When she takes the podium tomorrow at Harvard Medical School's Class Day, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton will have an important task at hand. She has the rare opportunity to convince members of the next generation of premier doctors that health care reform is inherently linked to children's welfare.

"I think she'll have a lot to say about the shake-up of the medical system we're in right now," says Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, professor emeritus of pediatrics at the Medical School (HMS).

"She can talk about the importance of the early years of children and their families. She's very well-schooled in what children need, especially poor children," says Brazelton, whose expertise in early-childhood rearing has helped the Clinton formulate family policy.

If the First Lady has her way, her audience of 161 Medical School and 59 Dental School graduates will walk away convinced that they too are an integral part of the village that Clinton has said it takes to raise a child.

Despite the much-publicized failure of her health-care reform proposal in 1994, Clinton has held firm to her original policy conceptions. And it seems, many of these ideas are working their way back into legislative action.

Clinton's success may stem from her persistence. Her persistence may stem from the values she learned growing up in a close-knit community of parents, teachers and neighbors who worked together to raise the community's children.

And in a world where Clinton's childhood experience has become more the exception than the rule, to build such a village, it takes a First Lady.

Hillary's Village

Born in Chicago, Ill. in the fall of 1947, Clinton grew up in the white-collar suburb of Park Ridge. Clinton's memoirs tell the story of a neighborhood where fathers took their children and their children's friends ice skating at the local pond and where the district school stayed open during the summer, sponsoring arts-and-crafts programs for the area children.

For years, Clinton and her two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony, faithfully attended Sunday school at the local Methodist church. Family dinners were a daily occurrence; time spent watching television after the Rodhams purchased their first set in 1951 was kept to a minimum.

By the time Clinton graduated from Maine Township South High School and headed for Wellesley College in 1965, the combination of parents, relatives, teachers and neighbors who oversaw her childhood had instilled in Clinton a sense of family values that she has often cited as a source of influence for years to come.

The Art of Making Possible

Clinton is certainly not a newcomer to the commencement limelight.

She gave her first speech for such an occasion at her own graduation from Wellesley College in 1969. It was the first time in the school's history that the graduating class requested a student speaker at its commencement.

"There was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be--Miss Hillary Rodham," said Ruth M. Adams, then-president of Wellesley College, in a prelude to Clinton's speech.