In 2000, while serving as First Lady of the United States,
Hillary Rodham Clinton won election to the U.S. Senate
from New York. On Capitol Hill she worked to rebuild
and secure New York City in the wake of the September
11, 2001, terror attacks, and pushed for measures to aid
the troops fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After
serving as Secretary of State in the Cabinet of President
Barack Obama, she became the first woman in American
history to be nominated for President on a major party
ticket. After breaking barriers at every turn during her
political career Clinton reflected on her legacy in March
2020. “Well, I know I was a good public servant,” she said.
“I hope that I’ve made it a little bit easier for more women
to enter the public sphere.”1
Hillary Rodham Clinton was born Hillary Diane
Rodham on October 26, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois, the
oldest of three children, to Hugh Ellsworth Rodham and
Dorothy Howell Rodham. Clinton grew up in the Chicago
suburb of Park Ridge and graduated from Wellesley
College in Massachusetts, where she became a campus
leader and was chosen by her classmates as the first student
commencement speaker.2
After earning a bachelor’s degree
in political science, Clinton completed a law degree at
Yale Law School in 1973. Inspired by the work of Marian
Wright Edelman, a Yale alumna and children’s rights
activist who founded the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF),
Clinton worked for the CDF after graduation. In 1974 she
joined the staff of the House Judiciary Committee special
counsel leading the impeachment inquiry into President
Richard M. Nixon sparked by the Watergate Scandal. After
Nixon resigned and the House closed its investigation,
Rodham accepted a teaching position at the University of
Arkansas School of Law and in 1975 married William J.
(Bill) Clinton, whom she had met at Yale. They have a
daughter, Chelsea.3
In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed Clinton to
the board of Legal Services Corporation—an organization
that dispersed federal money to legal aid bureaus nationally.
She founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and
Families and in 1978 was named to the Children’s Defense
Fund board, which she later chaired from 1986 to 1989.
In 1978 her husband Bill won election as governor of
Arkansas, and she took on responsibilities as the state’s
first lady during their combined 10 years in the governor’s
mansion.4
In 1992 she campaigned widely for her husband
during his run for the White House; Bill Clinton was elected President that November. For eight years, Clinton
served as an active First Lady, working on health care
reform, children’s issues, and women’s rights. President
Clinton named her head of his task force on health care
policy, but Congress never embraced her plan to overhaul
the health industry. The reforms were abandoned in
September 1994.5
In 1999, when New York Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan announced his retirement, Clinton joined the
race to succeed him while maintaining the role of First
Lady. In July 1999, she set up an exploratory committee
and pledged to “spend some time—a lot of time—in New
York listening to people.”6
Despite never having lived in
New York, Clinton established residency, gained strong
party support, and quickly became the frontrunner in the
Democratic primary largely due to her efforts campaigning
in upstate New York. In her official campaign launch
on February 7, 2000, Clinton took the stage at the State
University of New York with the President standing silently
behind her. Addressing certain criticisms head-on she said,
“Now I know, some people are asking why I’m doing this,
here and now. And that’s a fair question. Here’s my answer,
and why I hope you’ll put me to work for you: I may be new
to the neighborhood, but I’m not new to your concerns.”7
Clinton swept the Democratic primary, winning 82
percent of the vote against Mark McMahon, an orthopedic
surgeon who had only entered the race to prevent Clinton
from running unopposed.8
In the build up to the general
election against Republican Representative Enrico A. (Rick)
Lazio, Clinton pledged to help revitalize the economy
upstate and continue her commitment to education and
health care reform. She backed a “patients’ bill of rights”
and expanded Medicare coverage for prescription drugs.
Clinton hammered Lazio on the subject of health care in
the campaign’s final stretch, criticizing the Congressman
for missing a vote on an amendment to an appropriations
bill that would have required HMO plans to cover
Medicare patients for at least three years, instead of one.
On November 7, 2000, she prevailed with 56 percent of
the vote.9
Clinton’s election made her the first woman to
represent New York in the United States Senate; she was also
the first First Lady to win election to federal office.
In the Senate, Clinton received three committee
assignments in her first term: Budget; Environment and
Public Works; and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
(HELP). In the 108th Congress (2003–2005), she stepped down from the Budget Committee when she became the
first New Yorker in Senate history to serve on the Armed
Services Committee. Additionally, in the 109th Congress
(2005–2007), she was assigned to the Senate Special
Committee on Aging.10
Much of Clinton’s early work in the Senate focused on
promoting economic development in upstate New York—including the expansion of high-speed Internet access
and the creation of tax incentives for environmentally friendly building projects. She also promoted programs
to renovate and modernize schools. After the September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in
New York City, she worked to help the region recover.
Because of the attacks, New York lost one-third of all its
office space in Lower Manhattan; key rail and subway lines
closed, displacing more than a half million commuters;
and tens of thousands of jobs were lost. Clinton worked
with her colleagues to ensure New York received federal
funds to begin rebuilding. She fought to include $50
million for New York area nonprofits and $570 million
in infrastructure security in 2004. Eventually, more than
$21.4 billion was appropriated to rebuild and secure the
city and affected areas. Clinton also won an extension of
unemployment insurance to help displaced workers.11
In October 2002, following President George W. Bush’s
warning that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass
destruction, Clinton joined 28 other Democratic Senators
and nearly all Republicans in authorizing use of military force
in Iraq. Despite criticism from peace advocates and other
Democrats, Clinton defended her decision and later voted for
an $87 billion supplemental appropriation for the war. “The
fact is we’re in Iraq and we’re in Afghanistan, and we have
no choice but to be successful,” she explained in December
2003. As the war dragged on, however, Clinton joined a
chorus of Democrats criticizing the Bush administration’s
strategy. In August 2006, she called for the resignation of
Secretary of Defense Donald Henry Rumsfeld.12
During her time in the Senate, Clinton was either in
the minority party or part of a razor-thin majority. While
a few of her standalone bills became law, Clinton focused
on policy work in committee and on establishing bipartisan
relationships.13 Virginia Senator John William Warner, the
Republican chair of the Armed Services Committee, praised
Clinton’s efforts. “She’s very industrious,” he said. “She
does her homework very carefully. She’s very respectful of
how the committee does its business.” Clinton leveraged her understanding of the committee process to pursue more
protective body armor for troops in the Middle East and to
advocate for an end to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy
banning openly gay servicemembers.14
In fall 2006, Clinton was re-elected to a second term
in the Senate, winning 64 percent of the vote against
Republican candidate John Spencer. In 2007 she declared
her candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential
nomination. In a historic primary season, Clinton emerged
as an early frontrunner, but criticisms of her vote for the
Iraq War weighed on her campaign and she eventually
lost the nomination to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.
Following his election as President, Obama nominated
Clinton as Secretary of State. In late January 2009, after the
Senate confirmed her nomination, Clinton resigned from
the Senate to begin her duties as Secretary of State.15
Clinton served as Secretary of State in the Obama
administration from 2009 to 2013. On April 12, 2015, she
announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination
for president in 2016. Clinton won the Democratic primary
and, when she accepted the nomination on July 28, 2016,
became the first woman to head the presidential ticket of a
major party. Though she ultimately won nearly three million
more votes in the popular vote, Clinton lost the 2016
presidential election to the Republican nominee, Donald J.
Trump, who captured the Electoral College.16
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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