Current Events
23-year-old Hillary's letter to Chicago 'radical' Saul Alinsky reveals search for truth
As Hillary Clinton gears up for another expected run for the White House, a previously unpublished 1971 letter between the erstwhile Secretary of State, US Senator, First Lady and the late leftist and Chicago-based “community organizer” Saul Alinsky has been published.
The Washington Free Beacon posted a 1971 letter from the then 23-year-old law school graduate revealing her still-forming ideological bent and shedding considerable light, with 20-20 hindsight, on Hillary's future intellectual development.
“Dear Saul,” the letter begins. “When is that new book [Rules for Radicals] coming out—or has it come and I somehow missed the fulfillment of Revelation?”
“Rules” was (and still is among many former, current and upcoming “radicals") considered the bible for those who are determined to effect radical change in this nation-state.
The future New York senator continued:
“I have just had my one-thousandth conversation about Reveille [for Radicals – Alinsky's prior tome] and need some new material to throw at people.”
Alinsky’s widely read 1946 practical and theoretical guidebook on the ways and means of effective (results-oriented) community organizing became a staple among and required reading for those in the 1960s who protested America's war against Vietnam, demanded civil and human rights, Black Power and women's rights. (The Gay Liberation Movement was in its infancy at the time).
Future First Lady Clinton's '71 letter to Alinsky acknowledged and thanked him for his work in bringing anti-war and human rights movements to the "mainstream" of American political discourse -- and for his profound effects in helping focus her personal world view:
“If I never thanked you for the encouraging words of last spring in the midst of the Yale-Cambodia madness, I do so now,” wrote Clinton. At the time, she had just played the role of “moderator” during a Yale University student election as to whether that campus should join other campuses which were calling for a nationwide anti-Vietnam War student strike. She had just graduated and moved to California.
“I am living in Berkeley and working in Oakland for the summer and would love to see you,” Clinton wrote. “Let me know if there is any chance of our getting together.”
As to her law school experience, Clinton told Alinsky that she had “survived law school, slightly bruised, with my belief in and zest for organizing intact.”
“The more I’ve seen of places like Yale Law School and the people who haunt them," Clinton wrote, "the more convinced I am that we have the serious business and joy of much work ahead, — if the commitment to a free and open society is ever going to mean more than eloquence and frustration."
The former Republican and “Goldwater Girl” had first met Alinsky as a student at Wellesley in1969.
Alinsky's “Reveille” encouraged community organizers to "fan the latent hostilities" of poor whites, blacks and browns of the ghettoized cities while "search[ing] out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them."
The book Clinton was so eagarly anticipating urged organizers to "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it," Alinsky wrote.
In an indication that she is not and never has been the total and unrepentant "radical" which today's right loves to aver, she presciently added this little gem to her l971 letter to Alinsky: "Hopefully we can have a good argument sometime in the future."
Alinsky's secretary, Georgia Harper, responded to Clinton's letter telling her that the boss was away on a six-week trip to Southeast Asia, but that she had taken the liberty to read Clinton's letter anyway.
“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,” Harper wrote in the July 13, 1971, response. “And I’m glad I did.”
“Mr. Alinsky will be in San Francisco, staying at the Hilton Inn at the airport on Monday and Tuesday, July 26 and 27,” Harper added. “I know he would like to have you call him so that if there is a chance in his schedule maybe you can get together.”
Interestingly, according to Clinton's 2004 memoir, "Living History," Alinsky had offered her a job after she finished at Wellesley, but she turned him down in favor of an Ivy League legal education.
“He offered me the chance to work with him when I graduated from college, and he was disappointed that I decided instead to go to law school,” she wrote. “[He] said I would be wasting my time, but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within.”
Saul Alinsky
Yes. For the right wing, conservatives, the Tea Party, et al., Saul Alinsky had a real and present influence in the intellectual development of both Hillary Clinton (and Barack Obama). Both Clinton and Obama studied and to a greater or lesser extent followed his methods of political organization of the poor and marginal.
Thanks to the right wing's takeover of most media outlets (save the Internet!), Saul Alinsky has come down to us as a shadowy, radical ”Chicago-style” political bogeyman rather than as the actual political philosopher and grass roots activist whose deep-seated beliefs and practical application thereof helped to fuel the often real radicalism of the 1960s. His true meaning and significance in shaping American politics has therefore been virtually completely obscured by a correspondent right wing radicalism which has assigned Alinsky, his motives, and his progidies to an undifferentiated "left wing" world filled to overflowing only with those who "hate" all things “American.”
This process of delegitimizing Alinsky had begun within his lifetime, and 23-year-old future presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recognized both Alinsky's significance and the right's efforts to discredit him even then. “You are being rediscovered again as the New Left–type politicos are finally beginning to think seriously about the hard work and mechanics of organizing,” she wrote.
“Hopefully we can have a good argument sometime in the future.” I repeat and emphasize these words of young Hillary Clinton because they capture the mutual respect she and Alinsky shared while simultaneously acknowledging that there were significant areas of disagreement between the two.
Thus, these words indicate that Hillary Clinton was no “right” or “left” wing ideologue – at least not at the time this letter was written in 1971.
On the contrary, like most young people during those turbulent times and at that highly impressionable age, she was deeply involved in an active search for the truth.
References
http://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-saul-alinsky-letters-155526953.html
http://freebeacon.com/politics/the-hillary-letters/
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/22/hillary-letters-clinton-saul-alinsky-correspondence-revealed/
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/saul-alinsky-secretly-controls-hillary-too.html
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