By high school, boys seemed to have two different views about Hillary and her unusual kind of appeal. “Guys didn’t think she was attractive,” said one of her male classmates. “They liked girls who were ‘girlish.’” Hillary was “womanish.” Her ankles were thick. She had a reputation for being bossy. Though she displayed an easy humor with Betsy and some of the other girls, boys often perceived her as too earnest and aloof and, by implication, uninterested in sex. So much so that the Maine newspaper wrote “humorously” that she would become a nun, one day, with the name “Sister Frigidaire.” But some boys, usually older ones, were attracted by her seeming self-possession. She did not go out on dates often, but it wasn’t for lack of invitations. Partly it was because she was more interested in other pursuits, and partly because she seemed anything but confident about herself with the opposite sex.
Some of the difficulty was the way she dressed. Her face, without her glasses, was unquestionably pretty, though she had something of an overbite. And when she dressed up, it was said she had a certain tasteful look of refinement and sophistication. But she didn’t dress up often, and style did not come to her naturally. Hillary was convinced that her father’s penurious attitudes and his tendency to overrule her mother in decisions affecting her as a young woman forced her to dress unattractively. “He didn’t want to give her money to do things that she wanted to do,” said Betsy. “We were all clothes crazy and he didn’t see that as a good reason for spending a lot of money or time.” Betsy and others at school believed his attitude undermined Hillary’s sense of femininity, making it difficult for her to feel comfortable or popular with boys.
The essential rite of passage to young adulthood in suburban America of the 1950s and 1960s was getting a driver’s license. Hugh Rodham forbade it. “You don’t need to drive a car, you have a bike,” he insisted. Besides, Betsy, who did drive, picked Hillary up whenever they needed to get somewhere together.
Embarrassed to have to continue riding her bicycle while her classmates drove (and, in some instances, even owned) cars, Hillary took matters into her own hands. Lori Jo Hansen, a classmate, surreptitiously helped her get her driver’s license. Hillary’s father was incensed at first, but after some lobbying by her mother he finally agreed that she could sometimes drive his Cadillac. She turned out to be an awful driver.
As Hillary’s senior prom approached, her anger and disillusionment with her father became almost uncontrollable (or as uncontrollable as Hillary could get). She and Betsy were to double-date, chaperoned by the Rodhams. Hillary was clearly embarrassed by the dress her father had permitted her to buy. “Looking at it, I think everyone else next to me will think they are overdressed, it is so modest,” she wrote to Don Jones, the former youth minister of her church.
Betsy fixed Hillary up with Jim Van Schoyck, whom Ebeling had once dated back in tenth grade. Van Schoyck balked at the idea initially, saying Hillary was a bit too nerdy for him. But he agreed to call her, and took her out on a “practice date” a couple of weeks before the prom. They went for a drive and Jim stopped the car at the top of the Lutheran General Hospital’s winding driveway, brought out his skateboard, and asked Hillary whether she’d ever ridden on one. She hadn’t, but not wanting to say no, Hillary said she could do it. Jim handed her the skateboard and Hillary stepped on.
“[He] put her on the skateboard, and down she went,” Ebeling said. “And she made it to the bottom of the hill and didn’t wipe out. So, she was the date.”
Hillary’s next problem was her hair (which she has struggled with ever since). It was as strong-willed as she was. Betsy, who regularly had the difficult task of trying to tame her friend’s mane, described it as having a mind of its own. The most famous model of the day, Suzy Parker, fashioned her hair with a curl over her forehead, but Hillary could not achieve that effect no matter how hard she tried. The afternoon of the senior prom proved no exception. Hillary, who almost never paid attention to (or had the money for) brand-name goods, had a favorite mock tortoiseshell Revlon comb. She grabbed it angrily from Ebeling and cracked it. This was as riled as Betsy had ever seen her, and she was near tears. Finally, her mother came into Hillary’s room, pulled her daughter’s hair back, and put a blue bow in it and the three agreed it looked wonderful.
The prom crisis reflected Hillary’s developing perfectionism, which revealed itself in many different ways. If she couldn’t get something right, she felt surprisingly exposed and vulnerable. If men were involved, she could be especially sensitive to even implied criticism. Her face would become flushed or she would get angry and turn away. She didn’t like to be questioned, leading one of her friends to observe, perhaps too simply, “She didn’t like not to have the upper hand with men.” It reminded her of the way her father treated her, said the friend. Gradually, the conflicts over money and boys, and Hillary’s chagrin at her father’s prevailing demeanor and attitudes, led to an almost complete breakdown of their relationship. The rupture carried over to her college years and to matters far removed from his refusal to buy (or allow her to buy) the clothes she thought she needed. She and her father could hardly agree on the most elemental of questions, not to mention political ones, and his tone with her became increasingly intolerant.
After Hillary’s father died in 1993, she wrote that during this period she hardly knew what to say to him, and often argued with him over issues of the day, like feminism, the war in Vietnam, or the counterculture. “I also understood that even when he erupted at me, he admired my independence and accomplishments and loved me with all his heart.”
IN 1961, while Hillary was in tenth grade and the conflict with her father became more tense, there arrived in a red Chevy Impala convertible a dashing, transforming figure who, until she met Bill Clinton, would become the most important teacher in Hillary’s life. He was a Methodist youth minister, the Reverend Don Jones, twenty-six, who had completed four years in the Navy and had just graduated from the Drew University seminary in New Jersey. Hillary had never met anyone like him. Jones became something between a father figure, adored brother, and knight-errant. He had an ally in Dorothy Rodham, who regarded him as a kindred sprit.
Lissa Muscatine, Hillary’s chief White House speechwriter, who helped her work on Living History, once said of Hillary: “She’s a prude, she’s hokey, she’s a fifties person who grew up Methodist in the Chicago suburbs.” It wasn’t quite as simple as that.
Hillary had been confirmed at the First United Methodist Church of Park Ridge in the sixth grade. (Hugh Rodham’s parents claimed that John Wesley himself had converted members of the Rodham family to Methodism in the coal-mining district near Newcastle in the north of England.) Dorothy taught Sunday school at United Methodist. Hillary attended Bible classes and was a member of the Altar Guild. “[My family] talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied and argued with God,” Hillary said.
But until Jones showed up, Hillary’s sense of politics and her sense of religion existed on two different planes. Now they began to meld into one as he promoted what he called the “University of Life” two evenings a week at the church. Jones brought a message of “faith in action,” based on the teachings of Wesley and twentieth-century theologians, including Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who believed that the Christian’s role was essentially a moral one: balancing human nature, in all its splendor and baseness, with a passion for justice and social reform. He assigned Hillary and other members of the Methodist Youth Fellowship in Park Ridge readings from T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; showed them copies of Picasso’s paintings, which he sometimes explained in theological and geopolitical terms; discussed the significance of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov; played “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” from Bob Dylan’s new LP, and on weekends shepherded the privileged Protestant children of Park Ridge to black and Hispanic churches in Chicago as part of exchanges with their youth groups. On one visit, Jones had brought with them a big reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, which he
set up in front of the Park Ridge teenagers and members of a Chicago teenage gang. Picasso’s masterpiece portrays the horror of the Spanish Civil War in all its agony and misery. According to Jones, the ostensibly less-educated and less-sophisticated children from the city’s streets were far more articulate and candid in relating to the work than those from Park Ridge.
His interpretation of the Gospels, inevitably, ran afoul of Hillary’s high school history teacher, Paul Carlson (she was his favorite student), who shared Hugh Rodham’s unwavering belief in the coming of the Red Menace. In Hillary’s class, Carlson played excerpts of Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech to the Congress (“Old soldiers never die…”) and introduced students to refugees from communism who told of the horrors of the Soviet system. Carlson took it upon himself to warn the parishioners of United Methodist that the minds of their children were being poisoned by the new youth minister in the red Chevy convertible.
Jones had taken up his assignment in Park Ridge in 1961, during the summer of the Freedom Rides in Mississippi and elsewhere in the Deep South. That fall, when Martin Luther King Jr. again came to preach in Chicago, Jones took Hillary and other members of his youth group to Orchestra Hall to hear him.
Some parents had refused to let their children go, believing that King was a “rabble-rouser,” a view held by Hugh Rodham. Dorothy had granted Hillary her permission. After the program Jones took his awed students backstage to meet Dr. King. King’s sermon, “Sleeping Through the Revolution,” had woven the message of God with the politics of conscience: “Vanity asks the question Is it Popular? Conscience asks the question Is it Right?” He also cited Jesus’ parable about the man condemned to hell because he ignored his fellows in need.
Jones became not only the most important teacher in young Hillary’s life, but also a counselor over the decades whose ministrations would show her ways to cope with adversity, and to “give service of herself” at the most difficult moments: to “salve [her] troubled soul” through the doing of good works. At almost every juncture of pain or humiliation for the rest of her life, she would return—in her fashion—to this lesson. For more than twenty years she would maintain a fascinating correspondence with Jones in which they discussed the requirements of faith and the vagaries of human nature. During the Clintons’ White House years, Jones and his wife were frequent visitors there.
Aside from her family, Hillary’s Methodism is perhaps the most important foundation of her character. As one of her aides said during the winter’s night of the Lewinsky epoch, “Hillary’s faith is the link…. It explains the missionary zeal with which she attacks her issues and goes after them, and why she’s done it for thirty years. And, it also explains the really extraordinary self-discipline and focus and ability to rely on her spirituality to get through all this…. She’s a woman of tremendous faith. Again, not advertised. She’s not one of those people who’s out there doing the holy roller stuff. But that’s how she gets through it: some people go to shrinks, she does it by being a Methodist.”
Other members of the White House staff believed she used her religiosity as a cover for her faults. Some saw it as a mask in her relationship with her husband. “She elevates her staying with [Bill] to a moral level of biblical proportion,” said a presidential deputy. “I am stronger than he is. I am better than he is. Therefore, I can stay with him because it’s my biblical duty to love the sinner, and to help to try to overcome his defects of character. His sins are of weakness not of malice.”
After two years, Paul Carlson convinced the congregation of United Methodist that Don Jones’s teachings were too “freethinking,” and he was forced out. “We were fighting for [Hillary’s] soul and her mind,” Jones was to say years later.
Before he left, Jones gave Hillary a copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye to read. She did not like it. Holden Caulfield reminded her too much of her brother Hughie. Salinger’s coming-of-age novel seemed to stir up all kinds of difficult questions and feelings about family and family traits, including her own tendency toward aloofness and detachment. Over the decades some of Hillary’s greatest admirers came to question whether she genuinely liked people, at least in the aggregate, or whether she merely preferred the company of a few and embraced the multitudes as part of her sense of Christian responsibility and political commitment.
Shortly after Jones left Park Ridge, Hillary seemed to raise the question herself, in a letter: “Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals?” she wondered. She added, “How about a compassionate misanthrope?”
BY THE TIME seventeen-year-old Hillary Rodham left Park Ridge, Illinois, for Wellesley College, almost all the essential elements—and contradictions—of her adult character could be glimpsed: the keen intelligence and ability to stretch it, the ambition and anger, the idealism and acceptance of humiliation, the messianism and sense of entitlement, the attraction to charismatic men and indifference to conventional feminine fashion, the seriousness of purpose and quickness to judgment, the puritan sensibility and surprising vulnerability, the chronic impatience and aversion to personal confrontation, the insistence on financial independence and belief in public service, the tenacious attempts at absolute control and, perhaps above all, the balm, beacon, and refuge of religion.
2
A Young Woman on Her Own
Nineteen sixty-eight was a watershed year for the country, and for my own personal and political evolution.
—Living History
HILLARY DIANE RODHAM arrived at Wellesley College in the fall of 1965 a Barry Goldwater conservative, her well-worn copy of his famous book The Conscience of a Conservative in her suitcase. A relatively sheltered, suburban Midwest teenager, she was suddenly in the company of formidable young women who had gone to private boarding schools, summered in Europe, spoke foreign languages with ease, and possessed sophistication of a sort that had long defined the Wellesley aura. That she had been in the top 5 percent of her class at Maine South meant little. Hillary was no longer considered brighter than most of her classmates. In fact, admission to Wellesley, even more than the other Seven Sisters colleges in the Northeast, was predicated on the assumption that, upon matriculation, you were demonstrably brilliant. Most of her fellow students had been in the top 1 or 2 percent of their high school graduating class. In 1965, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and the other traditional Ivy League universities were still all-male bastions. Thus Wellesley had its pick of almost any girl in the country who aspired to the best possible education (and could afford it or win a scholarship).
In this rarefied environment, Hillary felt intimidated and lonely at the start, a foreigner in a strange place she had seen only in pictures. Her decision to go east to a women’s college had been inspired by a high school teacher who had attended Wellesley; Hillary gave it preference over the other Seven Sisters schools partly on the basis of photographs of the campus: bucolic acres of rolling green, wooded horse trails, and crystal-clear ponds. Pictures of Wellesley’s Lake Waban reminded her of Lake Winola, where she had summered in the Poconos. To this postcard scene, Hillary brought her suitcases packed full with Peter Pan blouses, box-pleat skirts, penny loafers, and knee socks. It became obvious soon after her parents had left her on the campus and had headed back home (her mother crying much of the way) that she had won admission to, and chosen to attend, a school in which more glamorous and accomplished young women—debutantes, many of them—were on the fast track. If she were to compete, it would have to be on her own terms. In this, she would be helped immensely by the country’s changing mood, culture, politics, and philosophies of gender during her undergraduate years. There would be no need, as it turned out, for the girl with Coke-bottle glasses and complicated political notions to hold to the old model of a Seven Sisters perfectly mannered woman.
Robert Reich, who would become President Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, met Hillary when she was a Wellesley freshman wearing bell-bottoms, board-straight blond hair, and no makeup. “She a
nd I were self-styled student ‘reformers’ then,” said Reich, “years before the radicals took over administration buildings and shut down the campuses. We marched for civil rights and demanded the admission of more black students to our schools. Even then we talked of bringing the nation together. We were naive about how much we could accomplish.”
In fact, the last thing on Hillary’s mind at Wellesley seemed to be adherence to the old paradigms, either political or gender-based.
Hillary’s mother had taught her that, above all else, she could do anything, aspire to anything, that there was no reason for a daughter to aim for less than her brothers. Hillary would later describe herself as a “transitional figure” in regard to the women’s movement, caught between two epochs—pre-feminist and post-feminist—and the demands and opportunities of each. However, as one less-conflicted Wellesley graduate observed, Hillary might not have considered or understood another possibility: that “it is not hard to have it all; but it’s hard to have it both ways.”
Hillary’s time at Wellesley was not made easier by whatever tendency toward depression she had either inherited or developed—a tendency that surfaced again in the White House. Periodically at Wellesley she fell into debilitating, self-doubting funks. During the early weeks of her freshman semester, she was so deflated that she called home and confessed failure and an inability to cope. She had never been away from home—even for a weekend—on her own before. She missed the comfortable precincts of Park Ridge, and insisted she was incapable of adjusting to the Wellesley milieu. Whatever her anger at her father, she briefly seemed to miss him. He said she could come back to Illinois, but Dorothy said she didn’t want her daughter to be a quitter. Her mother prevailed.