Hillary's Class.

In this examination of the women of Wellesley '69 and their devil's choice between career and family, the ground opened up straight off, at commencement ceremonies 25 years ago. Republican Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the main speaker, had just concluded his remarks on student protest ("a perversion of democratic privilege") when Hillary Rodham, the first Wellesley student ever chosen to address her own class, stepped up in turn. She put aside her speech and talked back: "As the French student wrote on the wall of the Sorbonne," she said, "'Demand the Impossible.' We will settle for nothing less." After the Republican victories of last November, Speaker-presumptive Newt Gingrich famously derided Hillary and Bill Clinton as "counterculture McGoverniks," and the unusual suffix was meant for automatic, subconscious decoding: first back to beatnik, and from there to the source of that word in Sputnik, the first space satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, and thus the root translation--commie. But what Hillary Rodham quoted that day was Situationist graffiti, from the uprising of May '68. That event has been written out of history, and so, many times, has Hillary Clinton, but I doubt we've heard the last from her.