Hillary Rodham Clinton Biography

Hillary Rodham Clinton was the Democratic nominee for president in 2016, losing to Republican candidate Donald Trump. Clinton was the U.S. Secretary of State from 2009-13 and a U.S. Senator from 2001-09. She is the wife of former President Bill Clinton, and the first American First Lady to be elected to national office.

After graduating from Wellesley College in 1969, Hillary Rodham went to Yale Law School, where she met Bill 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 married Bill Clinton and left Washington for Arkansas in 1975. She raised their only daughter Chelsea (b. 1980) and practiced law during Clinton’s 12 years as the state’s governor.

Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 and Hillary Clinton became a somewhat controversial First Lady, weathering criticism about everything from her hairstyles to her involvement in public policy to her role in a questionable Arkansas land deal (the so-called Whitewater affair). She also endured her husband’s much-publicized affair with intern Monica Lewinsky and supported him during the subsequent impeachment hearings.

After eight years in the White House, the Clintons took residency in New York in 2000. Hillary Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate that year, just as George W. Bush was being elected to succeed her husband. She was re-elected to a second Senate term in 2006. She ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, finally conceding to fellow senator Barack Obama after a lengthy campaign. After winning the general election that November, Obama nominated Hillary Clinton to the post of Secretary of State. She was confirmed and took office on 21 January 2009, the day after Obama’s inauguration.

Hillary Clinton served in that post throughout Obama’s first term, but stepped down in 2013; she was succeeded as Secretary of State by former senator John Kerry. On April 12, 2015, Hillary Clinton announced that she would again be a candidate for president in 2016. In the primaries she battled Bernie Sanders, the longtime liberal senator from Vermont, and won enough delegate votes in the primary to become the Democratic nominee and the first woman ever nominated for president by a major party.

A week before the Democratic National Convention in July, she named Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia as her vice-presidential running mate. Together they ran against Republican nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence. Though Clinton led in polls most of the way, Trump won the presidency in a stunning election-night upset on November 8, 2016.