May 8, 2013 8:31 PM
BEVERLY HILLS (CBSLA.com) — Former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton arrived at a Beverly Hills gala to much fanfare on
Wednesday as she prepared to accept an award for her public service.
Local volunteers from a national organization called “Ready for
Hillary 2016″ were organized outside the Beverly Wilshire hotel, where
the Pacific Council on International Policy would be honoring the
secretary.
The Council awarded Clinton with the inaugural Warren Christopher
Public Service Award, named after the former secretary of state who
served under her husband, former President Bill Clinton, from 1993 to
1996.
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Former
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton focuses on her predecessor's
legacy as she accepts an award named for Warren Christopher from the
nonpartisan Pacific Council on International Policy.
Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times / May 8, 2013
By Seema Mehta and Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times
May 8, 2013, 10:58 p.m.
Hours after Republican members of Congress sharply questioned Hillary Rodham Clinton and the State Department's handling of the terrorist attack in Benghazi,
Libya, the former secretary of State did not explicitly mention the
controversy in an appearance Wednesday night. But she did reference
partisan bickering in the nation's capital as she accepted an award in
Beverly Hills.
"We truly, still today — despite all of our
partisan wrangling, and the gridlock that sometimes seems to take hold —
we stand up for the rights and opportunities of all people," Clinton said in a speech that largely focused on U.S. policy toward Asia.
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Sarah Blackwill
4:02 PM on 05/09/2013
Fomer U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton speaks at an event hosted by The Pacific Council on
International Policy in Los Angeles, California on May 8, 2013. (Photo
by Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty)
Political Washington was consumed with a charged debate over Hillary
Clinton’s legacy Wednesday, but the former secretary of state largely
steered clear of politics in a speech in Beverly Hills. Clinton was in
Los Angeles to accept an award at the nonpartisan Pacific Council on
International Policy named for one of her predecessors, the late Warren
Christopher.
Her only mention of the growing drumbeat from conservative
critics—who are zeroing in on Clinton for the first time since Barack
Obama pulled ahead of her in the 2008 presidential race—was oblique. “We
truly still today, despite all of our partisan wrangling and the
gridlock that sometimes seems to take hold, we stand up for the rights
and opportunities of all people,” she said.
But Clinton’s speech, like the others she’s given since leaving the
State Department in February, focused on what she believes to be foreign
policy legacy: her lifelong work on human rights and women’s issues,
the U.S. pivot to Asia, and her view of American exceptionalism.
Christopher, she said, “understood something America’s leaders have to
understand and act on: The United States remains a beacon of freedom and
opportunity precisely because the American dream has been and must
remain open to all.”
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