Looking back, it is easy to see that ambitious political science major in the first lady, United States senator and, now, presidential candidate she would become.

She added later, вЂњThe whole society is brittle.вЂќ 23 letter to John Peavoy, a friend from high school. Rodham wrote about all the ferment in a Feb. was slain, she joined a demonstration in Post Office Square in Boston, returning to campus wearing a black armband. She attended both the Republican National Convention in Miami (bunking at the Fontainebleu Hotel, ordering room service for the first time - cereal and a daintily wrapped peach) and the Democratic donnybrook in Chicago (smelling tear gas at Grant Park, watching a toilet fly out the window of the Hilton hotel).

She might have been the only 20-year-old in America who worked on the antiwar presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire that winter and for the hawkish Republican congressman Melvin Laird in Washington that summer. Her political itinerary that year resembles a frenzied travelogue of youthful contradiction. It was a time at once disorienting and clarifying, a period that would reinforce the future senator and presidential candidateвЂ™s suspicion of вЂњemotional politicsвЂќ while stoking her frustration with what she considered the passivity of her classmates. Clinton said in a telephone interview about that period, which encompassed the second half of her junior and first half of her senior years. вЂњThere was a sense of tremendous change, internationally and here at home which impacted greatly how I thought about things,вЂќ Mrs. Hillary Rodham ClintonвЂ™s course was set, in large part, during the supercharged year of 1968. She would leave as an antiwar Democrat whose public rebuke of a Republican senator in a graduation speech won her notice in Life magazine as a voice for her generation. She came to Wellesley as an 18-year-old Republican, a copy of Barry GoldwaterвЂ™s right-wing treatise, вЂњThe Conscience of a Conservative,вЂќ on the shelf of her freshman dorm room. Rodham was completing a sweeping intellectual, political and stylistic shift. From a student activist perspective, there was a significant difference.вЂќДЄs the nation boiled over Vietnam, civil rights and the slayings of two charismatic leaders, Ms. вЂњShe was very much committed to working within the political system. Rodham, was an organizer of a student strike that April. вЂњShe was not an antiwar radical trying to create a mass movement,вЂќ said Ellen DuBois, who, with Ms. She preferred her вЂњconfrontation politicsвЂќ cooler. Rodham was attending teach-ins, leading panel discussions and joining steering committees. While student leaders at some campuses went to the barricades, Ms.

She took care to stay within the lines, even when they were moving so far and fast in 1968.

RodhamвЂ™s words are neatly contained between tight margins. Her handwritten remarks - on file in the Wellesley archives - abound with abbreviations, crossed-out sentences and scrawled reinsertions, as if composed in a hurry. Although we too have had our demonstrations, change here is usually a product of discussion in the decision-making process.вЂќ вЂњOn some campuses, change is effected through nonviolent or even violent means. It was a hot topic in that overheated year of what she termed вЂњconfrontation politics from Chicago to Czechoslovakia.вЂќ 4 - In September 1968, Hillary Diane Rodham, role model and student government president, was addressing Wellesley College freshmen girls - back when they were still called вЂњgirlsвЂќ - about methods of protest.

Hillary clinton voice change