I CAN’T take it anymore. If one more person sends me that e-mail about Hillary and the Black Panthers, I’ll have to be dragged away screaming in a straitjacket.
You know the e-mail I’m talking about. It accuses Hillary of helping the Black Panthers get away with torture and murder during the early 1970s. With a presidential race drawing near, the spam mills are creaking to life, flooding the Internet once more with this agitprop classic.Unfortunately, the e-mail mingles good information with bad, sowing more confusion than enlightenment. Some versions, for instance, carry the by-line of radio talk jock Paul Harvey, who says he did not write it. Such misrepresentations help Hillary defenders dismiss the e-mail as a hoax.
The story is no hoax, though. Its basic elements can be found in respected Hillary biographies and exposés such as Barbara Olson’s Hell to Pay; David Brock’s The Seduction of Hillary Rodham; Joyce Milton’s The First Partner; and Carl Limbacher’s Hillary’s Scheme.
Here are the facts.
In May 1969, fishermen discovered the body of Black Panther Alex Rackley floating in Connecticut’s Coginchaug River. Rackley’s captors had clubbed him, burned him with cigarettes, scalded him with boiling water and stabbed him with an ice pick before finally shooting him in the head.
New Haven detectives learned that the Panthers suspected Rackley of being a police informer. Panther enforcers had tied him to a chair and tortured him for hours. Police arrested eight Panthers and later extradited Panther leader Bobby Seale from California, after a witness accused Seale of ordering Rackley’s death. (1)
Campus radicals supported the Panthers. They organized mass protests in support of the so-called “New Haven Nine.” Hillary was right in the thick of it.
By the time she entered Yale Law School in 1969, Hillary was already a radical celebrity on campus. Life magazine had featured Hillary in a piece titled, “The Class of ’69,” which showcased three student activists whom Life’s editors deemed the best and brightest of the year. A line Hillary used in her Wellesley College commencement speech appeared under her photo: “Protest is an attempt to forge an identity.” (2)
At Yale, Hillary helped edit the Yale Review of Law and Social Action — a leftwing journal which promoted cop-killing and featured cartoons of pig-faced police. (3)



















