Interviewee: Hillary Clinton
Interviewer: Fareed Zakaria
Date: August 10, 2009

Even though she failed to clinch America’s highest office, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton has ascended to an exalted post. Serving as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, she is now the top diplomat in the US government.

became the country’s third female State Secretary in January 2009.

Earlier, Hillary Clinton had been eager to become the first woman president of the nation. Despite her early lead in the polls, the electorate voted in favor of her eloquent rival Barack Obama. The two dueled in one of the most divisive presidential primaries ever, Clinton priding herself on seniority, Obama on youthful “change.”

Hillary Clinton was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 26, 1947 to Dorothy and Hugh Rodham. She was raised in Park Ridge, Illinois. The future Secretary graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 and earned her JD at Yale University in 1973. She met her husband William “Bill” Clinton at Yale.

Post Yale, Hillary Clinton belonged to the congressional Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry staff. For over a decade since 1976, she was a partner of Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, where her husband became governor in 1978. She also taught at the University of Arkansas Law School in 1975. A few years later, she became a presidential appointee to the Legal Services Corporation board.

Then her husband won the 1992 US presidential election. Throughout Bill Clinton’s term and its controversies, she stayed on as First Lady. In this position, she was able to help expand health insurance coverage, promote women’s rights, write a newspaper column, and head the National Health Care Reform task force.

By the time her husband stepped down in 2001, Hillary Clinton had been elected Senator of New York, marking the first time a woman, and a First Lady, occupied a statewide New York post.

Hillary Clinton is the Grammy Award-winning author of the audio book It Takes a Village. She also wrote Dear Socks, Dear Buddy; Living History; and Witness to Genocide.

Since her Yale days, Hillary has been a children-oriented philanthropist. She interned for child advocacy Marian Wright Edelman while at law school; after graduating, she served on the boards of Arkansas Children’s Hospital and the Children’s Defense Fund in Cambridge. She jointly founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families.