Clinton Born: Future Secretary of State and Presidential Nominee

Hillary Clinton reshaped modern American politics across three decades, serving as First Lady, U.S. Senator from New York, Secretary of State, and the first woman to win a major party's presidential nomination. Born Hillary Diane Rodham on October 26, 1947, in Chicago, she grew up in the conservative suburb of Park Ridge, Illinois. She attended Wellesley College, where her 1969 commencement speech made national news for its directness and ambition. She earned her law degree from Yale in 1973, where she met Bill Clinton. She worked for the Children's Defense Fund and served on the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry staff during Watergate. As First Lady from 1993 to 2001, she took on a policy portfolio that was unprecedented for the role. She led the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, a comprehensive plan that collapsed under political opposition and industry lobbying in 1994. The defeat was politically devastating but many of the plan's principles resurfaced in the Affordable Care Act sixteen years later. She endured the public humiliation of the Monica Lewinsky scandal while maintaining her own political ambitions. She won a Senate seat from New York in 2000, the first sitting First Lady to run for elected office. She served on the Armed Services Committee and voted for the Iraq War authorization in 2002, a decision she later called a mistake. She ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 and lost to Barack Obama. As Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 under Obama, she visited 112 countries and managed the diplomatic response to the Arab Spring. The September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, became the subject of multiple investigations. She won the 2016 Democratic nomination, the first woman to achieve this from a major party. She won the popular vote by nearly three million ballots but lost the Electoral College to Donald Trump, 304 to 227. Her campaign was affected by the FBI investigation into her use of a private email server while Secretary of State and by Russian interference operations targeting the American electorate.