In 1979, Hillary Rodham was already wrestling with many of the same issues — privacy, keeping one’s identity in the public eye, and the strains of her career vs. Bill’s — that she is today.
In 1978, Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas in a landslide. He and his wife, whom he married in 1975, Hillary Rodham, were just 32. Rodham, who moved south for Clinton's political career, had already built a successful career in the state as a young lawyer and law professor.
The young Hillary had decided to keep her last name because she saw it as part of her own identity. (Bill's mother, Virginia, had cried at the news.) Rodham's last name ultimately became an issue in Bill's 1978 campaign, though. His opponent, Frank White, would introduce his wife as "Mrs. Frank White" — a not-so-subtle attack on what Republicans in Arkansas saw as the Clintons' brazen liberalism in the Southern state.
A month into her tenure as Arkansas first lady in 1979, Rodham sat down for an interview with the Arkansas public affairs program In Focus. The interview, available on BuzzFeed News for the first time in decades, is among the earliest, and most open, glimpses of Clinton's efforts to balance public and private life, a theme that has followed her long career. Archived in the special collections at the University of Arkansas, the nearly half-hour-long interview offers an insight into future Hillary Clinton and her early attempts to navigate the tough waters as the wife of a political figure while keeping her own identify and privacy.
The interview covers how the Clintons compromised on her dual roles in her career and as first lady and how they traded the exposure of being a public couple but guarded their private life. She talks about her and Bill's youth being an asset, and discusses wanting to have children (this interview took place before Chelsea was born).
The deeply personal interview is perhaps the oldest and longest video of the young Hillary Clinton.
Here are the highlights:
buzzfeed-video1.s3.amazonaws.com
Hillary said she dealt with guarding her and Bill's privacy and that accepting that your privacy will be curtailed is a part of public life.
"Well, I think that anyone who is going to be in public life has to, first of all, accept the fact that a certain amount of your privacy has to be curtailed, because you have an obligation to be available to people and for people to feel that they have access to you. So I think it’s a trade-off that one knows one makes, when you enter public life, but I try as much as I can, particularly on his behalf, to take as much effort as I can make to guard his privacy so he has enough time to sleep and eat and think, because I believe that the people elected him to make decisions, and if he’s just always a public person there’s no time for that. So it is a problem but it’s one that we’re willing to live with and figure out."
University of Arkansas Special Collections
