Clinton went on to become a lawyer (she flunked the bar in D.C.) and worked for other radicals (the Black Panthers, etc.) Her pro-community views are well noted in her book, It Takes a Village.
As the year was ending , Ms. Rodham was working on a 92-page honors dissertation on Saul Alinsky, the antipoverty crusader and community activist, whom she described (quoting from The Economist) as “that rare specimen, the successful radical.”
Power and Activism
Beyond Mr. Alinsky, the treatise yields insights about its author. Gaining power, Ms. Rodham asserted, was at the core of effective activism. It “is the very essence of life, the dynamo of life,” she wrote, quoting Mr. Alinsky.
Ms. Rodham endorsed Mr. Alinsky’s central critique of government antipoverty programs — that they tended to be too top-down and removed from the wishes of individuals.
But the student leader split with Mr. Alinsky over a central point. He vowed to “rub raw the sores of discontent” and compel action through agitation. This, she believed, ran counter to the notion of change within the system.
Typically, the paper, which received an A, was neatly typed, exhaustively footnoted and even included a page of acknowledgments. “Although I have no “loving wife” to thank for keeping the children away while I wrote,” Ms. Rodham said, “I do have many friends and teachers who have contributed to the process.”
In a listing of primary sources, Ms. Rodham reported that she met three times with Mr. Alinsky and that he offered her a job. “After a year trying to make sense of his inconsistency,” she wrote, explaining her demurral, “I need three years of legal rigor.”
Juxtapose that with what Saul Alinksy said about individual liberty.
A final word on our system. The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.
Great dangers always accompany great opportunities. The possibility of destruction is always implicit in the act of creation. Thus the greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the thesis? I'm interested to see how she differs from Alinsky after all. I looked for it, but Clinton apparently had Wellesley deny access during her (first?) White House years and access is limited to those who go all the way to Wellesley, MA. Also any help finding Obama's statements on Alinsky would also be nice.
Thanks for any help on this,
Charles Johnson
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