Overcoming history

During the summer of 1971 Hillary Clinton interned at a well-known Oakland “Communist law firm.” Today’s New York Sun publishes two articles by Josh Gerstein exploring Ms. Hillary’s activities that summer. Mr. Bill and Ms. Hillary acknowledge that they lived together in Berkeley during the summer of 1971. The Sun calls it “The Clintons’ Berkeley summer of love.”
Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham lived together in Berkeley while Ms. Clinton worked at the radical firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. Gerstein has examined archival material and interviewed law firm principals and others to ascertain what she did professionally that summer. What cases did she work on at the firm? In “Hillary Clinton’s radical summer,” Gerstein hunts an elusive quarry that is rendered even more elusive Ms. Hillary’s highly selective approach to her own history:

“I told Bill about my summer plans to clerk at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a small law firm in Oakland, California and he announced that he would like to go with me,” she wrote. “I spent most of my time working for Mal Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case.”

Gerstein struggles manfully to overcome Ms. Hillary’s evasive recollections, but he succeeds mostly in ruling out (at least to my satisfaction) “an oft repeated and published anecdote” involving her work on a matter involving the Black Panters:

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses