30 Interesting Facts About Hillary Clinton

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, is the fifth presidential candidate in the history of United States to lose the election while winning the popular vote. Here are 30 facts about her:

1. Clinton was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 26, 1947, to Hugh Ellsworth Rodham and Dorothy Emma Howell. She has two siblings – Hugh and Tony, who are younger to her.
2. She claims to have sent a letter to NASA in the year 1961, asking what she has to do to become an astronaut, and the response to have been that no women were accepted into any of NASA programs.
3. She is the first inaugural First Lady to have her own professional career till the time of entering White House. In fact, she is the first First Lady to have a postgraduate degree. She is also the first to have an additional office in the West Wing of to the White House, along with her First Lady office in the East Wing.
4. She organized a two-day strike following the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, and even worked with the black students in recruiting more black faculties as well as enrolling students in the Wellesley College, where she graduated in political science.
5. In the year 1978, she was appointed the first female chair for the board of Legal Services Corporation by President Jimmy Carter, where she expanded the funding from $90 million to $300 million during her tenure from 1978 until the end of 1981.
6. She took on child abuse cases from Yale-New Haven Hospital, when she entered Yale Law School and began volunteering free legal advice for the poor with New Haven Legal Services.
7. She credits political advisor Anne Wexler for providing her first political job, as Clinton was recruited by Wexler to work on the Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Duffey’s campaign in the year 1970.
8. She is the first student in the history of Wellesley College to speak following the commencement address by Senator Brooke. She even criticized Senator Brooke as a part of her speech, which was welcomed with a standing ovation lasting for seven minutes. Her speech was also featured in a Life magazine’s article.
9. “Children Under the Law,” was her first scholarly article, which discusses new children’s rights movement, published in the late 1973 Harvard Educational Review.
10. She agreed to marry Bill Clinton, whom she met and started dating during her time in Yale. The duo married on October 11, 1975 in the house they bought together in Fayetteville. According to the Arkansas Gazette, she was retaining her name Hillary Rodham even after marriage, a decision that is said to have upset the couple’s mothers.
    
11. She is the co-founder of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, developed in the year 1977 that works in alliance with Children’s Defense Fund.
12. Between 1978 and 1979, as a supplement to their income, she started trading of cattle futures contracts with just an initial investment of $1,000. However, she happened to generate around $100,000 from her investment, nearly 10 months after.
13. Historian Garry Wills once described Clinton as “one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades,” and an American Bar Association chair considers her scholarly articles of prime importance as it is said to help formulate things that have been inchoate.
14. It was during her husband’s re-election campaign that she used her name as Hillary Clinton or Mrs. Bill Clinton. When Bill Clinton returned to the Arkansas’s Governor’s office in the year 1982, she made it a point to use Hillary Rodham Clinton as her name.
15. She became the first female full partner of the Rose Law Firm in the year 1979, though she joined the firm in February 1977. Her specialization was intellectual property law and patent infringement, though she was also working pro bono in child advocacy.
16. She was named as the Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983 and was voted as Arkansas Mother of the Year, the following year.
17. During the Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign of 1992, he claimed that by electing him as a president, the nation would “get two for the price of one,” in reference to the prominent role of Hillary.
18. President Clinton named her as the chair of a Task Force on National Health Care Reform in the year 1993, in an effort to replicate the success she had with Arkansas education reform. However, the proposal was abandoned in September 1994.
19. She was elected as the first female senator from New York in the year 2000 and was also re-elected in 2006.
20. She was considered as a “rainmaker,” by the Rose Law Firm, as she brought in clients and made more than $200,000 though she billed only a fewer hours and earned less than other partners.
    
21. The National Law Journal named her twice as one among the 100 most influential lawyers in America in the year 1988 as well as in 1991.
22. Her initiative of Adoption and Safe Families Act in the year 1997 is what she regards as her greatest accomplishment as the First Lady.
23. She is the first female candidate for Presidential nomination by a major United States political party.
24. Starting with The American Spectator, in which Daniel Wattenberg wrote an article “The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock” about her, at least 20 other major publications compared her with Lady Macbeth.
25. She was appointed the chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee by her husband the same year, when she became the First Lady of Arkansas in January 1979. She held the title of First Lady of Arkansas for 12 years and worked hard on securing federal funds to facilitate expansion of free medical facilities to Arkansas’s poorest areas.
26. Though she lost to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential running, she has won far more delegates than any other previous female candidate.
27. After her husband named her the chair of Arkansas Education Standards Committee in the year 983, her prolonged battle against the Arkansas Education Association, in an effort to establish state standards and mandatory teacher testing, was known as her introduction into the politics.
28. She was elected the first chair of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, for the period 1987 to 1991. The association was created to address gender bias in the legal profession.
29. She was the founding chair of the Save America’s Treasures program, which is a national effort to preserve and restore historic items and sites.
30. Clinton, after Eleanor Roosevelt, is considered as the most openly empowered presidential wife in the history of American Government, as she is said to have been a part of the innermost circle with her choices filling at least 11 top-level positions.