“We’re not interested in social reconstruction,” she corrected the speaker, Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. “It’s human reconstruction.”
Her impromptu attack was over in a flash, and Wellesley President Ruth Adams set out to repair the damage.
Adams fired off a letter to Brooke, then the nation’s highest-ranking black elected official, apologizing for Clinton’s intemperate remarks.
“Courtesy is not one of the stronger virtues of the young,” she wrote Brooke on June 5, 1969, in a letter The Washington Post recently discovered in his archived papers. “Scoring debater’s points seems, on occasion, to have higher standing.” Washpost
—————-
Here you have it folks, it's not "social reconstruction" that she wants. It's "human reconstruction." In other words she wants to change human nature. It's not a wonder that she is a neocon. They, too, want to make the lions and the lambs lie down in peace together.
Amusingly, my uncle Gordon and his wife Althea endowed the "Gordon P. and Althea P. Lang '26" chair of biological sciences at Wellesley College. Perhaps the reigning professor sitting in that chair can come to Washington to help Hilly re-design us all. pl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Brooke
To pull a few quotes from the article:
” How do we harness such “youthful passion,” Adams asked, “without destroying the basic fabric of our democratic society?” (Senator) ” Brooke gave what some considered a patronizing speech … He illustrated social progress by citing a national decline in poverty rates, …”
Look at the wonderful things Hilary’s approach has done for black poverty. I believe we should could it the Detroit effect. “Scoring debater’s points seems, on occasion, to have higher standing.” Well, she’s at least got that going for her.
Cheap shot pulling up an almost 50 year old quote. You can do better than that!!
Col.,
Why is youth wasted on the young?
Might as well talk about how Kerry didn’t earn his Vietnam medals.
No her can’t
Whatever Wellesley College has released of the young Hillary Rodham’s remarks are available at this youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CAUOa5m5nY
Get it unfiltered without a WaPo intermediary.
And here is the text of Hillary Rodham’s speech:
http://www.wellesley.edu/events/commencement/archives/1969commencement/studentspeech
r whitmam
I will tolerate that ad hominem because you are an old hand here, but don’t do it again. In my experience people do not change much after they are about 20. You want her as president? Fine. I don’t want either one of them. if you want to complain, do it to the Post, not me. What she did to Ed Brooke was contemptible. pl
Just to point out the nature of those times, so different from today, two data points:
1963: Emily Wick ScD ’51 becomes the first female tenured faculty member at MIT (Food Technology).
1968: Caltech announces it will be co-ed from the 1970 session onwards.
One more data point – Shana Alexander, “The Difficulties of Being Hillary”, Playboy, January 1994: “In 1963…fifteen-year-old Hillary [Rodham] wrote to NASA asking what subjects to study to prepare for becoming an astronaut. NASA wrote back that no females need apply”.
Pamela Sargent wrote a science fiction short story “Hillary orbits Venus” beginning with this, in which Hillary marries Richard Feynman.
I apologize.
r whitman
Accepted. pl
There are some other quotes you missed –
Even then, Clinton “was a person who got what the system was,” recalled Eleanor “Eldie” Acheson, granddaughter of former secretary of state Dean Acheson.
Clinton circulated a note asking students for ideas. She wanted to create an “activist forum from which no ideas are excluded.”
Her conciliatory style was too soft for some students who wanted more radical change. “Hillary worked with the deans,” recalled classmate Dorothy Devine, “rather than circumventing the rules.”
In her new role, Clinton met regularly with Adams and Wellesley’s vice president, Philip M. Phibbs, a political-science professor. She was an “honest broker” for the students, Phibbs recalled, but didn’t rock the boat.
…
Clinton said later that she had a “fundamental disagreement” with Alinsky’s theory that change could come only from outside the system.
…
“She didn’t see it as her speech,” said Jan Piercy, a close friend who later worked in Bill Clinton’s administration. Piercy recalled Clinton tapping fellow students on the shoulder, asking, “What should I say?”
“She was on a listening tour,” said friend Ann Rosewater. Responses poured in.
…
Also, how you can call her speech contemptible and somehow get the idea that it makes her a neocon seems selective reading at best.
Hank P
I said that what she did to Ed Brooke was contemptible. Try to quote me correctly. She is a neocon because she wants to change the nature of foreign cultures and societies. That is a basic neocon goal. She has no military knowledge and will send the US military on many other errands like Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan because IMO she is an ignorant ideologue. Have you no knowledge at all of the positions she took within the Obama Administration? pl
Dr K
He did not deserve the three Silver Stars. Nothing he did justified them. He got out of the boat and walked around bit. for one of them he fished a sailot out of the water. Big deal! pl
“She has no military knowledge and will send the US military on many other errands like Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan because IMO she is an ignorant ideologue.”
Col. Lang
Her claim is that she’s got the experience and is the “trusted” hand on the nuke button. Although her track record of judgment on foreign affairs as both a senator and Secretary of State is proof that she is an “ignorant ideologue”. She will for certain send others kids on fools errands in distant lands to satisfy her and the Clinton Foundation’s donors lust for blood, all in the name of the cause of changing the nature of foreign cultures and showing them who is boss. IMO, she will be ultra hawkish to prove that a woman can be commander-in-chief of the US military.
All we can pray for is that she doesn’t bumble into a nuclear confrontation with Russia.
Colonel,
I missed her first moment of fame. She didn’t register with me until she was running for First Lady. A lot of their old pictures are now floating around. Bill loves the camera as much as JFK but Hillary is no Jackie. She lacks charisma. Bill’s charm is gone since he became ill. Americans will be lucky if this is the last hurrah by the “me generation”.
The real question is how did she become one with the Globalists and Wall Street. I assume it is because that is where the money is at; being broke after leaving the White House. Her attempts at being an insider do-gooder thwarted. If it’s the money; Okay. She may back off from blowing up the world
But, if she really believes the Democrat’s propaganda that Vladimir Putin is out to get America and Donald Trump is his stooge, she will to go to the edge to destabilize the Kremlin. She’ll believe this is the reason why she was elected President. One mistake could trigger a nuclear war. This is the ultimate danger of today’s corruption and information operations. Lies and false beliefs become reality to the leaders.
Colonel,
I should like to disagree with your characterization of neocons.
Neocons don’t want to “make the lions and the lambs lie down in peace together.” Au contraire, they want the lamb to bleat how wonderful it is to be lamb; how mesmerizing it is to be eaten by THE lion (not a lion or lions, no sir; the lion, for there’s never been, nor will there ever be a lion again), and to sell memorialized rituals of the slaughter to the hoggets as inevitable progress to the pinnacle of worshiping the lion that ate their dads.
Hillary is a different creature. She may parrot neocon talking points; channel militant feminists’ rage; play the reformer from within, or even adopt some never-again version of R2P slogans. However, she doesn’t believe any of these. Not for a minute. All she cares about; all that she thinks is left for her to do, is to obtain and exercise the highest power in the land.
Would she send the U.S. military on expensive boondoggles? Likely. If she did so, would it be because she has a warped view of human nature, and other cultures and societies, so she thinks they’re amenable to evolving into a higher form of social life called whatever? No. That’s not the reason. The reason is the childlike nihilism of I really want to press that button, just to see how everything can go to s**t. Have you looked at her eyes? Did you find the least bit of empathy (for anything) in them?
Thought so. She. Just. Doesn’t. Care.
The Democrats tried very hard to find a more widely disliked, old, ugly, scandal-plagued, tone-deaf, uninspiring, treadworn, blinkered, compromised, myopic, war-hungry, unwise woman to beat Donald Trump like a mule, and carry on Obama’s liberal legacy, but it was short notice, and they couldn’t find one.
“social reconstruction” and “human reconstruction” sound like buzzwords. It is not obvious to me what the debate is supposed to about. Clinton reminds me a bit of the “best and the brightest”.
Re: “All we can pray for is that she doesn’t bumble into a nuclear confrontation with Russia.”
It appears that Hilary is intent on ramping up the confrontation she helped get us into as SoS, so what we really need to pray for is that we don’t bumble from confrontation into nuclear war.
For her to claim that hers “is the “trusted” hand on the nuke button” is disingenuous because it’s not her hand on the button. However, it will be her decisions and actions that determine how close above the buttons the hands of those officers who are there must hover when on high alert. Only in recent years has the general public learned of incidents on both sides that very nearly tipped the world into nuclear war in October, 1962.
http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/27/vasili-arkhipov-stopped-nuclear-war
Then there’s the sadly well proven neocon inclination to shop for the intelligence that supports their pre-selected desired actions. We know how that has turned out. The neocon’s predecessors weren’t in the ascendent in 1962, but there were intelligence failures none the less. Most notably, Kennedy et al were being told there were no nuclear warheads on the island where in fact they later found out they were there in the high double digits. And more than a dozen small ones were installed on short range missiles that the USSR was considering targeting on the US fleet if there was an invasion.
It was only one Silver Star, not three. And there was no sailor in the water. It was a soldier, a 5th Special Forces Group advisor James Rassman, who was rescued reportedly while under fire. He had been thrown off Kerry’s PCF by the force of an mine explosion on the PCF next to Kerry’s.
Sir,
Nothing like an attack on the Borg Queen to cause all her drones to arrive en masse.
mike
OK. One Silver star. pl
I think trying to place the times in context is a bit of, eh, misguiding adventure.
It struck me that a lot of female political leaders like Clinton, Golda Meier, Indira Gandhi, and probably Maggie Thatcher have a bit of overaggression in their system. It may be that they want to overcompensate for the prejudice (that holds them to be weak) that they are subject to, maybe they really do want to prove that women can be as good a warmonger as “the boys,” or whatever. I find warlike posturing from political leaders contemptible enough, but I find women wrapping aggression and domination in the guise of “gender rights” disgusting. Who’s her role model? Irma Grese, who proved that women can be just as sadistic murderers and war criminals as men can?
Col. Lang –
I used shorthand, but I understand that you were talking about Brooke. As the first black Senator, I doubt he was seriously troubled by the comments of a college graduate. By the tenor of those times, as I pointed out with the quotes I pulled, it was fairly mild criticism and Clinton appeared to work at getting some sort of student consensus about how to express her positions.
I agree that Clinton is too much of a hawk, but I don’t think it’s because she believes she can change human nature. I think it’s because she’s the latest in a long line of American politicians who think they can do pretty much whatever they want in the world as far as military action or other interference is concerned. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t think there will be any blowback or that if there is, someone else will have to deal with it. But with a few minor exceptions, that’s been American foreign policy for over a century now. I do think Clinton will face pretty stiff resistance from the Democrats if she starts getting too interventionist.
There’s plenty to criticize Clinton for, I just find some of it hard to credit when many other politicians and candidates have done similar things and taken similar positions without much criticism.
Right “today’s corruption” .
HankP
As one of her partisans you have every right to support her. I think she is the same person as the girl who stabbed Brooke in the back immediately after he had spoken at her graduation. Brooke, BTW, was not the first Black member of the US Senate. IMO she is a bright, self-centered, neocon in foreign affairs and social revolutionary in domestic affairs. I think she is without redeeming qualities other than not being Trump whose “professional deformation” has made him incapable running anything except as a one-man impromptu show. and then there is the obvious monied support for Clinton that largely controls the media. she is being manufactured as the American Eva Peron just as Obama was manufactured by very monied interests. i gave Sanders money every month for a year. I would gladly have voted for him against Trump even though I do not favor many of his socialist ideas but I think he is a decent man. pl
“What she did to Ed Brooke was contemptible. pl”
Amen
I found the article highly interesting.
Yes a descent man is hard to find in politics today…..
That time in America was all about rights: civil rights, women’s rights — I’m thinking it’s more likely that by “human reconstruction” young HR was talking about universal human rights. Unfortunately, the article in the WP provides zero context for the “correction.”
EA,
I am absolutely shocked you have arrived to spin spin spin to defend your Borg Grandma.
Edward,
Yes, “universal human rights” – as in the US has an obligation to the world as viewed by those on the left.
It wasn’t the left that got us in Iraq, Fred.
Fred: Paging Donald Trump. Imagine if (1) this is true; and (2) it is confirmed by a leaked email. See https://twitter.com/A_Rockas/status/765593710730108928
notlurking: Brookes had one of those wonderful, old school resumes of quiet, decent, and diligent service to the Republic. The antithesis of Clintonism.
Col. Lang –
Not sure I’m really one of her partisans, as I’m much closer to Sanders on almost every issue. But, in our system you get to vote for one of two major coalitions and she and the Democrats are closer to my views than Trump and the Republicans. One can vote third party but they usually don’t really figure in the final results except as spoilers.
I do appreciate the fact that you’ve shared your personal opinions of her, since you’ve actually met her in a working environment, which is more than most people can say. It’s interesting and worthwhile to get different perspectives.
I’m not sure I agree about the “manufactured” part, she’s been in the public eye since the early 90s and I’m pretty sure most people already know where they stand on her. Obama was pretty much unknown before he ran, Clinton on the other hand has been one of the best known American women for the past 25 years. As far as moneyed interests, sure, they’re involved in every election and even more so since the Republican appointed justices pushed through the Citizens United decision. That’s one of the main reasons I support Clinton, which is that I want more liberals on the Supreme Court.
EA
The Ziocons infest both parties. Have we forgotten Joe Lieberman, the pure flame of neoconism. In this election cycle they were successful in infiltrating the campaigns of all the major candidates. They have no American party. and you seem to have forgotten all the Democrat liberals like your sweetheart HC who voted for war with Iraq on totally specious grounds. pl
EA
I think you conveniently forget that the Borg Queen voted to give Dubya the authority to do as he pleased in Iraq and was a major cheerleader for regime change. Let’s also let slide Slick Willy’s sanctions and no-fly-zone in Iraq. And don’t forget all the Democrat senators that voted for the Patriot Act. And also don’t forget the role that DiFi played in creating and sustaining the surveillance state.
Are you also gonna deny the left had no role in the creation of anarchy in Libya, Syria and Ukraine under the leadership of Obozo and the Borg Queen?
EA,
Yeah, cause invade the world invite the world is a conservative notion.
Col Lang
I know. My senator, Chuck Schumer, is one of the biggest Ziocons around. But Bibi’s embrace of the GOP makes a shift in the Dem party’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict possible. That shift was made more possible after the Dem pres debates when Sanders called for a more balanced approach and Clinton didn’t hammer him for it. A Pew Research poll released in May shows that “Sanders” Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israel 39% – 33%.
http://www.people-press.org/2016/05/05/public-uncertain-divided-over-americas-place-in-the-world/
Re: AUMF vote in 2002. HRC made it clear in her floor speech before the vote that her “yes” vote was not for war, it was to get UN inspectors into Iraq to prevent war. The res required that force was only to be used as a last resort, that sanctions/diplomacy be fully employed first. That didn’t happen. And no WMD were found. We went to war because Bush was always going to war, with or without congressional approval. Her *mistake* was in giving GWB the benefit of the doubt.
Jack
I’m not conveniently forgetting anything, you are. Please see my comment below in response to Col Lang.
I agree with you that there is plenty of blame to go around, but the only signs of FP reassessment I see happening anywhere in the US with regards to Israel/Palestine are on the left. There is little support that I’m aware of on the left for Syrian intervention. I believe that Libyan intervention was supported by just about everyone in Washington, and may even have been supported on this website (I’ll stand corrected if that’s not the case).
With regard to Russia and Ukraine. I am disturbed by the liberal trend to demonize Russia/Putin and the apparent eagerness to start another cold war. Trump has, IMO, taken the sensible position there.
Tyler
Except that *conservative* doesn’t mean what it used to in the USA any more.
Herb,
I believe The Donald is the widely disliked, old, ugly, scandal-plagued, tone-deaf, uninspiring, treadworn, blinkered, compromised, myopic, war-hungry (hear him lead the “Take the (Iraq’s) oil!” chants the other day?) unwise woman who is currently beating Donald Trump. The man’s inner self/alter ego does not wish to be burdened with the responsibility and is sabotaging him. Zaphod Beeblebrox?
EA,
All the cool kids (like me) are calling themselves reactionary nationalists.