Unrepentant radicals

Hillary Clinton's Letters to Saul Alinsky Prove Her Radicalism


Unrepentant radicals

Correspondence between Hillary Clinton and leftist organizer Saul Alinsky was recently made public by The Washington Free Beacon, and it proves the danger posed to this country should Clinton win her as-yet-unannounced bid for the White House. One thing is clear: Hillary is no “moderate.”

Clinton wrote the letters in 1971 while she was living in Berkeley, California, interning at Trehauft, Walker and Bernstein, a leftist law firm that counted the Black Panthers among its clients. In the exchanges, Clinton inquired about the expected publication of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” his work on organizing for socialist change that has since become the bible for leftist activism. “I have just had my one-thousandth conversation about Reveille [for Radicals] and need some new material to throw at people,” she wrote.

Of his “Rules for Radicals” (which by the way was dedicated to Lucifer), Alinsky wrote, “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-nots on how to take it away.” Note: If you’re in a middle-class family struggling to make ends meet, Alinsky would have considered you a Have, not a Have-Not.

Clinton corresponded with Alinsky between 1968, when she was a Wellesley student writing a thesis about him, and his death in 1972. Some of their exchanges detailed not only her adoration for his ideology and political strategy, but her thought process on going to law school to work to achieve change from the inside. Alinsky’s view of achieving radical social change was to work incrementally both within institutions and outside them. He recognized, particularly through viewing the failures of the New Left during the late 1960s, that America was not ready for socialism. His methods called for ideological stealth and gradualism under the cover of pragmatism.

While Clinton turned down an invitation to work for Alinsky, she never forgot his guiding principles. She offered only a paragraph about him in her book “Living History,” deliberately playing down the man who obviously figured prominently in her political education. Another fine example of pragmatic cover a la Alinsky was that her Wellesley thesis was sealed from public view until 2001 at the request of the Clinton White House. Alinsky’s disciples go to great lengths to cover their tracks.

Hillary was a principal force in the White House that pulled Bill to the left during his presidency. In fact, it was many of her actions during the early years of the co-presidency that caused Democrats to lose Congress in 1994 and almost cost Clinton re-election. Is there any reason to believe that Hillary has mellowed in recent years? None at all.

A Hillary Clinton presidency would be an opportunity for her and her leftist friends to push their agenda even further than they did under Obama. This country may not survive two Chicago activists in a row. It will be hard enough to undo the damage Obama has done. If Clinton follows him into the White House, it will be like a third Obama term that will embed ObamaCare into our society forever, send the investment class permanently overseas, and leave the economic scraps for her fellow domestic Alinsky disciples.