Hillary Clinton and Leadership
No other First Lady in recent history has been as admired and vilified as Hillary Rodham Clinton. Breaking from the mold of her immediate predecessors, Clinton has more in common with her earlier counterparts, like Eleanor Roosevelt, Dolly Madison, Abigail Adams or Mamie Doud Eisenhower.
However, many of her predecessors wielded a tremendous amount of power simply through their access to the president. Nancy Reagan, for example, would often discuss the effects of their friendship with the Gorbachevs in light of the unease over the Cold War.
Unlike them, Clinton was clearly not interested in this delicate, secondary form of leadership. Rather, she became an active participant in several of her husband's most important campaigns -- from health care to welfare reform. When her term as First Lady ended, she extended her leadership role further in her new position as New York's junior senator.
Through a reading of her memoir Living History, this paper assesses Clinton's rise to leadership and her various strengths and weaknesses as a leader. The first part of the paper studies the first leadership roles of the young Hillary. The next part then evaluates Clinton's actions in light of the various theories discussed in Peter G. Northouse's Leadership and Lee G. Bolman's Reframing Organizations. The next parts then examine how she has gone on assuming new roles, from her political conversion to a Democrat and her early career as a lawyer in Arkansas. Northouse's writings on leadership traits, the concept of transformational leadership, Dayle Smith's work on the role of gender and Ronald Heifetz's study of ethics form a useful framework for analyzing Clinton's leadership process.
Much of the paper is necessarily devoted to her leadership roles as the First Lady, amid much scandal, public adulation and public censure. In the last section, the paper summarizes how the theories on leadership help shed light on the processes and decisions made by Clinton through various points in her career.
The Early Years
Bolman and Deal (1997) advocate a "framing" approach towards understanding management organizations. The see these frames as "windows on the world and lenses which the world into focus" (12). These frames include organizational structure, human resources, political frameworks and cultural symbols and associations. By examining the interaction between various frames, a researcher could then gain a greater understanding of the organization as a whole.
In much the same way, Clinton's narrative in Living History could also be read through a similar "framing" device, one that explores various facets of her personal and professional experiences, education and personality to shed more light on her leadership style and decisions.
Living History thus provides several frames to locate Clinton's development. For example, she gives several surprising revelations regarding her upbringing, which tie into her early political views. The young Hillary is a far cry from the urban, sophisticated and liberal image she currently projects.
Clinton was raised in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, a heavy Republican enclave. In 1960, largely influenced by her father and a teacher, the young Hillary even joined Republican-led efforts to prove that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley stole the election from Richard Nixon through "creative vote counting." She even writes about walking around dangerous neighborhoods in the South Side, being "fearless and stupid." One of her triumphs was locating a vacant lot that was listed as a residence for 12 voters on the polling sheet.
In fact, Clinton's earliest roles leadership roles highlight her strong Republican leanings. While her courageous graduation speech at Wellesley has become famous, it is much less known that she was also president of the Young Republicans club. She admired Barry Goldwater's stand for individual rights and even worked on Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaign.
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