Hillary was a CR Prez?!

It's well known that Hillary Rodham Clinton was from a Republican family and that she participated in some Republican campaigns when she was young.

But, prior to reading this New York Times article earlier this week, I never knew that she had been president of the College Republicans at Wellesley College and even attended the 1968 GOP Convention in Miami.
Go figure.

From Mark Leibovich's article:

As the nation boiled over Vietnam, civil rights and the slayings of two charismatic leaders, Ms. Rodham was completing a sweeping intellectual, political and stylistic shift. She came to Wellesley as an 18-year-old Republican, a copy of Barry Goldwater’s right-wing treatise, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” on the shelf of her freshman dorm room. She would leave as an antiwar Democrat whose public rebuke of a Republican senator in a graduation speech won her notice in Life magazine as a voice for her generation. ...

A Goldwater Girl

Ms. Rodham had arrived at Wellesley in the fall of 1965, a decorated Girl Scout and teacher’s pet from a Republican household in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Ill. She had distributed leaflets for Mr. Goldwater’s presidential campaign the previous fall and was determined to rise quickly through the moribund ranks of Wellesley’s Young Republicans chapter.

As a go-getter freshman, Ms. Rodham was elected president of the group, dutifully recruiting students to help Massachusetts candidates including Edward Brooke, the future United States senator whom she would chastise in a 1969 commencement speech as being out of touch with the concerns of the new graduates.

If Senator Clinton were to win the White House in '08, I wonder if she would be the first past president of a College Republicans chapter to become POTUS. Something tells me that wouldn't end up as a laurel on the National CRs Website.

The photo above from the NYT Website is credited to Corbis. Caption: Ms. Rodham in 1969, the year she graduated.