Dear Reader,
Contrary to popular belief, Hillary Clinton has run for president before.
The year was 1960, when Clinton was a junior high student in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. In a special feature published today on In These Times’ web site, Betsy Vandercook, a former classmate of Clinton and supporter of her campaign for class president, recalls that race - and another campaign for the White House:
She later told me that she lost because all the boys in the class—and a few of the girls—believed a girl couldn’t be president.
That campaign was our bonding experience—I joined Hillary’s circle. We ate at the same lunch table, and together in the late fall of 1960, we experienced another presidential race—between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
For all of us, being Republican and Protestant (Hillary and I were both Methodists with dangles of Sunday-school pins to prove it), only one person was qualified to win that election—and he wasn’t Catholic.
As Barack Obama and Clinton head toward yet another - possibly final - showdown in North Carolina and Indiana Tuesday, take a few minutes to enjoy Vandercook’s account of another momentous presidential election 48 years ago.
“This is Hillary Rodham,” she said, “Calling from Emerson Junior High School in Park Ridge. I want you to tell Mayor Daley that it was wrong of him to steal the election, and that Richard Nixon should have won!” Then we went back to our table, and finished our milk and shared our cookies. We knew that we had just been a part of something out of the ordinary—that for a moment we weren’t powerless teenage girls.
Read the piece, titled “Hillary, Cookies and Campaigns: The Presidential Prequel,” here.
And as always, thank you for supporting In These Times.
Cheers,
Jeremy Gantz, web editor