© 2024 WSHU
NPR News & Classical Music
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
We received reports that some iPhone users with the latest version of iOS (v17.4) cannot play audio via the Grove Persistent Player.
While we work to fix the issue, we recommend downloading the WSHU app.

Remember When ... Memories of Bill And Hillary Clinton At Yale

Greg Gibson
/
AP
Then-first lady Hillary Clinton, accompanied by President Bill Clinton, reaches out to greet a visitor during the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 1993.

Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton gives her acceptance speech Thursday night at the Party’s convention in Philadelphia. Both she and her husband, Bill, have a Connecticut connection. In his speech earlier this week, Bill Clinton talked about about how they met at Yale Law School in 1971. 

WSHU’s Davis Dunavin got some comments about the Clintons from the Yale Law School community.

 
Harold Koh is a professor at Yale Law School. He says a lot of professors tell their students the story of the Clintons’ first date at the Yale Art Gallery. When Bill picked up Hillary for the date, he didn’t know the gallery was closed.

 
"They met a custodian who was coming out the back door. And Bill Clinton offered to pick up some trash for him if he would let them in the back way, and they would let themselves out. And so they went in and spent the whole time inside the art gallery.”

 
Walter Wagoner was a classmate of Hillary Clinton in the early 1970s. He’s had a law practice in New Haven ever since then. Wagoner remembers how in their student days, Hillary Clinton would take the edge off tense discussions about civil rights and equality.

 
“Those were tumultuous years at the Yale Law School. In comes Hillary and she was a real sweetheart.”

 
Wagoner and Clinton served in student government and worked together at a law clinic. He says he never got to know Bill, but he always liked Hillary.
 

“You hear people say Hillary’s the ice lady, she’s got a cold personality. When I see her on TV, it brings back all those memories. I can see exactly that same Hillary I met and worked with when she was in her early 20s, and as far as I’m concerned it looks like the girl I met.”
 

If Clinton wins in November, she’ll become the third Yale Law School grad to become president, after her husband and Gerald Ford.

Davis Dunavin loves telling stories, whether on the radio or around the campfire. He started in Missouri and ended up in Connecticut, which, he'd like to point out, is the same geographic trajectory taken by Mark Twain.