ ” Hillary found her vocabulary and philosophy. “Our love for this place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions,” she told a stunned crowd of two thousand, among them Nina Nitze’s father, Paul, and Eldie Acheson’s grandfather, Dean. “I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see.… To be educated, the goal must be human liberation, enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity to create.… We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living. So our questions about our institutions, our college, our churches, our government, continue. Every protest, every dissent, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age.” She read a poem byher classmate Nancy Scheibner: “And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle/For all those myths and oddments/Which oddly we have acquired/And from which we would become unburdened/To create a newer world/To transform the future into the present./We have no need of false revolutions/In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds/And hang our wills up on narrow pegs./It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives./And once those limits are understood/To understand that limitations no longer exist./Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free.” She called on her fellow students to emulate the protesting French students whose slogans covered the walls of the Sorbonne. “Be realistic, they say. Demand the impossible. We will settle for nothing less.” And she acknowledged the generational breach opening up before her. “Yesterday I was talking to an older woman who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to look ahead, because she’s afraid.”
When Hillary finished, her classmates rose to their feet and for seven minutes stood and cheered her defiant words. Or most did: Ann Sherwood sat still, “terrified that my father would be furious with me that one of my classmates had the temerity to rebut an adult, much less a U.S. senator.” Mary Day Kent also cast a cautious sidelong glance at her father, who had before that day never seen an Afro or a miniskirt, and was in shock well before Hillary opened her mouth. Charlynn Maniatis recalls her father whispering furiously, “What a disrespectful young lady,” and feeling the same way, “I was cringing.” “I would have liked to have stopped her,” Marge Wanderer told
Frontline
. “I’m sure her mother would have liked to have stopped her, but her class absolutely encouraged her.”
That a speech which was often incoherent and meandering could be so galvanizing and polarizing said much about the way these girls had been raised. “When we were growing up, it was unseemly to have confidence if you were a
That she had plowed through her course reading lists was evident in the echoes of Kierkegaard and Heidegger throughout her speech: In Kierkegaard’s warning that the “despair at not willing to be oneself” was the first form of “sickness unto death”; and in Heidegger’s description of the “inauthenticity” that comes from fleeing the terrifying necessity for self-creation by “allowing others to direct my life … when I surrender to ‘them,’ ” Hillary found her vocabulary and philosophy. “Our love for this place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions,” she told a stunned crowd of two thousand, among them Nina Nitze’s father, Paul, and Eldie Acheson’s grandfather, Dean. “I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see.… To be educated, the goal must be human liberation, enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity to create.… We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living. So our questions about our institutions, our college, our churches, our government, continue. Every protest, every dissent, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age.” She read a poem byher classmate Nancy Scheibner: “And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle/For all those myths and oddments/Which oddly we have acquired/And from which we would become unburdened/To create a newer world/To transform the future into the present./We have no need of false revolutions/In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds/And hang our wills up on narrow pegs./It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives./And once those limits are understood/To understand that limitations no longer exist./Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free.” She called on her fellow students to emulate the protesting French students whose slogans covered the walls of the Sorbonne. “Be realistic, they say. Demand the impossible. We will settle for nothing less.” And she acknowledged the generational breach opening up before her. “Yesterday I was talking to an older woman who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to look ahead, because she’s afraid.”
When Hillary finished, her classmates rose to their feet and for seven minutes stood and cheered her defiant words. Or most did: Ann Sherwood sat still, “terrified that my father would be furious with me that one of my classmates had the temerity to rebut an adult, much less a U.S. senator.” Mary Day Kent also cast a cautious sidelong glance at her father, who had before that day never seen an Afro or a miniskirt, and was in shock well before Hillary opened her mouth. Charlynn Maniatis recalls her father whispering furiously, “What a disrespectful young lady,” and feeling the same way, “I was cringing.” “I would have liked to have stopped her,” Marge Wanderer told
Frontline
. “I’m sure her mother would have liked to have stopped her, but her class absolutely encouraged her.”
That a speech which was often incoherent and meandering could be so galvanizing and polarizing said much about the way these girls had been raised. “When we were growing up, it was unseemly to have confidence if you were a
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