The Document Hillary Didn’t Delete: Hillary’s Suppressed Thesis on Her Marxist Mentor Saul Alinsky

In 1993, the Clinton White House contacted Hillary Rodham’s former thesis adviser Alan H. Schechter, informing him that the Clintons had decided not to release her senior thesis on Marxist organizer Saul Alinsky. When Schechter asked why, he was told that Hillary was working on health care now and she did not want to alienate Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom Schechter was told she had criticized in the thesis. This puzzled Schechter, since he did not recall Moynihan being mentioned in the thesis. (Actually, the thesis does have a chapter critiquing Moynihan’s War on Poverty legislation.) Schechter argued that they should release the thesis because the more they hid it, the more people would want it. He later criticized Hillary’s decision not to release the thesis as “stupid”.

After Schechter received the call from the White House, Wellesley's president Nannerl Overholser Keohane consulted with attorneys. Her legal counsel concluded that applicable copyright law was ambiguous. Keohane then instituted a new policy of closing access to the thesis of any sitting President or First Lady, a policy affecting only Hillary’s thesis. In 1995, this policy was reiterated in writing by new Wellesley president Diana Chapman Walsh. Keohane and Walsh were both Clinton supporters.

These maneuvers kept the thesis out of circulation until the Clintons left the White House. Even legendary muckraker Jack Anderson could not get his hands on it. The thesis became unsealed when the Clintons left the White House, but access was restricted to on-site researchers, who were not allowed to copy more than a few pages of it at a time on threat of being charged with statutory damages up to $150,000. Internet access to the thesis was accordingly restricted. These restrictions were in effect when news commentators relying on physical access to the thesis commented on it during the 2008 election campaign. However, since then, copies have been posted online.

Background: Saul Alinsky

Born in Chicago in 1909 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Alinsky graduated from the University of Chicago in 1930 with a degree in archaeology before the Great Depression derailed his archaeology plans. Alinsky then entered graduate school in criminology, which led him to become friendly with Al Capone and the Chicago Mafia, whose tactics he studied and emulated. After two years of grad school, he began working as a criminologist for the State of Illinois. Meanwhile he began organizing for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a Communist-controlled labor union. By 1939, he had drifted out of the labor movement and into community anti-poverty organizing in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, initially motivated by a desire to combat the spread of fascism there, he later told Hillary.

In 1940, Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a national community organizing network, with support from Chicago Auxiliary Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and philanthropist Marshall Field III. Sheil was a social justice activist who founded the Catholic Youth Organization and was a labor supporter, which occasionally led him to support controversial labor strikes. Field was later called before the Congressional Cox Committee to testify regarding his sponsorship of the Communist fronts the American Committee for Yugoslav Relief and the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship; his Field Foundation trustee Channing Tobias’ association with 48 Communist front groups; his foundation committee member Justine Wise Polier’s association with multiple Communist fronts,; and his foundation’s funding of Communist front organizations such as the Open Road, the People’s Institute of Applied Religion, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the Institute for Pacific Relations.

The Chicago FBI office opened a file on Alinsky in October 1940. At this time, the Communist Party was under surveillance for supporting the antiwar activity of the Soviets’ Nazi German allies, and the Bureau initiated inquiries into whether Alinsky was a Communist. By 1944, an initial investigation had not turned up any derogatory information on Alinsky himself, but had determined that in 1939 his wife Helen had been a member of the American League for Peace and Democracy, a Communist antiwar front associated with Soviet spy Helen Silvermaster, identified as “Dora” in the Venona decrypts. The League had dissolved after the August 1939 announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Germany, transforming into the American Peace Mobilization in accord with the new Soviet party line.

Subsequent investigation by the Bureau determined that Alinsky had at one time been a Communist Party ally but that he did not consistently follow the party line. In 1944, San Francisco Communist Party organizer Harry Bridges characterized Alinsky as having been “alright” at one time but as currently not necessarily “alright” all the time, implying he was considered of unknown reliability by party leadership. Other Communist Party members complained that Alinsky was an egoist who thought he was farther left than they were.

Despite this strained relationship with the Communist Party hierarchy over his independent streak, Alinsky’s poverty organizing activity continued to involve him in activity with Communists, Communist front groups, and extremists from the 1940s through the 1960s. For instance, a 1947 memo in Alinsky’s file mentions that his book Reveille for Radicals was being promoted by the Chicago representative of The Daily Worker, the official Communist Party newspaper. Alinsky’s various associations over the years included the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Black Panther activist Stokely Carmichael, and The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), “which employed youth-gang leaders who were involved in violence.” (Barack Obama would later organize for the Woodlawn Organization, and during his administration, Woodlawn properties linked to Obama associates Valerie Jarrett and Tony Rezko would receive millions of dollars in HUD grants, with support from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel.)

As racial tensions grew during the 1960s, the FBI began tracking Alinsky’s activity in relation to its Racial Matters files, which encompassed investigations of both Communist elements within the civil rights movement as well as racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and their Black nationalist counterparts. Alinsky’s file notes that in December 1963, a Nation of Islam magazine promoted one of his speeches. In September 1964, the Chicago FBI field office flagged a memo about Alinsky’s organizing activity for church groups in Kansas City with the conclusion, “This matter will be followed as to any developments which may indicate a potential for race tensions and violence”. The Kansas City field office subsequently kept ongoing track of Alinsky’s activity.

The December 1965 issue of Counterattack noted that Alinsky had sent advance agents into Los Angeles that May, prior to the Watts race riots that August. In February 1966, Alinsky met with farm workers organizer Cesar Chavez, who had originally been trained by a member of Alinsky’s organization and was now receiving Communist support. In October 1966, the Buffalo field office was monitoring potential racial violence stemming from Alinsky’s organizing activity in Rochester and Buffalo. In January 1967, the FBI flagged an item about Alinsky joining a Detroit public speaking event with SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael, who was by now working with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to promote antiwar activity. That July, a source who later spoke to the FBI was approached by three individuals identifying themselves as Black nationalists who stated that Alinsky was a Communist and that he was working “hand in glove” with Carmichael.

In August 1967, the Chicago FBI office recommended that Alinsky be placed on its Rabble Rouser Index, later known as the Agitator Index. This index collected background information on individuals who had demonstrated a propensity for fomenting racial disorder and violence by appealing to prejudices and emotions in a demagogic manner. FBI headquarters approved this request and began a name check review of all files related to Alinsky. On December 14, 1967, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover instructed the Chicago field office to immediately prepare a succinct summary of Alinsky’s background for dissemination to other field offices.

On January 23, 1968, the Chicago Daily News reported that Alinsky was staying in Chicago over the spring and summer in preparation for the August Democratic National Convention in order to organize plans “to blow this town apart”. Alinsky predicted that Mayor Daley’s threats to get tough on protestors would backfire, saying, “He’s just asking for it. His blunderings have put Chicago on top of the powder keg that could blow so high Detroit will look like a sideshow.” After this was published, Alinsky claimed he had been “misrepresented” and that “he did not ‘plan to blow this town apart’ but rather to organize the Negroes so that their voice could be heard through elected representatives, as is the democratic way”. An FBI file accompanying the article noted, “He is quoted as having made statements advocating racial violence.”

In March 1968, the FBI forwarded Alinsky’s file to the Secret Service following Alinsky publicly indicating knowledge of a threat to President Lyndon Johnson when Johnson attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August. Speaking to the Medical Center of the YMCA on March 7, Alinsky had said that despite strict security measures, “The President would be safer to take a sub through the sewer system.”

Racial violence soon ensued around the country following the assassination of Martin Luther King that April. Johnson then announced he would not seek reelection, so he did not appear at the Democratic National Convention. As the convention approached, Alinsky announced in early August that he would be opening a school in Chicago to train organizers in anti-government pressure tactics, with funding from the Midas International Foundation headed by Gordon B. Sherman, a former member of a Communist Party front group and currently head of Chicago Business Executives for Vietnam Peace. Subsequent violence at the convention in late August resulted in the trial of the Chicago Seven for inciting a riot. The Chicago Seven case, which attracted national attention, lasted from September 1968 to March 1969.

Hillary’s Relationship with Alinsky

It was during Alinsky’s involvement in organizing the Chicago Seven riots that Hillary Rodham became actively involved with Alinsky. Rodham first became aware of Alinsky in April 1962 at the age of 14. At that time, her Park Ridge, Illinois youth minister Don Jones had introduced her to a version of Methodism which drew parallels between Marxist utopianism and liberal Christianity. Jones took Rodham’s class to Chicago for activities such as visiting South Side slums and hearing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. Rodham first learned of Alinsky when she Jones arranged for her class to hear King speak at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall on April 15, 1962. Rodham remained in contact with Jones after he left Park Ridge and she left for Wellesley, which she began attending in 1965.

When Rodham was considering topics for her senior thesis during the 1968-1969 school year, her adviser Alan Schechter suggested that she should leverage her relationship with Alinsky by writing her thesis on him. Rodham interviewed Alinsky for her thesis in Boston in October 1969. Hearing him speak in Boston prompted her to organize a demonstration at Wellesley. She also invited Alinsky to speak to a private dinner of two dozen students at Wellesley in January 1969, when she interviewed him again. Rodham’s meetings with Alinsky occurred during the period when he was organizing riots for the upcoming Democratic National Convention and the FBI and Secret Service were monitoring him as a security threat.

Rodham turned in her thesis with a completion date of May 2, 1969, a day after the annual Marxist celebration of May Day. In the opening acknowledgments for her thesis, Rodham thanked Alinsky for offering her a job. She interviewed for Alinsky twice, but ultimately declined his job offer because, according to Schechter’s interpretation of her thesis, she felt Alinsky’s local organizing tactics would not be effective on a national scale, and she envisioned changing the system nationally. So instead, she decided to attend Yale and work through the legal system to achieve her goals, as she told the Chicago Daily News in an interview in summer 1969.

At Yale, Rodham became affiliated with the radical Yale Law Review of Law and Social Action, cofounded by Robert Borosage of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a Communist think tank linked to domestic terrorist groups such as the Weathermen and Venceremos Brigade and to Soviet, East German, and Cuban intelligence agents. In 1970, through her work for the Review, Rodham became involved in defending Black Panther members on trial for murdering a police officer. She met the Panthers’ attorney Charles Garry, who had defended the Chicago Seven, and Garry’s assistant Robert Treuhaft, former attorney for the California Communist Party.

In 1971, Rodham interned for Treuhaft and his wife Jessica Mitford at their law firm in Oakland, which represented radical clients such as the Oakland-based Black Panthers. She was joined in San Francisco that summer by her boyfriend Bill Clinton. Rodham had met Clinton in spring 1970 following his return from Oxford. While at Oxford from 1969 to 1970, he had lived with Strobe Talbott, then translating the memoirs of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, which were being leaked to him by Victor Louis, a KGB disinformation agent and talent spotter. He had also organized American participation in the activities of antiwar organization Group 68, cofounded by Heinz Norden, who had been dismissed from a sensitive US Army position after US intelligence discovered he had a background with Communist Party union and antiwar activity. After organizing for Group 68 in fall 1969, Clinton had traveled to the Soviet Union, where in Moscow he met Anik “Nikki” Alexis, a daughter of a French diplomat who was now studying at the Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University, a KGB training ground famed for turning out alumni such as the notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Clinton then returned to America and began attending Yale, where he met Rodham.

During the time Clinton and Rodham were at Yale and in Oakland, Rodham remained in correspondence with Alinsky. On July 8, 1971, Rodham wrote Alinsky. She updated him on her living and work situation, saying that she was living in Berkeley at 267 Derby #2 and working in Oakland. She asked him about his forthcoming book Rules for Radicals. She then said “I miss our biennial conversations” and invited him to meet if he ever got out to California. She asked him about his travel plans to organize in Asia. In her conclusion she said, “I hope you are still well and fighting.”

On July 13, Alinsky’s secretary Mrs. Georgia Harper wrote Rodham back. She explained that she was replying because the letter had arrived while Alinsky was traveling in Asia for the next ten days and, “Since I know his feelings about you I took the liberty of opening your letter because I didn’t want something urgent to wait for two weeks.” She promised, “You will hear from him on his return.”

It is unknown what further contact Rodham and Alinsky may have had before he died the next June.

Hillary’s Thesis on Alinsky

In a 1993 interview with the Washington Post, Rodham summed up her thesis by saying, “I basically argued that [Alinsky] was right.” Following her acknowledgments to Alinsky, she opened up her thesis with a biographical portrait of him, leading into an analysis of his organizing philosophy and tactics. Her analysis of his philosophy focused on what Alinsky meant by being “radical”, which she interpreted as seeking radical equality for all people, administered from the bottom up by the masses rather than imposed from the government down. To achieve this, he advocated a strategy centered around achieving enough power to negotiate and compel negotiations, rather than negotiating on the assumption of the other party’s good will. For Alinsky, this implied being prepared for conflict in order to gain power. For groups lacking financial or political power, this meant organizing superior numbers, Alinsky taught. Alinsky therefore focused on the role of the community organizer, whose job he saw as to agitate hostilities to the point of provoking conflict. Alinsky criticized those who wanted to effect change without conflict, comparing them to contemporaries of the American Revolution who said “America should be free but not through bloodshed.” Rodham noted that this type of inflammatory language had drawn criticism from critics who saw Alinsky’s tactics as comparable to those of hate groups and lynch mobs. She conceded that Alinsky sounded bad, but argued for a positive underlying intent, saying, “Unfortunately, the war-like rhetoric can obscure the constructiveness of the conflict Alinsky orchestrates.”

Rodham then went on to consider three case studies of Alinsky’s organizing tactics in action: the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council; the Woodlawn Organization; and Alinsky’s Rochester-based FIGHT organization, created to pressure Kodak. She used these case studies to illustrate Alinsky’s protest tactics as well as his method of building organizations.

Rodham then discussed Alinsky’s relationship to the War on Poverty. Here she followed Alinsky in critiquing Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s anti-poverty legislation, which was based on the opportunity theory of sociologists Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward, the latter famous as an architect of the Cloward-Piven strategy of deliberating overloading the welfare system in order to force a replacement of the national welfare system with a guaranteed national income. Rodham argued that Moynihan’s approach was an undemocratic imposition of legislation on the masses rather than the type of community-based empowerment Alinsky advocated. Rodham also criticized Sargent Shriver, who had taken issue with Alinsky over the War on Poverty.

After defending Alinsky against his critics, Rodham then moved into a critique of Alinsky himself. Drawing from critics of Alinsky such as Philip W. Hauser, Harold Fey, and Frank Riessman, as well as conflict theorist Lewis Cosor, Rodham argued that Alinsky’s approach had not succeeded beyond the local level because it had become bogged down in local organizing for the sake of protesting without a specific goal. She further contended that Alinsky himself had changed his methods over time because he had recognized the limitations of his own community-based approach. She argued that a community-based approach was obsolete in 1969 due to the fact that the community neighborhood was no longer a workable societal unit, and also because power had become centralized in the federal government since the New Deal era when Alinsky started organizing.

Rodham’s final chapter softened her criticism of Alinsky by calling it a “’perspective’ rather than a ‘critique’”. She managed this by contending that Alinsky’s own philosophy was still evolving, implying that it was actually moving in the direction she was advocating. She argued that Alinsky’s basic premises were sound but that his philosophy was still developing in its understanding of community and of the role of national central planning in effecting social change. She explored how Alinsky’s radical community reorganization approach might be expanded to apply to the city and national levels. “If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized,” she concluded, “the result would be social revolution. . .Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared--just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths--democracy.”

Rodham’s appendices to her thesis include an October 25, 1968 letter from Alinsky’s IAF, responding to a previous inquiry from her by sending her an application for Alinsky’s new Chicago training school, the IAF Training Institute. The letterhead footer lists the IAF’s board of trustees as including “Miss Marian E. Wright, Jackson, Mississippi”. This is evidently Mississippi civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman, who had recently married Kennedy family associate Peter Edelman on July 14, 1968. Rodham and Edelman would meet at Yale in 1970, leading Rodham to join the staff of Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund, an association that would continue after Hillary Clinton moved to Arkansas. In December 1992, following Bill Clinton’s election to the Presidency, Edelman would join Bill and Hillary Clinton at an economic summit in Little Rock. Peter Edelman served the Clinton administration in the Department of Health and Human Services before resigning in 1996 to protest the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. The Clintons’ relationship to the Edelmans has been strained since then, but they have lent their support to her 2016 Presidential campaign.

The bibliography to the thesis mentions, “Alinsky and I met twice during October in Boston and during January at Wellesley. Both times he was generous with ideas and interest. His offer of a place in the new Institute was tempting but after spending a year trying to make sense out of his inconsistency, I need three years of legal rigor.”

In addition to Alinsky, Clinton also acknowledges his organization members John Haffner, Nicholas von Hoffman (currently of the Huffington Post), and Phyllis Ryan, along with Wellesley sociology professor Annemarie Shimony, whom she credits for criticizing Alinsky and focusing her thoughts.

The Current Relevance of Hillary’s Thesis

Clinton’s thesis reveals several important things that are relevant to the current election campaign. First, it documents that in her student days, she was a fellow traveler with Communists considered by the Johnson administration to be national security risks because of their role in promoting racial violence, a foreshadowing of the Democratic Party’s current deployment of Black Lives Matter. Second, it shows that Clinton equates democracy with a Marxist vision of a classless society, a philosophically fallacious view that founders on the fact of human diversity, and one hardly consistent with the bicameral premise of the United States Constitution that she is purportedly running to uphold. Third, it shows that Clinton’s ideology values power above rational negotiation and is willing to use violence to attain power. Finally, its reference to Marian Wright illustrates how Clinton has continued to associate with descendants of Alinsky’s radical network since her student days. Hillary was and is a dangerous radical, and like her mentor Alinsky, she is a rabble-rousing agitator of racial violence and a threat to national security.

Select Bibliography

Bill Dedman, “Reading Hillary Rodham’s Hidden Thesis: Clinton White House asked Wellesley College to Close off Access”, MSNBC.com, May 9, 2007, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17388372/#.V6bo1K2VZPY

Bill Dedman, “How the Clintons wrapped up Hillary’s thesis: ‘A stupid political decision,’ says her former Wellesley poly-sci professor”, MSNBC.com, September 6, 2007, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17388394/#.V6brtq2VZPY

HOOOOOOOOO boy.

This is why, in spite of myself, FR is my chief news source. I see stuff well in advance of it hitting the media. Scoop city.

Trump: “You got some ‘splaining to do, Hill!”

You forgot Kristol. There is something elementally psychotic about the attitude of Kristol and Will. In a human sense, when it is evident Trump will win in a landslide on election night, someone should be there to prevent a suicide. But in a visceral way, the crime scene photos after the suicide would be ‘closure’.

I’m more familiar with the Texas organizations and leaders. I had a secretary back in the 70s whose husband was a local leader and organizaer. I knew many of the local San Antonio leaders of La Raza through my own politcial work. The town had been run by an elite group of citizens for years and it was amazing to see them shouted down at city council meetings. Now they have become part of the local establishment.
San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro and State Rep. Joaquin Castro, brothers whose mother, Rosie, was a founding member of Raza Unida.

Ramsey Muniz, an attorney from Corpus Christi, was the first Mexican American candidate in history for governor. He was a very charismatic young man but eventually got caught up in a large drug transaction that put him in jail and out of politics.

La Raza was able to take over the city governments in several small Texas towns with Mexican American majorities—but most of these folks implemented the corrupt techniques of politicians in Mexico and ran the governments as personal financial fiefs. The FBI arrested a bunch of city councilmen and the city manager in one S. Texas town just a few months ago.

Saul Alinsky, as a student at the University of Chicago, figured out how to cheat a diner chain out of a entire meal for the price of a cup of coffee. He gave his method to his fellow students because he figured that students should be able to eat for the 5 cent cup of coffee. It was his first venture into criminal behavior. After graduation from graduate school, he went to work for the the Capone mob. This is an ethics challenged man, which Hillary (also Obama) took hook line and sinker.

Interesting fact, Saul Alinsky was mentored by Al Capone’s right hand man Frank Nitti.

From comment # 17:

It is probably one of the most amoral, twisted works I have ever read. Given that Alinsky wrote a dedication to Lucifer, I shouldn’t be surprised. The dedication was taken out of later editions so as not to offend the clergy he was attempting to recruit, but the version I read had it. Apparently, it was a copy from the 1980's, and they figured it was safe to put it back in.

From what I can see, reading that book enables one to understand what makes Obama (and his devoted followers) tick.

The very FIRST paragraph exposes very clearly what they are all about:
"What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. 'The Prince' was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. 'Rules for Radicals' is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away."

It is unrestricted class warfare, pure and simple. And it is the bible of Obama, Clinton, and their like-minded followers.

Check out article and comments.

Well written! Applause!

Thank you for the ping, IT. Fedora pinpointed so clearly what was happening at a very impressionable time of my life that I now have shivers up my back. I was a teenager during the Watts riots. I do remember things such as “ruling by chaos” during those times in very conservative Orange County, California. Scared me to death then. Scares me even worse now.

Thanks for the additional info on their activity in San Antonio. I have added that to my file. As I recall, the FBI files that were the source of the information from my previous post regarded the Colorado VVAW’s activity with La Raza, but they also included a file from 1971 by the San Antonio FBI office regarding the VVAW’s Austin operation, under Terry DuBose; the VVAW branch there was active in Killeen and recruiting at Fort Hood. VVAW also had their national meeting in Houston in 1972, at which time the Bureau’s file noted they were working with La Raza. I don’t see anything additional about San Antonio upon a brief review of the file, but I will keep that in mind.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.