Portrait of the Candidate as a College Student

Teen correspondence shows new side of young Hillary Rodham
Posted Jul 29, 2007 7:43 AM CDT
Portrait of the Candidate as a College Student
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., address delegates at the National Convention of College Democrats, Saturday, July 28, 2007, at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. (AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain)   (Associated Press)

The first shock is to remember that college students used to actually write letters. To friends from high school, even. One of Hillary Clinton's bookish buddies from Park Ridge, Ill., then a Princeton undergrad and now a professor at Scripps College, saved her dispatches from Wellesley and shares the revelatory dispatches with the New York Times.

Most compelling, perhaps, to those who came of age in the late '60s, they are self-absorbed and self-effacing, charting her journey from Young Republican to McCarthyite with humor, yet without damaging admissions of indulgence in mind-altering substances. Of leadership, she has this to say: “If people react to you in the role of answer bestower then quite possibly you are."

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