Clinton White House Suppressed Hillary's Senior Thesis
The Hillary Clinton campaign will have a few more questions to answer about her husband's tenure in office after MS-NBC reported this morning that his administration demanded the suppression of her senior thesis at Wellesley:
"I got a call from someone at the White House — I don't remember who — shortly after the inauguration, saying the Clintons had decided not to release her thesis," professor Alan H. Schechter told MSNBC.com."I said, 'Why? It's a good thesis.' I got some mumbo jumbo about how they were beginning to work on health care and she had criticized Sen. Moynihan in the thesis, and didn't want to alienate him.'"
In fact, the thesis from 1969 contains not a negative word about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York, and Schechter allows that the real source of fear must have been the subject of the academic paper: Chicago radical organizer Saul Alinsky.
Schechter, a Clinton supporter who has contributed money to her campaigns, said that hiding the thesis, which got an "A" grade, was one of many "quite naive" decisions by the Clintons in those early days — he also lists making gays in the military the first priority, and trying to do too much with her health care plan. But liberals, he said — and he counts himself among them — tend to overreach instead of taking the incremental approach.
After the call from the White House, Wellesley's president, Nannerl Overholser Keohane, consulted with lawyers and closed access to any thesis written by a U.S. president or first lady, a rule affecting only Hillary D. Rodham's thesis. Keohane moved on later that year to be president of Duke University, and now is a visiting professor at Princeton, where she teaches political philosophy, leadership and feminist theory. An Arkansan who was eight years ahead of Hillary Rodham at Wellesley, Keohane is a regular contributor to Democratic candidates and to a congressional PAC that gives exclusively to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton.
On one hand, trying to determine someone's political views by reading a thesis written four decades earlier is silly. Ronald Reagan was an FDR Democrat until middle age, as were several Republican politicians. Hillary herself flirted with the College Republicans at one time in her career. People grow out of some nonsense, especially during their college years, when they have a lot of pressure to try out some of the sillier political positions on the spectrum.
However, the thesis isn't really the story. What's news is the Clinton effort to hide the thesis, proving once again that the coverup is worse than the crime. The Clintons had no problem extorting Wellesley into hiding Hillary's thesis, which makes one wonder what else the Clintons managed to bury during their two terms in the White House.
Hillary apologists have at times tried to distance themselves from the actions of Bill during the 1990s. This shows that the abuses of the Clinton years weren't limited to the man from Hope.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on March 2, 2007 8:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (7)
