Hillary Clinton has few rivals when it comes to dominating headlines in The Washington Times for the past 35 years, as the paper’s reporters investigated and chronicled her many ups and downs.
Her lifetime in the public eye unfolded in The Times’ pages, from her prominent role in the successful 1992 presidential campaign of husband Bill Clinton to her own repeated failed runs for the White House, capped with a stunning upset loss last year to novice politician Donald Trump.
It has been a roller coaster, and The Times has been there for every twist and turn — not just along for the ride but pushing forward Mrs. Clinton’s story by exposing the truth behind her public persona.
Whether it was her backroom fury over her husband’s Oval Office sexcapades with Monica Lewinsky or revelations of classified material bandied about in her secret private email account as secretary of state, The Times drove the coverage.
With exposes and analyses, The Times dogged Mrs. Clinton from the misadventure of “HillaryCare” in 1993 to her easy wins of a U.S. Senate seat from New York, from the racially tinged feud with Barack Obama in 2008 to her political rebound as secretary of state, and from the lackluster response to the deadly terrorist attack in Benghazi to her grueling and ultimately heartbreaking 2016 presidential bid that may have ended her political career.
Mrs. Clinton was as prominent on the editorial pages as in the news section.
After she went from being first lady to Sen. Clinton in 2001, Editor in Chief Wesley Pruden, in one of his twice-weekly columns, described her as “abandoning her role as America’s sweetheart to become the gray eminence of Gotham.”
That was one of his kinder descriptions of Mrs. Clinton, who was always a lightning rod for controversy and a favorite subject of many of the paper’s opinion makers.
The Times was front and center for Mrs. Clinton’s many milestones, including when she broke through the proverbial glass ceiling to become the first woman to win a major party nomination for president.
The paper’s political team followed her every move at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, taking careful note of the history she was making.
“Tonight’s victory is not about one person. It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made the moment possible,” she said in her acceptance speech, as she earned another banner headline on the front page of The Times.
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