PROFILE: HILLARY CLINTON

Early Years: Hillary Clinton, 60, was raised in the quiet, white-dominated Chicago suburb of Park Ridge in a middle-class family with working class roots. She was interested in politics from an early age and gravitated towards the Republican party under the sway of her staunchly conservative father, a textile salesman. At age 13, she helped investigate voter fraud in Chicago after Richard Nixon’s defeat by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election and four years later campaigned for Barry Goldwater, whose book, “The conscience of a Conservative”, became her political bible. She began drifting leftwards while studying political science at Wellesley College in Massachusetts but only after a spell chairing the campus branch of Young Republicans. She finally broke from the party in 1968, when she was deeply affected by the assassination of Martin Luther King and angered by Republican race baiting in the US south. Her political transformation was completed at Yale, where she studied law and met her future husband: Bill Clinton.