After Dinner Speakers: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Claudia Winkleman, Ajaz Ahmed

The wife of President Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000, becoming the first First Lady ever elected to national office. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1969, Hillary Rodham went to Yale Law School, where she met Clinton, a fellow student. She served as a staff attorney for the Children's Defense Fund and was also on the congressional Impeachment Inquiry staff in 1974, at the tail end of Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. Hillary left Washington for Arkansas, marrying Bill Clinton in 1975. She was First Lady of Arkansas (the governor's wife) for 12 years, while raising their daughter Chelsea and practicing law. When Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992 she became the 43rd First Lady of the United States. During her stay in the White House she was often controversial, weathering criticism about everything from her hairstyles to her involvement in public policy, her role in a questionable land deal in Arkansas (the so-called Whitewater affair) and other scandals. She also endured her husband's much-publicized affair with intern Monica Lewinsky and supported him during the subsequent impeachment hearings. In 2000 she moved to New York and became the state's Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. That November, on the same day in which George W. Bush was chosen to replace her husband as president, Hillary Clinton was voted into the Senate. In 2003 Clinton published a 562-page memoir, Living History, detailing her eight years in the White House... Her 1996 book It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us was a best-seller, though the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child" was frequently lampooned by her opponents.