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 of Hillary Clinton talking about being proud of her time as a "Goldwater Girl" in 1964. It turns out to be an incomplete and selective excerpt of a lengthy — and still compelling (all these years later) — interview Clinton did in 1996 with 

The whole interview is worth a listen or a read. The full transcript is below. But let's just say, the Goldwater section might not even be the most interesting part.



The interview originally aired Jan. 13, 1996, and was pegged to the release of Clinton's book 

. But most of it focuses on the various tentacles of the Whitewater scandal Clinton had been tangled up in since the start of her husband's administration.
The way Clinton discusses that scandal and the various investigations will likely sound familiar. There are echoes in the way she's responded to the controversy over her use of a private email server for official business while secretary of state — and her saying that she and her husband were "

Here's how she described Whitewater to Simon:


At the time of the interview, some much sought-after records from the law firm where Clinton was a partner in Arkansas, the Rose Law Firm, were found. It was a 

 and fed theories for some, including Whitewater investigators, that Clinton was hiding something. Here's how 

Simon asked Clinton about it, referencing her time as a young lawyer working on the Nixon impeachment:

At the point in the interview where Clinton talked about her time as a "Goldwater Girl," it's clear that's not really what Simon was trying to ask about. In the light of today, his question was far more prescient:

As for Clinton's time as a Goldwater Girl, she volunteered for the Arizona senator's presidential campaign in 1964 when she would have been 16- and 17-years old. She and her friends wore cowgirl hats, even helped open the Barry Goldwater for President campaign office in their hometown of Park Ridge, Ill.

"It just seemed to be part of what you did. Some people became Girl Scouts, and we did politics," said Clinton's childhood friend Betsey Ebeling, in an interview with NPR last year. And at the time, in their little suburb, the default political setting was Republican.


The clip going around the Internet leaves off the part where Clinton talks about her political beliefs changing. But that evolution is something she is asked about regularly. MSNBC's Chris Matthews brought it up last week during a 

Clinton said her father was a "rock-ribbed conservative Republican," and they talked about politics around the dinner table.

"When I went off to college, I went believing I was a Republican," she said. "And actually I was president of Young Republicans for a couple of months and then I decided that I was much more in the camp of people like, you know, President Johnson — trying to promote civil rights, voting rights, ending poverty."

Here's the full transcript from the 1996 NPR interview with Scott Simon:

Politics and Government News

Election 2016

In 1996, NPR's Scott Simon interviewed first lady Hillary Clinton about her battles with Republicans and her own time as a young booster of Barry Goldwater.

This 20-year-old Clinton interview about Goldwater, Whitewater echoes today

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