In 1973, however, the exam changed. Instead of writing essays about local D.C. law, students spent one of the exam’s two days answering multiple-choice questions about “multistate” law: legal principles common across the country. “My understanding is that Nacrelli was not teaching [the multistate material] or not teaching it well,” Georgetown University professor Sherman Cohn, who ran a rival course built around the new exam, told me. A student who took Cohn’s course that summer but whose roommate took Nacrelli’s recalls that “Nacrelli seemed past his sell-by date. He just wasn’t teaching to the right exam.” A Harvard Law School graduate named David S. Fishback grew so alarmed by the way Nacrelli was preparing students for the constitutional-law portion of the multistate section that he and a friend decamped to the library to study it on their own.
It’s impossible to know for sure why Hillary failed. (When I asked Philippe Reines, Hillary’s media guru, he wasn’t familiar with the incident.) But in their mostly flattering book, HRC, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes offer a plausible theory: Hillary was “a great student,” but she “didn’t have the vision to see the trouble some of her peers identified and adjusted for.”
Does this ancient, obscure episode have any bearing on what kind of president Hillary Clinton would be? It just might. This spring, I immersed myself in the vast literature about Hillary’s life and career. The more I read, the more I became convinced that she possesses some of the qualities most necessary for presidential success. But if she struggles, there’s reason to suspect it will be for the same reason she appears to have struggled with the D.C. bar exam in 1973. She’s terrific at developing and executing a well-defined plan. She’s less adept at realizing that a well-defined plan is not working and improvising something new. Single-mindedness is both her greatest strength and greatest flaw.
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