The Massachusetts Effect: How Five Years Shaped Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton's time in the Bay State was relatively brief — four years at Wellesley College, and less than a year with the Children’s Defense Fund in Cambridge.

It's where Clinton left the Republican Party to become a Democrat, where she landed her first job out of law school, and where she developed the brand of change-from-within, "pragmatic politics" that would define a career on the precipice of the presidency.

That approach to politics served her well in deliberative settings and during her time in the U.S. Senate. As a leader, however, what Clinton calls pragmatism, critics deride as an abandonment of principle. That distrust persists even within her own party, a disconnect on flagrant display in Philadelphia this week.

It all started here.

Wellesley Women

At a high school teacher's urging, Clinton applied to two private women's colleges in Massachusetts — Smith and Wellesley. She was accepted to both and chose the latter, sight unseen.

Clinton would later say she picked the small school outside Boston based on photos of campus, especially Lake Waban, reminiscent of a Pennsylvania lake where her family spent summers. She stayed in the Stone-Davis dorm her entire time on campus, securing a third-floor suite overlooking the lake in her junior and senior years.

At Wellesley, Clinton famously underwent a transformation from "Goldwater girl" Republican, strongly influenced by her father's conservative leanings. She initially served as president for the student Republican group and campaigned on behalf of GOP candidates.

But, as chronicled in her 2003 memoir, "Living History," Clinton was not immune to the chaotic '60s. At Wellesley, she transitioned to a Democrat and an activist, writing that her eyes were opened to racism and civil rights issues while in school.

She dodged rocks and tear gas outside Democrats' 1968 convention in Chicago. She, by a former roommate's account and her own, flung her bag against the wall and sobbed when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. She donned a black arm band and joined a 10,000-strong march to Boston's Post Office Square in protest.

But Clinton dipped only one foot in the protest culture of the streets, keeping counsel with the administration even as she joined her classmates petitioning school officials for change.

"Even back then, she was carving out the political middle ground — as opposed to the radical fringes — on campus," New Yorker contributor Charles Bethea told Patch.

Clinton the pragmatist. It hasn't changed since her days at Wellesley and, later, Yale, where former classmates call her an activist, but not a radical. Never a radical, many take pains to delineate.

2016 Election Draws 'Media Frenzy' to Wellesley

Her mostly unscripted 1969 commencement speech laid the foundation for the Clinton narrative as it's known today. Then-Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke, a Republican for whom Clinton had campaigned, offered a preliminary address that she would later say failed to capture the complex realities of a class shaped by war, political assassination and protest.

"We feel that for too long, our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible," she said, rebuking the senator. "And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible."

She earned a standing ovation from students. A Life magazine report that summer featured Clinton's image and an excerpt from the speech. She was invited to address the 1970 League of Women Voters' convention in Colorado Springs as a ''young leader of the future.''

Thus the narrative of "Clinton as leader" took shape. But of what stripe? Even among the other students profiled in that Life feature, her comments are notably subdued.

"I don’t think any of us saw her as a radical," classmate Francille Rusan Wilson told Bethea in a June New Yorker story, speaking of that storied Class of '69 commencement.

Wilson told Bethea she ran a campaign for class president "somewhere far to the left of Karl Marx" in 1968; Clinton ran against her, and won, as the "consensus candidate." As Wilson and fellow African-American students in the newly formed Ethos racial justice group staged sit-ins, teach-ins and other protests, Clinton predominately served as a supporter, while keeping lines of communication open with the administration, Bethea said.

As chronicled in a Clinton biography by Joyce Milton, former Yale classmate and friend Michael Medved offered similar testimony.

"She was passionately antiwar, antibusiness and suspicious of the police and was beginning to think about women's and environmental issues," Medved, now a radio host and film critic, said in Milton's "The First Partner." "What set her apart from the true radicals was that she had little faith in direct action. She wanted to keep lines of communication to the administration open and work through existing institutions."

This philosophy is made manifest in her senior thesis, a critique of community organizer Saul Alinsky. It argued, Clinton wrote in "Living History," that Alinsky "believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't."

In 1969 as now, that change-from-within approach sat poorly with certain observers.

“There were probably some students among us who felt she had too good a rapport with the administration,” a former Wellesley News editor said in a 1993 Boston Globe profile. “She was maybe more willing to compromise, to compromise too soon.”

Such critiques echo loud in 2016, an election that saw Clinton's path to the presidential nomination mired in an unexpectedly protracted battle against a modern radical — Independent democratic socialist candidate Bernie Sanders.

It's an especially bad time to be seen as an insider. A national poll conducted by the Pew Research Center during the primary showed more than 80 percent of voters feel frustrated, if not outright angry, with the federal government.

Read: Hillary Clinton Accepts Democratic Nomination: 'The World is Watching What We Do'

But Clinton, only a Trump away from the White House, may in some ways be well-served by her less strident political brand. A July 14 Pew survey showed only 19 percent of voters view Clinton as "extreme," compared with 55 percent for Donald Trump.

'Pragmatic Politics'

Wellesley represents Clinton's transformation from a Republican campaigner to a Democratic activist, if not a radical. Her second stint in Massachusetts foreshadowed a second transition: from activist to politician.

As Clinton tells it, her time in the Bay State would have continued with a degree at Harvard Law, had it not been for the sexist condescension of one professor. His sneering declaration — "We don't need any more women at Harvard" — solidified her decision to choose Yale, Clinton wrote in "Living History."

She returned to Massachusetts in 1974, fresh from law school, and inspired by Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, for whom she had also interned in 1972.

It plays a small role in her personal memoirs, but ultimately a large one in her political career — tied to the moment many liberal allies turned against her. That, of course, merits no mention in the campaign literature.

She began working for the Defense Fund in the summer and left to join Bill Clinton in Arkansas in the spring, writing in "Living History" that she missed him terribly, although she enjoyed her job.

Despite its brevity, Hillary Clinton's time with Edelman's Cambridge-based group merits a mention in nearly every biographical summary of her life and has featured prominently in her 2016 campaign. Other writers, including Milton, have characterized Clinton's time at the Defense Fund as a stopgap — a holding pattern until she made her next decision (one ultimately made for her after she, as Clinton herself revealed, failed the Washington, D.C., bar exam).

During the 2016 primaries, Clinton's work with the Children's Defense Fund garnered at minimum one mention per Democratic debate. In June, it became the subject of a multi-million dollar ad campaign blasted out across eight battleground states.

"After law school," a voice declares over images meant to be New Bedford, Massachusetts, "she could have gone to a big law firm. Instead, she went to work for the Children's Defense Fund, helping get disabled kids out of the shadows and into their local schools."

That time in New Bedford consisted of conducting on-the-ground tallies of young children who appeared in the census but were not enrolled in school.

As Clinton describes it in "Hard Choices":

"I went door-to-door in New Bedford, Massachusetts, talking to families. We found some kids staying home to care for younger siblings while parents worked. Others had dropped out to work themselves in order to help support their families. But mostly we found children with disabilities who were staying home because there weren't adequate accommodations for them at the public schools. We found blind and deaf children, children in wheelchairs, children with developmental disabilities, and children whose families couldn't afford the treatment they needed."

When she accepted the party's nomination for presidential candidate at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Clinton recounted the story of meeting a wheelchair-bound girl on her back porch during one of those tallies.

Data collected there and elsewhere around the country would later serve as the basis of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, subsequently expanded and renamed as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It mandated that schools receiving federal funds provide handicapped students with equal access to education.

"Change from within" — in practice.

The decision to eschew a major law firm in favor of Edelman's grassroots organization is key to Clinton's campaign persona as "lifelong advocate for children." But today it also fuels the argument that she can’t be trusted, particularly by fellow Democrats.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton was looking down the barrel of a fourth veto on Republicans' welfare reform bill, chastened by a 1994 election cycle that had proven disastrous to Democrats in Congress. As Hillary Clinton would later describe in "Living History," it was a matter of passing the legislation under the benevolent hand of a Democratic administration or blocking it yet again and facing ruin in the polls.

She ultimately supported her husband.

Many of her critics on the left — including her mentor, Edelman — would go on to characterize the bill as a broken promise. Clinton would prefer to call it compromise or, as she put it in "Living History," "pragmatic politics."

"To those who knew Hillary Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman, this was the moment that showed how far Clinton had traveled from her early activist days," a Washington Post reporter wrote in a June story on the two women.

Edelman's husband resigned his post with the administration. Edelman herself penned a "Letter to the President" op-ed eviscerating Bill Clinton's decision. "BETRAYED" blare headlines in liberal publications from Salon to The Nation.

For Hillary Clinton, the welfare debate represented another transformation.

“In the painful aftermath, I realized I had crossed the line from advocate to policymaker,” she wrote in "Living History."“I hadn’t altered my beliefs, but I respectfully disagreed with the convictions and passion of the Edelmans and others who objected to the legislation.”

Many liberals tout it as a singular example of why Clinton cannot be trusted, a characterization that has been costly for her campaign and could yet do more damage.

Trust is by far Clinton's largest liability in a match-up against Donald Trump. The July Pew survey saw only 13 percent of voters consider Clinton honest, compared to 19 percent for Trump. Only a quarter of those polled believe she has deeply held beliefs, as compared to a still less-than-stellar 19 percent for Trump. In Pew's primary poll, angry voters describe the top reason for their vitriol as "politicians lie/don't keep promises/are self-serving."

The 2016 election is characterized by much of the same tension, disillusionment and anti-authoritarianism that shaped Clinton's class of '69. Her "pragmatic politics" feel as out of step to critics now as Brooke's commencement speech did to Clinton on her graduation day.

In 1992, Clinton returned to Wellesley's campus and her treasured Lake Waban, invited again to provide a commencement address. There, she reflected on that first speech in 1969.

"It was full of the uncompromising language you only write when you are 21. But it's uncanny the degree to which those same hopes, values and aspirations have shaped my adulthood," she said. "On behalf of the class of 1969, I said, 'The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.' That is still the challenge of politics, especially in today's far more cynical climate."

As Clinton strives toward the White House, much the same could be repeated in 2016.

>> Top photos via Wellesley University, Hillary Clinton 2016 Campaign