Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician who was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, and served as the junior U.S. Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009 and 67th United States Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. In 2008, she sought and lost the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States to then-Senator Barack Obama. She became the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States in the 2016 election.

In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science. During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans. As the leader of this "Rockefeller Republican"-oriented group, she supported the elections of moderate Republicans John Lindsay to Mayor of New York City and Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke to the United States Senate. She later stepped down from this position. In 2003 Clinton would write that her views concerning the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War were changing in her early college years. In a letter to her youth minister at that time, she described herself as "a mind conservative and a heart liberal". In contrast to the factions in the 1960s that advocated radical actions against the political system, she sought to work for change within it.  By her junior year, Rodham became a supporter of the antiwar presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy. In early 1968, she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association and served through early 1969. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Rodham organized a two-day student strike and worked with Wellesley's black students to recruit more black students and faculty. In her student government role, she played a role in keeping Wellesley from being embroiled in the student disruptions common to other colleges. A number of her fellow students thought she might some day become the first female President of the United States.  To help her better understand her changing political views, Professor Alan Schechter assigned Rodham to intern at the House Republican Conference and she attended the "Wellesley in Washington" summer program. Rodham was invited by moderate New York Republican Representative Charles Goodell to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller's late-entry campaign for the Republican nomination. Rodham attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami. However, she was upset by the way Richard Nixon's campaign portrayed Rockefeller and by what she perceived as the convention's "veiled" racist messages and left the Republican Party for good. Rodham wrote her senior thesis, a critique of the tactics of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, under Professor Schechter. (Years later, while she was first lady, access to her thesis was restricted at the request of the White House and it became the subject of some speculation. The thesis was later released.)  In 1969, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, with departmental honors in political science. After some fellow seniors requested that the college administration allow a student speaker at commencement, she became the first student in Wellesley College history to speak at the event. Her address followed that of commencement speaker Senator Edward Brooke. After her speech, she received a standing ovation that lasted seven minutes. She was featured in an article published in Life magazine, due to the response to a part of her speech that criticized Senator Brooke. She also appeared on Irv Kupcinet's nationally syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New England newspapers. That summer, she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthful conditions).

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