's
ties to 1960s radicals, her comments baffled two retired Bay Area
lawyers who knew Clinton in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an
intern at a left-wing law firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended
communists and Black Panthers.
"She's a hypocrite," Doris B. Walker, 89, who was a member of the
American Communist Party, said in an interview last week. "She had to
know who we were and what kinds of cases we were handling. We had a very
left-wing reputation, including civil rights, constitutional law,
racist problems."
Malcolm Burnstein, 74, a partner at the firm who worked closely with
Clinton during her internship, said he was traveling in Pennsylvania in
April when Clinton attacked Obama for his past interactions with William
Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, members of Students for a Democratic
Society who went on to found the bomb-making Weather Underground.
"Given her background, it was quite hypocritical," Burnstein said. "I
almost called the Philadelphia Inquirer. I saw what she and her campaign
were saying about Ayers and I thought, 'Well, if you're going to talk
about that totally bit of irrelevant nonsense, I'll talk about your
career with us.' "
In her campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination,
Clinton has said little about her experiences in the tumultuous late
1960s and early 1970s, including her involvement with student protests
and her brief internship at the law firm, Treuhaft, Walker and
Burnstein. She has said she worked on a child custody case, although
former partners recall her likely involvement in conscientious objector
cases and a legal challenge to a university loyalty oath.
But her decision to target Obama's radical connections has spurred
criticism from some former protest movement leaders who say she has
opened her own associations to scrutiny.
"The very things she's accusing Barack of could be said of her with much
greater evidence," said Tom Hayden, a leading anti-Vietnam War
activist, author and self-described friend of the Clintons.
Robert Reich, who went to Yale Law School with Hillary Rodham and Bill
Clinton and later served in the Clinton administration, called Hillary
Clinton's attack on Obama "absurd," adding: "That carries guilt by
association to a new level of absurdity. Where does guilt by association
stop? I mean, she was a partner of Jim McDougal in the 1980s, for
crying out loud." Reich is now an Obama supporter.
In response to the assertion that Clinton is a hypocrite for calling out
Obama's ties to Ayers, campaign spokesman Philippe Reines said: "The
comparison is patently absurd." The campaign played down her friendship
with a noted student protest leader and defended her work with the
Oakland firm. "At the time she worked there, the firm was primarily at
the forefront of civil rights advocacy cases, which was a good fit with
Senator Clinton's long-standing interest in civil rights and
constitutional law," Reines said.
Clinton's associations date to her years as a student leader at
Wellesley from 1965 to 1969. It was the height of student opposition to
the Vietnam War, and Carl Oglesby, the president of Students for a
Democratic Society, came to campus to speak.
"I gave a talk at Wellesley, where she was a student," Oglesby said in a
telephone interview from Amherst, Mass., where he is recovering from a
stroke. "I can't say that I was a close friend of hers. It was more of a
passing acquaintance. I liked her. I think of her as a good guy. I
think she has a good heart and a solid mind. And I support her in the
current primary."
Oglesby had been close to Ayers and Dohrn, but the couple split with the
more moderate SDS factions to form the Weather Underground, which
engaged in a bombing campaign to try to stop the Vietnam War. The FBI
monitored Oglesby throughout the period.
The Clinton campaign suggested last week that she did not meet Oglesby
until the 1990s, long after his activist years. But in recent
interviews, Oglesby has made clear that she stood out in his memory as
he traveled across the country speaking at rallies.
In 1994, Clinton told Newsweek that Oglesby's writings in the 1960s
helped persuade her to oppose the Vietnam War and to become a Democrat.
She visited Oglesby in 1994 in Massachusetts, a meeting that was omitted
from the First Lady's official schedule. Oglesby told the Boston Globe
at the time, "We mostly discussed the '60s. I may have been a little
gushy in my praise of the administration, but she was extremely
impressive."
Oglesby now talks warmly about Clinton. In an interview with Reason
magazine, he called their association "a friendship, a comradeship,
within the context of the movement. She and I, for a while, were warm
with each other. She and I were semi-close."
But Oglesby said he has not contacted Clinton because he is afraid that he could harm her candidacy.
"A friend of mine mentioned me to her not long ago, and according to him
she got a case of the shakes. I think it was because she could imagine
if any of her considerable enemies on the right wanted to do her in,
they would be happy to discover a relationship between her and me," he
told the magazine.
Clinton interned at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein while attending Yale
Law School. The firm defended the Black Panthers, including Angela
Davis, and Clinton had been editor of the Yale Review of Law and Social
Action, which included articles about Black Panther leader Bobby Seale's
murder trial in New Haven, Conn.
Author Gail Sheehy wrote about the internship in her book "Hillary's
Choice." Sheehy, who also wrote a 1971 book about the Black Panthers,
interviewed firm partner Robert Treuhaft, who described Hillary Rodham
attending a New Haven fundraiser for Seale's defense that he threw with
his wife, author Jessica Mitford. Treuhaft -- who, with his wife, left
the Communist Party in 1958 -- died in 2001.
Clinton kept up correspondence with the British-born Mitford through the
early 1990s. "Top students like Hillary were much sought after by huge
prestigious Wall Street-type law firms -- some, like Hillary, were far
more interested in left-wing firms," Mitford wrote to a friend in 1992.
In her autobiography, "Living History," Clinton details little of the
firm's background. She wrote that she "spent most of my time working for
Mal Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child
custody case."
But members of the firm have different recollections. Burnstein recalled
her working on a case involving Stanford University students who
refused to sign an oath attesting that they had never been communists.
Walker said that Clinton probably worked on cases to help young men
avoid the draft. "We did a whole lot of conscientious-objector work,"
she said.
Hayden, one of the Chicago Seven who were acquitted of inciting riots at
the 1968 Democratic National Convention, said he is disappointed that
Clinton has tried to taint Obama with guilt by association.
"Once you introduce the concept of guilt by association, everyone is in
trouble because there is no end to it," he said. "The goal is to render
Barack so unelectable that the party has to turn to her. Because the
goal is so narrow and obsessive, she's not aware that she's also going
to be collateral damage."
Researcher Madonna Lebling and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
