Hillary

All right so we wanna hear your story.

Unvarnished, beginning to end.

‐ Gotcha, okay.

‐ Is it okay now? ‐ It's okay.

I'll try not to move so much.

No, please move as much as you want.

Are we ready?

Roll sound.

Okay so do you feel frustrated

that you've been in public life for 30 years,

yet people feel that they don't know

who you are.

That you seem inauthentic.

‐ I do!

I do feel, I do feel like

what is this about.

When people say I'm not authentic,

what you see is what you get,

I mean I'm sorry if I'm not brilliantly

charismatic on TV, but I am the same person

I've always been and going through this gauntlet

of unbelievable obstacles,

I mean yeah you get scarred up

a little bit.

Hillary, Hillary, Hillary, Hillary, Hillary.

Please welcome to the stage,

Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Clinton set to launch her second bid

for the presidency.

‐ The goal is to get Hillary Clinton elected

to be the 45th president of the United States.

‐ Thank you San Antonio. ‐ She is the most

recognizable female public figure.

It's time the sense of destiny.

‐ The problem is of course,

she is one of the most admired

and one of the most vilified women in American history.

Hillary is unlikeable

because she's unlikeable.

She is just sort of a polarizing figure.

She hides things.

That's her nature.

‐ You hear about her, I don't know,

there's something about her I just don't like.

I don't know, there's something about her

I just don't trust.

Almost since the moment Clinton

burst on the national scene in 1992,

she has set off a firestorm.

‐ Either people feel extraordinarily,

passionately positive about her,

or they absolutely do not like her and reject her.

‐ What an honor.

‐ Hey Hillary Benghazi matters, you're incompetent.

‐ You bet, you bet, read the report.

‐ I provoke strong opinions, positive and negative.

‐ Hilary, take a hike!

‐ I mean I one time said to somebody who asked me

what do you want on your gravestone I said,

she's neither as good nor as bad

as some people say about her.

‐ I didn't grow up as a little girl

thinking hey I could be president.

That never crossed my mind.

I was born in the city of Chicago.

When I was about four, we moved to a suburb

called Park Ridge.

It was a classic post World War II

Leave it to Beaver upbringing.

When I was a little girl,

I never knew a woman who worked outside the home

except for my teachers and the librarians

at our library.

She's got a man she's promised

to love honor and‐‐

‐ Keep house going the right way.

‐ Does that mean I never have to help with the dishes.

‐ Never.

Vel does my dishes.

It's Marvelous.

‐ I had an incredible mother.

She really was loving, encouraging.

My father had been a chief petty officer

in the Navy.

He didn't know anything other than to set high expectations

and that even though I was a girl,

he was going to expect me to do well.

The neighborhood was pretty conservative.

They were all Republicans.

I remember one time playing Pinochle

with the grown up men, we got into a big card fight.

And I say to my father, I'm quitting

and I'm leaving and when I grow up I'm going to marry

a Democrat .

It was the worst thing I could think of to say to my father,

and they were like oh, what what?

‐ And my father said his prayers by the side

of his bed every single night,

being a Methodist was a big part

of my upbringing.

Do all the good you can, to all the people

you can for as long as you can.

Then in 1961 we had a new youth minister show up

and his name was Reverend Don Jones.

He was a real Methodist, I mean

he really had a mission, he thought everybody did,

and that everybody was supposed to be striving

to do all the good they could.

Don's goal was to sort of force us to open

our eyes to world beyond our comfortable suburb.

Two, four six eight,

we don't wanna integrate.

‐ The Civil Rights movement was in full motion.

We want King, we want King, we want King.

‐ I was seeing so much of what happened during

the Civil Rights movement

through the lens of the faith I was brought up in.

‐ I mean how could you go to church on Sunday

and hate people on Monday,

I just could never figure that out.

Our youth group had gone to hear Dr. King speak

in Downtown Chicago.

‐ Because however much she strays away from it,

the goal of America is freedom.

‐ Dr. King's sermon was called staying awake

through the revolution.

‐ Our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America.

‐ I'd never heard anything like that before.

I mean I'd never been to a a sermon like that,

I'd never heard a speaker like that.

‐ We shall overcome because the arc

of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.

‐ I was so struck by it.

It meant so much to me.

I mean I was beginning to wake up

to paraphrase Dr. King's sermon.

The high school I went to was huge,

probably 4,800 5,000 people,

a lot of the girls didn't wanna make

better grades than their boyfriends.

They didn't want to make themselves

un‐marriageable by looking too smart,

working too hard.

I just couldn't be anything other than...

what I was.

‐ Hillary was on student counsel in high school

and she ran for president.

But you have to understand,

no matter how many girls ran, it was always the boy

who was going to win.

‐ The boys basically said no,

no girl's going to be president,

and then the boy who won, as soon as he won,

he came to me and asked me to do all the work.

He was going to be the president

of the student council.

But he wanted me to lead the organizations committee

to do all the work,

which of course I said yes,

because I was interested in the work,

but that was that was kind of the education

about what was going on in the world.

And it was one of the reasons why I decided

to go to an all‐girls college.

I decided to go to Wellesley, and that was it.

I was pretty intimidated through the first weeks,

felt very out of place.

I didn't think I could do the work.

I didn't think I belonged.

‐ We were in the same dorm, freshman year.

I have a pretty good sense of humor,

she had a great sense of humor.

She did come from conservative Republican parents.

‐ Friends of mine tended to be more liberal and progressive.

They'd say wow do you believe

that Hillary Rodham was for Goldwater.

‐ I actually went to the young Republicans meeting,

and much to my surprise was elected

president of the young Republicans.

I held that position for maybe a month or two

and then I just decided

I don't think I believe that any more.

I've got to do my own due diligence to figure

out where I stand politically.

‐ And I could see in constitutional law class

she felt very strongly about marginalized

groups in American society and social reform.

She was very very pragmatic, even then.

Basically her view was how do you get from here to there.

‐ Look, I consider myself a problem solver,

I consider myself an idealist

and an optimist, but you have to be willing to work

in the system.

NBC News live coverage

of the Democratic National Convention.

‐ The Summer of 1968, the Democratic Convention

was in Chicago.

10,000 anti‐war demonstrators

gathered in Grant Park this afternoon.

‐ Hillary called and she said