Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

large farms in Florida where migrants were treated as badly as they had been a decade before. Several students I knew from Yale attended on behalf of the corporate clients of the law firms they were working for as summer associates. The students told me they were learning how to rehabilitate a corporate client’s tarnished image. I suggested that the best way to do that would be to improve the treatment of their farmworkers.

When I returned to Yale for my second year in the fall of 1970, I decided to concentrate on how the law affected children. Historically, children’s rights and needs were covered in family law and usually de fined by whatever their parents decided, with some notable exceptions, like the right of a child to receive necessary medical treatment even over the religious objections of his or her parents. But starting in the I g6os, courts began finding other circumstances in which children had, to a limited extent, rights separate from their parents.

Two of my law school professors, Jay Katz and Joe Goldstein, encouraged my interest in this new area and suggested that I learn more about child development through a course of study at the Yale Child Study Center. They sent me to meet the Center’s Director, Dr. Al Solnit, and its chief clinician, Dr. Sally Provence. I persuaded them to let me spend a year at the Center attending case discussions and observing clinical sessions. Dr.

Solnit and Professor Goldstein asked me to serve as their research assistant for Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, a book they were writing with Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter. I also began consulting with the medical staff at Yale-New Haven Hospital about the newly acknowledged problem of child abuse and helping to draft the legal procedures for the hospital to use when dealing with suspected child abuse cases.

These activities went hand-in-hand with my assignments at the New Haven Legal Services office. A young legal aid lawyer, Penn Rhodeen, taught me how important it was for children to have their own advocates in situations involving abuse and neglect.

Penn asked me to assist him in representing an African American woman in her fifties who had served as a foster mother for a two-year-old mixed-race girl since the child’s birth. This woman had already raised her own children and wanted to adopt the little girl.

The Connecticut Department of Social Services, however, followed its policy that foster parents were not eligible to adopt and removed the girl from the woman’s care and placed her with a more “suitable” family. Penn sued the bureaucracy, arguing that the foster mother was the only mother the little girl had ever known and that removing her would inflict lasting damage. Despite our best efforts, we lost the case, but it spurred me to look for ways that children’s developmental needs and rights could be recognized within the legal system. I realized that what I wanted to do with the law was to give voice to children who were not being heard.

My first scholarly article, titled “Children Under the Law,” was published in 1974 in the Harvard Educational Review. It explores the difficult decisions the judiciary and society face when children are abused or neglected by their families or when parental decisions have potentially irreparable consequences, such as denying a child medical care or the right to continue school. My views were shaped by what I had observed as a volunteer for Legal Services representing children in foster care and by my experiences at the Child Study Center in Yale-New Haven Hospital; I advised doctors on their rounds as they tried to ascertain whether a child’s injuries were the result of abuse and, if so, whether a child should be removed from his or her family and put into the uncertain care of the child welfare system. These were terrible decisions to make. I come from a strong family and believe in a parent’s natural presumptive right to raise his or her child as he or she sees fit. But my experiences in Yale-New Haven Hospital were a long way from my sheltered suburban upbringing.

There may have been child abuse and domestic violence in Park Ridge, but I didn’t see it. In New Haven, by contrast, I saw children whose parents beat and burned them; who left them alone for days in squalid apartments; who failed and refused to seek necessary medical care. The sad truth, I learned, was that certain parents abdicated their rights as parents, and someone―preferably another family member, but ultimately the state―had to step in to give a child the chance for a permanent and loving home.

I thought often of my own mother’s neglect and mistreatment at the hands of her parents and grandparents, and how other caring adults filled the emotional void to help her.

My mother tried to repay the favor by taking in girls from a local group home to assist her around our house. She wanted to give them the same chance she had been given to see an intact supportive family in action.

Who would have predicted that during the 1992 presidential campaign, nearly two decades after I wrote the article, conservative Republicans like Marilyn Quayle and Pat Buchanan would twist my words to portray me as “anti-family”? Some commentators actually claimed that I wanted children to be able to sue their parents if they were told to take out the garbage. I couldn’t foresee the later misinterpretation of my paper; nor could I have predicted the circumstances that would motivate the Republicans to denounce me.

And I certainly didn’t know that I was about to meet the person who would cause my life to spin in directions that Icould never have imagined.

BILL CLINTON

Bill Clinton was hard to miss in the autumn of 1970. He arrived at Yale Law School looking more like a Viking than a Rhodes Scholar returning from two years at Oxford.

He was tall and handsome somewhere beneath that reddish brown beard and curly mane of hair. He also had