Clinton, through eyes of Wellesley classmate from Vancouver

Candace Young wishes Bernie Sanders supporters who criticize Hillary Rodham Clinton as untrustworthy, inauthentic or part of the establishment could have been in the audience in 1969 during her Wellesley commencement speech.

“She seemed so radical at the time of the speech,” said Young, a Vancouver resident who was in Clinton’s class at Wellesley when she was known as Hillary Rodham.

Young still remembers feeling electrified watching her classmate speak and how horrified her conservative Republican parents were at Rodham’s speech.

She expressed sentiments that most women at the time didn’t say, Young said. It was the civil rights era, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, and Rodham was chosen to be the first-ever student speaker at the elite all-women’s college.

“She was a forward thinker, and for women a revolutionary thinker,” Young said.

Here’s an excerpt of Rodham’s speech, covered by the national press at the time and earning the 21-year-old a spread in Life magazine: “We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue.”

Rodham ended up scrapping some of her prepared speech and gave off-the-cuff remarks.

“She did it on her toes. It was eloquent. It wasn’t ranting and raving,” Young said, “But it was clear she was a leader. That’s it, she’s just always been driven to lead.”

It was an era when people protested in the streets and shouted from the sidewalks.

Young was one of them, she said. But Rodham carved out a reputation as someone who took it to a deeper level working for civil rights and social justice.

“She wasn’t running for politics. This is just who she was,” said Young, a practicing psychologist. “She had integrity as a young person and idealism.”

The two weren’t in each other’s close circle of friends, but they have seen each other over the years at fundraisers and other social events. When Bill Clinton was president in the 1990s, Hillary Clinton hosted the class reunion at the White House.

There’s been a lot of press coverage of the Democratic presidential candidate’s transformations over the years: from the 21-year-old college activist, to the first lady of Arkansas who wouldn’t change her last name, to her decision to ditch the glasses, blow out her hair and take the name Clinton as her own.

But there’s one characterization of Clinton that particularly makes Young bristle.

“Sometimes people think she came in on Bill’s coattails or she developed this persona over time of the person she wanted to be,” Young said.

But Young still sees the same Hillary she knew on the third floor of Davis Hall her junior and senior years.

“She was serious, she was committed and she had a vision to make the world better,” Young said.

And she was going places on her own.

Young, who is 68, still marvels that her former classmate is considered the establishment.

“I think for a woman to be an establishment figure is breaking the glass ceiling,” she said. “How many women have this power and prominence they have developed over decades? Something about that breaks the glass ceiling in its own way.”

There is a story that circulates about Rodham within the Wellesley crew. One of the renowned political science professors reportedly wrote Rodham a reference and it said something along the lines of, “This young woman has the potential to change the face of history.”