Replies

HERE IT IS, cutie !! ;) (It was posted on the Sunday Talk Show thread, thanks to Aliveritas.) Thanks, Ali!

http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169hillary.html"

....
But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves.

To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect.

Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence.

If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know.

Integrity -- a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust."

What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in East Coker by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.

And then respect.

There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people.

Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences.

And the word "consequences" of course catapults us into the future.

One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid.

Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.

There are two people that I would like to thank before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner who wrote this poem which is the last thing that I would like to read:

My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"

Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
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
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible."

I wonder what brave 'reporter' will demand that Hillary release it?! /s

Barbara Olson: Hil's College Thesis Reveals Her Mind

News/Current Events News
Source: NY Daily News
Published: 1/17/2000
Posted on 01/17/2000 15:13:38 PST by ironman

Hil's College Thesis
Reveals Her Mind

By BARBARA OLSON

"He who fears corruption fears life."
— Saul Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals"

This quote immediately came to mind after my reading of Hillary Rodham's Wellesley College senior thesis — a document kept under lock and key since the 1992 elections.

Back then, when researchers and journalists were searching for information on the newly elected First Couple, Wellesley suddenly declared that it would seal the thesis of any graduate who became President or First Lady.

A few weeks ago, however, I came into possession of Hillary's suppressed thesis. In those 75 pages, the future First Lady reveals herself as someone steeped in the political lore and history of one of America's most political cities. No, not New York — Chicago. There she began her political journey from Goldwater girl to leftist icon.

The thesis' title, "There is Only the Fight ... An Analysis of the Alinsky Model," exposes Clinton's strong ideological attachment to her most influential mentor, Saul Alinsky.

Reading this work makes it clear why she had to remove it from public view, for Alinsky, who died in 1972, was a radical social activist who preached grass-roots organizing and intense, confrontational politics.

While Clinton was studying under Alinsky, he was preparing what would be his final and most important book: "Rules for Radicals," published less than two years after Hillary graduated from Wellesley and only one year before his death.

Alinsky's hold on Hillary is astonishingly evident in her thesis, which is replete with his yet-unpublished political tactics. The thesis reveals that he was moving from local organizing efforts to a new arena — the national stage.

She wrote: "His [Alinsky's] new aspect, national planning, derives from the necessity of entrusting social change to institutions, specifically the United States government."

Alinsky, we can now see, taught Hillary the political tactics that she successfully deployed in Arkansas and the White House and is now beginning to use in New York.

What were his lessons?

Alinsky defined "obtaining power" as a key tactic of organizing his "mass jujitsu." His formula for attack: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it."

This principle has become the essence of the Clinton rapid-response tactic and a key aspect of Hillary's attacks on what she has dubbed "a vast right-wing conspiracy."

The Clinton White House has adhered to Alinsky's rule that "ridicule is man's most potent weapon" and followed his advice to "let nothing get you off your target."

Hillary discusses another Alinsky rule — "power is the very essence, the dynamo of life" — in her thesis. Clearly, she had absorbed his lesson that one must first obtain power to achieve real change.

But nowhere in her thesis — or in her later life — does she seem to recognize the classical liberal critique that the relentless pursuit of power is antithetical to democracy.

Perhaps the most prescient part of the thesis is a quote from a profile of Alinsky in The Economist: "His charm lies in his ability to commit himself completely to the people in the room with him. In a shrewd though subtle way, he often manipulates them while speaking directly to their experience."

Although her thesis was written several years before she cornered Bill Clinton in the Yale Law School library, Hillary had come to recognize the potential power of a man of exceptional charm.

Alinsky recognized the potential of his student and offered her a paying job to develop organizers for "mass power-based organizations." Hillary's thesis confirmed the offer and called it "tempting." But she decided law school was a better place to develop the skills necessary to effect the changes in government she has spent so much of her life trying to achieve.

Hillary's thesis received an A. So far, her political acumen in New York has yielded her at best a C-. But her story continues to unfold.

Olson is the author of "Hell to Pay:
The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton."

http://tinyurl.com/395fxg