On April 29, 1972, the Barristers Union at Yale Law School held its annual Prize Trial, in which four top lawyers, two to a side, competed. Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham formed the prosecution team on a fictional case about police brutality in Kentucky. The case was presided over by Abe Fortas, who had recently been forced to resign from the United States Supreme Court.
Despite arguing vigorously on admission of evidence, Bill Clinton lost the evidentiary ruling. As David Maraniss in First in His Class writes, first-year student and case-writer Elliot Brown recounted that “Hillary was much calmer. You could see her say, ‘Okay, we lost it, let’s move on.’”
Let’s move on. The idea of moving on, of finding the next door when one is closed is the enduring Clinton legacy. Accepting his party’s nomination in 1992, Bill Clinton remembered learning his most valuable lesson in Professor Carroll Quigley’s classroom at Georgetown University: “America was the greatest Nation in history because our people had always believed in two things: that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.”
Last night in Denver, Hillary Clinton echoed that call, and went one further. She not only invoked Harriet Tubman’s cry for freedom—“keep going!”—she reminded eighteen million people that a vote for her was a vote about justice and fairness, about a young Marine, about a mom with cancer but without healthcare, and a boy and his mom on minimum wage. She made the case for Barack Obama—the only chance we have at improving those lives in the next four years—in a way that no former rival has ever done for another in American political history.
One of my roommates said I was the only guy he knew in love with a sixty-year old woman. I spent close to 175 days in the past two years—a few in New Hampshire, many in Washington, a few in Iowa—working for Hillary Clinton. Many others spent months and years more than I did.
When Hillary ended her candidacy at the National Building Museum in June, she spoke in the spacious hall of a place devoted to invention and reinvention, a building that has gone through its own transformations through history. Last night’s speech was evidence that, in her very own way, she has built her own legacy: never give up, never give in, and never back down from what you believe in.
– Rahul Prabhakar
