Hillary Clinton: Photos of the Future First Lady as a Wellesley Grad

Written By: Ben Cosgrove

Long before Yale Law, before Arkansas, before her marriage to Bill, before the Senate, the White House, her own runs for the White House, the State Department, and so many other highlights (and lowlights) of her remarkable life, she was Hillary Diane Rodham, the older sister of two brothers, and the over-achieving daughter of loving, politically conservative parents from suburban Park Ridge, Ill.

Intelligent, intensely curious and, from a young age, driven to find a way to contribute to the world around her, Hillary Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College in the fall of 1965. It was there, in Massachusetts, that the moderate Republican underwent her transformation (she might characterize it as “an evolution”) to committed Democrat.

By the time she graduated from Wellesley in May 1969, Hillary Rodham was already such a notable figure that she was featured, along with four other speakers from four other schools and excerpts from their commencement addresses in the June 20, 1969, issue of LIFE, in an article titled, simply, “The Class of ’69.”

Her speech was, perhaps not surprisingly, less strident and confrontational than those of the other student speakers quoted in the issue. As early as 1969, Hillary was showing signs of her ability to modulate her message without diluting or compromising it that helps explain so much of her success in public life. The other student speakers featured in that June 1969 issue included Yale’s William Thompson; Justin Simon at Brandeis; Mills College’s Stephanie Mills, an author; and Brown University’s Ira Magaziner, a high-profile student activist who went on to become a business strategist and a senior adviser in the Clinton White House.

Here, LIFE.com presents a series of pictures by photographer Lee Balterman, only one of which ran in the June 20 issue of LIFE. The images were captured at the Rodham home in Park Ridge in mid-June 1969, a week and a half after she graduated from Wellesley. Leaving aside the insights into late-Sixties fashion that these pictures afford, the LIFE archives also contains insights into the younger Hillary that never made it into the magazine. For instance, in a note dated June 11, 1969, that accompanied Balterman’s film when it was sent from Illinois to LIFE’s offices in New York, we learn that Hillary told reporter Joan Downs that “press accounts of her commencement speech were vastly different from what she actually said because the speech wasn’t written out and taped transcripts were unavailable until several days after commencement.”

“She’s also quite concerned” the note continues, “that it be made clear she was not attacking Senator Brooke personally.” Senator Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the Senate and the last Republican Senator elected from Massachusetts until Scott Brown’s election in 2010, spoke before Hillary Rodham at Wellesley’s commencement, and she deviated from her prepared remarks to address at least part of what he said.

Another Balterman note in the archive, meanwhile, written in the photographer’s own hand, points to a less dramatic, if no less revealing, element of the photo shoot: “Had to go for nothing more than informal portraits, but should be some good expressions & hand gestures, etc.,” the note reads, before ending with a simple, gentle suggestion: “Her glasses helped.”

—Photo gallery edited by Liz Ronk