Hillary Clinton Failed the D.C. Bar Exam?
Had missed this one somehow:
Bernstein referred to Living History while discussing Hillary Clinton’s friends’ reaction to her disclosure that she had failed the D.C. bar exam (Page 92):
On November 3, the District of Columbia Bar Association notified Hillary that she had failed the bar exam. For the first time in her life she had flamed out — spectacularly, given the expectations of others for her and even more so her own. Of 817 applicants, 551 of her peers had passed, most from law schools less prestigious than Yale. She kept this news hidden for the next thirty years. She never took the exam again, despite many opportunities. Her closest friends and associates — Webb Hubbell, Jim Blair (Diane’s husband), Nancy Bekavac, Betsey Write, Sara Ehrman — were flabbergasted when she made the revelation in a single throwaway line in Living History. “When I learned that I passed in Arkansas but failed in D.C., I thought maybe my test scores were telling me something.”
Those who knew her best speculated that she must have felt deep shame at her failure, and that her self-confidence — always so visible a part of her exterior — was shattered by the experience (though many first-rate lawyers, even Yale Law graduates, had flunked the bar on their first try). There can only be conjecture about what turn her life — and the nation’s — might have taken had she not failed the exam.
Source: http://mediamatters.org/items/200706010006
