Hillary Clinton

Rodham grew up in Park Ridge, a conservative Chicago suburb, the daughter of a small textile manufacturer and a homemaker who had herself been abandoned by her own parents as a child. She went to Wellesley College in 1965 a Young Republican and left it four years later a war-skeptical Democrat, delivering a student commencement speech pointed enough at the senator sharing the podium that Life magazine covered it. At Yale Law School she worked on child-welfare cases, met a fellow student named Bill Clinton, and in 1974 took a staff job on the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry into Richard Nixon. She followed Clinton to Arkansas afterward rather than take the Washington legal career friends assumed was hers for the taking.

She became the first female partner at Arkansas's Rose Law Firm in 1979 and chaired statewide education reform as the governor's wife, then took on health care reform as first lady in 1993 — a plan complex and closely guarded enough that it collapsed in Congress without a vote. She won a Senate seat from New York in 2000, secured billions in post-9/11 recovery funding, and voted to authorize the Iraq War, a vote she later called a mistake. As secretary of state from 2009 she pushed sanctions on Iran and intervention in Libya, while a private email server used for government business became a defining controversy. She lost the 2008 primary to Barack Obama, then in 2016 became the first woman to win a major party's nomination and the popular vote, and lost the Electoral College to Donald Trump.

The 1993 health plan that was supposed to define her as a policy heavyweight instead became a case study in how not to pass one: drafted mostly in secret by a task force she chaired, more than 1,300 pages long, and dead in Congress without a vote, a defeat that helped hand Republicans the House the following year. The email server became a smaller version of the same pattern — a preference for tight control over her own information that outside investigators ultimately found no criminal basis to prosecute, but that FBI Director James Comey's public comments on it, eleven days before the 2016 election, are still credited and disputed in roughly equal measure with costing her a race she won by nearly three million popular votes and lost by roughly 77,000 votes across three states.

She has not run for office again. Since 2020 she has served as chancellor of Queen's University Belfast, and since 2023 as a professor of practice at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, while her political group Onward Together backs a new generation of Democratic candidates rather than her own comeback. Where she ranks — the first woman to win a major party's nomination and the popular vote, or the two-time loser of a primary and a general election she was favored to win — is not a settled question, and Democratic strategists still argue over how much of 2016 was hers to lose.

Hillary Clinton's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• It Takes a Village book
  Her first book, on child welfare policy 1996
• State Children's Health Insurance Program law
  Championed as first lady 1997
• Living History book
  Her memoir of the White House years 2003
• Hard Choices book
  Memoir of her years as secretary of state 2014
• Onward Together company
  Political organization founded after the 2016 loss 2017

• 1965 aged ~18 Enters Wellesley College a Young Republican
• 1969 aged ~22 Graduates Wellesley and enters Yale Law School
• 1973 aged ~26 Earns her J.D. from Yale Law School
• October 11, 1975 aged 27 Marries Bill Clinton
• 1979 aged ~32 Becomes the first female partner at Arkansas's Rose Law Firm
• 1993 aged ~46 Becomes First Lady of the United States and chairs health care reform
• 2000 aged ~53 Elected U.S. Senator from New York
• 2009 aged ~62 Becomes U.S. Secretary of State
• 2016 aged ~69 Wins the Democratic presidential nomination and the popular vote, loses the Electoral College

• Bill Clinton b. 1946
  42nd president whose centrist politics, economic agenda, and impeachment shaped the post-Cold War era. married to
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. defeated her in the 2008 primary
• Donald Trump b. 1946
  Businessman, media personality, and 45th and 47th president whose populist movement transformed American politics. defeated her in 2016
• Shirley Chisholm 1924–2005
  First Black woman elected to Congress and first woman to run for a major party's presidential nomination. predecessor in the attempt
• Madeleine Albright 1937–2022
  First woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State and shaped 1990s policy in the Balkans. predecessor as Secretary of State