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Rose law firm: The missing years

April 4, 2008

By Indira Lakshmanan 

Hillary Clinton says her “35 years of experience making change'' and “lifetime'' of public service make her uniquely qualified to be president.

While her pitch to voters relies heavily on her 15 years as first lady and New York senator, Clinton, 60, skims over the preceding two decades in Arkansas. The candidate rarely if ever mentions that she spent at least as much time practicing corporate law for Little Rock's top firm as she did performing public service.

Clinton's description is accurate if a bit disingenuous, said Robert Reich, 61, a Yale Law School classmate and former labor secretary under President Bill Clinton who has been critical of her campaign tactics.

“To say that one has spent their life in public service implies full-time work, and may suggest someone has not been distracted by a job as, say, a corporate lawyer,'' said Reich, who hasn't endorsed a candidate. “But it is fair to say she's been engaged in public issues, and very engaged at a state and federal level long before she was elected to the Senate.''

Clinton spent 15 years at the prestigious Rose Law Firm, from the time Bill Clinton was elected Arkansas attorney general until he became president. She was the family breadwinner, earning several times her husband's $35,000 pay as governor.

Logging, Canning

Her cases included representing a logging company in a fatal workplace accident and a canning company against a man who found a dead rat in his pork and beans. She also joined the boards of Arkansas-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and TCBY Enterprises Inc., the yogurt-shop chain.

Former law partners recall she also took on many pro bono child-welfare cases and sat on non-profit boards, including the Children's Defense Fund, the Arkansas Children's Hospital and the Legal Services Corp., to which she was appointed by President Jimmy Carter.

Her public activism dates back as far as her law-school days, when she ran voter registration in Texas for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972. After graduating, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and worked less than a year for the Children's Defense Fund before heading to Washington to join the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment investigation of President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate scandal.

Move to Arkansas

In 1974, after Nixon resigned, she abandoned her career in Washington and joined her then-boyfriend Bill Clinton in Arkansas. The move left her mentors worrying that “she was wasting her time — we didn't know who this guy was,'' said Andrew Young, 76, then a congressman from Georgia, who met her through the Children's Defense Fund.

At the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, she spent two years on the law-school faculty while running the campus legal-aid clinic and prison-law program. In her 2003 memoir, “Living History,'' she described her qualms about acting as court-appointed defender for a man accused of raping a girl, which later led her to help establish a victim hotline.

In 1976, she worked as the Indiana field coordinator for Carter's presidential campaign. The same year, she moved to Little Rock after her husband's election as state attorney general, and she was forced to make another career change.

`Overlap' Concern

“I didn't think it was a good idea to work for any state- funded institution or in any other public job'' where her “work might overlap or conflict'' with her husband's role, she wrote in “Living History.'' Instead, she joined Rose, where she became a partner within three years.

In addition to her non-profit board work, Clinton helped found Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and a parent- education program that boosted preschool results, said state Senator Mary Anne Salmon, 68.

Brantley Buck, 57, who joined Rose Law Firm around the same time as Clinton, credited her with juggling “a substantial charitable and public-minded aspect to her career as well as an active litigation practice,'' adding that she was “on the lower end of partner compensation because she was doing so many other things.''

Gay White, 61, a Republican who was the first lady of Arkansas between 1981 and 1983 after her husband Frank defeated Bill Clinton, said even Hillary Clinton's critics in Little Rock don't deny that she “cared very much about public service.''

Making a Difference

White, whose husband lost to Bill Clinton in a rematch and who recently worked on Republican former Governor Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign, said Hillary Clinton has “always been focused on trying to make changes and make a difference.''

During 12 years as the state's first lady, Clinton emphasized public education and health, leading hearings on school standards and an overhaul that included controversial teacher tests. She chaired a committee to improve rural health and helped negotiate a resolution to a court-ordered desegregation stalemate, all while working at Rose.

Clinton, who has recently drawn criticism for allegedly taking too much credit for her role in global and domestic issues in her husband's presidential administration, has lately put less emphasis on her experience.

Instead, campaigning across Pennsylvania ahead of the state's April 22 primary, she has held herself up as “the fighter, the doer and the champion.''

A few hours into a 15-hour, four-city tour April 1, her pitch to reporters was: “I've been producing positive results for the American people for a number of years now.''

Source: Bloomberg

Posted by Hillary · Filed Under Hillary Clinton, News, Scandals 

Comments

2 Responses to “Rose law firm: The missing years”

  1. Man Dat Ting on April 23rd, 2008 4:03 am

    As a foreigner I wonder how is it possible to be as unethical as this woman appears to be. And as blind to ethical issues as the whole newspapers public combo in the USA.
    Clinton already spent 8 years as a first lady, as I read here but as it appeared in every newspaper world wide she wasn’t “just” a first lady she was all over the government during these years.
    The laws in the US do not allow anyone to be at the white house any longer than 8 years. Ethically speaking she should never had been in politics to begin with and never running for presidency.
    But as she is so thirsty for power this does not matter to her, and being some kind of a modern crusader makes her probably blind on matters who might infinge her own vision of herself and the whole world.
    As you know crusaders were very well motivated in what they wanted to achieve, but exactly for that reason they never got anywhere near their intentions. (returning Jerusalem to christianity).
    As a person who admired your country, its wonderful constitution and several other achievements, remembers very well being saved from the Nazis, this decadence is very very sad.
    In many ways the world gets the idea that the democrats allow this “phony” battle because they do not want to deal with the disasters in the Middle East. This explain properly the Clinton-Obama fights. Or perhaps is just a simulation for a time to come for real in a very distant future,
    If this is just fanta-politcs it is even sadder because we see a woman openly struggling for power while nobody in the USA seems to care about it.
    Unfortunately the US presidency forces other countries to go ways they wouldn’t want, and generates terrible conflicts political, economical and so on.
    America is well protected by the great oceans surround it, and this is its major weapon, in spite of the rest of the hardware so badly used as it is under everyone’s eyes after world war II.
    We all pay the consequences of a severe chidlike usage of the vast quantity of information your different agency gather but are unable to decode in true international terms, even for a sounder protection of “the American interest”.
    The world feels as if your country has no allies in the traditional and etymological sense of the world. But only subjects as in the old days. To have Clinton again as an undisputed monarch of the west will alienate even more what’s left of the world trust in your country.

  2. Desparaged on May 5th, 2008 12:21 pm

    ” . . . if a bit disingenuous”. This is a GROSS UNDERSTATEMENT. HRC is an OUTRIGHT LIAR, so disingenuous is just too inadequate to apply to anything she says. Let’s say it just like it really is: HRC IS A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR!

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