Kind of a Horowitzian transformation. The Alinsky thing is trivial; Alinsky was less radical than Barney Frank, though it might be possible to sell him to the public as otherwise. Carl Bernstein on Hillary:
In the 60s, as an undergraduate at Wellesley, she exhibited an academic fascination with the Left and radicalism; rejected more extreme forms of political protest and violence as a student leader (there is no evidence I know that Obama has ever done anything but the same); wrote her senior thesis on the radical Chicago community-organizer Saul Alinsky (whose best-known philosophical mantra was, "Whatever works to get power to the people, use it."); and then, during the 1992 presidential campaign and White House years, insured that the thesis was locked up in the Wellesley archives and unavailable to reporters.
At Yale law school she embraced some leftist causes she perhaps wishes she hadn't today (the Black Panthers' claim that they couldn't get a fair trial, more about which later); worked in the most important radical law firm of the day -- Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, in Oakland, which represented the Communist Party and defended the Panthers in their murder trials; and became associate editor of an alternative law review at Yale which ran stories and pictures depicting policemen as pigs and murderers.
In her 2003 "memoir," Living History, Hillary mentions not a word about her role in the Panther trial in New Haven--during which she directed Yale law students monitoring the proceedings for evidence of government misconduct in its prosecution of the Panthers accused of murder. "It meant going in and out of the Black Panther headquarters to obtain documentation and other information," a classmate told Donnie Radcliff of the Washington Post, quoted in Hillary Rodham Clinton: A First Lady For Our Time. "Hillary's job was to organize shifts for her classmates and make certain no proceeding went unmonitored...[for] civil rights abuses..."
As for her summer at the law firm, Hillary's one-sentence mention of it in Living History gives the impression that Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein might as well been handling postal rate increases, rather than defending the Panthers, members of the communist party, and accepting cases that mainstream lawfirms were afraid to take -- particularly civil liberties cases -- in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. "I told Bill about my summer plans to clerk at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a small law firm in Oakland California, and he soon said he would like to go to California with me."
That is the total verbiage expended on so formative an experience, and the lasting -- but distant friendship -- she maintained for the next twenty-some years with Bob Treuhaft and his wife, the muckraking journalist (and, like her husband) former communist party member Jessica Mitford.
"The reason she came to us," Treuhaft told me [the quotation is in my biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman In Charge] "the only reason I could think of, because none of us knew her, was because we were a so-called "Movement law firm at the time. There was no reason except politics for a girl from Yale" to intern at the firm. "She certainly... was in sympathy with all the Left causes, and there was a sharp dividing line at the time. We still weren't very far out of the McCarthy era."