Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, was elected junior senator from New York in November 2000. Clinton grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois; her father owned and ran a drape and curtain factory. She excelled at her studies and was elected to student government at Maine South High School. Park Ridge is a solidly Republican Chicago suburb, near O’Hare Airport, and the young Hillary Rodham was a Goldwater girl in 1964. She went to Wellesley College, where she became a Democrat in the turbulent election year of 1968: she wrote her senior thesis (kept under lock and key by the college since 1993) on applying the theories of radical Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky and argued that antipoverty programs did not give enough power to the poor. She was elected student government president, and pushed successfully for admission of more black students and admission of men to women’s dorms. At the 1969 commencement she gave a speech that won notice in Life magazine. She went on to Yale Law School, where she worked with the attorney for Black Panthers accused of murder and clerked for a summer with Communist attorney Robert Treuhaft in Berkeley. At Yale she met Bill Clinton, and they became partners for life.

Bill Clinton was anything but reticent about his political ambitions in his native Arkansas. He showed her around the state and together they went to Austin in 1972 to run the McGovern campaign in Texas. After graduation in 1973, Bill Clinton moved to Fayetteville to teach law at the University of Arkansas. In 1974 Hillary Rodham moved to Washington to work for the House Judiciary Committee’s special counsel John Doar on the impeachment of Richard Nixon; Bill Clinton ran for Congress and came close to unseating a Republican incumbent. After Nixon resigned, she returned to Arkansas to teach law, and in October 1975 she and Clinton were married. In 1976 he was elected attorney general of Arkansas; she worked for Jimmy Carter’s campaign. After that she worked for the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock and in 1977 was appointed part-time chairman of the Legal Services Corporation. Under her leadership, the Legal Services budget increased dramatically, including contributions to local political campaigns and conducting campaigns against ballot propositions. In 1978 Bill Clinton ran for governor, and after he won the Democratic nomination, tantamount to victory that year, Hillary Rodham invested $1,000 in commodities future and, with the help of a friend who was general counsel of Tyson Foods, one of the state’s biggest businesses, saw that turned into $100,000.

In 1980 Bill Clinton was defeated for re-election. He promptly took up a more moderate line and his wife began to call herself Hillary Clinton; in 1982 he beat the incumbent and became governor again. Hillary Clinton continued her law practice and service on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund and other organizations. She served on the boards of Wal-Mart, TCBY and in 1988 and 1991 was named by the National Law Journal as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country. It was in these years also that she and her husband invested in the Whitewater real estate project and that she performed legal work for the Morgan Guaranty Savings and Loan, which invested in the project and whose failure cost the federal government $73 million. Whitewater later became the subject of congressional hearings and an independent counsel investigation, both of which were impeded when Rose Law Firm billing records were subpoenaed in July 1994 but were not found until they turned up in the residential quarters of the White House in January 1996. Independent Counsel Robert Ray in September 2000 ended the investigation, saying he could not prove that the Clintons had been involved in criminal activity or that they concealed information from investigators or obstructed justice. In his final report in March 2002 Ray noted that Rose Law Firm records were found in the family quarters of the White House in January 1996 and that three witnesses told investigators they saw her “carrying records that had the appearance of the billing records in July 1995”; but he said that that evidence was insufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.

In 1991 Bill Clinton ran for president. It was widely rumored that he had had many extramarital affairs; at a Washington press breakfast the Clintons admitted that their marriage had not been without problems. After the election, Clinton announced that the leader of his task force on health care reform would be the first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton—the first time her maiden name was featured. The task force under her direction and that of Ira Magaziner met secretly and without input from members of Congress; a complicated plan was finally produced after a couple of deadlines were not met. Clinton eventually did testify before Congress; there and in other public forums she was crisp, articulate, and knowledgeable. But she was unable to persuade Congress to adopt her plan. It never came to the floor in either house, and was abandoned in September 1994. In the meantime, the first lady had other problems. In May 1993 the members of the White House Travel Office were fired, and director Billy Ray Dale was later prosecuted—and acquitted by a jury within minutes. Clinton denied that she had any role in the firings, or in apparent plans to replace the charter service with one owned by Clinton friends and Hollywood producers Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. In June 2000 Independent Counsel Ray concluded that Clinton had given “factually false” testimony in a sworn deposition, but declined to prosecute her.

Clinton persevered through the humiliations of the health care fiasco and the scandals with an aplomb that showed great discipline and determination. She wrote It Takes a Village and donated the proceeds to children’s hospitals. In January 1998, when Bill Clinton denied the charge that he had had an affair with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Rodham Clinton flew to New York to appear on the Today show and charged that the allegations were the product of “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” She continued to support him, though with obvious frostiness, when he was forced to admit in August 1998 that the charges were true.

Meanwhile, she campaigned gamely for Democratic candidates in the 1998 elections, and was particularly moved by the warm applause she received in her four appearances in New York for Senate candidate Charles Schumer. Three days after the 1998 election, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced that he would not run for re-election in New York in 2000. Moynihan, the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson, a man whose public career extended back into the 1950s and included many prescient warnings and original insights, who had served four terms in the Senate after serving in the cabinet or sub-cabinets of four successive presidents, obviously was not going to be replaced by a politician of similar magnitude; there aren’t any. But there also weren’t any obvious Democratic successors in New York. Moynihan, who passed away in March 2003, himself suggested state comptroller Carl McCall; Congresswoman Nita Lowey of Westchester County was interested in the race, though it was not clear that either had the stature to beat the likely Republican nominee, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In early 1999 Bob Torricelli, the aggressive head of the Senate Democrats’ campaign committee, called for Clinton to run. She said she was giving “careful thought” to it. She started making more trips to New York, and Lowey said she would be glad to step aside if Clinton ran. In July 1999 she appeared at Moynihans’ Upstate farm and then began a “listening tour” across Upstate New York. Giuliani responded with an appearance in Arkansas.

Clinton’s early campaign was not without troubles. There was widespread ridicule of the idea of someone with no previous connection with the state running for senator from New York. In August 1999 Bill Clinton granted clemency to four Puerto Rican terrorists who never expressed remorse for their violent crimes—an obvious pitch for the Puerto Rican vote. Embarrassed, she came out against the move, without giving a heads-up to Puerto Rican leaders. That same month the Clintons left their favorite vacation spot, fashionable Martha’s Vineyard, for a sojourn in Skaneateles, a pleasant town in the Finger Lakes they would probably never have visited otherwise. In October the Clintons bought a house in woodsy Chappaqua in Westchester County and were then embarrassed because they borrowed most of the purchase price from Democratic fundraiser Terry McAuliffe; later they got more conventional financing. In November 1999 on a trip to Israel, Clinton embraced and kissed the wife of Yasir Arafat after a speech in which she lambasted the Israelis; Clinton explained later that she was acting in a diplomatic capacity, but her act brought back memories of her endorsement of an independent Palestinian state when that was not yet U.S. policy. In February 2000 she formally announced her candidacy, with her husband standing silently by, from a venue in Westchester. By that point her poll ratings had slipped, and she was running no better than even with Giuliani.

Carpetbagging is not necessarily a political crime in New York. Voters there in 1964 elected Robert Kennedy, though he lived in Virginia and had a technical residence in Massachusetts. Robert Kennedy won in 1964 not just because of Lyndon Johnson’s coattails, but because he ran virtually even in usually Republican Upstate New York; national celebrities may be commonplace in New York City, but when they show up in Upstate towns and cities it is noted and appreciated. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s strategy was similar. With her usual hard work, perseverance and intensity, she criss-crossed Upstate New York, listened to its voters’ many complaints, learned about local issues and adopted appealing positions on them: the same slogging persistence she had shown in the dreary days in Arkansas and the tumultuous days after the failed health care initiative and scandal charges in Washington. In April Giuliani announced that he had prostate cancer; in May he announced that he was seeking a separation from his wife. Days later, in a dramatic press conference, he announced he was leaving the Senate race.

Within 24 hours the Republicans had another candidate, Long Island Congressman Rick Lazio. He had talked of running in summer 1999, until Governor George Pataki announced suddenly in August that he was backing his longtime rival Giuliani. Lazio had a moderate voting record in the House; like Giuliani he backed abortion rights. He raised plenty of money: Hillary haters from all over the country sent in contributions large and small, and he ended up spending $40 million. But his campaign was less than perfect. Lazio was vulnerable to attacks, made often by Clinton, that he had supported Newt Gingrich, a bete noire to most New York voters. And there were unforced errors. In the first debate on September 13, Lazio walked over to Clinton and presented her a paper with a pledge to eschew soft money ads. In a time when voters were eager for consensus, Lazio was providing them with confrontation, and this in-your-face behavior was especially repugnant to women. Nine days later they both agreed to not run ads financed by soft money, that is, contributions to parties; but this was unenforceable, since parties and others can spend what they want to, and the assumption that campaign finance was a vote-moving issue proved ill-founded. In the second debate, Lazio declined to say that he would vote for any Supreme Court nominee who opposed the key abortion rights decision of Roe v. Wade, a defensible position intellectually, but one difficult to sustain politically in New York; Clinton pounded him on it.

For a race that was close almost all the way in the polls, this Senate election—surpassing the 1998 New York Senate race as the most expensive in history not involving a self-financing candidate—was decided by a surprisingly wide margin. Clinton won 55%-43%, almost the same as Schumer’s 55%-44% two years earlier. “Sixty-two counties, 16 months, three debates, two opponents and six black pantsuits later—here we are!” exulted Clinton on election night. She was helped, of course, by the fact that Al Gore was carrying New York 60%-35%. But she ran well on her own. She carried New York City by 74%-25%, the same margin as Schumer’s in 1998. She trailed in the suburbs by only 53%-45%, despite Lazio’s suburban provenance; he carried his Long Island base, but she carried her now native Westchester. And Lazio won Upstate by only 50%-47%; Clinton carried most of the large counties there, and her percentages in county after county, not usually 50% but seldom under 40%, were impressive evidence of her hard work in campaigning and mastering Upstate issues. Clinton carried the Jewish vote, according to the VNS exit poll, by only 53%-45%, which would usually mean disaster for a Democrat in New York, and she did far less well than Schumer and other Democrats among those with graduate degrees, a large percentage of whom are Jewish. But she carried Upstate women by 55%-43%, an excellent showing for a Democrat: the work paid off.

A few days after the election, Clinton took a victory lap around Upstate New York. But her standing fell in the months after the election. In December 2000 she signed a book contract with Simon & Schuster for $8 million—$4.5 million more than the book contract for which Newt Gingrich was so roundly attacked in 1995. In departing the White House, the Clintons took $190,000 in gifts—far above the Senate’s $50 limit—and many had to be returned when it was revealed that they included items donated to the White House, not the Clintons. Among the gifts were $7,375 worth of coffee tables and chairs donated by Denise Rich, former wife and advocate of Marc Rich, the fugitive financier pardoned by Bill Clinton on his last day in office, despite the opposition of New York U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White. Hillary Rodham Clinton said she had no opinion on the pardon. Nor, she said, did she have any role in the pardon of four Hasidic Jews from the Rockland County community of New Square who were convicted of fleecing the federal government of millions of dollars—a pardon White also opposed. But Clinton had visited New Square in August 2000, had won the community’s vote by a margin of 1,400 to 12 and had been present at a White House Map Room meeting between their leaders and Bill Clinton on December 21, 2000, where they asked for the pardons. She said she had no knowledge as well that her brother Hugh Rodham had, while living at the White House, pushed for and obtained the pardon of two other felons for which he had been paid $400,000.

Many expected that Clinton would be greeted grudgingly and suspiciously by other senators because of her obvious presidential ambitions. In fact she has worked hard at the often tedious business of being a senator. She continued to travel around New York, especially Upstate: by June 2002 she had made 130 trips to Upstate New York. She worked on the arcana of dairy price supports and turned down many opportunities for national appearances; only after September 11 did she appear again on Meet the Press, in December 2001. She worked hard in the Senate, attending just about every committee and subcommittee hearing, spending time on the floor, approaching Republican colleagues to ask if she could cosponsor their bills. At Democratic caucus meetings, she would get coffee for other senators. Republicans found themselves sheepishly admitting they liked her. At the same time, by all accounts she took a hard partisan line behind closed doors. She advised Tom Daschle that Senate Democrats should have a war room, as the Clinton campaign and White House did. She supported George W. Bush in the war on terrorism and voted for the Iraq war resolution, and told him in their meeting on September 13, 2001, that she was one of the few who understood the loneliness of the White House, but she advised down-the-line opposition to his domestic policies. Occasionally in public she sounded a partisan note. In May 2001 she cast the single vote against the Justice Department confirmation of Michael Chertoff, who had worked on the Whitewater independent counsel investigation. HILLPAC, her leadership PAC, raised $3.2 million in the 2002 cycle and contributed more than $1 million to Democrats across the country; she put on fundraisers for fellow Democrats in her Washington house.

Clinton’s propensity for bipartisanship and her partisanship were both on display at the opening of the 108th Congress in January 2003. In December she had gotten agreement with Don Nickles on a compromise proposal to extend unemployment benefits. It was the first item of business in the new Congress. But unexpectedly Clinton rose and offered an amendment to extend coverage to 1 million people whose benefits had expired. This triggered several hours of debate on parliamentary motions—a tough initiation for the new Majority Leader Bill Frist. Eventually Clinton’s amendment was rejected and a compromise was passed. In the new Congress, Clinton was elected head of the Democrats’ Steering and Coordination Committee, a job that has never generated much publicity for its incumbent; it gave her an institutional base for her behind-the-scenes partisan strategizing. She got a seat on the Armed Services Committee, on which no New York senator had ever served, and worked methodically on defense issues. Republican Lindsey Graham, who cosponsored benefit increases with her, said, “People may think she has an antimilitary bias or is not strong on defense. But I find her to be very reasonable. I think she has been responsible in making sure the men and women in the military are well taken care of.”

Clinton voted for the Iraq war resolution in October 2002 and did not flinch from supporting it later; she voted for the $87 billion supplemental in November 2003. “The fact is we’re in Iraq and we’re in Afghanistan, and we have no choice but to be successful,” she said in December 2003. In spring 2004, when other Democratic senators were flocking to the premiere of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” she said Saddam Hussein was “a potential threat” who “was seeking weapons of mass destruction, whether or not he actually had them.” She was critical of the conduct of operations, however. After a trip to Iraq in December 2003, she said, “Everybody told me we don’t have enough intelligence, civil affairs, MPs, engineers.” She said that the Bush administration wasn’t “leveling with the American people about what it is we’re up against, how long it’s going to take, how much it’s going to cost.”

On domestic policy she described the administration as “radical,” bent on dismantling the “central pillars of progress in our country during the 20th century” and seeking “to undo the New Deal.” But her specific proposals were more incremental and less confrontational. On homeland security, Clinton got passed in September 2004 amendments providing $50 million for nonprofits and community organizations vulnerable to terrorist threats and $570 million to safeguard New York’s trains and tunnels. Clinton had cast lone votes against Michael Chertoff, the onetime Whitewater investigator, for a Justice Department position and a judgeship, but when he was nominated for Homeland Security secretary in January 2005 she said coolly, “I look forward to meetings with Judge Chertoff in the very near future to discuss many important issues, including the specific homeland security needs of New York as well as the many homeland security challenges confronting our nation.” She voted for his confirmation: working for homeland security for New York and the nation was evidently more important than any personal grudge.

Clinton made it plain after the November 2004 election that she took a different approach than John Kerry. When Kerry’s defeat was blamed on values issues, she commented, “I don’t think you can win an election or even run a successful campaign if you don’t acknowledge what is important to people. We don’t have to agree with them. But being ignored is a sign of such disrespect. And therefore I think we should talk about these issues.” In January 2005, speaking to abortion rights supporters in Albany, she surprised many in the audience by saying, “Yes, we do have deeply held differences of opinion about the issue of abortion, and I, for one, respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available. There is an opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate. We should be able to agree that we want every child born in this country to be wanted, cherished and loved. We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.” She continued to support a partial-birth abortion ban only with an exception for the health of the mother and parental notification only with a judicial bypass. She supported an informed consent law for New York and voted in the Senate against a bill penalizing those who help girls cross state lines to get abortions and in October 2006 taped automated calls against a California parental notification ballot proposition. While many Democrats were skeptical of government aid to faith-based service providers, Clinton, a regular participant in the National Prayer Breakfast, said, “There is no contradiction between support for faith-based initiatives and upholding our constitutional principles.”

She continued to work on defense issues major and minor. “She’s very industrious. She does her homework very carefully. She’s very respectful of how the committee does its business,” said Armed Services Chairman John Warner. With committee Republicans she worked to improve the living conditions of military personnel and for better health care for National Guard troops. She visited soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, on one trip accompanied by John McCain. She demanded an inquiry in January 2006 on body armor. In March 2007 she told the Human Rights Campaign that she opposes the ban on openly gay service members. Over several years she worked with Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds to get $17 million in earmarks for the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station; when it showed up on the Pentagon’s base closing list in May 2005, she obtained an internal Pentagon document showing that closure would cost $190 million more than the official estimate. She called the head of the base closing commission, former Veterans Secretary Tony Principi, with whom she had worked on veterans issues, on the day the commission made its decision, and the commission recommended it be kept open. Similarly the commission rejected the Pentagon recommendation that personnel in Stratton Air National Guard Base in Glenville be moved to Arkansas.

On Iraq her tone, if not her position, evolved. In a November 2005 letter to constituents she said, “I voted for [the resolution] on the basis of the evidence presented by the administration, assurances they gave that they would first seek to resolve the issue of weapons of mass destruction peacefully through United Nations sponsored inspections...Their assurances turned out to be empty ones.” When Democrats were divided in June 2006 on Russ Feingold’s amendment for U.S. withdrawal, she opposed it and said, “Although unity is important, it is not the most important value.” In August 2006 she called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his “failed policy” in Iraq. In October 2006 she said flatly, “If we knew then what we know now there never would have been a vote and there would never have been a war.” In January 2007 she called George W. Bush’s surge “a losing strategy,” but added, “I’m not for imposing a date-certain withdrawal date. But don’t be mistaken, I am for ending this war as soon as possible.” She continued to refuse to apologize for her October 2002 vote; campaigning in New Hampshire in February 2007 she said, “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.” In March 2007 she voted for the nonbinding resolution that sets a “goal” of March 31, 2008, for withdrawal from Iraq. In May 2007 she voted for a resolution sponsored by Feingold to de-fund the war after March 31, 2008, saying, "we, as a united party, must work together with clarity of purpose and mission to begin bringing our troops home and end this war."

Clinton voted against several prominent Bush administration nominees: John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Lester Crawford at the FDA, Alberto Gonzales, Porter Goss at the CIA. She and Patty Murray blocked a vote on FDA nominee Andrew von Eschenbach pending approval of over-the-counter sales of the Plan B abortifacient; when it was approved for adults in August 2006 they withdrew their objection and he was confirmed. She pursued several cross-aisle initiatives. With Newt Gingrich outside the Congress and with Bill Frist in the Senate, she pressed for legislation improving the use of information technology in health care; their bill passed the Senate in November 2005. She worked with Trent Lott on improving FEMA, with Tom DeLay on foster children care, with Rick Santorum and other conservatives on children’s exposure to graphic images, with Mike DeWine on asthma, with Wayne Allard on barring banks from the real estate business. In September 2005 she sponsored with Barack Obama a bill to encourage providers to disclose medical errors early, issue apologies if warranted, offer immediate compensation and analyze errors; this was offered as an alternative to the medical malpractice bill supported by most Republicans. In February 2007 she and Charles Schumer sponsored a bill to create a process in the FDA to approve generic biotech drugs. In May 2006 she sponsored a bill to put an extra tax on oil company profits and repeal some oil company tax breaks and use the money for a Strategic Energy Fund to reduce the consumption of foreign oil 50% by 2025. On immigration, in March 2006 she cited the Bible in criticizing the provision in the House-passed bill criminalizing the offering of aid to illegal immigrants. She voted for the bill passed by the Senate in May 2006 and for the border fence bill passed in September 2006; with an eye on the labor needs of Upstate farmers, she urged the Senate to pass Larry Craig's AgJobs bill, with its guest worker provisions. She continued to work on Upstate projects. She and Tom Reynolds arranged $30 million in federal funds for expansion of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. She got funding for fiber optic wiring for St. Lawrence County. She worked for disaster aid for dairy farmers and apple and grape growers.

No Democratic senator from New York has been defeated for reelection since the institution of popular election of senators, and no one thought Hillary Clinton would fail to win reelection in 2006. She refrained from making the usual promise to serve out the full term (which her husband had made in his 1990 campaign for reelection in Arkansas), serene in her confidence that voters wouldn’t mind. They didn’t. She had an anti-war primary opponent who rode his bicycle from Manhattan to Buffalo; she won 84%-16%. She lost in the college town of Ithaca and a township next door but won everywhere else. Republicans tried to find a suitable candidate. Edward Cox, Manhattan lawyer and son-in-law of Richard Nixon, traveled around the state but in November 2005 withdrew from the race. Former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer declared his candidacy in June 2005, although his star was dimmed by the revelation that he had carried on an affair with his chief of staff for many years and had two out-of-wedlock children with her. Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro declared for statewide office in 2005 and said she was running for senator until December, when she declared for attorney general instead; her star was dimmed by her husband’s tax fraud conviction. Reagan administration appointee K. T. McFarland ran a game campaign against Spencer but lost 61%-39%. In October, Spencer made the tabloids when he charged that Clinton had had cosmetic surgery; Clinton, showing a light touch, tilted back her head and asked reporters to look for scars. Clinton raised some $34 million for this campaign, a figure so high that some Democrats complained she was taking money away from other candidates. But in October she had given $1.1 million to the DSCC, $250,000 to the DCCC and $150,000 to the New York Democratic primary. She appeared at fundraisers and campaigned for Upstate Democratic House candidates who won or came unexpectedly close to winning. Statewide she won 67%-31%, a margin a little smaller than Eliot Spitzer’s in 2006 or Charles Schumer’s in 2004, but very impressive indeed. She won 83% of the vote in New York City, 62% in the suburbs and 60% Upstate.

She proceeded to do what everyone expected her to do: run for president. It turned out to be a different kind of contest than many expected. In early 2006 it looked like she might have ideological opposition on the left from Russ Feingold and on the right from Mark Warner. In such a contest her firm stand on Iraq and her familiarity with military and defense issues, together with her leadership on domestic issues and her ability to work with Republicans on some issues all seemed like assets. But both Feingold and Warner decided not to run. So did 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry. In the race, however, were 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards and 2004 national convention keynoter Barack Obama, and in mid-2007 they were Clinton’s strongest competitors in the polls. Edwards had barely stopped stumping in Iowa after the 2004 campaign; Obama in the fall of 2006 rocketed to popularity among Democrats and all voters as well. Obama’s rise in the polls seems to have prompted Clinton to formally announce her candidacy earlier than planned, in January 2007. Obama’s opposition from the beginning to the Iraq war—he spoke out against it while an Illinois state senator—and John Edwards’s apology for his war vote and calls for immediate withdrawal put Clinton on the defensive in a race among a Democratic electorate almost unanimously and usually bitterly opposed to the war. At the same time some Democrats wondered whether a candidate who polarizes the electorate as much as Clinton, at least in summer 2007, could win the presidency. But she has assets no other candidate brings to the race: actual day-to-day experience in the White House, and she has shown the grace under pressure and the persistence in the face of daunting setbacks that are qualities most voters seek in a president.