"She was so ambitious," a cla.s.smate recalled in a 1993 New Yorker profile.
"She already knew the value of networking, of starting a rolodex, even back then. She cultivated relationships with teachers and administrators even more than with students. While she was noticed across the board and she had her circle of friends, I would not say she was popular. She was a little too intimidating for that."*20 Hillary"s last act at Wellesley was to create a defining radical moment for her in 1969. She gave a commencement address that has been mythologized by her adherents as "The Speech," the touchstone that friends, journalists, biographers, and future Republican opposition research a.n.a.lysts have returned to again and again.
THE SPEECH.
It was the spring of 1969. Richard Nixon was president, and it was becoming increasingly clear that his promise of "peace with honor"
was not intended to be a surrender. Tons of bombs were raining on Hanoi. Draft riots and resistance to the war intensified, and the campuses of America were in turmoil.
The commencement speaker at Hillary"s graduation was Senator Edward Brooke, the first African American to sit in the United States Senate since Reconstruction. He was a liberal Republican from Ma.s.sachusetts and an accomplished lawyer who had once smashed organized crime rings as a prosecutor.
As a Young Republican, Hillary had once supported Senator Brooke.
She had even campaigned for him in her soph.o.m.ore year. But now he was tainted, beyond repair, given his partisan a.s.sociation with Nixon (though Brooke would later help sink the nomination of G. Harrold Carswell, Nixon"s appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court).
There was widespread interest among Hillary"s friends, especially Eldie Acheson, in staging a counter-commencement. After much back-and-forth, University President Ruth Adams reluctantly agreed to allow a designated speaker to have a few words at the commencement.
According to Joyce Milton"s The First Partner, Adams extracted a promise from Hillary that she would submit a prepared text of her remarks and stick to it.
For three days, Hillary and her friends put together a speech. To this day, Hillary"s staff do not expect the speeches they produce to be delivered as written. On the stump, Hillary extemporizes, pulls together her theme with reactions to what has just been said.
Her first big speech was a forerunner of that style. It was pure reaction, a rebuke that reads polite on the page, but was hard, even rude, when delivered.
Senator Brooke, when he spoke, expressed empathy with the students and their anguish over racial and social injustice as the root cause of human misery and the chief obstacle to the proper development of our nation. He praised Hillary"s generation as an expression of an America that "has identified more precisely than ever before the nature and magnitude of its acute social problems." He even sounded themes that should have played well with Hillary--that societyy has a responsibility to alleviate poverty, hunger, unemployment, inferior education, and inadequate health care. Brooke"s Republicanism was not the "individual responsibility" ethos of Barry Goldwater, but the liberal Republicanism that had resonated in Hillary"s social conscience.
But then he went on to speak the unspeakable on an American college campus in 1969. "Whatever the romantics may say about violence in our national life," Brooke said, "the use of force is repugnant to the spirit of American politics." He denounced the radical Students for a Democratic Society and suggested that the fringes of the protest movement might be giving comfort to America"s enemies.
This was more infuriating to Wellesley"s fashionable leftists than hearing Vice President Spiro Agnew directly lash into the students without apology, or restraint. That this combination of criticism and "empathy" enraged young Hillary shows how radicalized she had become. It wasn"t enough to be a black liberal Republican with a liberal social agenda because liberal Republicans weren"t willing to go all the way and expunge by force the evil that Hillary saw manifest in the Vietnam War, resistance to every demand by the civil rights movement, and in failure to eradicate poverty.
"Senator Brooke gave an address that was pretty close to being just absolutely disconnected with the four years of our experience at Wellesley," says Acheson. "Hillary decided it could not go unremarked upon, and before her speech, gave an extemporaneous critique of Brooke"s remarks."*21 In 1992, in a Newsweek interview with Eleanor Clift, Hillary characterized Brooke as giving "a very traditional, conventional speech in which he basically took a kind of Republican apologist line about what was happening, what President Nixon was doing."
Hillary Rodham Clinton continued: "It was exactly the kind of message my cla.s.smates felt they didn"t want as their last remembrance of Wellesley. When I spoke, I responded to his not really having addressed the concerns of the people about to go into this world."*22 Noted feminist bete noire Camille Paglia has given a s.e.xual interpretation of what happened on that spring day. She wondered if Hillary was "lashing out in a visceral response to the invasion of her all-woman"s school by a glamorous, lordly male who, from my one pa.s.sing encounter with him as he sauntered elegantly down the Capitol steps in 1972, had a distinctly roving eye."*23 Whatever the cause, something about Brooke pushed Hillary"s b.u.t.ton as she stepped before the podium.
Introduced by College President Ruth Adams as "cheerful, good-humored, good company, and a good friend to us all," Hillary quickly extinguished all hopes that charity., generosity, respect, and good manners might reign that day. Surprise, then shock, rippled through the audience as Hillary ripped into a United States senator, a civil rights icon, a black man before a liberal audience.
"Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn"t do anything," she said, with the pompous, angry, impatient, and self-righteous tone that was so typical of campus "leaders" of that era. "We"ve had lots of empathy; we"ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of the making what appears impossible, possible."
After bitterly rejecting Senator Brooke"s effort to express support for her colleagues" ideals, she characterized him as a craven apologist for Nixon. She then went on to attack the dispa.s.sionate terminology that she perceived was being employed to evaluate her country"s many ills.
"What does it mean to hear that 13.3 percent of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That"s a percentage. We"re not interested in social reconstruction; it"s human construction. How can we talk about percentages and trends?"
Hillary said of her cla.s.smates: "Our att.i.tudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade--years dominated by men and dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the s.p.a.ce program--so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn"t a discouraging gap and it didn"t turn us into cynical, bitter old women at age eighteen.
It just inspired us to do something about that gap."
Hillary reminded everyone of the many concessions that she and her cla.s.smates wrested from the school administration. The rest of the speech was part sixties psychobabble, with its undertones of German existential philosophy, and part youthful, egocentric angst.
"We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty," she said. "But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and compet.i.tive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us."
After this impenetrable declaration, she went even further into the depths of murky sixties thinking: "We"re searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living." A line for which one craves Camille Paglia"s exegesis.
Much of the rest of the speech discussed "authentic reality" versus "inauthentic reality." Performed by a spirited woman to an audience of young women of similar leanings, it undoubtedly made a strong impression of youthful idealistn. But is entirely incomprehensible today.
Even in today"s liberal culture, such a convoluted stew would be seen not as a courageous declaration of ident.i.ty, but as a hopeless meandering of feminist plat.i.tudes and catchy sound bites that would cause listeners, students, and faculty alike to look away out of embarra.s.sment for the speaker. As a style it could be called the first person, subjective.
Another student who gave a commencement address at Brown University that year exemplified the same selfindulgent style and non-linear thought processes. That student, Ira Magaziner, was brought twenty-four years later to the White House by first lady Hillary to create and manage her health care proposal.
Echoing Hillary"s ascent into rhetorical fantasy, the theme of Magaziner"s address was "realities exist but they"re not real to me."
Magaziner, soon to head to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, said, "I can"t believe us spending millions of dollars to send soldiers to West Germany to engage in a war game. I can"t believe financing the burning of our crops while millions starve. I can"t believe a.n.a.lysts seriously discussing how decisions are made by whether Johnson or Nixon feel that their place in history is going to be preserved if they make certain decisions while people die." You can tell why Hillary and Ira became such close compatriots.
Magaziner and Hillary Rodham can be forgiven for these youthful flights because they were repeating a peculiar self-centered idealism, seemingly rooted not so much in morality as in aesthetics: A view that somehow the world and society had a responsibility to produce results that made the student, or teacher, or community activist feel better personally.
The elites of American education, the best and the brightest, sought to create proteges by giving young leaders an unprecedented freedom to discover their own truths. And they did: They found truths no one before or since has quite recognized. This generation of leaders, chosen, taught, and celebrated by elite academics embraced an inexpressible ideal, whose core characteristic was a feeling of unending ent.i.tlement.
The world had to do more than improve. It was expected to reorder itself, to become a great pinwheel to spin around tender egos and emotional needs.
Whatever the reaction of listeners in Hillary"s Wellesley graduation audience like Paul Nitze, the diplomat, and Eldie"s distinguished grandfather Dean Acheson (he actually later asked Hillary for a copy of her speech), the reaction of Hillary"s peers was immediate and unanimous. They gave her a seven-minute standing ovation. Hillary was soon profiled with other young Americans in a Life magazine piece, t.i.tled "The Cla.s.s of "69." Looking bespectacled and bemused, an excerpt of her speech ran under her photo: "Protest is an attempt to forge an ident.i.ty."
Later, she confessed that she had celebrated at the end of commencement day by breaking a campus rule. She swam in the school"s Lake Waban. She stripped to her bathing suit, and carefully folded her clothes and gla.s.ses on the sh.o.r.e, only to have them confiscated by a security officer. "Blind as a bat, I had to feel my way back to my room," she said.*24 Hillary took off that summer with other students to do odd jobs around the country, winding up in Alaska. She took a job at a fish cannery, where she informed the owner that she did not believe that his fish appeared fit for consumption. She may have expected him to close down his cannery and change his methods. Instead, he fired her.*25 SAUL ALINSKY, HILLARY"S RADICAL PROPHET.
When William Jefferson Clinton took the oath of office, Wellesley suddenly adopted a new-found policy of putting the thesis of any graduates who became first lady under lock and key. It is hard to imagine that this unique provision was adopted without the strong support, if not the instigation, of the highly secretive first lady.
The contents of Hillary"s thesis, and why she would want it hidden from public view, have long been the subject of intense interest.
Most likely, she does not want the American people to know the extent to which she internalized and a.s.similated the beliefs and methods of Saul Alinsky.
It was Alinsky, legendary organizer and left-wing folk hero, who was responsible for bringing Martin Luther King, Jr., to Chicago.
Hillary first met him under the auspices of the Reverend Jones and the University of Life. Born in Chicago in 1909, Alinsky did graduate work at the University of Chicago in criminology. He studied prison life at Joliet State Prison and took a particular interest in the Capone gang.
He emerged as a radical leader when he joined forces with the impoverished families of the "Back of the Yards" area in Chicago, near the old stockyards, site of Upton Sinclair"s The Jungle.
Skillfully building up local support and enlisting the backing of the Catholic Church, he campaigned for increased social services and enhanced government support for housing programs.
"I acted in such a way that within a few weeks, the meat-packers publicly p.r.o.nounced me a subversive menace," Alinsky later wrote.
"The Chicago Tribune"s adoption of me as a public enemy of law and order, a radical"s radical, gave me a perennial and constantly renewable baptismal certificate in the city of Chicago."*26 Alinsky a.s.sembled a staff of followers that drew from the lessons learned in the 1930s. In time, they spread their organizing mission to the black ghetto of Rochester, New York, and the Mexican-American barrios of California. Alinsky became a confederate of both Martin Luther King and California farm-worker organizer Cesar Chavez. He took it as a matter of pride that he was arrested frequently and touted that he was under FBI surveillance.
In 1947 Alinsky wrote Reveille for Radicals, a bestseller in which he argued against the labor model of trying to reform capitalism, arguing instead for a more direct takeover of power. The sequel, Rules for Radicals, published in 1971, had a galvanizing effect on the young radicals wending their way through the elite universities of the East Coast. The generation of social protest had found its Socrates in this portly, balding man with the wizened face.
One of Alinsky"s adherents was d.i.c.k Morris, future Clinton political consultant, who incorporated Alinsky"s methods in running draft clinics and busing thousands of students to the peace marches in Washington. Another was Hillary Rodham, future first lady and "co-president" of the United States.
To understand Hillary and much of her subsequent life, it is important to learn the philosophy and tactics of the mentor who has had more apparent influence on her than any other.
For Alinsky, the goal of the political organizer is to help his followers acc.u.mulate power. He harbors the strong belief that the role of the organizer is to be a neutral agent, a kind of ideological agnostic seeking no particular outcome and advancing no philosophy other than the winning of power.
The trick, Alinsky suggests, is taking on whatever protective coloration one needs to win the trust of one"s charges. To this degree, he offers nothing but stinging criticism for any organizer whose language or demeanor turns off would-be followers. He admonishes the children of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) generation to change their off-putting dress and language, to not be ashamed of their middle-cla.s.s roots. "Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and ways of life of the middle cla.s.s," he writes in Rules for Radicals. Alinsky teaches: They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt.
They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the big middle-cla.s.s majority. Therefore, it is useless sel-indulgence for an activist to put his past behind him. Instead, he should realize the priceless value of his middle-cla.s.s experience. His middle-cla.s.s ident.i.ty, his familiarity with the values and problems, are invaluable for organization of his own people.
He will know that a square is no longer to be dismissed as such, instead, his own approach must be "square" enough to get the action started.*27 He was aware that America gave the radical much more opportunity to accomplish his aims than in other countries.
True, there is government hara.s.sment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my govermnent, try to organize or change it. That"s more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana.... Parts of the far left have gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but indistinguishable from the extreme right.*28 Alinsky excelled at the outrageous. He once suggested buying one hundred tickets to the Rochester symphony, and giving them to the first one hundred blacks who responded to an offer of a free dinner of baked beans. The establishment, Alinsky wrote, would not in its wildest fears "expect an attack on their prize cultural jewel, their famed symphony orchestra. Regular stink bombs are illegal and cause for immediate arrest, but there would be absolutely nothing here that the Police Department or the ushers or any other servants of the establishment could do about it." Alinsky delighted in the idea that "the law would be completely paralyzed."*29 The idea of a bean-generated gas attack, silly as it sounded, was the kind of weapon Alinsky was adept at crafting--acts designed to reduce an enemy to powerlessness through ridicule. "People would recount what had happened in the symphony hall and the reaction of the listener would be to crack up in laughter. It would make the Rochester Symphony and the establishment look utterly ridiculous ....
Imagine the tension at the opening of any concert! Imagine the feeling of the conductor as he raised his baton!"*30 Among Alinsky"s key tactics are these: . Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
. Never go outside the experience of yourpeople. Alinsky would not have urged migrant laborers to adopt the techniques of, say, striking Parisian students.
. Wheneverpossible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here he approvingly cites General Sherman"s defiance of the traditional military doctrine of his time, disconnecting his army from supply lines and living off the land.
. Make the enemy live up to their own rule book. "You can kill them with this, for they can no more live up to their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity." Alinsky excelled at forcing his opponents to violate their own standards, and then force them to capitulate out of shame.
Ridicule is man"s most potent weapon.
There was another rule that has been so thoroughly absorbed and implemented by Hillary, the Clinton operation, and their team of private investigators, dirt diggers, and apologists, that it now defines her and her husband.
Alinsky was an advocate of "ma.s.s jujitsu." In many of his forms of attack, he advocated letting the enemy move first, and then use his own momentum against him.
But Alinsky also had a rule for pure attack. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
Senator Brooke was the first victim of Hillary"s skill at freezing, personalizing, and polarizing. There have been many others.
In the fall of 1968, Hillary informed her thesis advisor, political scientist Alan Schechter, that she would write a paper questioning how much control poor people should have over programs designed for their benefit. She interviewed Alinsky, and concluded that Johnson-era programs did not go far enough. The problems of poverty made it necessary for a fundamental shift in the structure of power.
Hillary would later look back warmly at her philosophical mentor in a 1993 Washington Post interview. Nowhere does she recognize the cla.s.sical liberal critique that the relentless pursuit of power is ant.i.thetical to democracy.
LAW SCHOOL LIBERALISM.
Hillary briefly entertained an offer of an internship with Saul Alinsky, but opted instead for law school. Put off by the s.e.xism and sn.o.bbery of a Harvard law professor, she chose Yale.
Harvard offered a traditional legal education. Yale Law School was a better fit for Hillary, as much an endless social science seminar and finishing school for radicals at the time than anything else.
At Yale, Hillary"S rolodex of lifetime political contacts grew fat.
It was here that she established a friendship with future Labor Secretary, Robert Reich; future U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor; future Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott; and future Justice Department nominee Lani Guinier.
And, of course, the ultimate connection, her future husband, the future president of the United States.
For all the protest at Wellesley, the level of activism was tame at the women"s university in comparison to the strident protests at Yale in the 1970s. The university, functioned then, as it functions today, in the style of a cla.s.sic medieval academic city. A citadel of higher learning, Yale draws up its gates at night to protect itself from New Haven"s rampant crime--the ever-present threat of robbery, rape, and murder.
Much of the city--black, poor, and threatened by muggers and drug dealers--is a natural and convenient venue for the ideas and experimentations of the social scientists who work on the safe side of the drawbridge.
The New Haven/Yale dichotomy has long been the defining feature of the community. In 1970 the parallel between a mostly white, academic castle in a neighborhood that is mostly black and poor charged the atmosphere with danger, excitement, and possibility. In this mix, students sought to make law school as relevant as possible to the larger social issues; indeed, to make it a tool of social change.
"With its acc.u.mulated resources," student Robert Borosage wrote in a 1970 issue of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, "the law school could have attempted to define and protect the public interest in the legal process, or at minimum, those interests which were poorly represented."
At many law schools, student defiance went only so far before meeting steel. At Yale, it met only mush.
The school had long since accepted pa.s.s-fail grading, responded to disruptive and dangerous outbursts by students with mournful apologies, and reacted to threats by flinging open dormitory doors to visiting radicals.
It also, of course, offered access to some of the most distinguished names in legal scholarship. On the left was Burke Marshall, perhaps the leading civil rights advocate of the time. To the right--and there was almost no one to the right--was future Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork, Sr., clearly an anomaly.
Much later in an address to law students, former Yale law professor Judge Bork said, "America is being governed by Yale law graduates with 1960s att.i.tudes .... Law schools... have become politicized ....
The legal system has started to judge by ideology, not law." The judge spoke of his former students Bill and Hillary Clinton: "I used to say they were both my students. Now I say they were just in the room."
Such "straight" professors as Judge Bork were tolerated as a necessary evil, a sop to ideological balance that was otherwise ignored.
"The professors" a.s.sumptions, undefined and unrevealed, were to be accepted by each of the students," wrote student radical Robert Borosage. "This led to rather amusing results, property taught as if the market system still worked, and ant.i.trust as if the notion of state capitalism had never occurred to anyone.
"Like intellectuals in Stalin"s Russia, students played one role in public and another in private," Borosage wrote. "They went through the motions of acquiring a legal education, but contributed little of themselves in the process.*31 More typical of the Yale style of legal education was Charles Reich, whose book, The Greening of America, became a 1960s leftist bible (later lampooned by columnist George F. Will as the worst book ever written). Still to the left, but well within the legal establishment, were the staid champions of legal realism, theorists who advocated the expedient use of law as a means for advancing social progress. Legal realism had already come to dominate the activist jurisprudence of the Warren Court. Its most forceful and perhaps most eloquent adherent was Justice William O. Douglas.
Here at the apex of avant guarde American legal philosophy in the seventies, the relativism of the liberal elders had created consequences they could neither contain nor control.
THE CRITS.
Duncan Kennedy was Yale Law"s leading radical legal theoretician, founder of Critical Legal Studies, or Crits as we knew them. Crits applied to the law the same deconstructionist methodology that French philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida, had once applied to literature. Law, no less than literature, was best viewed as a "social construct" that expressed the needs of the prevailing power structure. It would need to be deconstructed to understand its roots in the power structure, and then reconstructed to build a new and better society. American law was necessarily an expression of bourgeois values and an instrument of oppression wielded by a corrupt authority.
Crits were explicitly Marxist in their dialectical methods, and interested in revolutionary change, not in reform. Judge Bork says the Crit movement"s "mindless form of leftist politics" and "crude anti-intellectualism would not have been tolerated on any decent law school faculty." prior to the radical sixties generation. "That it thrives now," he says, "speaks volumes about the political and intellectual atmosphere in many of today"s most prestigious law schools."*32 For many cla.s.sical liberals--and conservatives like Yale graduate and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas--law is rooted not in "the power structure," but in the words of our Const.i.tution. But for the followers of Critical Legal Studies, the law is an empty vessel, a semantic weapon backed by the threat of state coercion that can be used on behalf of the powerful or the powerless. As Judge Alex Kozensky explains, the Crits believe the law is rooted as much in the text as in "what they had for breakfast" on any particular day.
Duncan Kennedy--whose ultinate goal was to radicalize as many students as possible--became a tenured professor at Harvard, where his philosophy took root and ultimately influenced much of the Clinton judiciary.
HILLARY AND THE BLACK PANTHERS.
With her sandals, stringy hair, c.o.ke-bottle gla.s.ses, and a black arm band worn in remembrance of the dead at Kent State, Hillary was gaining prominence in the Yale protest movement. She was seen leading demonstrations on the great and small issues of the day, many of them targets of opportunity, from the Vietnam War to the lack of tampons in the women"s rest rooms. One of Hillary"s professors at Yale was Thomas Emerson, known as "Tommy the Commie." It was through Professor Emerson that Hillary had been introduced to defense attorney Charles Garry, who guided her involvement in the support and defense of the Black Panther Party.
Members of the Black Panther Party, including the infamous Bobby Seale were being tried in New Haven for murdering one of their own.
The victim, Alex Rackley, had been suspected by the Panthers as a police informant. What was certain was that he had been brutally tortured, beaten, scalded, mutilated, and killed. The evidence against the Black Panthers was overwhelming--including an audio tape of part of the "trial" to which Rackley was subjected. Two Panthers confessed to shooting Rackley as part of a plea bargain. But Bobby Seale fought extradition from California and became another target of opportunity, much more appealing than issues on feminine hygiene, and a rallying point for student radicals who idolized the Panthers as the leaders of a necessary black insurrection against the repressive white establishment.
That the Black Panthers could actually be guilty was an idea that had never occurred, or mattered, to their defenders, who were not at all fazed by a Black Panther Party that justified the rape of white women by black men as a political act of protest against white oppression, or that glorified the killing of police officers--or, in their words, "pigs."
Yale was a natural forum, perhaps battleground, for the privileged white students who wanted to show their solidarity with the Black Panthers and the forces of revolution against the presumed racism of American law.
A protest, centered around a May Day strike, was set to occur on the Yale campus. Possibly intimidated by the still-fresh images of Kent State, and consistent with Yale"s supine reaction to virtually every radical student initiative of the era, Yale President Kingman Brewster issued a statement sympathizing with the students and the plight of the Black Panthers. Then he opened the college dorms to demonstrators, whether they were students or not, and allowed Black Panther lawyer Charles Garry to make his residence on campus.*33 Hillary formed a close a.s.sociation with Garry, and manifested no misgivings by the violent rhetoric of his clients, who called for police a.s.sa.s.sinations and said, "If Bobby dies, Yale fries."*34 As part of her coursework with Professor Emerson, Hillary attended the Black Panther trials and put her considerable leadership and organizational skills to work in organizing shifts of fellow students to monitor the trial and report alleged civil rights abuses.
LEFT COAST RENDEZVOUS.
Robert Borosage, the student writer, was another radical leader who had become a colleague and close acquaintance of Hillary"s. Borosage later went on to lead a left-wing think tank called the Inst.i.tute for Policy Studies, which supported Cuban expansion into Grenada and Angola, and Daniel Ortega and his Soviet-backed Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
Hillary"s friendship with radicals like Garry and Borosage led Hillary to all the fashionable "chic," as writer Tom Wolfe put it, reaches of the left including Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford.
Treuhaft was a former lawyer for the Communist Party. His wife, the late Jessica Mitford, was famous in muckraking circles for savaging the American funeral home industry in The American Way of Death.
They were both committed Communists. Stalinists, in fact.
David Brock, in The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, quotes historian Stephen Schwartz as saying that this was not a pair of cuddly modern-day Fabians: This was a group of hard Communists who had been running the Communist Party of Northern California...It was a political organization whose loyalty to the Soviet Union was explicit, whose discipline was Stalinist, and whose intellectual att.i.tudes were mainly Stalinist ....