By MICHAEL BARBARO
from The New York Times

Naturally, something would come out about Hillary Clinton’s past. Even though it was as a board member to Wal-Mart all the way back in 1990. - JS

In 1986, Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, had a problem. He was under growing pressure from shareholders - and his wife, Helen - to appoint a woman to the company’s 15-member board of directors.

So Mr. Walton turned to a young lawyer who just happened to be married to the governor of Arkansas, where Wal-Mart is based: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton’s six-year tenure as a director of Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest company, remains a little known chapter in her closely scrutinized career. And it is little known for a reason. Mrs. Clinton rarely, if ever, discusses it, leaving her board membership out of her speeches and off her campaign Web site.

According to fellow board members and company executives, who have rarely discussed her role in Wal-Mart, Mrs. Clinton used her position to champion personal causes, like the need for more women in management and a comprehensive environmental program, despite being Wal-Mart’s only female director, the youngest and arguably the least experienced in business. On other topics, like Wal-Mart’s vehement anti-unionism, she was largely silent, they said.

Her experience on the Wal-Mart board, from 1986 to 1992, gave her an unusual tutorial in the ways of American business - a credential that could serve as an antidote to Republican efforts to portray her as an enemy of free markets and an advocate for big government.

But that education came via a company that the Democratic Party - and its major ally, organized labor - has turned into a political punching bag, accusing it of offering unaffordable health insurance and mistreating its workers.

read more at THE NEW YORK TIMES